Can you make money by blogging?

Creating a blog can be a fun hobby. But is it possible to make a living from it?

Mummy blogs, political blogs, prison blogs, anonymous police officer blogs, even school dinner blogs. The internet has provided a platform that the UK population has enthusiastically embraced.

But is this a way for would-be writers and hobbyists to make some real cash?

Making money by writing

Recently, I’ve looked at whether you can make money writing Mills and Boon or by self-publishing.

But maybe you don’t have the time, the imagination or the dedication to complete a whole book. That’s not necessarily a bad thing. But if you enjoy writing or you have a particular passion you want to share with the world, then a blog could be a good way to express that.

And if you can make a few quid at the same time, then so much the better.

How much can you make?

Without being too flippant, how long is a piece of string? Some bloggers are almost celebrities - just look at Guido Fawkes. His political gossip website is one of the most visited blogs and it’s filled with paid-for advertising.

Yet one blogger I spoke to has made just £120 in six years. So there’s quite a scale. But what about a blog that’s successful but hasn’t achieved the fame of the Guido Fawkes site?

LittleMummy

Meet Erica Douglas. She began writing one of the first parenting blogs – LittleMummy - several years ago, as a hobby. Since then, she’s turned it into a successful business and launched other businesses off the back of that success.

Illness meant she had to leave her part-time job and her husband suggested that she turn her blog into a full-time occupation, to see if she could make money from her hobby.

“Within three months I was earning £500 a month from my parenting blog. I built it up from there.”

Erica has set up a business training people in blogging. You can see some of her free e-courses on her website. But she’s still making money from her original blog, despite having fewer hours to work on it.

“The mummy blog is earning £500-600 a month. Some months it earns over £1,500, it just depends. What I love is that it’s part-time hours and very flexible. I can be there for the school drop off and picking up, for the school plays.”

Before Erica’s success, the family was living on her husband’s salary as a bus driver and there wasn’t much spare cash. Now they can afford to move to a larger home and she treated her other half to his dream holiday for his 30th birthday. Blogging has made a real difference to the Douglas family.

Making money with Google Adsense

There are many different ways for bloggers to make money through their work. They might become affiliate marketers, who get paid for including links to other websites. They might sell a product or service off the back of their blog – that’s why so many companies set up their own blogs.

However, the simplest way for bloggers to earn money with a popular website is to sell advertising space. Some will agree advertising with specific companies and sponsors, but others just want to write and earn without the hassle of selling space on their site.

That’s why Google’s Adsense is such a popular option. In Google’s own words it’s “a free program that empowers online publishers to earn revenue by displaying relevant ads on a wide variety of online content”. Essentially, you hand the space over to Google, it publishes adverts that seem relevant to your content, and you earn a small amount every time someone clicks on one.

Bob Bardsley is a blogger who uses it on a variety of websites. His main website is a music review blog –Popsiculture, which carries advertising across the top. He also earns by linking to music at the iTunes store.

So, is it making him big money? Far from it. “I can't give exact figures, as Google's terms and conditions forbid it, but none of my sites generate huge profits. You can take a payment or withdrawal when you reach about £60 in revenue, and I've only ever made it to that total twice in about six years I think,” he says.

Ah. This is barely beer money. However, it turns out that it’s not all about the advertising revenue for Bob. “I'd say for bloggers, the best option to earn an income is to get freebies and paid-for articles sponsored by companies who send you their products to review, and usually keep.

“This seems to be what the big mummy bloggers do, and some of them seem to do pretty well out of it. Obviously sponsorship and paid-for articles put your editorial integrity under a bit of pressure, but the good ones put full disclosure notices on their posts, explaining that the product was free or the article paid for, but that the opinions expressed remain their own.”

Go ghostblogging

Fortunately, Bob does make a living through blogging and it’s more than £120 in six years. He ghostwrites blogs for companies and individuals who lack the time or skill to do so for themselves but want the audience.

[SPOTLIGHT]This is something I do myself and it can be a great way to make some extra cash without the hassle of running your own blog. Of course, you get none of the credit either, so this isn’t for everyone.

If you have a particular skill or knowledge base, consider pitching a blog to a relevant firm or company. The more specialist your knowledge, the more sellable it is.

