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Putting up a blog gives you the opportunity to brand your own business or product but can also provide an income stream from affiliate recommendations or AdSense. Nonetheless, many folks are not familiar with the process of putting up a blog and monetizing it successfully. Read on to discover several simple methods of setting up a blog and driving traffic.



When it concerns trying to pull in money from a blog, you actually have two alternatives. Your first choice is to buy a domain name and put up a blog on your own hosting. Another alternative is to set up a free account with blogger.com as you can use AdSense and recommend affiliate programs when using their system. But be sure not to use a free WordPress blog as they will close your account if you use affiliate promotions. Still, as I mentioned earlier, you can put up a WordPress blog on a site that you personally own if you wish to use the WordPress platform.



If you want to have your own domain, you will discover that there is a program set up in your cPanel that will allow you to automatically install a WordPress blog on your own website. This is truly the preferred method since you will be promoting your own website as opposed to one that belongs to Google. But you can, of course, use the free blog if you wish to get cracking without spending the few dollars a month for your own web hosting account and domain name.



Once you have your basic blog all set up, you will have the choice of adding AdSense and making other affiliate recommendations. One thing you need to do is to start blogs about things you enjoy, as this will help you to stay dedicated to posting new blog posts every day. This will be crucial in achieving high rankings in the search engines. Be sure to avoid being hard-selling when it comes to your affiliate promotions. Gently instruct visitors on the benefits of the product and add a contextual link, but be very careful not to be too aggressive in your promotion or they will be put off and avoid your blog in the future.



You will also need to promote all of the blog posts you make on your blog. Article marketing is the best way to get this done because you can create links to each blog post; alternately, you may use social bookmarking to obtain links. In time, you will be able to present yourself as an expert in your niche, and this will help to build credibility for the products you advertise. Just follow these simple steps and you will be a prosperous, profitable blog owner before you know it.