1. Think about the topics you may know something about - more than the average person. My first web site was on some weird health problems that ran in my family and how we corrected them. It turns out the problems weren't as rare as I thought, and now that site gets thousands of visitors a day. Try to write about a topic you enjoy. Then writing about it won't even seem like work. My first sites had thousands of visitors a day before I even realized I could put ads on the sites and make a living just by making web sites, writing about my hobbies and solutions to health issues.
2. Start out not investing any money in your web sites at all. Okay, maybe you can buy your own domain name. But really, you don't need to spend a lot of money to make money on the web. My first web site was on the free hosting from my ISP. I got kicked off of there eventually for using too much bandwidth as my web site grew in popularity. Your best investment is most likely going to be really interesting articles that just take time to create. You can do this with a totally free blogspot blog.
3. Start out with easy to rank for terms. The longer the term, often the less competition there is for that term.
4. Get links for the easy terms first, start ranking, get traffic and then if people enjoy your articles they will give you free "natural" links and you will soon be ranking for shorter, more competitive terms. Links from other sites are currently the currency of the web. The more links you have, and the higher the quality of the sites are that are giving you those links, the higher your site will rank in the search engines. My main Always Frugal site started out ranking for the terms like "how to make extra money when you don't have a job" . It's a long term for sure, but in the current economy I actually started getting traffic on this term. Eventually, without much extra effort on my part, I started getting traffic for the shorter term "how to make extra money" and other variations with more traffic.
5. Look for topics with lots of advertisers but not a lot of competition. If you enter a term in Google and there are lots of ads long the sites of the listings, that is generally a good sign. If you enter a term and there are no ads, then write about your topic it if is a hobby topic but don't expect to make a fortune from it even if you end up getting traffic.
6. Don't get discouraged. Many bloggers fail because they are only making $1 or so a day from their blogs and give up. Remember, most bloggers and web site publishers don't start out on day one with thousands of visitors. If you know how to make $1, then repeat what you did to make that $1 and start making $2 a day.
