Well after helping a friend on facebook figure out how to start up a blog and monetize it I felt that it was a great way to begin a post. First off this will only be covering the beginning so if you are interested in more advanced aspects of online business and blogging then you will need to visit my blog in the resource and I will discuss it in later posts. To start it is important to build your online presence TODAY. This is the biggest setback for those thinking they want to make money online is actually setting up a presence which they can begin with.

A couple presences that are really great to start out with is something as simple as a squidoo lense. You can write a lense on something you are passionate about. There will be some internet marketing involved, but usually squidoo does a decent job of helping your lense out by linking it to related pages. There are those such as Seth Godin who have pretty much mastered such websites as Squidoo and actually make quite a bit just from the revenue sharing program. How the program works is when you create a lense and it begins making money squidoo will share a percentage of the income with you.

Now for those who have been reading you may be wondering why I haven’t been talking about setting up a blog. Well the rest of this will be on the set up which includes content creation and monetization. The beginner of online business will be quite overwhelmed when first starting not sure where to go or what to do. If you are interested in setting up a blog there are two main free places that people go. If this is your first blog and you don’t want to spend any money then you will not need to at blogger.com or wordpress.com. Both of these websites will allow you to set up a free blog, give you a free domain name, and host your blog for free. If you get really good at blogging you can always purchase webhosting and a domain name, but for your first blog this is not necessary.

The first step is choosing a title which will also make a good domain name. This does not have to be really difficult just think of what you want to write about and what people will type in to find you. If you want to teach people how to fix tv’s then name your blog Ultimate TV Repair or something similar. Find a good name for your blog one which has not been already taken. To do this you can type in the URL of the title your want or search Google. You don’t want people to get confused when trying to find your presence.

The next step (after choosing a template) is writing your first article. This is a very important part of blogging your first article says to the world "I am open for business". You may not get any traffic from it, but if you do people will know that you are ready for them to come and read. In fact your first article can be just that Open For Business and explain what you will be writing about.

Once you get your blog up and have a few articles written it will be time to think about monetization. For this it will take some time to find what will be the best fit for your blog. If you are brand new and chose blogger to build your blog then adding Google adsense is extremely easy. Go to your blogger dashboard and hit optimize. Google will let you pick where and how you want your ads. If you are having trouble with adsense there are other programs which allow also let you make money. Some of these include amazon associates, click bank, and cash crate. Make sure and find a program which people on your blog really respond to and remember you will need quite a bit of traffic to make good money. Don’t get frustrated just keep pushing out article after article and never stop learning about online business, internet marketing, and blogging.