Playing around on the internet can be quite fun. But even better, it can also be profitable. This is especially true of creating and maintaining a blog. You can make money blogging if you know what you’re doing. Here are three simple strategies that you can try to bring in some extra cash.

One good strategy, and probably the most profitable, is called the “flagship method.” In this method, you develop just a few blogs and devote massive energy and effort toward making them extremely popular within their respective niches. The goal is a flagship blog with a large audience and high daily visitor counts.

People who use the flagship method do so because the potential is there for generating a lot of money. However, there are even more who avoid this method because of the amount of time needed to generate that income. Usually you have to spend months building up your site, and most of that time you’re not making much or any money. Bottom line: It takes time.

But the payoff can be huge. This type of mega-blog can have many types of monetization options. Chief among them is direct advertising sales.

Not everyone will want to try the flagship method of blogging. Only try this method if you know you have knowledge in a niche area, as well as the marketing skill and networking know-how to make it work.

Another popular method that many people use to make money online via blogging is known as the pay-per-post blogging method. Under this technique, you set up many more blogs than with the flagship method. These can either be on your own domain or with free blog host sites such as Wordpress or Blogger. You then maintain all of these blogs for a span of time, focusing on creating content and building up each one’s Google PageRanks, link profiles and Alexa Ranks.

You must spend the necessary time to submit each blog to pay-to-blog sites such as LoudLaunch, Review Me, PayPerpost, Blogitive, Sponsored Reviews, Blogsvertise, and others, for their advertisers to consider sponsoring your blog post about their product - which in reality are meant to sell products in the guise of a blog post.

The chief disadvantage to this method, though, is that you’ll have no passive income. Therefore in order to make money, you have to take the time - sometimes lots of time - creating numerous sponsored posts, which some people consider boring and time-consuming.

A third way of making money blogging is through automated blogging. This involves setting up some blogs that pull content automatically from search engines, RSS feeds and news sources, all of which serve as content for your site. The money then comes from context ads such as Google Adsense or similar programs. The advantage to this method is that, after you’ve set it up, you spend little time maintaining it. The disadvantage is that profits are likely to be quite low unless you set up a huge number of blogs (Commonly one such blog will provide you about a month).

Whichever method or methods you choose, you’ll doubtless find that blogging is a fun and fulfiling way of making some extra money. Try one or two of these and watch the extra money start coming in.

If you’ve dipped so much as a toe into today’s marketing world, you’ve heard about blogs. Actually, if you’ve been on the internet at all lately, you’ve probably seen that blogs are a pretty commonplace occurrence. I bet you probably don’t know how simple it is to get your foot in the door and advertise on an esteemed blogger’s blog.”

What is this thing called a “blog?” What is it for? When did it first enter the human lexicon? How can you make it work for you in today’s competitive marketplace, especially when you have very little money to spend on your marketing?

The term “weblog” was coined in 1997 by Jorn Barger, editor of RobotWisdom.com, one of the oldest blogs out there. The shortened term “blog” came about in 1999, offered up by one Peter Merholz, editor and author of Peterme.com, a very well-established blog about his life, the web in general, and about everything else under the sun.

By July 2006, statistics show that there were 12 million bloggers in the US alone (we’d venture to say there are many times that amount now), and that more than 39% of the US population reads blogs. Again, chances are that now, with the unemployment rate rising and Internet costs getting less expensive, that number is much higher. From the perspective of someone who wants to advertise on blogs, this is a good sign. Statistics also show that by February of 2009 there were 1.5 billion Internet users worldwide.

At about 25% of the world’s population, that is nothing to shake a stick at. With only 80% of the world’s population being literate, you can figure that almost half of the world’s literate population is online. And more and more of those that “surf the web” are reading blogs. What does that mean for you, oh Person Who Wants to Advertise Their Business? It means that you can use this medium to promote your business.

For a minimal cost you can reach millions of people with your brand and your website. And why does it mean that? For as many bloggers as there are, there are that many blog readers.

Many people choose not to put their every thought and opinion onto a website, but that doesn’t mean that they don’t want to read the thoughts and opinions of the people who do. The cool thing about that is that many bloggers are quite influential. When it comes to reviewing products and companies, they do not hold anything back. So how do you get into their sites to advertise your company? One way is to find blogs that fit your product’s image and go through the rigmarole of emailing them individually.

You’d need to offer them free product, send it to them and wait for them to write about you and link to your website. Or, in an easier and possibly more effective move, you can sign up with a service that makes your ads available to bloggers. Because of today’s economic climate, more and more bloggers are trying to make a profit from their blog.

Whether it’s to offset the cost of their domain name and website, or whether they are trying to put food on the table, more and more quality bloggers are putting advertising on their websites. The service they use can be the same service you use to take advantage of some prime internet real estate and reach an audience who may not be looking for your product otherwise.

Blog readers aren’t stupid, but they are partial to the blogs they read the most. And chances are, if the blog is established and has a decent readership, those readers are going to be interested in the ads posted on their favorite blogger’s website. Should not that ad be yours?

This article has been donated by Samson Harper, an esteemed agent at BloggingAds.com, a website that helps businesses purchase blog advertising and gives bloggers an opportunity to earn money blogging

For many bloggers, they fail to realize how important search engine traffic can be because they have no clue as to how to go about optimizing their blogs. Failing to capitalize on this free targeted traffic is one reason so many new bloggers don’t earn fast money with their blog.

But it doesn’t have to be this way. It can be done in three easy steps. By doing these three steps all the time, you can increase visitors which may be the difference between a blog that makes its blogger little if any income or one that a blogger can quit their day job and make a full time living with.

Here are a few simple tips to search engine optimize every blog post you upload and start taking advantage of free search engine traffic.

To begin with, you should make sure your blog post addresses are SEO optimized. If you use a free blog service like BlogSpot, this is done automatically and cannot be changed. WordPress blogs need a little work. If you use the WordPress blogging platform, then change your url structure or permalink so that blog creates SEO optimized url’s when you write a post.

All you have to do in WordPress is go to the Permalinks tab, and check the button next to the Custom field. Next you’ll put a percentage sign followed by the words Postname. Immediately after the words postname add another percent symbol. This makes sure your blog will have SEO optimized addresses.

The most important tip on SEO optimizing your blog is to put the keyword in the Title of your blog. Let’s say you’re blogging about how to make fast money, then make these keywords the Title of your blog. What you don’t want to do is put unrelated keywords in your Title. Using the keywords in the Title, then you’ll rank higher than if you name it something totally unrelated.

Your next move is to use the keywords in your Post’s title. If you’re trying to lure traffic to visit your post about ebay to to make extra money, then your post title should have those keywords in it. Not irrelevant keywords like How I Make Money With Auctions. Doing this prevents the search engine bots from figuring out what your post is about and you won’t attract the right kind of traffic. If you’re using Adsense to monetize your blog, this is a very important tip to get targeted traffic for high paying keywords.

Implementing these 3 simple tips will go a long ways in letting the Search Engines determine what your post is about. When you make it easy for the search engines to understand what your post and blog are about, the search engines will rank you higher in the Search Engine ranking pages.

Building links to each of your optimized post is the last step in dominating the search engine rankings with your blog post. Ahh, but link building is a whole nother article that has to be saved for later. First, get acquainted optimizing your own blog and blog post.