Warning! Do not Attempt to use Blogging as a Money Making Vehicle Until You Read This (Second of a series about working from home)

Work at home moms are using blogs to start successful home businesses with little difficulty; as we know, blogs are here to stay, and savvy WAHMs are getting on this bandwagon. Using the power of blogs is a popular and natural choice among work at home moms. As compared to other types of websites, blogs are simple to set up and to update. In less than thirty minutes' time, you can have a professional looking blog and start your blogging career, all for free.

As most of you know, a blog is a type of online journal that is very easy to update with content. You can choose whether to update yours by the hour, on a daily basis, or each week; it's your choice, you're your own boss. The most recent entries will show up on top. Normally, entries made are short articles of between 200 - 500 words in length. Readers will visit to read your new entries, and if they like your style, they will become followers. Readers also have the ability, and are encouraged, to comment on your entries.

Blogs can be about almost anything for which people have interest; in many cases, bloggers use their own lives as inspiration. There are blogs about everything from politics to home schooling, and from weight loss tips to barbecue sauce recipes. When choosing your topic, do some research online to determine if your topic has a dedicated group of folks who are genuinely interested in the topic.

In choosing your topic, be sure and choose a relatively small "niche." This term refers to a specific group of people who share a similar interest. There are very broad niches, such as working from home, as well as small niches, such as tips on keeping your leather sofa supple and fresh. Find the middle ground between a popular topic and a narrow niche, so that your blog can attract a large number of readers. Broad topics, like make money online, or how to start a small business, will prove too competitive as far as finding readers is concerned.

There are two major free platforms you can use to get started: www.wordpress.com or www.bloggers.com. These are not the only possibilities, merely the best known; heck. at times I have used them, too. Full instructions will be provided by the platforms.

Once you have your first few blog posts under your belt, the good part comes in: you'll be able to monetize your work of art. This means that you will have to make some minor changes to your settings in order to make some dough. One such monetization strategy, and it's used by millions of bloggers to rake in some money, is to use a contextual advertising program, such as Google Adsense; these advertisers will pay you for each time one of your readers clicks on one of the advertising links that have been provided for you. The types of links that are chosen by the platform to add to your blog depend on the prevalent keywords used by you in your content.

Let's say your blog pertains to children's TV, and one of your posts discusses Sesame Street. The ads placed by the advertising platform of your choice will be related to Sesame Street. These might include links to Sesame Street items, or an ad leading to a DVD set on eBay that traces the history of the program.

Be aware, with contextual advertising you will not ever have to select the ads that appear on your blog. You will enter the advertiser's code on your blog once, and they will automatically refresh the ads' content with each new post. Each click will equal only pennies each; this doesn't seem like much, but depending on the size audience your blog attracts, it can add up rather nicely for you.

Using contextual advertising to make money from your blog is not the only option available to bloggers. You can make product recommendations, also known as affiliate marketing, suggesting that your readers purchase certain products that you like or that you have purchased yourself. This is a way of leveraging the influence you build up over time by making useful, thoughtful posts that your readers appreciate.

Lastly, another way of benefiting with affiliate marketing is by writing entire posts recommending certain products and services; there are companies that will pay you for this. An obvious disadvantage is that, there will be full advertising posts appearing all through your blog; this could push away some readers who may be offended by outright advertising. To fight this, you can preface each advertising post with, "Here's a word from one of our sponsors," or words to that effect; this could minimize any bad reaction.