Computer science is one of the most popular subjects these days because it deals with the way software works, and if you want to write a blog about it, you can sometimes make a little money this way on the side. According to Problogger.com, the way money is made through blogging is by selling products to your readers, by selling ad space on your blog to advertisers and by asking for PayPal donations from your readers.
How to Start a Computer Science Blog
How-to and informational websites make money by selling ad space, and this strategy requires a lot of traffic to come through your domain. In other words, no one is going to pay you to publish a blog on your personal URL, but you can earn profits from AdSense and perhaps other revenue streams if you have information that can capitalize on a niche in the CS blog market.
To figure out if your blog will work, you can use the Google Keyword Planner to research keyword ideas. Search for a list of broad terms with various wording to get an idea of the exact words people are using to search for the information you’re providing. When the results from your search come back, sort them in ascending order by number of searches per month. This value is the only information Keyword Planner provides on how well your articles will do. You can ignore the Competition field because this value tells advertisers how much competition there is between other advertisers for keywords and doesn’t reflect the competition between content providers. To find out how competitive the niche for a specific keyword is between bloggers, enter it in Google to see how many authoritative sites have already published articles for the specific keyword.
You should start with keywords that get around 100 to 1,000 searches per month and that have an overall positive or level trend. You can see the trend by mousing over the chart icon in the search results. There are alternatives to Google Keyword Planner, but this general approach is how bloggers get started. Shared Web hosting usually costs about $3.99 to $7.99 per month, but you have to buy at least 12 months upfront.
How to Become Profitable
It’s not realistic to expect to make much money selling ads on a computer science blog unless you have one of the top authority sites in your niche. Most small bloggers make money by selling products through affiliate marketing programs, and the vast majority of these bloggers get traffic to their websites through social media and other alternative sources because it takes many months to reach the first page of Google search results. In a crowded niche like computer science, it will definitely take more than a year to get to the top of Google results, and if you target the wrong keywords, you may never get to the top. If you are an expert in computer science and have made significant discoveries in algorithm design, data mining, artificial intelligence or some other important field, you should have no trouble attracting an audience. The most important ingredient is your knowledge of the subject.
Blogging is a great way to share your ideas with the world and maybe even meet people over the Internet, but it takes a lot of work to generate revenue from a blog. If you have a great deal of knowledge that can benefit your readers, write a blog about it to see how much traffic you can get.
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