Anyone can make money blogging; you can even earn enough to quit your present job if you do it right.  But you should be careful with books or courses promising to make you rich overnight.

You might have seen or heard of reports about bloggers making several thousands of dollars every day.

What you don’t know is that it might have taken them many years, or they might have to spend several bucks, to accumulate enough backlinks and traffic. Perhaps they might have their own websites or JV partners, where they can leverage from each others’ assets.

If you’re just starting to blog and you don’t have your own network yet, don’t worry. In this article, I’ll show you how to make money blogging using 5 simple steps. As long as you’re willing to learn and take action, you can skyrocket your earnings in no time.

Step 1: Decide the specific topic or niche of your blog. 

Your blog topics should be something that both you, and your audience, are familiar with or passionate about.

Let’s say you want to make money blogging about video games. If you’e a WarCraft fan, and you understand the game from top to bottom, you’re more likely to come up with beneficial content than if you were to write something completely uninteresting or foreign to you.

Step 2:  Create a professional-looking blog.

Choose an eye-catching design and style for your blog. You can find free themes and plugins on the internet, so you can build attractive blogs and maximize their full moneymaking potentials.  

Step 3: Post valuable, entertaining or controversial content on your blog. 

It’s better if you write the content yourself, so that your personality may shine through. But in case you can’t think of any ideas or you’re pressed for time, you could always outsource the task to a dependable freelancer.  Remember, if you want to make money blogging, you need to invest time and/or money in providing excellent content.

Let’s say you have a WarCraft blog offering free tips for a soon-to-launch ebook, what’s a good plan?

Well, you could write 300-600 word quality articles related to your World of WarCraft blog, and post an article at least 5 times a week in it. If you give quality content, your credibility or authority level shoots up.

Getting people to write comments is an excellent way to get free content and make money blogging. People love to join hot discussions. Encourage comment posting by offering certain prizes for blog commenters of the month. For example, you could give $50-$100, gift cards to Amazon, or copies of your own products (in case you don’t want to offer money).

By posting valuable content and encouraging comments, you’re slowly building a network of fans to your blog.

Step 4: Monetize it.

There are a number of ways to make money blogging through various monetization streams.

You could promote your own products related to your content. If you provide good solid information and they’re satisfied, they are more likely to buy from you.

If you don’t have your own products, you could buy products with resale or private label rights. But if you don’t want to go through any hassles, you could simply promote affiliate products related to your content. 

You could also post Google adsense on your blog, so you can make money blogging whenever someone clicks on those ads, even if they didn’t buy anything.

You can also make money by using pay-per-action programs. These programs usually pay you more than adsense, but less than the normal affiliate programs. How do you earn with pay-per-action programs? Every time someone does a specific action that the advertiser intends them to do (whether it’s filling up a form, downloading a report, subscribing to a list, etc.), you get paid a certain amount. 

If your blog becomes popular enough, you could also offer advertising space where marketers will pay you to put their advertisements in your blog.

Step 5: Bring in the traffic.

There are different techniques to generate traffic and make money blogging.

Set up your blog posts to be “pinged” automatically to a list of ping sites every time you make a new post. Pinging is a method that allows your content to be indexed faster by the search engines.

Use Google Adwords or other pay-per-click methods to advertise your blog. When people search for certain keywords related to your blog, your pay-per-click ad comes out. You only pay every time someone clicks on your ad.

Create informative or entertaining videos, advertise your blog in that video, and upload them to video-sharing sites. Youtube may be the most popular one, but there are other sites worth uploading your videos to. You may use a free service like tubemogul.com to simultaneously upload your videos to a variety of video-sharing sites of your choosing. 

Submit your blog to blog directories. Simply search for “blog directories” in Google and you’ll get a list to submit your blog details to. 

One of the most effective ways to make money blogging is to contact other bloggers and set up a proposal – you put their blog link on your blog, and vice-versa.

Write articles and submit them to article directories. You can then advertise your blog in the resource box.  You could even use your blog content as articles to submit to article directories. But that’s not all…

You could maximize your content to its full capacity by converting your articles to powerpoint presentations and posting them at slideshare.net. You could also convert those powerpoint presentations into videos, and then post them to various video-sharing sites.

Use various Web 2.0 methods to make money blogging.  Bookmark your links at social bookmarking sites like digg.com, stumblepon.com, propeller.com, and many others. However, you should always observe proper netiquette. Most, if not all, of these bookmarking sites prohibit any marketing activities. But you can get under the radar if you give first, become a helpful part of the Web 2.0 community, and bookmark a lot more non-self-serving sites than self-serving ones.

These are the 5 simple steps to make money blogging. Hope you find them useful and may you earn a lot of money with your blog.