Blogging On WordPress.com

Blogging has become very popular for personal, professional and corporate use. There are a few decisions to make before you settle on starting a free blog with WordPress.com. Several other services provide free blogging software including Blogger, Posterous, and Tumblr just to name a few. I currently maintain several blogs and I find creating a blog on WordPress.com a good choice and I use it for my primary personal blog. Thousands of blogger choose WordPress.com because of it's flexibility, the wide range gorgeous themes, and the numerous supply of widgets and features which are constantly being updated by Automattic, the creators of WordPress. Here's a video overview detailing the layout options available from Blogger and WordPress.com.

Limitations of WordPress.com

There is one major limitation of using WordPress.com for your blog. If your primary motivation behind creating a blog is to use display ads to generate income, you will not want to use WordPress.com because display ads are not allowed. In other words, WordPress.com blogs cannot be monetized. This means that you cannot place any ads on your blog from Adsense, Amazon or take advantage of any other affiliate ad program. For this reason alone many bloggers choose to use the free blogging service from Blogger instead, since they can be monetized quite easily.

Creative methods to monetize any blog

If your blog has a significant amount of traffic, loyal readers, and RSS subscribers to your content, you can use the feedburner service to create an RSS feed for your WordPress.com blog. In order to do this, disable the default RSS and email widgets from your sidebar and replace them with an image widget that links to the RSS feed you created with feedburner. Then you can monetize your feed with Google Adsense.

Another resource available to make money from your blog is to consider joining blogging forums that participate in ad revenue sharing programs. For example Blog Engage allows you to submit articles from your existing blog to be shared with other bloggers within the community. Summaries of your posts will appear on the Blog Engage website next to targeted ads from affiliate programs designated by the blog forum owner. The MMOSocialNetwork is another site with similar structure to Blog Engage. The only difference is that MMOSocialNetwork focuses on blogging about making money online.