Some people are earning money blogging but fewer people know how to do it. If you want to start blogging to make money you will probably be happy to know that it is not rocket science. You can be earning money blogging in a fairly short space of time if you put some effort into understanding how others do it. Let's talk about what you need to start blogging to make money.

1. The most basic requirement is to have a blog page that you can manage yourself

Wordpress is a wonderful tool for this as it seamlessly allows you to have web pages and a blog on the same site with little effort. It is also one of the easiest tools to use and you don't have to work hard to make it search engine friendly so that Google can find your page. You can also use Blogger or Facebook or HubPages or Squidoo or other social networking sites - but if you are serious about earning money blogging sooner or later I guarantee you will want a Wordpress site as it is the best tool to support you with blogging to make money.

You might not be a techic person in which case you may be thinking that building a blog or webpage is going to be hard work and that is true, as I said at the start, blogging to make money requires some effort. If you don't want to make the effort you can get someone else to build your basic site and help you manage it until you are confident you have learned how to do it yourself. This need not cost much - simple websites are very cheap nowadays.

2. Find something to sell

Before you set up your site you need to think about what you are going to sell because earning money blogging only works if someone is paying you - here are two ways you can get paid:

A. Sign up as an affiliate marketer and put links to the products you are marketing on your blog pages

This is not difficult to do. There are thousands of affiliate programs, that are free to sign up to and often they will not even want to check your blog or website before you to sign up and start blogging to make money with their products. Clickbank is a well know example offering hundreds of affiliate products that you can market. Amazon has an affiliate program. So you don't have to look far to find products to market.

Perhaps you don't know what affiliate marketing so here is a definition: affiliate marketing is when you get paid commission from a business for bringing someone to them who then buys their product. You bring in a customer by providing a link via your website or blog to their sales pages. The wonders of technology mean that the seller can track the sale back to your link and you automatically get paid a commission on each sale.

B. Sign up with Google AdSense and embed Google code in your blog pages

This is not difficult to do. Once you have subscribed to Google AdSense you can put Google Ads on your blog or web pages and if people click on one of the ads you get paid a percentage of what Google is being paid for the ad. You need a lot of people to clicks to earn much money – and that brings me to the next step...

4. You also need to have a strategy to drive traffic to your site

There are several ways people do this and it really depends on what you are planning to sell. The easiest way, especially if you are new to blogging to make money, is to find a niche market. A niche market is a specialist market that is focused on a very specific product - for example van roof racks, or model railways. The reason why a niche market is often easier to make money is because you will have less competition from other online marketers and websites. Of course you need to make sure there are affiliate programs that pay good commission for the products you are thinking of earning money blogging about.

5. Once you have identified your niche market for earning money blogging, start your campaign

Begin the process of blogging and building a campaign to drive traffic to your website. Again there are lots of ways to do this. You need to choose the right blog name; you need to choose good keywords that will work with search engines like Google. You may also want to make a simple video for YouTube or you may write articles and post them on article sites to get some back links.

So is it rocket science or not?

I have made all this sound quite simple and as I said blogging to make money is not rocket science - but you need to do your homework because if you don't you will waste a lot of time and energy blogging to make money while not actually earning money blogging. Then you will get disillusioned.

I recommend that you think about what you need to learn before you can start blogging to make money and ask yourself if earning money blogging is something you really want to do. If you decide it is, search around for the right training and support to help you succeed in your mission of making money blogging.