How to Make Money with Free Blogging: Easy Step by Step Instructions

  In one of the many RV/traveling groups I belong to on Facebook, Full Time RV Living, a woman recently asked what she can do to earn an income as retiree while traveling in her and her husband’s RV. The OP threw quite a stick in the chicken pen with her question. Apparently everyone RV’ing seems to be interested in doing just that, first time ever I see so many people typing ‘following’ in a thread in a group on FB.

  A number of really useful ideas popped up, but as the OP Tamara Lynn specified, she’s looking for something not entailing sales. Thus nosy me just had to chip in. :)

  

  I currently have 7 blogs, of which this one is the black sheep that I only started very recently. Really not much going on here, but it’s due to change in future. I’m still not really sure where this blog should fit in with my plans to take over the world. But I earn money blogging from my other blogs, and just one of them pays all my bills for very little work daily. If I get a heart attack now I know my bills will still get paid for months, due to the passive income nature of blogging. I know some bloggers that earn a whopping hundred thousand dollars a month from blogging only.
And it’s no lie, I’ve see their checks. 

  Of course, the vast majority of bloggers can only dream about that kind of cash, you really need to have a passion for blogging and know your story to get to that kind of money every month. Those super bloggers appear on TV interviews, by the way, and that’s not my kind of thing. They had become experts in their fields, or niches as it is called online, and they monetize it big time. 

  But anyway, so I suggested blogging in the group under that thread, and there was clearly some interest in how to start blogging. And yes, even though there is a treasure trove of info on the web on how to get blogging and making money doing so, many people still don’t know how to get started. Too many options and advice, I guess. I had the same problem when I started some years ago, and I had to learn through trial and error.

   This is why I’m writing this quick post, and as the observant reader will notice, some of my advice I am going to give here I’m not even applying to this blog! Me the hypocrite, huh. But that is because I have several online identities, pseudonyms as is commonly used by writers, and I don’t want to mix it up. Therefore I cannot place this article on another blog where I do follow my own advice, and then place that link in the group on FB.
   The secret reason: Two of my blogs under other pseudonyms are extremely controversial, about politics and religion, and I don’t want to upset members of the RV group. Even though a post or ten on this blog in future may already do that. So read just this article, then makes like Elvis and disappear! :)

  Blogging consists of two tasks: Writing an article, and ‘marketing’ it. Your goal should not be to see how much money you can make (although, secretly....), but how many visitors to your blog you can get to read it. You should turn it into kind of a game for yourself. Spend an hour a day writing your post and choosing photos and banners to compliment it before publishing it, and another hour or three on other sites where you had shared your article to. There you can stir up some trouble, or be such a pleasure to others, that they feel they just have to check out either your profile there (which will have your blog URL) or click the link you had left in a comment.

  In essence you will be doing much the same as you are already doing now on FB, but getting paid for it. And if you can write a post on FB, you can blog. Period. No magic or other skills necessary. My English is pretty poor as you can see here, and I still blog. I’ve seen bloggers way worse than me, that do very well for themselves. So don’t let your spelling, grammar, or tenses (mine suck) put you off from blogging.

  When deciding to become a blogger you have two options: Blog on a blogging platform, or go the self-hosting way. Summed up, the former is dirt-easy to set up, free, and will have you on the air in 182 seconds, the latter is a bit more complicated with you having to choose a web hosting service first (which usually costs a few dollars a month) but with which you will have complete control over your blog with no restrictions. Serious big bloggers go for the latter with all its bells and whistles, but you can do so a few months from now.

   Since this article is aimed at newbies, we’ll go with a blogging platform to get your feet wet and money in your bank account asap. Of these blogging platforms there are a huge number to choose from, even Facebook qualify. I did research on many of them for months, so here’s my short opinion of some before we get to the actual steps.

1. Blogger, which is the one I recommend for now. Easiest to set up of all, with a fairly surprising large number of features. Perfect for long articles, short posts, photo blogging, video blogging (since YouTube belongs to Google too), and more. You don’t have to buy a domain name through Google like with WordPress.COM, and you can add affiliate banners to your blog that will be a gaint source of income for you, and you can also integrate Google AdSense to earn an income from ads from people merely visiting your blog, they don’t even have to click on any ad.

  What’s more, Google sometimes syndicate your posts to elsewhere on the web, and actually advertise some of your posts, thus gaining you some quick traffic. You can also have your posts shared automatically to Google+, which means more extra free traffic, and of course to a number of big social sites like Facebook with a single click. Why write your opinion on Facebook, if you can do it on your own blog and earn money from it? And since Blogger belongs to Google, if you write good articles you may rank higher in search results than with the same post on WordPress.com.

