The other day I met a young mother who is home schooling her two young boys.  

While we were talking I introduced her to the world of blogging and making money from home.  She had never heard of blogging and she is not alone in this.  Hardly anyone I meet, including family on my recent trip to NZ, know about blogging and when you consider that there are around 98 million blogs on the internet and the number is growing daily, I find it incredible that people haven’t stumbled upon the term somewhere.

But then when I mentioned it to my husband he pointed out that he and our immediate family only know about blogging because I am so involved in it along with the affiliate marketing side of having an online work from home business.

Paula and I have been working with our various blogs for a little while now and realised the potential for making money from this medium in the early days. 

Of all the people that I have told about blogging, and I mention to anyone willing to listen, only one has taken up the challenge and that is my daughter Varinina.  My granddaughter Demelza started a blog but teenage angst has gotten in the way of her progression with it. 

Now we all know that it takes time to build up a blog that people want to read and keep coming back to, so it has to have something to offer that is interesting and/or informative.  The content needs to be well written and easy to read. 

If the blog is about a product such as our area rugs  or lingerie blogs then you are able to add Google and merchant ads that relate to your product and this will generate an income for you.  It won’t make you an overnight millionaire but as your online traffic increases you should be able to make a nice little income.

The next biggest single thing you need to do is get traffic into your site, so you will need to promote your blog to sites like www.spicypage.com, www.mybloglog.com, and any other number of blog directories and communities that can easily be found on the web by typing ‘blog directories’ or ‘blog communities’ into the search engine.

So we now know that:

• the content needs to be well written
• place Google ads on the page
• place merchant ads on the page
• actively promote your blog to get traffic

Blogging is not only a way to produce an income, it is fun especially when you are writing about things that interest you. Once you join a blog community and start to read other peoples blogs you will find some are personal diaries, some are humourous, some topic specific and most make great reading.  Sometimes you will come across something that clashes with your beliefs, simply move on, do not get involved in silly name calling or online arguments, remember to respect other peoples point of view, they have a right to their opinions as much as you do.