What is the difference between blogging and article writing, or is there a difference at all? For me the definition of blogging is writing on a blog where the posts appear on the same home page, and are updated as you write more ones.
The small difference with writing articles is you don’t have the whole posts on your home page or profile page, only a link to the article. The difference is not much, but it can make a difference in terms of back links, because if the home page of your blog has a high page rank, then you can make a higher quality back link to another page, and boost it’s Google rating.
Free blogs are not easy to get a high page rank for, and generally the advice is that you should buy a domain name that is relevant to the subject matter you are going to be writing about in your blog.
So what’s the difference between a website and a blog? A website is a fairly broad term that probably encompasses all different types of page designs, but it seems to mean that you have a domain of your own.
Do you Need a Domain of Your own to Make Good Money Writing?
The advice I have gotten is that it is better to have a domain of your own, especially when you compare a free blog to a hosted one, because the URL is so much longer with a free one, (which Google doesn’t like), and you have a lot less options unless you pay money to get template designs and stuff.
The question you have to ask yourself, is are you going to blog enough on the one topic to make hundreds of dollars a year from Google Adsense or Amazon ads, to cover the costs of buying a domain name, hosting, and template designs?
That is a hard question to answer, as you have to be very good at SEO in order to get your articles on the first page of a popular Google search, different Google Adsense keywords are worth different amounts in different countries, and you may not even be good enough at designing pages and writing for people to stay on your page more than a few seconds.
I can tell you what I have heard about setting up a good hosted blog or website. The best site to go to is wordpress.org, (not .com), and you need to already have a domain name to set up your website or blog using a Wordpress template. Perhaps Go Daddy?
Then you need hosting, and I have heard that Host Gator is the best if you are setting up many different websites, because they have unlimited domain hosting for about a hundred a year.
Making Money From Free Blogs and Articles
I found all of this stuff too complicated as a beginner, and when I make fairly good money from my free blogs, I can’t really be bothered.
I have a free blog and most of my blog posts there get on the first page of a Google search, if I pick a fairly specific title that doesn’t have too much competition.
My free Blogger blog SEO Articles has no such luck with the page rank. At one point I got it up to a 0, and then it dropped back down to n/a.
I have a free Wordpress blog too, but I barely even bother writing in that one. A free Wordpress blog doesn’t allow you to put any ads on it at all, so it’s not really worth my time.
I can post any ad or banner code into my other two blogs though, and usually I put Amazon ads in, because I lost my Google Adsense account.
Because I lost my Adsense account, I am very limited in the amount of money I can make from a blog unless I get hundreds of thousands of views on Amazon ads that are selling expensive products with a big commission, so I tend to just write posts here.