Getting started blogging is easy. You just need to create a blog and get posting. Here’s how!

The easiest way to get started blogging is with a tool such as Blogger, or WordPress.com. With these, you sign up for the service, choose your blog name and with a few clicks of the mouse, your blog is set up. Simple!

But, this is not the best way to get started if your purpose in blogging is ultimately to earn an income. And the reason is quite simple – a lot of these quick and easy to use tools do not allow certain types of advertising within the posts. With those that do, there is no guarantee that in a year they will still be allowing paid posts, affiliate links, banner advertising, contextual adverts and so on. Some of the paying schemes also require you to install javascript code onto the website to prove ownership and count your readerships. But this is not always possible with these sites.

Instead, go to WordPress.org and download the latest version of the blog. Save it to your machine and then unzip the files. Have a look around the internet for suitable website hosts (some actually make it very easy for you and will install WordPress for you!), sign up for an account, register a URL (the name for your website) and activate the hosting.

If you have not got an easy to install website host, you will need to follow their instructions for uploading WordPress and installing it, but it is reasonably easy to do. Now, you are up and running!

But the default WordPress template does not look good. If an advertiser reviews your site to see if they want you to do the job for them and they see the basic default theme, then you might not get the work. Instead, do a search on your favourite search engine for free WordPress themes. There are absolutely loads to choose from, so download a few and upload them to your blog. I always like to upload a few different themes and see which ones actually work for me and the way that I want to blog to work.

Now all that you need to do is to start writing posts. A lot of paid posting systems require that your blog has at least 20 unique posts of 200+ words. This means that you cannot go to article directories, grab a set of articles, post them and have done with it. No, you must write the articles yourself and publish them to your blog.

Most advertisers also want to see that you have traffic and / or a good Page Rank on your blog. You can work on these hand in hand, although one does not always give the other. As you are writing you should also be taking care of these by building links, building traffic and publicising your blog. It can all be fun work, but it does take time.

Expect to spend at least 3 months from when you first post to your blog, with regular posts over that time, before you can reasonably expect most of the paid posting systems to work with you. But, it is possible!

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