Blogging 101- Beginner's Level

I have met some of my friends and cousins whom I've talked about blogging and how I earn through blog. They have a lot of questions and the first question is How to start a blog. So, I'll be posting a series about Blogging from the Beginners Level to Pro Blogging ( Professional Blogging where you earn through blog). As I've shared in one of my post, I'm not an expert but I would just like to share my experiences and learning from other Pro Bloggers like Ruby, Janet and etc. So, let me start from the very basic level.

How to create a Blog and earn through it.

1) You must have a blog. As a start you can create an account with any of the free hosted blogs like yourblogname.blogspot.com or yourblogname.wordpress. For a blogspot blog you can go to www.blogger.com to create a free account or wordpress.com. I personally started with Blogger but now I have a wordpress blog. Some 'get paid to post' companies don't accept blogs from Wordpress (like PPP or Socialspark) while I know only of one company who only wants Wordpress blog. So, I advise you can start off with Blogspot and once you get the feel of it, create another Wordpress account.

2) Post as much as you can in 3 months. For the next three months, don't think about monetizing your blog yet but enjoy writing your posts, visiting and learning from other bloggers. The reason for this is that some companies only accept blogs that are more than 3 months old while a few accepts blogs as old as 1 month.

3) Build your traffic and links. While waiting for you blog to mature, you can also build your traffic by letting people know about your blog ( or for advanced bloggers , creating an account on any auto surf sites or traffic building sites like entrecard.com, linkreferral.com and etc.) and build links by leaving comments on other blogs and exchanging links with them. It has been said, that doing these can increase your ranking ( Pagerank, Alexa rank and Realrank) and therefore, more opportunities to get more paid advertisements in the future.

4) Aim for your blog to get a Page Rank. This is one very 'mysterious' thing for bloggers. I don't even want to define what it is because the Google's definition is already quite confusing. But anyways, PageRank is one important thing for advertisers because some of them gives more opportunities for blogs with Page Rank. Thus, it is also important for us bloggers to have a high pagerank.

How to know a site's pagerank?

You can find out any site's pagerank by downloading the google toolbar in your browser and then press 'setting', then 'more buttons' and check 'enable pagerank'. Then you will see a line on top of your browser with a green bar. If you don't see any greenbar, it means the site your in doesn't have a Page Rank.

How to get a pagerank?

Oh, until now I'm still not sure how they calculate it. Some say the more traffic and links you build, the more chances you'll get a Pagerank. But then, I have another blog ( From Asia and Beyond ) that doesn't have much links and traffic but it has a Pagerank of 3. Maybe it has something to do with traffic, searches, links and a lot more. But anyways, you can search and study about Page Ranks as you go on with your blogging.

4) Create a Paypal Account - While waiting for your blog to mature, you can also create an account with Paypal ( www.paypal.com) . You must have a Paypal account because this is the only way the companies pay you. Don't worry, Paypal is very safe, secure and credible. It's widely used in the worldwide web.

What are the requirements to create a Paypal account?

You must have a credit card or Unionbank Eon Account ( for those residing in the Philippines). Either of the two cards are needed for the verification process. But once your account is verified, there are many banks all around the world where you can withdraw your money from Paypal.

to be continued...