Don't go with a free blog. There are lots of restrictions on the advertisements you can place on them. Some don't allow any. Go with a paid Wordpress site, as in your own domain.

But warning: don't think you just create a blog and start earning money. If it were that easy we'd all be multi-millionaires!

Yea you should consider getting a host and then possibly installing wordpress on it. Wordpress is pretty easy to use and the search engines love them.

You can't monetize a free wordpress blog. As everyone mentioned above, get your own website. This way you will be more secure and protected. To start earning, you need to put some high quality content up, and then do an active traffic drive.
Do some forum and social media promotion to grow your reader base. If you have a little money to invest, go the paid traffic route. You will get the traffic faster.

Once you have the traffic coming in, you can monetize your website through affiliate marketing, Adsense or selling adspaces.

Yea, all business invest some money to make money. If only money just grew from nothing, that would be great!

Get writing plenty of fresh, interesting, content. Research into SEO and get high up those search rankings and then sell your advertising i.e. through Google Adsense.

Free blogs are not a good idea as they are not really yours. But making money from blogging can be good as you can write about something you actual enjoy as you are not selling a product. You can make the money from adsense. If you want to promote an affiliate product then you can make money from this but it tends to make the whole blog look like you are obviously promoting something.

Please don't think about free.It is a sin if you want to earn money by free blog.A blog write need freedom ,but there is a lot of restriction here.So my suggestion from experience is that please use money to get money.And make your blog full of healthy content.

It won't cost alot but you will get some respectability with a good blog

Would suggest hosting your own wordpress.org install. That way, you can sign up for adsense as well as promote affiliate links if you wish. Make sure the site is legit though or Google won't approve it.

You cant use adsense on free wordpress,if you really wanna go with free,than use blogger(google product)

Start SEO Now !!!..

Install WP Plugin and Install High CTR WP Theme to improve your earning

Free blog might go for practice, but it's very unlikely you'll earn any money from it... EVER.

Guess now that you say it makes sense, however going free route certainly limits your monetization options. I'd still say exceptions are rare.

You can earn good money from a blog. I've discovered some of the ugliest layouts of my adsense ads on my site produce good clicks and high CTR's. I have Blogger... which of course is free, but i use it primarily to lead folks to my website - not to make money from it.

But if someone wants to click on an adsense ad and earn me money in the process, i'm good with that. That's why i have both... my product and adsense on my blog.

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there are a lot of retsrictions that would bind you if you go for a free blog and would not allow you to earn much so i would suggest you to go for a paid blog...and one thing more you can do is that you can improve the ranking of your blog by getting more traffic and thn people would want to get their site links placed on your blog that way you can earn handsomely

the cost to start a paid blog is very low, just 6 to 7 dollars per month. strongly recommended to start a paid blog.

You are so right my friend! It takes lots of Education, Hard Work, Lots of Designing, and a lot more things to it to start generating Leads on a consistent basis. Always go for a Wordpress Blog through a good Web Hosting Services like Godaddy and HostGator. Great Marketers say that your Hosting account quality has a lot of impact on your Blogs SEO...

I recommend you can start a Wordpress Blog (You need to host the blogs in your own hosting provider), it is very SEO oriented. There are a lots of 'plug-in' available to customized your own blogs. below are
5 ways to monetized your blogs.
1. PPC - Pay Per Click is an advertising program in which ads are placed on your blog and you are paid whenever your visitors click on the ads. This is most common method bloggers use to make money online. It involves almost no effort and is so incredibly easy that many blogs have too much advertising on them.

2. CPM - Cost Per Thousand ("m" is roman numeral for thousand) is an impression based advertising system. This means advertisers place ads on your blog and you are paid based on how many times the ad shows up. This can be profitable for blogs with big traffic, and can start to bring money to even the smallest blogs.

3. Parked Domains - Parked domains serve the purpose as advertisement and traffic redirection. This is perhaps the easiest way to make money, although in small doses, online. Just get a domain name and use the very easy parked domain programs.

4. Affiliate Marketing - Perhaps the most lucrative process for earning money online is by using your blog to recommend useful and relevant products to your readers. You can choose the affiliate themes, ebooks and other products. The best thing about affiliate marketing is that you are only marketing the product and not selling it. Just make sure the product is relevant and not over-used.

5. Direct Banner - With PPC and CPM advertising there is potential to make money, but direct banner ads bring advertising on your blog to a new level. It takes a little more work but you can find yourself making much more money and doing it pretty quickly.

Enjoy

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I had a free blog, and I also suggest you to avoid it. It's better to have your own domain name. In my opinion the best you can do on a new blog is adding a PPC company and when you have more traffic add some affiliate products too.

Don't go with Free blogs, That's not yours. Try to buy domain and get started.

