Over the last year, creating a blog on how to make money online has been all the rage.  The problem is that while these blogs start up with a bang, they quietly shrivel up and go away after three months or so.  What happens is that these new writers read a blog about making money online (like John Chow, Problogger, or Shoemoney) and think to themselves, “Hmmm, this looks easy.  I’ll start a blog and make thousands online.”  What looks easy from the surface actually takes alot of long and hard work behind the scenes.

How to Start Making Money Online from College with a Blog 

Starting a blog is actually very easy, just alittle piece of advice.  Write about something you actually know something about.  If you don’t know anything about making money online, don’t write about it.  If you’re the master of playing World of Warcraft, blog about that.  If you are the king of MySpace, write about MySpace.  Get my drift?  Go with what you know and are good at.

After determining your topic, now it’s time to choose a platform.  Blogs far and wide will tell you to register your own domain and run wordpress.  While that is excellent advice, that’s not the path I’m going to suggest for you.  My suggestion is that you start with a simple blog using Google’s Blogger platform.  I want you to determine if you can start and keep up with a blog before you start spending any cash on it, and hosting your own blog takes money.  It doesn’t cost much money, but if your college days are anything like mine were, I was too busy trying to scrimp and save so I could afford cable, gas money, and the weekly pizza feast.  If you’re iron-willed enough to use what little cash you have for hosting fees, go for it, I just remember money being in short supply.  Dreamhostis the hosting provider I personally use; they have nice rates and a one click install of Wordpress.  Anyway, back to Blogger.

Use your Google Account information as a sign-in.  If you don’t have a Google Account, create one here.  You’ll sign in, go through two more steps to create your blog, and now it’s time to start blogging.

When I first started blogging, before I got my own domain, I used Blogger:

At this point you want to start to optimize your theme.  There’s not much you can do beyond putting widgets into your theme on the sidebars and switch themes.  Use Google’s Adsense and other ad-services that allow interested readers to generate some ad revenue.  I’m telling you right now, you won’t make much money at the start.

The best thing you can do at this early stage is to start routing your RSS Feed through Feedburner.  This will allow you, in the future when you switch from Blogger to your own domain, to make a few clicks in Feedburner to have your old subscribers switched over to your new site, and they’ll never have to do anything themselves.

You need to focus on writing articles for three months.  Visit other blogs; commenting on articles may direct some traffic your way if your comments are good and on topic.

After three months, you’ll have a good idea if blogging is for you.  If so I suggest to sign-up with PayPerPost, take a few opportunities, and use the income from those articles to register a domain and setup hosting, and transfer your blog from Blogger to Wordpress.

You’re well on your way to making money online with your blog.  It will be slow going, but reading the following blogs will give you further ideas on how to make money online through blogging:

• John Chow
• Problogger
• Cash Quests
• Strategic Internet Marketing

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