One of the things that every parent worries about is “am I really doing everything I can to ensure that I am properly planning for my child’s college education?” College is incredibly expensive. Even the state/publicly funded schools that used to be an affordable route for nearly everyone now cost upwards of $20K a year for tuition, fees and living expenses. Not everybody (in fact, hardly anybody) is able to afford that outright. So what can you do?
Getting Creative
These days one of the best ways to bring in extra money is to set up a website. The great thing about starting a website and using it to earn money is that this is something that you can do in your spare time while spending time with your family.
The easiest type of website to set up is a blog. There are lots of free blogging platforms out there to choose from (we, obviously, like WordPress the best). You simply choose a name, password, input some basic information and viola! Your very own website.
Blogs are great because they have so many different avenues for monetization:
- You can sell sidebar ads
- You can sell advertising in the headers and footers of individual posts
- You can get people to sponsor individual posts
- You can sell ad space in your blog’s header and footer space.
- You can put paid links in the text of your regular posts.
- You can create products that relate to your blog and sell them.
The best thing about blogging as a platform is that it is so versatile. Thanks to free content management systems like WordPress you can set your blog up to be pretty much whatever you want. You could even set your blog up to function as the landing spot for a web based business.
For now, though, let’s focus on the blog.
You can focus your blog on a single topic (make sure it’s something you care about so you’ll be motivated to write) or you can generalize and make the blog more of a lifestyle oriented site.
What matters is that you choose something about which you are already enthusiastic. This way you will want to work on your site. You’ll want to do the research. You’ll want to do the link building and networking. Readers can sense enthusiasm and they are more likely to respond to it than to something someone is obviously creating with the sole purpose of making money in mind.
So: what do you love? When you do have a moment of free time, what do you choose to do with it? What subjects do you gravitate toward? The answers to these questions are where you should start when you’re trying to figure out what to blog about.
As long as you are passionate about it and work hard, you should be able to start making money via your blog within a few months.
There are other things you can do, of course—other affiliate marketing and internet marketing methods you can use to earn extra money. The blog, though—the blog is the best place to start.