I'm reading the thread and all the resources here. I am starting to build my website. I hope i can learn a lot from you guys.. Thanks

Basic requirements:

Domain Name (Godaddy of course as it is too reliable, secure and popular)
Hosting Service (HostGator as most of webmasters use this company)
Wordpress (too seo friendly no doubt about it)
Adsense (an easy way to make money online)
4 hours daily (writing content and commenting on other blogs)
Dedication of course..

Do it for one to two months, you would see money coming in...

I'm wondering how I can get the paid version of WordPress?

Do I get a paid version if I'm using my domain to host a WordPress site or do I still have to pay for WordPress no matter what I do?

Thanks in advance.

I would suggest that if you want to make serious money with your blog as a first timer, I don't recommend free blogs. You need to invest with a .COM domain and a cheap web hosting provider to create a self-hosted Wordpress blog.

To monetize the blog, I would suggest not to use Adsense. Just register as a Clickbank affiliate, find niche products, and promote it with their affiliate banners and links.

Also as a blogger, there's no instant money here. You've got to spend time daily trying to update your blog by optimizing it with your primary keywords. It needs hours, days, weeks and even months of doing the hardwork to make money in the long term.

Jeff

As you are a beginner. So I think the best way to earn is to go for adsense. And for adsense I think Blogger is one of the best platform.
But I don't support WordPress free version. Its not a good platform for advertising.

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I would always recommend buying a cheap domain. You can pick up a .info very cheaply and start blogging away.
Blogger.com is a good place if you are looking to learn but I wouldn't recommend it in the long run.

I would always recommend buying a cheap domain. You can pick up a .info very cheaply and start blogging away.
Blogger.com is a good place if you are looking to learn but I wouldn't recommend it in the long run.

Don't waste your time with a free blog. It is harder to sell once you get enough traction for your blog. I said "harder" not impossible. Regardless, absolute ownership still lies with the free blog platform owner. Not a good start. It only costs around $75 for a domain and a year's worth of hosting. Maybe investing that money will push you to invest your most important possession in your venture - your time.

Try ad networks such as adsense, reachjunction.

If you really want start a free blog then go with blogger, you cannot monetize free WordPress blog, it has various restrictions. But for start you can use blogger it did not have such kind of restriction. I myself using blogger for advertisement.

Alright my man...

Don't tell me you don't have 10-15 bucks for a domain and hosting...
Go to namecheap or wherever and get your own domain, hosting and everything.
It's just not serious to go for a free blog.

Anyway, if you choose to get a free one, it doesn't really matter that much where it would be.

What matters is for you to learn how to market. This is what would make you money. The better you are- the more money you make.

While it's true what was said above that free blog platforms usually don’t allow you to earn from advertisements, and that they have a lot of design limitations, it's also true can use them for practice if you don’t have prior experience setting up and customizing websites.

Once you get the hang of it, you can get a web hosting account (as cheap as $4 per month) and start a blog. As long as you provide valuable content, Adsense will probably eventually accept your affiliate application. After that, you can start earning money. My advice is to find a niche that you feel passionate about. I’ll tell you now that content is king.

It is important to find a good niche which you are passionate or familiar with. If you do not find a niche of your interest, you will give up on this blogging idea soon.

Nothing is easy man. I would recommend to buy your own domain name, and set up WordPress that way.

This endures the site is yours and remember you will need invest something into your site if you want a long-term goal to be more achievable.

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Just get a domain name so you can use it isnt that expensive

It takes a ton of work to make money with blogging. But it can be done.

As the other posters have mentioned get a hosted wordpress site up and let us know how you are doing. We would love to see it.

Best

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Since you are just starting out, I advise that you build a good readership base before even thinking of how to make money from it, once you have a good number of visitors then you can start find ways to earn from your blog.

Blog commenting is also a nice way to make some money online. Webmasters are busy and most of them hire commentators for blog commenting.

One great tip that is free is to go to Youtube and search for how to make money with blogs and you will find all the how-tos you could ever want. Start free and build up and use the free social bookmarks on blogger to get your site going with visitors. If you use long-tailed keywords that are in high demand, you will have traffic flowing quickly. Make your offer clear and at the top of your page too. Hope that helps. Kristie

you have to create a beautiful and popular wordpress and then you have to get a good traffic. Remember Good traffic is the main key to get success. and good content is the main key to get good traffic. Then you add some advertise on your site and by clicking on add you can earn dollar. that's the way you looking for.

Having your own blog is so much better than free ones. I can do so much customization to my blog and I'm so happy with it. No regrets.

For $10 you can have your first website live and hosted, with that the sky (and your creativity) are the limit. Invest that to bypass the restrictive hassles of working on someone else's platform.

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Don't waste your time with free wordpress blog. That are not at all profitable. If you are serious with blogging for making money, just invest fee dollars and start working. paid one can give you your desired money.