Before you start a Blog from the perspective of making money from it, make sure you understand the basics of:

• Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)
• Book Marking of the page
• Track backs
• Online Advertising

To make things easier and to get you started, here are some popular and free blogging software's that you can try:

• bBlog - It is a free PHP blog software that is best for blogging beginners.
• MSN Spaces
• Windows Live Spaces
• Wordpress

Up and Running

If you intend to make money through blogging, here are some tips and pointers to get it up and running.

1. Decide Your Niche

Writing on any random thought or topic is not going to gain you any popularity, provided you are a celebrity already.

Otherwise, decide on your niche. Each post of yours should be able to provide genuine value to your visitors. For example, if you decide to talk about a passion like food, make sure you have genuine recipes, video clips of you cooking or at least photos of the different items.

Make sure the titles you use in each post are direct and attract surfers who are searching for that topic.

To attract a reasonable traffic, you need to gain more link backs from sites like Technoratti and Digg.

2. Hosting Your Blog

If you are a beginner go for an automated blog hosting site such as livejournal.com, blogspot.com Here the set up is easy, as it provides you with available templates and other options from which you can choose. In particular, look out for specific features like tracking tools which will help you build traffic, identify recent posts and popular message threads.

3. Watch the Traffic

Monitor the amount of traffic you receive. If the number of page views and users seem low or stagnant, improve it by varying your themes or subjects.

Then make sure you get visibility by say adding a link to your home page in Wikipedia and to other blogs. Make sure you also reciprocate by adding links to other blogs as well.

This encourages a steady flow of traffic back and forth between various blogs and sites. You can also comment on what other bloggers have written and link it to them.

4. Key to Keywords

Search engine results are another way of generating traffic. To get to the top of the search engine results make careful use of keywords in your headline and blog copy. If you have your own blog site, use proper keywords and description tags in your pages. You can learn the basics of HTMl on Webmonkey.

For instance you are writing on career and flexi work, make use of these two words as often as possible in varied permutations in your copy.

If you already have a blog going with Ad sense and are generating decent traffic, share your tips using the comment box below.