Blogging is a lucrative source of profit and blogs are easy to set up and maintain. Imagine a home based business where you are paid to write on stuff that interests you, whenever you want, wherever you are. The mere flexibility of blogging makes it easy for you to just kick back, relax and go on a vacation whenever you feel like it.



In this article, we are going to look into the profitability of a blog and set up a blog of our own at no cost! Interested? Read on!

First, we need to obtain a blog. There are several options - host a blog on your own domain or get a free blog. For starters, let's talk about the free blogs. You can easily obtain a free blog at Blogger or (and considered better by many) WordPress. In fact, there are actually upwards of 40 different free blog sites available on the internet today. If you are a techie, you must have heard of WordPress, it's a great free blog engine that is robust and very expandable.

Blogger is actually owned by Google, so it may be detected on Google's radar faster which means faster indexing. WordPress however is quite flexible with a wide variety of plug ins and features. As of this writing, I have no comparison on the speed of getting indexed by search engines. I prefer WordPress personally due to the features. And, you can easily manage your sidebar links very efficiently (more about this later).

Now, go get a free blog at Blogger, WordPress, or any of the other free blogging service providers. Then, familiarize yourself by creating your first post on your blog and tinkering around with the options and templates.

Here are a few common "blog-related" words to help you out:

1) Permalink - Permalink stands for permanent link, which is a URL (uniform resource locator) that leads to an individual post that you make in your blog.

2) Trackback - When you post about someone else's blog post elsewhere, your post will show up in their "trackback" section.

3) Pinging - Blogging seems to be paired with pinging almost every time either one is mentioned nowadays. Pinging is actually the action where a certain aggregator is notified whenever your blog is updated, so that the aggregator may show the newest post of your blog on their website. This is a useful way to gaining traffic, which we shall discuss later.

4) Blogroll - Literally a list of blogs. A blogger features a list of their favorite blogs in the sidebar of their blog.

For now, I shall leave you testing out your new blog and the features that come included with it as you build your home based business.