2.WordPress.COM, a big no-no in my opinion. Although the WP software itself that you can get at WordPress.ORG is free and open-source and great (you download that and upload it to a web host if you want to go for the self-hosting option, as mentioned above), with the .com option your blog is on WP’s own servers. Although free to blog there with no monthly fees just like with Blogger, Wordpress.com place ads on your blog that lure visitors away, and WP then gets paid for it by advertisers, not you. You don’t want that.

  Also, the .com site charge you 18 dollars for a domain you have to buy through them, if you decide you want a domain name. Affiliate banners are also not really welcome on a .com Wordpress blog. They offer their own advertising network for blogs with a lot of traffic, WordAds, but it is pretty much useless at this stage. Therefore, if you want to make money blogging, WordPress.com is not the option for you.

3. Medium.com - The site is extremely heavy on data usage (a big no if you’re on mobile data), you cannot choose your own domain name, and you cannot earn from advertising.

  On the plus side, Medium is a huge traffic booster, they blast your article across their site. So what I do is to post just a part of my article that I had published on my blog first, on Medium. Readers on Medium then click my link to go through to the full article on my blog elsewhere, where I do have ads and affiliate banners. Google is fine with that strategy for SEO (search engine optimization) purposes too, and many large companies and big bloggers follow this strategy.

4.Altervista - an intriguing platform that I somehow missed for years (bad SEO on their part, yeah, let me blame them), but worth considering. An Italian blogging platform established already in 2005, in English, very popular in Italy and elsewhere. It allows AdSense ads - but you must first register you AdSense ID with Altervista, then the site gets a cut from Google of your AdSense income; bit of a bummer - and also ads from their own advertising network.

   Affiliate banners are not allowed, so there this site as blogging platform option goes down the drain too if you want to earn big money blogging.

5.Tumblr - just as heavy as Medium on data usage, and more meant for photo blogging than real blogging. No ads allowed, although you can get away with affiliate banners. It belongs to Yahoo, and with Yahoo snooping on users’ private info and with two major hacking breaches, I toned down my two blogs there. But 250 million users on there, so do consider it as part of your marketing strategy (more about that later.)
 

6.Several other blogging platforms apart from the ones above I also reviewed over the past few years, I’ll probably do a post about them on another day.

  Enough talking, let me outline the steps you need to follow to get started blogging within this hour.

1.Open a Blogger account at Blogger.com. If you have a Google account you can just sign in, Google owns them. Choose a theme, go through the settings, choose a name. Your blog will get a URL like myblog.blogspot.com. You can also link your own domain name, which looks way more professional and will thus boost your credibility, in the Settings panel. If you don’t have a domain, get one at NameCheap, prices range from 2 dollars to around 10 dollars for a .com one. Or stick with the blogspot one for now. Stay clear free domain registrars like Freenom and Dot TK, those skunks are scammers that steals your traffic once you're blog is starting to make money. Experience is a bitch.

2.Download Open Live Writer if you have Windows on your computer. It’s a desktop blogging platform client, the successor to Windows Live Writer, which is generally hailed as the king of desktop blogging software. With it you can write a post on your computer, and upload your article(s) all at once to your blog. Handy if you write best without the distraction of the internet. This is optional, you can write an article in Microsoft Word (I use Kingsoft/WPS instead; it’s free and better), then just copy and paste your article and photos into Blogger.

  There is something magic to me when you just click ‘publish’ in OLW, and there goes your article to the internet. Wow. A hundred years ago your grandma would have thought you must be crazy for speaking to the whole world that easy. For Linux, consider Blogilo, although it isn’t nearly as nice as OLW. This way of publishing also helps to back up your blog in case Google bans your blog for being nasty to the president of Banania. But they’re pretty protective of their bloggers, so don’t stress.

3. Download the official Blogger app from Google Play Store. Again, it’s optional, and although the app is superb, WordPress’s app is better. But this app allows you to write a quick short post on your phone, and either save it in your Blogger account as a draft for later publishing, or to publish right away. Using this you can really blog on the go just as easy as it is to send out a tweet on Twitter.

   If you’re traveling and see something interesting, take a photo with your phone, write a short blurb about what you saw, add the photo, add an affiliate banner related to your post, and upload it all to your blog instantly. Incredibly easy, and really so cool.

