Introduction

Hey guys, I'm Steve, and I'm here to show you how you can get started with the blogging world.

It's quite simple to get started, and if you want to do it for the profit, that can be done too. However you must remember that time is money. The more time you put into it, the more money you'll make.
You don't have to do it for the profit though, blogging can be a great hobby, with or without the intention of making any money.

In this post I'll run through the main points a beginner will want to know, and I'll extend on them all in later posts.
I'll also point out right now that I won't go into marketing in this post, however I will later make a post explaining a few ways to promote your blogs, as that is the crucial part to profit making and getting an audience size worth anything.


Creating a Blog
The first thing you need to know about is creating the actual blog. There are many many ways to do this, some better than others, and different people will prefer or require a different way of doing it, depending on their intentions, target audience, amount of time to spend, amount of money to spend, etc.

Blogger is what I'm using here, it's Google's own blogging network, and it's very very simple to use, and it will be the preferred method of blogging for low-profit individuals, especially since Google will have all your blogs organized for easy maintenance and posting . It also allows easy integration of ads, using Google's Adsense, which I'll get to later. The other great thing about Blogger is that you can use your own domain with it, and that isn't too difficult to set up.

Wordpress is another good blogging tool. This can either be used with their own hosting, in the same way Blogger does, or you can download the open source software, which you can install on your own server. This method is great for individuals with a server, and tends to be one of the best options for organizations/businesses.
Wordpress is very flexible and customizable, which has obvious benefits. However, it's only downfall is the fact it isn't organized with Google, meaning you'll have blogs all over the place if you intend on running multiple blogs, and placing ads can be quite daunting sometimes.

I'll not go any further on ways to blog, as there aren't many other ways I would actually recommend to a beginner, and some I wouldn't recommend to a single living soul, as there are a lot of sites out there that totally rip off people wanting to write articles.


Placing Ads
If you want to make money from your blog(s), you will want to be placing ads on your site. Again, there are plenty of ways to go about doing this, however at the moment I'm only going to cover Adsense.

Adsense is basically a service from Google which allows you to place ads on your website. These ads come from people using Google's Adwords, who pay for every click (and every 1000 impressions/views) of their ad. So, the people using Adsense to display ads basically receive their money, indirectly.

All you really need to know is that you have to sign up to Google Adsense, and set up an ad on your website using the steps they provide (which I'll cover in a later post).
However, if you're using Blogger, you're in luck, because it will take care of a lot of the boring stuff for you.


Writing Content
Once you understand how to set up blogs and how to place ads, you'll need to worry about the content you write.

First you need to think about what you want to write about. You may have so many interests that you don't even know what to title the blog. In a case like this it is obvious that you have potential for having multiple successful blogs, rather than one blog that might not even go anywhere.

The idea behind making profit in blogging is that you need to have many blogs with many articles in each.
Every time you think of a new idea, set up a new blog and just start writing. Every time you think of something related to a blog you already have, go back to that blog and just start writing. Every time you have any damn reason to start writing... just start writing!

How you write your content:
However, when you are writing your content, you will want to be actively thinking about two things; firstly, what people think of your content; and secondly, what Google will think of your content.

If you want to make money from this, you want as many interested viewers as possible. This means you want Google to rank it as high as possible, which you have a certain level of control over in your content. Plenty of keywords and key-phrases in your content will help a lot (words and phrases searched for a lot). But for the best results, you need to heavily think about topic. Keep the post related to the blog, and keep the keywords you use related to the post.

But remember, it needs to be user-friendly too, sure you can shove a whole load of keywords in a post, but that'll heavily put off the readers, and Google is getting pretty smart these days, so there's no point trying to trick it. In fact, a good way to put it is; The best way to trick Google is to actually have content that Google wants up top.
The thing that actually causes Google to rank highest is the amount of backlinks to a page. This is exactly why content should be user-friendly. Because the more people like it, the more they will link to it elsewhere.
It is much easier to have content good enough that people will link it, rather than the impossible task of creating enough backlinks that Google see as genuine.


I'm not going to lie to you, I'm far from a good writer, but I understand how these things work, so the thing I want most is for you budding writers to take this knowledge and make the most of it yourself.
From this post alone, it's possible to get yourself into blogging. But I will make plenty more posts explaining things better, including tutorials and guides showing how to set up blogs and ads, etc.