It is a no laughing matter to come up with a blog that will push a large number of readers and help you earn a lot of money. That's why I wanted to bring this guide together to help you make the choices that will maximize the odds of creating a popular blog that people would continue to visit over and over again. Hopefully this guide will give you some hints, some tips and help you make your blog not only good, and read well, but also get all the necessary readers, followers, contacts, pundits and likely detractors and ultimately help you make a lot of money.

This guide will teach you how to monetize your blog and catch your share of traffic, which in turn will help you make some money from your writing. It will guide you through the stages of setting up your blog, monetizing it and even driving traffic in measures that are easy to follow. If you're new to blogging then I suggest you start working your way through chapter one, but if you've already set up your blog and just want to build on what you've already developed, then pick and choose-dip in and out the most valuable bits for you.

You've already read more about blogging, vlogging, tweeting, podcasting, and micro-blogging, however you may have thought that being a blogger (someone who posts a blog), vlogger (someone who hosts/produces a video-based blog), and/or podcaster (someone who creates an audio podcast) is too time-consuming, too expensive, and wouldn't help you in some way. Well, the time has come for you to talk about this again and again. In the past, it was important to land a job as a writer for a big newspaper or magazine, or become the host of a radio or television program, if you wanted to reach a mass audience.

Even if you succeeded in winning one of these jobs, you always had to stick to your bosses' stringent editorial standards and uphold a high degree of journalistic integrity. However, due to blogging, anyone from anywhere has the ability to share their views, suggestions, information, viewpoints and/or experience with a potentially large audience around the globe and the expense of doing this is basically at a lower cost.

The main idea that you need to take away from this book before we get started is, sure, blogging is easy to do. If you build it, though, they won't actually come here. Even if you build and post the most amazing, groundbreaking, artistic, imaginative, fun, insightful and interactive blog in internet history, it won't generate an audience if you don't invest the time and resources you need to market your blog, too. After all, thousands of new blogs are generated every day, and the blogosphere already has millions upon millions of popular (and not - so-successful) blogs out there. If you want your blog to be popular, you'll need to be creative and innovative, directly target your original content to your intended audience, and, most importantly, encourage your blog to build and maintain the following.

However, if you take the right path to get reasonable goals into this project, then the possibilities are completely limitless. Before we really start learning everything about blogging, it's important to understand that a blog can take on many types these days. It can be created using text alone, or you can blend text with images, video, audio, computer graphics, and other multimedia content to communicate your core message or information to the intended public. Similarly a blog need not be a stand-alone body. For eg, it can be released as part of a website or Facebook page or it can be linked directly to everything else that you do online.

The term "blog" came from merging the terms "online" and "book," which was used for a short time to describe blogs that posted a running list of dated posts, kind of like a chronologically presented digital diary.