4. Get writing. Basically, the aim of my article is about getting you to do this within - look at the clock on your computer right now - twenty minutes. What to write about? Look through your FB timeline. What do you write most about? That’s your passion. But now, instead of writing on FB, you’re going to do it on your blog, then share that article to your FB timeline and to FB groups related to your topic. Actually, that is precisely what I’m doing with this article, going to post the link to it later today on that RV group.

  This strategy will bring people to your blog, often for months or years, and if you have ads on your article, you will earn an income from it, automatically every time. Work once, get paid over and over for it. No need for any selling. Just add value to the reader’s life and you’re set.

  Try to get your posts to have 500 words or more. Just ten words accompanying a photo is fine too, but Google index only posts of 500 words or more for SEO purposes as I understand. (May be 499 words. Lol.) Some of my posts are 7000 words (only because I love writing and am quite passionate) and they rank high in Google search results for many keywords.
 
  Write naturally, forget keyword stuffing. The first two paragraphs of your article - if you write such long posts as me - are the important ones. Use especially names, surnames, and brand names in there. It works well for natural SEO. I personally don’t care much for SEO, since I refuse to rely on Google alone to send me traffic.

   Avoid plagiarism like the plague, Google will penalize you badly for it. Write an article yourself, even though you got the info in there from someone else’s work. An article should add value to the reader’s life, it must make him upset, or happy, or mad, or excited, as I sees it. Get emotion out of the visitor, and you’ll both score.

  Get at least one nice photo to complement your article. It makes for easier reading. (I tend to overdo it.) Ensure its size is around 100 KB and not a MB or two per photo, to ensure your blog loads fast in the visitor’s browser. Keep that in mind when taking a photo with your phone and uploading it directly, you may need to first get its size down with another app. Some phones go crazy with 3 MB photos.

  Your title is extremely important. Spend as much time thinking about the right one (write down a number of potential candidates) as you spent on writing your article. The title is what readers see first, and determines if they’re going the read the article (especially when seeing it on FB after you shared it there, and having to click through to your blog, so your photo that shows is also important).

  ‘NASA Space Shuttle Crashes Against End of Universe’, remember that article? Cannot remember the exact title now, but something like that. Written by a 16-year old Macedonian teen (as far as I remember) that ran a fake news blog, that article alone made him 15 000 dollars in one day from advertising revenue. His article with that incredible title went viral on social sites. I bet you can come up with something really far-fetched too about something ordinary you’ve seen today. Give it a try and have a laugh. The more ridiculous the better.

  That’s pretty much it regarding the writing aspect; you’ve got your blog on the air, and the world at your feet. 

But now how to monetize your blog? You have several options.

5. After you have around 20 posts on your blog, you can apply for an AdSense account. Or if your posts are good, Google will send you an invitation to add AdSense to your blog, in your blog’s dashboard. AdSense is basically where advertisers’ ads that they pay Google for will show up on your blog, and you get a cut of what those advertisers had paid Google. Both for impressions and clicks, which is great. I personally don’t like AdSense very much, since ads take the traffic you worked for away from your blog in exchange for anything from a few cents to a dollar or two per visitor. On most of my blogs I don’t use AdSense, because when you do your marketing wrong you can get your AdSense account disabled, and then Google refuses to tell you what exactly you have sinned. And they don’t tell you how much you will get paid per impression and click, which is unethical in my opinion. But it’s your choice if you want to integrate AdSense on your blog, and it’s very easy and quick in your Settings panel.
 

6.The rich bloggers make their money from affiliate offers and various streams of income, and so should you. Head over to Clickbank.com, or Commission Junction, or e-Junkie, or any other affiliate market place, and register a free account. (Many other websites offer affiliate programs, just in this post alone I could’ve gotten paid by pretty much every name I mentioned in here, like NameCheap, for recommending them. Maybe I’ll still add affiliate links later, just see how many visitors this post get first. I’m leaving money on the table.)
 
  Then, once you have wrote a decent article on your blog, select a digital product on your affiliate network of choice that is related to your post’s topic (this is very important!), get its link and promotional banner, and place it inside your article, then hit publish. The reasoning behind this is, and it is true, is that when one affiliate sale pays you say 30 dollars (some pays up to 2000 dollars per sale!), you will earn more from a hundred visitors, than from AdSense for the same 100 visitors, even though the buy-ratio will be lower than the click through ratio (CTR) on ads.

  Your affiliate recommendation (the banner) just have to match the topic of your article. It’s all about getting targeted visitors to your blog, and showing them a targeted banner-ad.

