Many people who are looking for ways to make money online consider the blogging for profit opportunities but they get overwhelmed with information and can't decide where to start. There are tons of 'silver bullet' products out there claiming to turn your blog into an online ATM instantly. Unfortunately, this is deceptive sales tactic and blogs don't start generating cash overnight. It takes research, decision making skills and disciplined work to create the content, get the traffic and start making income from blogs.

I am going to provide some simple ways to start blogging for profit for the people who are just starting out.

1. Make a blog about a physical product niche. You need to do proper keyword research using free tools like Google Keyword Tool and Cherry Picker, or a paid tool like Market Samurai. Whatever you use, pick the keywords that have a high monthly search volume and low competition. For a total newbie, 30.000 or less pages competing for the keyword is good to start. You don't have to put a ton of content in this sort of blog, pick reviews from Amazon and stick it in the blog posts with your Amazon affiliate links for the product. Then you can write some extra content as blog posts, support those by writing some articles about it and submit it to article directories. Next step to generate more traffic is to make some YouTube videos using the best reviews and the photos of the product. If you own the product, you can make a live action video about how to use it, how it makes your life easier, etc. Submit them on YouTube, and also as video responses to the videos with a lot of views in the same niche. Make sure to use your keywords in titles, tags and video description fields for proper SEO purposes. You can also post informative articles about this on Craigslist and other classifieds sites.

2. Make a blog about a digital product niche from ClickBank or Paydotcom. Pick a few products with decent sales figures and search thoroughly to see how much competition is there promoting them. If there are too many affiliates promoting them everywhere, that is probably going to be very hard to start seeing any income from it. This is where most newbies give up. Pick the products with decent gravity number but not fierce competition for affiliate marketing. Research all reviews about them on web sites, blogs, articles, YouTube videos and compile the information you learned into categories. Then review and recommend the couple of products with the best feedback to your readers. You can then put your ClickBank affiliate links in your blog. After this, you need to follow the steps to start generating traffic for this blog.

3. Make a content heavy blog in a niche for both AdSense and affiliate income. If you concentrate on content, it will be more work than product or micro-niche blogs, but there are many great content authors who are blogging for profit and enjoying a great income from those blogs. Some of them even compiled their popular posts into books and became best sellers in their niche fields. If you build good content around a niche, you can get a lot of traffic by networking with other bloggers, writing guest posts in high traffic blogs and also supporting your blog with audio podcasts, videos and articles.

Blogging for profit is quite possible but it requires work such as proper research to find the right niche keywords with the lowest competition, traffic generation work and forging relations with the popular bloggers in the blogosphere.