The number of new blogs springing up every day is unbelievable, take the Freelance Academy Blog as an example. A few years back you had to know html and struggle and battle to get your website up and running and get visitors to it. Then blog platforms started to emerge and not only could people install one on their own domain in a matter of clicks, but they could just make their own on Wordpress.org or Blogger.com without spending a cent, and start to blog straight away.

Now that people could so easily post something to the world then everybody started to post pretty much anything to their blogs, almost using it as a diary, but one the whole world can see! It is not uncommon to find all sorts of strange and wonderful posts on blogs ranging from the trouble they had shopping today to how their cat needs a wash, anything goes!

Fortunately most blogs like that will not actually get much traffic, but people have turned their blogs and random postings into quite lucrative businesses. People like to be entertained and if you are the kind of person who has an opinion about anything, then you can make a name for yourself by blogging.

You have to have more going for you than just interesting opinions of course, active promotion and networking is essential, plus link building etc to give your blog weight in the search engines, but you can learn that as you go. Promoting the blog is easy, you can find out how to do that for free on many different sites, but making content that people talk about and love is something you either produce naturally, or a skill you need to develop over time.

One simple way to get started is to choose topics that are in the news and you get discussions going with the comments and encourage that by responding to people’s questions etc, then people are going to feel valued so they will come back and also tell people about your blog. Concentrating on current topics also allows the search engines to find you better as people love to link to new information on the latest trends and fads, so you might find people driving traffic to you just for your choice of story.

So what does the future hold? Well video has taken off big time online, the next step is vlogs where people use video instead of posts, I love video as it saves me doing all this typing!