[Start-it-up] How To Monetize Your Writing Skills and Start a Blog If you are good with words, blogging is still an option to make money, albeit your content speaks volumes. Here's a guide to help you through.

After social media became the flavor of the town, and took over as the platform for all kinds of content that an average person consumes, blogs, which were erstwhile a popular form of expression on the internet, took a backseat.

Essentially a website that mainly focuses on written content, blogs are easy to maintain.

If you are good with words, blogging is still an option to make money, albeit your content speaks volumes. Here's a guide to help you through.

The Basics

Although writing is among the most important skills that a blogger must possess, passion topples that. When starting a blog and considering the millions out there, it is important to be extremely passionate about your blog's subject.

What you must ask yourself is: why would someone read your blog? Offer something different and unique.

The next step is to keep honing your writing skills. Writing more is obviously going to help in this regard but read all kinds of content, learn new techniques of writing, and remember to be conversational. A conversational style of writing helps keep your audience stay on.

Once you have decided on a topic and your style of writing, the next thing to do is research. You may not be an expert in your field, or might just be, but choose a topic that you feel hasn't been talked about in the kind of detail that people would like to read about. It may take days to weeks to months, but to offer something different, you must churn out every last bit of information.

Use the likes of Facebook, Twitter and spend some money on paid ads if you deem necessary. After you have your initial base of readers, word of mouth is necessary to grow.

Setting Up

There are several different websites that let you set up a blog for free, including Blogger Wordpress, Tumblr and the relatively new ones like Medium.

All of them have different templates and features, so you must do test runs on at least a few before zeroing on one.

If it is a free blog, you would have a subdomain attached to the name of your blog. To remove those, all these different sites offer paid plans to buy a custom domain name. If you wish to start afresh without taking help from any of these blog publishing services, go ahead and hire a freelance website designer.

Investment

Blogging is perhaps the cheapest things to do even today in terms of initial investment, with free sites allowing you to practically start for free.

While for these different blog publishers, you have different pricing depending upon the premium plan you choose or even if you are just buying a custom domain name, hiring someone to build your website could cost anywhere between INR 5k to INR 10k. Buying a domain name could cost you as little as INR 1k a year while hosting a simple website would come to about INR 2.5k a year. The designer's charges would vary depending upon your requirements.

Earning

The first step should be to have a google adsense account and put that initial traffic to use with pay per click ads. After you have enough traction to attract advertisers, rent out space on your blog for potential advertisers.

If you are writing a blog and have an opportunity for potential product placement, approach relevant companies and work out a paid collaboration. They might even be willing to sponsor that particular post.

In case you don't want to depend on ad revenue and if your loyal readers are willing to pay, use a service like Patreon. It may seem fairly difficult but several popular bloggers and even YouTubers operate this way.