First, making money blogging is not as simple as a lot of people want you to believe.

Don’t believe all the hype of sales letters and blog posts that you see. There is work involved.

You can’t just throw up a blog, make a few posts and expect the cash to roll in.

However, if you are prepared to put together a solid game plan and put in the necessary work, blogging can be a fantastic and easy way to make money working from home.

But you need to realize that you need a plan, just like with any other business.

If you were going to spend $350,000 to open a retail store, I doubt you’d just rent a building, purchase a bunch of random stuff, toss it into your store and open for business, expecting people (traffic) to stampede to what you have to offer (your blog’s content), and whip out their credit cards for your products (your offers on your site, whether it’s adsense or affiliate links).

So if you still want to make money blogging, here are eight steps you can take to start generating traffic and pulling in profits.

1. Select A Niche

There’s been a lot written about how to select a niche. My favorite ways to find a niche are actually offline and you can read more about that in my article, How To Find Profitable Niches Offline

To confirm that the niche will be viable online (people are searching for the topic and you can generate traffic), you’ll need to do some keyword research as well.

Wordtracker’s Free Keyword Research Tool goes a long way in helping you determine if your niche is being searched for online.

2. Create Your Blog

Once you have your niche selected, you need to set up your blog.

While there are a number of free options such as Blogger.com and Wordpress.com I recommend that you get your own hosting account and use the blogging software at Wordpress.org to create your blog.

One, it’s more professional. Two, it’s YOUR blog.

If you host somewhere else like Blogger, the site belongs to them (in this case, Google) and they can delete your entire blog whenever they want and for no reason at all.

I’ve seen it done to people more times than I can count.

By the way, I do recommend you use sites like blogger and wordpress.com for marketing and traffic generation purposes but not as your main site or blog.

Wordpress is currently the most powerful blogging software around today. I give it my highest recommendation.

However, there are a number of things you’ll want to do with your Wordpress once you have it installed.

This mainly involves setting up a number of different plugins that will make your site more user friendly as well as search engine friendly.

Here are a few plugins to get you started:

• Google Sitemap

• Subscribe Me

• Sociable

• Related Posts

• Tagalize It

• All in One SEO Pack

• ALinks [creeate links in your posts to affiliate products]

• Adsense Deluxe

• Akismet [spam buster for blogs]

3. Write 10 – 15 Quality Articles

Once your blog is set up, you’ll want to add quality content. Before doing any marketing, take the time to add ten to fifteen quality posts to your blog.

I would recommend you write ten solid articles in the 300 – 500 word range.

Once you’d done that, write another five pillar content articles. Pillar content articles will take you more time.

They should be longer, more in depth and the type of articles people would want to bookmark. That means high quality articles that include lists, resources, step by step plans, etc.

Think about articles you’ve bookmarked to read again. Why did you bookmark them? Look for the common characteristics of articles you’ve bookmarked. Then use them for your own pillar content articles.

4. Create Web 2.0 Pages

Yes, it’s time to create more content. I’m talking about creating content on web 2.0 properties like Squidoo.com and HubPages.com

By the way, this is when you can use sites like blogger and wordpress.com as well.

Here’s a sample Squidoo lens on affiliate marketing tips.

5. Network Marketing

No, this isn’t that kind of network marketing. This is the kind of networking where you get out there and mingle with those in your niche.

Email bloggers in your niche and let them know about your pillar content articles. Ask if they use guest posters. Vote on their stuff at social sites.

6. Submit 5 Articles to Article Directories

You’ll hear some people say this is one of the best internet marketing tactics around.

Others will say not to do it because of the duplicate content penalties in the search engines or that you won’t get much traffic and the links aren’t very valuable.

Personally I’ve gotten hundreds of visitors from an article directly from EzineArticles.com but there is an even more valuable reason to submit articles to article directories.

This reason is longer term but it’s very important. By getting your articles out there via guest blogging and article submissions, you get your name all over the internet.

You become an expert in your niche and other experts look at you that way as well. This leads to opportunities via networking by having other experts contact you about various joint ventures.

This has happened to me numerous times in the fitness niche, leading to marketing and product creation opportunities. This doesn’t happen over night but it will happen if you stick with it.

7. Blog Comments and Trackbacks

Look, I’ll be honest with on this one. It’s not going to instantly drive thousands of visitors to your site. However, it fits well with number five above, networking.

By being a regular commenter (with quality comments) and using trackbacks, you’ll get noticed by other top bloggers in your niche.

8. Submit Pillar Content to Social Sites

Submit your top content pieces to sites like Digg, Propeller, StumbleUpon and Sphinn

Find sites like digg or propeller that are specific for your niche and submit your content there.

Sign up at Only Wire and bookmark you blog posts.

Put these steps into action, follow them consistently and you will start seeing results. Before you know it, you’ll be making money blogging.

For a complete course, covering all this information, including videos, check out the VRE Coaching Course It’s free and provides more quality information than most courses costing hundreds of dollars.

For example, my top article for 2007 was viewed 42,898 times on EzineArticles.com and also received 1,188 clicks (highly targeted traffic to my site)!

Those article marketing numbers are only the immediate stats direct from EzineArticles.com.

Article Marketing Update:

Some articles have legs and it really is set and forget. You never know which articles will achieve this which is why you need volume. Keep writing.

In addition to the above mentioned stats for 2007 that same article already has the following numbers for 2008.

Remember, these numbers are specifically from EzineArticles.com

Articles Views: 3,080
Click Throughs: 408

I don’t want to cherry pick and make the picture seem rosier than it is.

I have articles older than this one that don’t have any many views as this one has click throughs. That’s the nature of the beast.

The more you write, the more likely you’ll generate some articles that give you big numbers.

Article marketing doesn’t work like it used to but is still very effective.

It’s even more important than before to do good keyword research, use effective headlines that grab attention, write high quality content and provide the information on a niche that is in demand.

This will help you stand out amongst all the low quality recycled plr content from people that are throwing up 40 – 50 software generated “articles” each day.

I know plenty of people complain that EzineArticles.com has become very strict about the articles it accepts. The truth is this is a good thing.

If you do things right, from article marketing to blogging, to social marketing or anything else, you’ll have very little competition.

Very few people follow through and take action. Most do nothing at all and some try and take a shortcut and use things like article “writing” software to recycle crappy PLR content to create crappy articles.

Don’t let this be you.

Massive Action Equals Massive Results!