Learn First, Write Later:
Keywords ****Must read!http://blog-guide.blogspot.com/2008/05/getting-your-blog-to-rank-highly-in.html
More on Keywords ***Must Read!
http://thehappyhubber.hubpages.com/hub/Using-Keywords-in-your-HUB-for-Search-Engine-Ranking
Blog Organization Using Labels as Categories
http://blog-guide.blogspot.com/2008/07/how-to-add-labels-or-categories-to-your.html
Blogger Gadgets in the top of the Post Column
http://blog-guide.blogspot.com/2008/07/blogger-gadgets-on-top-of-post-column.html
Getting Started:
1. You need an account with Google Adsense if you don't have one already.
2. I recommend Blogger (www.blogger.com) to write a blog on. Blogger is owned by Google and makes it really easy to set up to work with Adsense. Once you have an adsense account number, you'll see where you can add that into Blogger and set up ads directly within blogger. You DO NOT need to set up ads in Adsense and paste code into blogger.
3. Now that you have a Blog set up, go back to adsense. You can create a channel in AdSense for your blog. If you have more than one blog, or you publish articles to hubpage (we'll talk about that later), then create a channel for each of these. Then you can see which blogs and which articles are earning money and how much. This will help you write more about the topics that earn you the most money.
4. Next set up an account with StatCounter (http://statcounter.com/). This is free. StatCounter will allow you to see how many people are visiting your blog, which pages they look at, how they found you (direct enter your site address or through a search engine), and what keywords they searched for to find you. StatCounter will give you instructions on how to put their code on your blog. Put a StatCounter on each and every blog you create. This will allow to you know which keywords are bringing you people and which topics are the most popular. Check it at least once a month.
5. Hubpages (www.hubpages.com) - this site if free to join and allows you to publish articles on any topic you want. You can earn ad revenue directly from Hubpages but also connect it to your Adsense account. They do a profit share on the Adsense revenue but they're pretty fair about it. The up side to this site is you can write on random topics and they help to drive traffic to your articles. You can link to your blogs in your profile too. You can also get ebay and amazon revenue but it's never done me any good and seems like a waste of advertising space. This site is also very easy to use.
Submitting your Writing to Search Engines and Pinging:
Submit the URL for each article or blog post you write. Not the site URL such as myblog.blogspot.com but full URL to get to just that article (such as the ones I provided above in the education section.)Pingler
http://www.pingler.com/
https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/submit-url?continue=/addurl&pli=1
Bing/Yahoo/MSN
http://www.bing.com/toolbox/submit-site-url
Tools:
Research Keywords to get ideas for similar keywords and phrases. Also look for keywords that have a high search volume and/or low competition.https://adwords.google.com/o/Targeting/Explorer?__c=1000000000&__u=1000000000&ideaRequestType=KEYWORD_IDEAS
Google Hot Searches:
http://www.google.com/trends/hottrends
Google Trends:
Shows you the search popularity of a keyword over time.
http://www.google.com/trends/
Finding Other Writing Jobs:
You will need a few good samples of your writing style and skill online before you apply to online and freelance writing work.About.comhttp://beaguide.about.com/gdapplynow.htm
Blogger Jobs:
http://www.bloggerjobs.biz/
Search Tempest will allow you to search Craigslist over multiple locations at once. Since Freelance Writing Jobs are not generally tied to a location, this is the best way to look. You can find real writing work in here, and you can find a lot of scams. Be careful.
http://www.searchtempest.com/
