How does blogging make you money? It was asked time and time again how anyone can earn money from blogging. In this post, I will discuss how you can start earning money from your blog.

First step is to determine the topics that you want to discuss in your blog. Many have advised that you conduct keyword research and competition before you decide the topic(s) of your blog. My recommendation, especially for beginners, is don't over analyze. Go for topics that interest you regardless of the earning potential and competition.  For bloggers starting out, the critical thing at this point is you keep the momentum of filling your blog with quality contents. You have to blog regularly and consistently. If you can't do this, no matter what market you are in, no matter what earning potential you may have for this market, you will fail eventually. 

Once you gain some experience in blogging, you may want to explore blogging about other topics outside your comfort zone. Of course, you need to create another blog for this. When you are ready, you can research for profitable niches and competition. The niche research is another topic in itself and it will be contained in one of my future posts. I will just tell you the one single most important factor in researching niches. The niche that you should go into is something that has good-to-high demand but few-to-medium number of competition. You don't want to get into a niche that is fiercely competitive. Be realistic and give yourself achievable targets. An example of a niche blog is Website Design - CRM Blog. I regularly contribute to this blog.

2nd step is to decide where you want to blog. Contrary to what others believe, blogging can be done freely. The only investment you have to make is your time. There are many blogging platforms that allow you to create your blog. Some of these are blogger.com, wordpress.com, flaney.com (another real estate blogging site) and of course, activerain.com. If you are in the real estate niche, the best bet for you is to blog in flaney.com and activerain.com. Not only you have a niche topic to blog but also your blog will be read by the people you are targeting. 

3rd step is to create your actual blog posts. Do your posting over time. You don't want to have a 1000-article blog in one week. The key here is to gradually post so the Search Engines will not think that you are spamming them. During the first month, you could blog every other day. After the first month, once a week is fine. As long as you continuously churn out relevant and original contents, you will be fine. Don't also be too conscious about your writing styles. Many have advised about keyword density, frequency and relevancy. I tell you to keep your blog as reader-friendly as possible. Keep it natural and conversational and your natural rankings in the search engines will improve and as a result you will get high quality traffic.

4th step is for you to get traffic.  To get your targeted traffic or visitors, you need to promote your site. Go to forums and in your forum signature, include the URL of your blog. Participate in other like-minded blogs by commenting on relevant posts. Submit your blog to blog directories, RSS directories. Submit articles to article directories referencing back your blog URL. You may also would like to try social media marketing like posting to Digg or bookmarking your site to Onlywire.com. If you have the budget, you may also explore PPC advertising. Make your presence in a wide variety of sites like squidoo, hubpages, friendster, facebook, etc. Getting traffic and promoting your blog is an activity that will last the lifetime of your blog. You can never stop doing this. It is going to be the lifeblood where your blog will depend on.

The last step is monetize your blog. You will observe that there is no point in monetizing your blog if you haven't done the first 4 steps. That is why, I was advising that your blog should be something that interests you. Otherwise, you may not reach this step at all if you can't give yourself enough motivation to write consistently about a topic you are not interested in. There are various ways to monetize a blog. You can do adsense, amazon.com or affiliate marketing. If you have a product or service that is related to your topic of interest, you could sell that on your blog. 

To answer the title of this article, if blogging can make you money, the simple answer is yes, it does. It is making many people money in the long term. Don't expect to be rich in a month's time blogging. It will take months and months of religiously following a blogging routine before you realize its profit potential. When you decide to travel the long road to blogging, make sure that you enjoy the side trips and the scenery along the way. Don't focus too much on its earning potential. As long as you write informative blog posts that your readers will enjoy, you will soon realize money will come in the end.