   Oh, and just something extra: I like to design my own banners, instead of using the affiliate owner’s banner, just for kicks. A banner should be like a meme that people enjoy reading, right? To damn with boring sales banners. So my excuse for creations (again, they’re on my other blogs, in future on here too) include some humor, because I found that smiling/worried people click through easier, and buys easier. Emotion is what makes people buy.

7. Another option to monetize is to use CPA. Cost Per Action is where a visitor do something like installing a phone app, or give his email address, in exchange for something, like winning an iPhone or getting a free gift shopping card. The process doesn’t cost the visitor any money, and he gets something more out of the deal.

   For example, if you have written a book you want to sell, instead of placing it on Amazon you can CPA it. Before a reader can download and read your book, he has to complete an action, with the advertiser then paying you via the CPA network. Or if you have a popular TV episode you want to monetize (it’s not exactly legal, but many people do it, I recommend rather doing it with a legal video you had password-locked on YouTube), just password-lock it by RAR’ing it with HamsterSoft (much better than WinRAR, and free), put it in your Google Drive account, and CPA the password. If you like this idea, sign up free at CPAlead.com. Just keep an eye on your data usage, of disable flash temporarily, that site eats like 80 MB in a minute because of a flash bug.

There are many other CPA networks as well, I can also recommend ShareCash and DollarUpload. I am still using all three.

8.You can get paid for writing sponsored reviews, too. The blogging community frown upon this, and I have never done it myself, but there are paid-to-write platforms that pays you a bit of money to write an article singing the praises of a product you may barely know. Thus the frowning and fake coughing, you see. Some bloggers make good money with this, but in my opinion it degrades the quality of your blog. Nobody likes being sold to, and I anyway am way too critical to pull it off.

9.Consider dropshipping. This is where you simply collect orders on behalf of a company, and give it through to them to process and ship to the customer. Big money to be made with this, there’s a video on YouTube (sorry I don’t have the link) of a husband and wife who earned 4 million US dollars in commissions doing dropshipping with their blog. They eventually used their garage as storage facility just to ensure parcels get to customers on time in case of a delay on the supplier’s side.
 
  To integrate an e-commerce cart into your blog is easy, I used E-Junkie before and can recommend it. On Full-time RV Living the ideas I saw that works well for some members are to sell jewelery and cosmetics. The names Stella & Dot, Young Living Essential Oils, CBD oil, Plexus, and others were recommended by members there and may be worth checking out. You can always promote those products on your blog, either by getting them to just pay a monthly fee for a banner on your blog, or by taking orders on their behalf and act as agent.

  Heck, you can even play travel agent for a town you liked a lot on your travels, and book orders for accommodation and more. One guy is working from home for a helicopter company, which you can do just as well as a blogger when having a niche blog.

  Basically, as you can see from the above, the options to monetize your blog are numerous. Seriously, people make incredible amounts of money from the most unusual ideas with their blogs.

  As I wrote this article in a hurry without any of my notes with me, I may have left out some information that you may find valuable. So you should bookmark my blog (see what a sly trick I’m pulling here to get you to come back! Shame on me) as I will be editing this article in future with those notes.

Okay, so now you know how to put up a blog, and how to monetize it, but what about marketing?
 

  Marketing is the most important part of blogging if you want to earn money with it. It is, however, not sales. Think of it as more of a shout-out to the world 'hey, look at me!', and there are a plethora of methods to accomplish this online, for free too. You can sell thousands of a bad product (like the Mazda 323, which must've been the worst car ever built), while a good product will have no sales with poor marketing (poke poke, Nissan Maxima.)

  The same principle applies to your blog. Your blog is your store, your business, and your articles your products. Your money is your number of visitors. Forget about the dollar or pound sign for now, focus on the number of traffic your blog gets, and its quality. Unlike a store in real life where location matters, the internet doesn’t have that. Nobody will even know about your blog with its 1 million posts if you don’t let people know about it.

   The internet is loaded with strategies on how to get traffic to your site, some are pure junk, others are scams, others continue to work. I tried them all, believe me.

1. My first bit of advice therefore is: Have patience, and keep on blogging. In the beginning it will take time for your blog to take off, with you not making a dime. Don’t give up! Experienced bloggers say it takes around six months before your blog starts getting constant traffic without input from you. It’s true, but I found that with proper planning you can shorten it to three months before your kite can go auto-pilot. Stick it out for that three months an hour a day, and you’ll never look back, I promise.

