When blogging first caught steam on the web, people were using it to share minutia about their lives such as what they ate or what they think about their professor.

As the web matured, so did blogging. Blogging is now an absolute artform embraced by everyone including the biggest corporations. One thing that sets blogs apart from other media of communication is that it allows creators greater license for creative self-expression.

This freedom to express themselves made creators connect with their audiences at a deeper level than someone using an impersonal corporate platform would. In the world of advertising, media trades attention. Since the attention was moving online, the money had to follow. Almost all corporations now advertise online.

You can get a share of these dollars if you start blogging today. To make money blogging, you have to approach it with a business mind and not as a hobby.

Your goal will be to create a platform your audience will love to visit to get the information they want and from which you can sell your own products or other people’s products.

The Platform

Your platform will be your blog. Creating a blog is very easy. You actually do not need any special technical skills to create a blog today.

You can have a blog up and running in less than 20 minutes by following these simple steps:

Step 1: Buy a domain name: a domain name is the name of a website. CNN’s domain name is cnn.com while Wikipedia’s domain name is wikipedia.org.

Step 2: Get web hosting services: you will need to ‘host’ your domain somewhere. If you don’t get your domain hosted, no one will be able to see it. A web hosting service allows people to get access to your site through the World Wide Web. One great webhosting service you can use is Bluehost.

Step 3: Install WordPress: You don’t have to code your website from the ground up. You can install a content management system such as WordPress so all you have to do is just write your blogs.

Getting the Word Out

No one will visit your blog if no one knows it exists. You need to market it. There are several ways to market a blog. Some of the simple effective methods you can take advantage of immediately include:

• Optimizing your articles so people find them on search engines.
• Writing guest articles on other people’s blogs and then linking to your own blog in the article.
• Building a social media following and then directing your audience to your blog.

Making Money

After building a blog and an actual blog audience, you can start making money. It really is not that complicated. The easiest way to make money is to recommend products your users would normally use.

If you blog about coffee, for instance, you can have a great coffee brand advertise on your site or sell an e-book about how to brew the perfect black coffee at home.