The Lady Programmer

These past weeks I had been able to find old classmates and friends in real life. They’ve always asked what I do. I kept telling them that I am earning both from my blogs as well as with freelancing.

For now I can just list down steps on how to get started in blogging.

How to get started in blogging

1. Decent writing skills. I started out using a word editor with a spell checker to help me out.
2. Knowledge of using the computer and the internet. Obviously.
3. Decent internet connection. Believe me, I started blogging and even freelancing using 56kbps free internet connection that came with my telephone line.
4. (optional) Your own computer. Here in my country (Philippines) you can always blog at any internet cafe for a  minimum of P10/hour.

Of course, the next thing to do is to open up a blog for free.

1. Blogger.com: The site is great for starters (and even advanced users) to start earning money from blogs. They allow placement of advertisements and other useful codes into the blog.
2. WordPress.com: Their blogs may look better and have better comment management, but they don’t allow advertisements and other codes to be placed on their blogs. If you don’t really intend to make money, then this may be a wiser choice.
3. There are more free blogging platforms out there such as Blogsome, but performance-wise, the first two options are still the best ones to start blogging.

What’s next?

1. Choose a topic for your blog. Most often people think of blogs as a place to write down personal thoughts: but blogging had matured and evolved, so it is now easy for one to pick a topic. It is best to write topics that revolve around your personal interest if you want to earn from your own blog: cars, technology, gadgets, fashion, kids and parenting, news and commentary – the list is endless.
2. Learn the technicalities of blogging, such as HTML. Or pay an expert to help you out in coding your blog. Or ask the help of a friend in doing simple HTML tweaks on your blog. Sometimes you want to insert advertisements and other useful codes into your blog.

Making Money from Blogs

1. Learn SEO techniques. If you want to attract huge amounts of traffic to your advertisements or offers.
2. If SEO is too technical to understand do occasional paid reviews and link selling instead in addition to SEO. You may even have to invest in a domain name just to qualify for these offers. Please visit this link to learn more.
3. Do not stop at the first two steps. Making money online doesn’t stop there. There’s always a new trick or technique that comes along the way.

I keep on getting emails and even get to chat with a few online friends that they want to make a big career change move: quit to job then go to freelancing or problogging (bloggers earning income from blogs such as blog advertisements).

One email I got said that she is planning to quit her job and just go freelancing. She plans to start building work history right after she resigned from her job. She could not explore freelancing while she is employed because the job takes a lot of her time.

I’ve got so many old friends who were suddenly interested on how I earn online these days (both from freelancing and blogging). If they happen to be skilled in Information Technology, writing or even both, then they can be able to get online freelance jobs successfully. Those who are interested in earning from blogs need to improve their writing skills and eventually move to learn SEO. However, their interests were short-lived even if they wanted to learn the ropes.

I helped two friends start their own blogs to earn from them. After that one session, they were not able to update it as often as they should. They were just too busy with the day jobs.

To be successful in this venture, people need to be able to honestly answer these questions:

1. Can I afford to quit my current job?
2. Do you have the right skills and experience to go into freelancing?
3. Am I able to learn new skills quickly with my own resources?
4. Is there a huge demand for my skills and experience?
5. Can I have a social life at home with online friends all around me most of the time?
6. Am I a master of my own time?
7. Do I have the nose for new income opportunities?
8. Do I tend to decide just early enough to get started?
9. Do I tend to be a bit ahead before everyone gets to discover the awesomeness of a good opportunity?
10. Am I thinking about making the preparations for freelancing or problogging over several weeks?

All the questions are essential to the success of a freelancer, but I’ve bolded the most important ones. If you can say yes to most (not necessarily all) of the questions above, then you may be a good fit for freelancing.

Freelancing and problogging always give better returns compared to regular salaried jobs to those play the cards right.

For neophyte freelancers, I’ve always recommended that they learn the ways on how to talk, communicate and negotiate with other people and think the business way. For aspiring probloggers, they just need to start out their own free blogs in Blogger (not WordPress.com – it is a platform that does not let you post advertisements in their blogs) then watch and see over time whether they blogging is for them or not before they waste their time, effort and money on things that may probably not work out for them (talking about perception and persistence!).

If you had been an avid follower of this blog, I had been writing some sponsored reviews in this blog every now and then. I am not limited to a single paid review site though, but one of the places where I get my technology-related sponsored reviews is at SocialSpark – and they got plenty of them in different flavors: blog posts, sponsorship, affiliates and CPCs.

One of the new changes that I like in SocialSpark is their CPC campaigns. I noticed that each click pays more than what I normally earn in Google Adsense. In addition to that, I am not limited to displaying CPCs only in my blogs – I got both Facebook and Twitter, and SocialSpark provides the necessary links for me to display those ads in two Social Networks.

I’ve tried posting out technology-related CPC links right here in this blog, and in Twitter and Facebook too. So far, I’ve earned more from both this blog and Twitter, but not much on Facebook. I guess it is because I’m not too actively involved in Facebook (but I am not simply posting out sponsored links either). However the earnings I got from promoting tech-related products or services are not really that much – I still need to learn and figure out how to get the most out from CPC clicks.

If you are a blogger who loves to write about technology as well as earn money from blogs, then be sure to head out to SocialSpark – they already got plenty of technology-related opportunities up for grabs.

Finally, this much-awaited tutorial is out. I’ve promised a tutorial on how to move from Blogger to WordPress to a number of readers – finally, it’s now published on JaypeeOnline! Visit the link:

HowTo: Move from Blogger to WordPress Part I – initial import fom Blogger to WordPress

HowTo: Move from Blogger to WordPress Part II – configuring the permalinks

I’ve deliberately disabled comments on this post. Please visit JaypeeOnline, read my guest post and leave your comments.

NOTE: Jaypee of JaypeeOnline is looking for guest bloggers. If you are interested, please contact him with some writing samples or a link to your blog post.

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I have already rewritten one of the pages of this blog: I’ve renamed it to Current Earners. Those are the ones that are brings me money each month, aside from participating in surf and click programs of course.

The page is now quite descriptive – you can actually see an overview of what the program actually is. I’ve also included links to the past reviews that I had already written on this blog!

Oh, and do me a favor by signing up!

visit Current Earners page