How to make money blogging!

In the past few weeks, I’ve been noticing a lot of posts by newish bloggers about how to make money blogging. Not just a little money, but how someone can make blogging their primary source of income.

Can you make blogging your primary job? Sure. Can anyone do it? Anyone who’s got a good idea and the dedication to keep going. There are a number of PF bloggers out there who make a good amount of money from their blogs. What do they have going for them? Not only do they run good ads on their website, but most importantly, they provide good content. These bloggers update at least once a day, probably more often than that. They provide posts that are interesting to read and provide useful information. Their sites are well designed, created so that the ads are present and prominent enough to please the sponsors, but not so prominent that they are annoying. Most of them don’t use pay per post type services – the sites that pay you for writing about a certain product.

Blogging for a living is not easy. It’s not like you can sit down and write a post in an hour and then have the rest of the day to yourself. You have to spend time researching and planning posts. You have to promote your site. You have to find sponsors, and you have to keep those sponsors happy.

For the majority of us, blogging will never be a primary source of income. But a good blog can bring in a little bit of extra cash. I’ve got ads running on my site. I don’t think I’ll ever make a significant amount of money from the site, but I am hoping to be able to make enough on the site to perhaps get a domain name for the site and some hosting outside of Blogger. And after that, I’d like to be able to blog for charity. Sure, it might be only pennies a day, but every penny counts.

So if you’re looking for advice on how to make money blogging, all I can suggest is to provide good content. Personally, I would also suggest not inundating your visitors with ads and text links and popups – for me, those are the types of things that make me remove a site from my bookmarks. And keep at it. A lot of bloggers who are making money by writing have been at it for years. It’s not something that happens in a day.

Megan Smith

Megan is a 40-something government employee in the Washington, DC area. She got interested in Personal Finance when she got out of college and realized that her paycheck wasn’t going to go as far as she had hoped. Since starting this blog, she has managed to buy a house and make a solid start on her retirement goals, and hopes to help others do the same. Here is her story:

In 2007, I was a gainfully employed 20-something with no debt but not a lot of knowledge about personal finance.  It was a co-worker’s comment about Roth IRAs that sent me to the internet, searching for information.  It was then that I realized that I really didn’t know a whole lot about personal finance and that my current financial situation was due a lot to inherent frugal tendencies, generous family members, a fear of debt, and good luck.  While that was working for me, clearly I needed a better plan.

While I had no debt, I was also pretty much living paycheck to paycheck and not worrying about going over budget (I say this as if I had a real budget) because I had an emergency fund set aside to cover any overages.

Except that’s not what an emergency fund is for.

So I did a lot of research, read a lot of blogs, and decided that I needed a plan.  I needed to budget.  I needed to know what I was spending my money on.  I needed to prepare for the future.

I decided to create a blog not only to make myself accountable to others but also to share the knowledge that I gained along the way.  I’ve learned so much from my fellow bloggers, and I hope that my readers can find something useful in what I have to share as well.