Why Would I Want to Blog?A blog? You’re wondering what it is exactly right? You have heard of it… but you just aren’t really sure what it means and how to even get started. You see so many people popping up all over with these new blogs and you’re curious why it’s becoming such a fad. You’re wondering what’s in it for me or you’ve heard that people are actually making money with their blogs. It’s starting to sound kind of good to you right, but you just don’t know where to start. Well first of all a blog is a platform where you can write about anything your heart desires. There are many blogging platforms available for people to choose from and I’ll talk more about that later, but lets understand what blogging is first. Many people write about things that are of interest to them. For instance an artist wants to start a blog to talk about art, she knows just about all there is to being an artist and wants to share it with the world. She’s so well informed and people all over the internet who are searching for information on art start to find her blog and think it’s soo cool! Those people come back to the blog almost everyday because this girl is amazing the information she’s giving and the tips she offers are so informative. She starts to build a following and she looks up and thousands of people are visiting her blog everyday… she thinks this could be the start of something!Time to Make Money with My BlogSo the artist heard that she could actually start making money with her blog by monetizing it (putting stuff on it that will make her money). She just had to figure out how she wanted to monetize her blog, there are so many ways to do this it all just depends on what you feel will work best for you. Well the cool thing about this artist is she had her own art to sell. So guess what she did, she incorporated a way to put her paintings on her blog for people to buy. She would discuss her paintings and add a photo of her paintings to her blog and made them clickable so when someone clicked on her painting they would be taken to her online store where she sold her paintings. Isn’t that awesome! So… yes.. people who already have a product they are selling can use a blog to sell even more of their product!Now that’s just one way to make money with your blog. Suppose you don’t have your own product but you have something you love to do and you know a lot about it or you have something you want to learn more about and master it, well that could be what you write about and start providing information to people about the subject you are interested in. There are many websites that offer you the ability to market their product and make a percentage of the sales, like ClickBank or Commission Junction (just to name a few). Many of these websites offer this ability to market their products for absolutely free. This is called becoming an affiliate, you would be an affiliate and market someone else’s product on your blog. For instance say the artist didn’t have her own product but she found an awesome art company that had an affiliate program which would allow her to market the products of that art company for a profit on her blog! Oh YEAHH! She’s now making money from the sales that she’s getting when people visit her website and see her talking about art and they are so thrilled that they take out their credit card and buy! The artist sees that this is a great way to help people out who are looking for information and also build an income that will change her life forever! But there’s a piece missing she is getting money, but not enough to really be financially free. She asks herself what would she need to do further to her blog to make more sales. After thinking hard about it she understands that she needs to get MORE people to come to her blog.Getting Traffic to Your BlogDING DING DING!! That’s it… the artist needs to get more people to her blog and see the products… this is called generating traffic! So how does she get traffic to her blog? Well there’s something that she needs to learn about and that’s called SEO (search engine optimization). Hmmm uh what? “I don’t know what SEO is”… she thought? In basic terms SEO is the a way of getting your website or blog ranked high on the search engines which in turn brings more traffic! So when people go on Google, Yahoo or bing (which are the top 3 search engines) and they search for let’s say “unusual art pieces” the websites or blogs that talk about that particular topic should show up in the search, and if that website is good at SEO then they should be on the very first page of the search results. That is where you want to be..you want your website to show up in the search results on the very first page of the search..why? Ask yourself this question… when you are searching for something how often do you go to the bottom of the page and click on page 2 or 3 or 4? Not often right usually you don’t go further than the first page. That’s pretty much what everyone else is doing too, no one has time to search pages and pages they usually look at what’s going on, on the first page… period! So our artist decides to search for how to use SEO for her blog and learns just what she needs to do when she’s writing her articles to optimize her blog so the search engines know she’s talking about art. Then those search engines recognize there’s a girl over there talking about art lets see what else is on her blog about art. After adding in SEO techniques to her blog the artist starts checking her stats everyday to see how many visitors are coming to her blog and low and behold everyday the number got bigger and bigger and she started to see her sales going up day after day! Wow!! Who would’ve thought you could make money talking about what you love! Sure beats the you know what out of working a JOB you dread going to, right?How do I build my Blog? So now what, you are ready to start writing about your great idea, but where do you write it? For anyone new to blogging I recommend using a blogging platform that is already built for you and you can be up and running in 30 minutes or less. You want to look for one that already has authority with the search engines, you can do that by checking how much traffic is coming to a particular blogging platform. Also check to see if the blogging platform provides educational material on how to get ranked fast with the search engines for each of your blog pages. So do your research to find the blogging platform that fits your needs. Happy Blogging!