 Hello and welcome to Start It Up. In 2020, with social media having become the one-stop shop for almost all content that an average person consumes, do you remember this arcade thing called blogs? Before it all started belonging to the likes of Facebook, blogs were a fairly popular and powerful medium of expression. Essentially a website focusing on written content, blogs are easy to make and can be maintained without much fuss. If you have a way with words, blogging could still be an option for you to make money. Given your content speaks volumes. At Start It Up, you will tell you how to go about becoming a blogger and potentially earn of it. While it may seem like the most important skill for a blogger is to be able to write well, costay, but passion overtakes them. When you are starting a blog and considering the millions out there who might have already tried venturing into what you are, it is imperative to be passionate about what you want your blog to be about. It doesn't matter if you know 100% about it, but you must love it enough to get down and dirty with the subject. What you must remember is, why would someone read your blog? You can always move elsewhere and get access to similar content. So, be different. Of course, the next step is to keep honing your writing skills. While the easiest option is to keep writing more, it is also a good option to read. Read all kinds of content, learn new techniques of writing, but remember to be conversational while writing your blogs. You must always be engaging. A conversational style of writing helps keep your audience stay on, in an age where everyone seems to have the attention span of a school. Once you have decided on a topic and your style of writing, the next thing is to research. As said before, you may not be an expert in your field or might just be, but choose a topic that you feel hasn't been talked about in the kind of detail that people would like to read about. Put yourself in the reader's shoes and do extensive thorough research. It may take days, two weeks, two months, but to offer something different, you must churn every last bit of interesting fact you can about your topic. Marketing your blog is important, at least in the first few days. Use the likes of Facebook, Twitter and use some paid ads if you deemed necessary. But after you have your initial base as a blogger, your growth must happen organically through word of mouth. So, the first thing you need is to put out a blog. There are several different websites that let you do it for free, including blogger, which is owned by Google, WordPress, Tumblr, or even the relatively new ones like Medium. All of them have different templates and features. So, you must do test runs on at least a few before you zero in on one. Choose whatever suits your topics the best. If it is a free blog, you would have a subdomain attached to the name of your blog. For example, anything built on blogger would be name of website.blogspot.com. To remove those, all these different sites offer paid plans to buy a custom domain name. If you wish to start a fresh without taking help from any of these blog publishing services, go ahead and hire a freelance website designer. Well, blogging is perhaps the cheapest thing to do even today in terms of initial investment. Free sites allowing you to practically start off free. However, if you are going a step further, it would cost you a little. While for these different blog publishers, you have different pricing depending upon the premium plan you choose, or even if you are just buying a custom domain name, hiring someone to build your website could cost you anywhere between Rs. 5000 to 10,000. Buying a domain name could cost you as little as Rs. 1000 a year, while hosting a simple website would come to about Rs. 2500 a year. The designer's charges would vary depending upon your requirements. The first step should be to have a Google Adsense account and put those initial traffic to use with pay per click ads. After you have enough traction to attract advertisers, rent out space on your blog for potential advertisers and decide on a pricing strategy. If you are writing a blog and think there is an opportunity where you could have product placement for a company, approach them and see if you could work out a paid collaboration. Better yet, see if they would like to sponsor that particular blog spot. If you do not want to depend on all of these and feel that your content is good enough for loyal readers to pay, use a service like Patreon for people to voluntarily pay to keep your blog up and running. It may seem fairly difficult but several popular bloggers and even YouTubers operate this way. Do let us know if the video was useful and for more about blogging, log on to www.entrepreneur.com.