Top tips for earning by blogging 

Erica’s blog became so successful that she began running courses for other aspiring parent bloggers. She soon realised that these classes were filling up with corporate clients and so launched a business teaching companies how to market through their blogs.

And this is where the real money is, but Erica still enjoys the flexibility she had when it was just one blog. She’s launched her new business with another mother and they employ parents. The whole company works flexibly, so everyone can balance their childcare around their work.

Erica really shows how the internet can allow you to realise your potential and earn money doing what you love. So what are her top tips for aspiring money-making bloggers?

Her main tip is to find a niche, so you won’t have to compete with too many existing blogs. She also warns bloggers to be in for the long haul:

“You need to be prepared for the fact it takes a good six months to build a solid site. One person I’m working with found their first advertiser within six weeks, but she’s far from the norm.”

Erica advises planning how you’ll make money from the start, rather than trying to tack on a way of earning money afterwards.

“Think about how you’ll monetise it early on. Will it be by selling products and services, advertising, affiliate marketing? Audiences can be tricky, you might build an audience who are just looking to be entertained and not buy anything.”

Despite that, she urges would-be bloggers to write about something they’re genuinely interested in: “Don’t just choose something based on money or you’ll give up after a few months.”

Have you ever written a blog? Did you make any money from it? Was it worth the effort? Let us know your thoughts in the comment box below.

How to Register a domain name

Registering a domain name isn’t as daunting as it may sound; thanks to the Internet, registering a domain name takes only minutes. Select a tentative domain name. 

This name will go between the www. and the .com (or .net, or .org or whatever you choose).
It’s a good idea to come up with several possible names for a web site. Many nice names are already in use, and you should also remember that a hyphen can make the difference between availability and unavailability. For example, while www.MyWebSite.com might not be available, www.My-Web-Site.com could be up for grabs.
Don’t rule out a .org or .net or other suffix like .name, .mobi, .tv, .biz, .info, .tel or .pro. Anyone can purchase domain names with these suffixes, so if www.AwesomeClothingForYourDog.com is unavailable, try www.AwesomeClothingForYourDog.tel instead. It normally works, and isn't much of a extra hassle!

Go to a reputable domain registrar such as NetworkSolutions.com, Register.com, GoDaddy.com or other and see what domain names are available. 

Network Solutions maintains not only a list of what domain names people can still buy, they also offer alternative available domain names in case the one you want is taken.

• Try out a few different domain names. Double-check the spelling of every word before committing to paying to register a domain name.

• A domain name will identify your business or hobby for a long time, so look at the way it reads. For example, www.WeAreMu.com may just denote a fraternity, but it can also read “Wear Emu,” which may cause confusion or protests from animal activists.

Pay for the selected domain name. 

Network Solutions offers different levels of services.
Purchase only the services you need. Network Solutions offers packages that will help market a web site or even design it. These services, while helpful, aren't necessary. All anyone must spend is the cost of actually purchasing the domain name.

How to Write PHP Scripts

PHP is a server scripting language used to make web pages interactive. Think of what happens when you edit a page on this website, for example. When you submit your changes, they're sent to one of the wikiHow servers, where they're processed by PHP scripts, and a new version of the page is sent back to your browser. Behind this process are many, perhaps hundreds of PHP scripts, controlling how web pages change based on a variety of circumstances.


While creating the software that powers this wiki is a monumental task, the programming itself is actually very approachable, even if you've never had any training as a programmer. This article will teach you how to write a few very simple PHP scripts so that you can get a basic understanding of how PHP works.


Install the Apache Web Server.


Install the PHP Engine on Your Computer.

Echo
Open Notepad (File>>All Programs>>Accessories>>Notepad). You'll be using Notepad a lot.

Type this into Notepad:

<?php echo "Hello World!"; ?>

Save this file as "helloworld.php".


When saving files in Windows Notepad, wrap the filename in double quotations so that Notepad doesn't add .txt to the end of the filename. Notice in the image that the file helloworld.php has " " around it. You have to do this or Notepad will save the file as helloworld.php.txt


Or you can simply click the drop down for Save as type and change it to All Files (*.*) which will leave the name exactly how you type it and the quotes will not need to be added.