 2. Plan your day and stick to a schedule. Self-discipline is extremely important when you're working for yourself. Determine what your blog is going to be about (look at your FB timeline to determine what your passion is), and identify a source where you will get ideas from to write about. It can be a general blog like this one, or one dealing exclusively with the length of your cat’s tail. No need to go rocket scientist about it. Just write, you can always delete or draft a post later. Newspapers, breaking news sites, Fark, Buzzfeed, social sites, the list of sources are endless. Anything you see that interests you, you can write about.

 Write and publish at least once a week, but I’d say once a day in the beginning, to get your blog some body and you in the habit of blogging. This is of vital importance, that habit-forming. Even if you just upload something silly via the Blogger app on your phone. Add doing this to your phone’s calendar and set an alarm. Getting into the habit to visit your store is important, just like with any real world business.

3. For the rest of the day after writing your article, spend a measured amount of time (two hours, it will allow you to blog part-time if you want) on sites where potential visitors are likely to hang out. Who will enjoy reading your article, on what sites will you find the type of people looking for the info your article contains? Go there. FB yes, but don’t neglect forums and bookmarking sites like Reddit. Just google “pink cats forums” if your article is about pink cats. Forums are, like FB groups, about certain topics. That is the best targeted traffic you’ll ever get, for free. Join the forum with the best Alexa rank (then you know it has a lot of members), and start participating there. Don’t spam, just get your signature up as soon as possible, which will have a link back to your blog.

  Set yourself a goal to get X amount of traffic to the article you’re promoting, before promoting another article. Your statistics in your Blogger dashboard will motivate you. You can write as many posts as you like in between, you only need one to be your money-maker that you’ll focus on promoting.

 4. Don’t pay for any ebook telling you how to do internet marketing. Everything you need to know is free on the internet, just google it. Just use common sense, and stay clear from the million dollars a day mindset. Blogging is already smart work, don’t overthink it. I’m so fed-up for so-called guru’s promising the moon that I can give birth to a Birmese python and wear it as a belt before reading one of their emails ever again. Me spending a fortune on all those courses wasted an incredible lot of my time, and lead to me procrastinating to get writing to an Olympic standard.

5. Keep your marketing simple and enjoyable. Consistency is what counts. My strategy: Write a post, share it to 10 websites related to the topic, and participate on each website. That’s my week’s work. Who doesn’t like hanging out on sites and chit-chatting there? Not only will you learn a lot about what interested you enough to wrote your article in the first place (allowing you to edit your article later on to make it better), but you’ll get traffic from those sites for a long time to come, earning you passive income. Blogging is smart work, not hard work.

6. Retain your visitors. The money is in the list, and I have learned that lesson the hard way. A person that has been on your blog before is magnitudes more likely to buy something you recommend, than him as a first-time visitor. For that, sign up (at a fee) at the industry leader Aweber, or second place contestant GetResponse, or MailChimp, with the latter I recommend for now (because they allow a free account, of up to 2000 subscribers.)

  The above are all autoresponder services, allowing you to capture email addresses of visitors in exchange for something like a free ebook (you’ve seen it before, I know) or access to something, etc., with the service then sending them automated letters you have drawn up weeks or months before. Email marketing is incredibly powerful, when done right. I firmly believe not to pester my subscribers with offers, but instead keeping them engaged. Hey, add me on Facebook, man. That kind of thing. Or an occasional joke. Or how to do something, via email instead of in an article. (I could have converted this article into an email course, spreading this whole article over say 5 emails over 5 days, instead of offering a book in exchange for the subscriber’s email address.)

  And I keep an eye out for what people ask me. Like how to set up a blog, with this article being the result. Then I just pop an email to my subs, notifying them I got a number of questions about blogging, so I wrote an article, come check it out. And boom, four thousand of my ten thousand subs click the link, read my article, and I earn from them seeing ads and/or interacting with an affiliate offer. If just 1% (the industry average) of those 4000 people buy a product I recommend, that I get 37 dollars on in commissions, I earned myself with one email 1 480 dollars. Once you see the digital products on affiliate market place you’ll understand why so many bloggers make that kind of money.

  There’s even one software product I came across that gives you thousands of TV channels for free, for a one time fee of 70 dollars I think. Why pay Netflix every month if you can get more for a one-time fee? Affiliates of that satellite TV product made a killing, and the software programmer too.

Okay, that’s about it for now, I will probably update this article in a few days’ time. I hope I motivated you enough to go activate your Blogger blog right now since you already have a Google account. Just hop over to Blogger.com and sign in. Take that first step, do it now. 

  And bookmark my blog, and if my autoresponder is up on this blog by the time you read this, subscribe. And, once you start making money with your blog, please feel under the obligation to send me, say, 10 percent of it. LOL.