Are you new online? Maybe you're just getting started with Internet marketing. If so, you have undoubtedly heard of blogging. Yet, you may wonder, What the heck is a blog? Blogs, or "weblogs," are somewhat like a journal in that you can write anything in it you wish. You can add video and/or sound. You can post pictures. You can do just about anything you want to do and have a great time with it.

You can have a blog hosted on your own server or it can be hosted at places like WordPress.com or Blogger.com. Yet, it's better to have your blog on your own account because then, you can do anything you want with it. You can add pictures, sound, video, banners, whatever. It's best not to get too carried away. Still a little Google AdSense is always good for a few bucks a week. What you should do is to provide great content and link to the peoducts you review so that people can further explore your recommendation. Loyal readers will trust you and be interested in what you're discussing in your blog.

Of the self-hosted blogs the most preferred format is WordPress, which you can download from WordPress.org or if you have hosting with cPanel control panel, you can very easily install a WordPress blog through Fantastico. Then, you can decide on your template. There are thousands of options and most are free, though you can pay for a theme, if it suits your purposes better. Just be sure to check your blog out in both Internet Explorer and Firefox because both browsers are used so heavily and Internet Explorer tends to do strange things to some templates.

When you've chosen a cool template, the next step is applying for Google AdSense, unless of course, you're not running a blog for business. But if you are, you can place a few ads from Google on your site and make a few bucks each week. The revenue, which we call "pay-per-click," comes from people clicking on the links on your site and you get a portion of that revenue. You can find WordPress templates with AdSense already installed and then, just go in and change the user ID. Keep this in mind when choosing a template, if you're not into changing the blog's files, which are written in PHP.

But the thing to remember is to have fun with your blog. It's best to stick to a central theme and write all your posts around it. So, if you're writing about dogs in your blog, don't go off on a "What I ate for breakfast" rant or people won't appreciate it. Those kinds of whiny blogs are not heavily trafficked, anyway. If you want to have that kind of a blog, separate it from the dogs and let them make money.

The greatest thing about a blog is that you can really drive traffic back to your main website from it. In my next article, I'll show you ways to make this happen.