Open your favorite browser and type this address in the address bar:http://localhost/helloworld.php

• If you receive an error message, make sure you typed in the code exactly as shown above, including the colon.

• This is what you should see in your browser window:

Hello World!

Now it's time to understand how it works.

<?php ?>

These two lines tell the PHP engine that everything between them is PHP code. Everything outside the two tags is treated as HTML and ignored by the PHP engine and sent to your browser the same as any other HTML. The important thing you need to recognize here is that PHP scripts are embedded inside regular HTML pages.

echo "Hello World!";

This line uses the echo statement (well, actually it is a construct, but more on that later). Statements are used to tell the PHP engine to do something. In this case, you are telling the engine to print what is inside the quotes.
It's important to know that when we say print, we don't actually mean print. The PHP engine never actually prints anything to your screen. Any output generated by the engine is sent to your browser as HTML. Your browser doesn't even know that it's getting PHP output. As far as the browser is concerned, it's getting plain HTML.




PHP and HTML
Change the script above so that it looks like this:

<?php echo "<strong>Hello World!</strong>"; ?>

Save the file as "helloworld2.php", and open your browser by using the address:http://localhost/helloworld2.php

This time the output is the same as before, but this time the text is in bold.

<strong> and </strong> are HTML markup tags the tell the browser to show any text between them as bold. As stated earlier, a browser will treat anything that prints out of a PHP engine like HTML.

Let's write the same script as before, but add another echo statement. 

Type this into Notepad:

<?php echo "Hello World!<br />"; echo "How are you doing?"; ?>

Save this as "helloworlddouble.php". 

When you run the script in your browser, you should see this:

Hello World!How are you doing?

The thing you need to notice is the <br /> on the first line. This is HTML markup to insert a line break. If you didn't add this, your output would look like this:

Hello World!How are you doing?

Now that you've mastered the echo statement, let's move on to something a bit more complicated.

Variables
Think of variables as containers for data. To manipulate data, be it numbers or names, you need to store the data in a container. The syntax for assigning data, or better called a value, into a variable is:

$myVariable = "Hello World!";

In the above example, the value is "Hello World!", and the variable is $myVariable. You're telling PHP to store the value at the right of the equal sign, into the variable at the left of the equal sign.

The dollar sign ($) at the beginning tells PHP that $myValue is a variable. All variables must start with the dollar sign.



Now let's do something fun with a variable. Open Notepad and type this in:

<?php $myVariable = "Hello World!"; echo $myVariable; ?>

Save the file as "myfirstvariable.php". When you browse to this script with your browser, the output should look like this:

Hello World!

Let's examine in how it works. On the first line of the script, you have defined a variable called $myVariable, and you have inserted a value; "Hello World!". On a line like this, you are giving the variable name on the left of the equal sign, and the value you want to assign to it on the right of the equal sign. From this point on in your script, unless you change the value, $myVariable will always contain the value "Hello World!".

The next line you should be familiar with, a simple echo statement. What you need to take notice of is that the echo statement printed the value of $myVariable, and not literally "$myVariable".

Variables can also contain numbers, and then those numbers can be manipulated using simple mathematical functions.

Take this next script, for example. Type this into notepad:

<?php $mySmallNumber = 12; $myLargeNumber = 356; $myTotal = $mySmallNumber + $myLargeNumber; echo $myTotal; ?>

Run this script in your browser, you should see this:

368

Nothing real impressive, but you did add two variables together. Let's review.

On the first two lines, you created two variables. $mySmallNumber, and $myLargeNumber. You have inserted into these variables two values, 12 and 356, respectively.

On the third line, you have created another variable called $myTotal. With this variable, you have stored the value of $mySmallNumber PLUS $myLargeNumber. Since $mySmallNumber has the value of 12 stored in it, and $myLargeNumber has the value of 356 stored in it, what you have done is stored the value of 12 + 356 into the $myTotal variable. The value stored in $myTotal is 368.

The last line is an echo statement which outputs the value of $myTotal.




tips

This article assumes you've installed Apache and PHP on your computer. Anytime it's said to save a file, you are saving in the\htdocs directory inside the Apache directory.
A really useful tool to help you test PHP files is XAMPP which is a free program that installs and runs Apache and PHP to help you simulate a server on your computer.