Does blogging make money? Can you really set up a blog and expect to make an income? We have a look at what you can expect.

A lot of people start blogging with the expectation that very quickly they will be earning a lot of money. Sadly, that is certainly not usually the case.

Take, for example, a newly set up blog on a free blog system that is full of private label rights content. What does this offer for any advertisers? It is not going to have a loyal following of readers and it is too new to have any search engine ranking benefits whilst the duplicate content that many others are sharing will probably prevent the search engines ranking the site.

So, if you are offering the advertisers nothing, why would they want to pay you?

Therefore, we need to look at what you can offer to advertisers that will make them want to part with their cash in your direction.

In short, they want more visitors to their websites and that is either through exposure to your visitors or through optimising their website through getting a search engine benefit from your blog.

To get an increase in traffic to their website by exposure to your visitors, you need to have plenty of visitors on your blog that will read adverts that you are displaying and then click on them and visit the advertiser’s website. This can be direct adverts, affiliate links or even pay per click adverts. There are plenty of different ways of turning traffic into cash through adverts.

Getting your blog to this point of a good readership takes time and effort. You need to do your groundwork in establishing plenty of interesting content and then encouraging visitors to your blog. Easy enough if you know how and are experienced, not so easy for the beginner.

So, what about the search engine benefits of being listed on your blog? Again this takes time and effort to build in to your site plenty of incoming links. A lot of the value of your blog will be based on its PageRank. Build a good PageRank and the value goes up.

This means that a lot of the value of your blog is based on how much work you do on your own optimisation and how soon Google updates its PageRank information. If you have a high PageRank, you can demand good amounts per link. But with no PageRank there will be few advertisers and these will not be happy to spend a lot advertising on your blog.

So, for a brand new blog then blogging will probably not make much money. But if you can establish a quality blog with a lot of well written and interesting original content, build your own traffic levels and your blog’s own search engine rankings then there is indeed the opportunity to make a lot of money from that blog.

And, once you have done it once, you know what to do to do it again and again. It becomes a matter of how many blogs can you handle?