The goal of these articles is to teach you ways to get started making money online without having to spend any money. This time we discuss having your own blog. There are endless ways of making money once you have traffic, and your blog will get you traffic. The income we will be looking at today will come from Google AdSense.

There are multiple benefits to having a blog including the low cost (or no cost), the resources that will help you get traffic to your blog, and the fact that you can provide your blog as an RSS feed. An RSS feed will allow readers to automatically receive your updates into their RSS reader.

Let’s get started with the steps…

1. Set up your blog. You will need to decide what you are going to blog about. You should decide on a theme and name your blog appropriately. There are a number of free ways to set up a blog & to have it hosted for free. Blogger, WordPress and many social networks are good blog platforms. Most will allow you to set up a blog for free. They will host it for free and they will ping search engines every time you update, meaning you will get found.

2. Write some content. Before we move any further there has to be some information on the site and that means you have to make some entries. You can write some of these entries yourself and some can be quotes from sites of interest to your reader. A toolbar button for your browser will make it easy to post. The content will be added to your blog along with a link back to the site.

3. Once you have a weeks worth of blogging with two or three entries for everyday, you can apply for an AdSense account. You can find out all about it on the AdSense page but basically you get Google ads on your site then get paid if your visitor clicks them.

Google will decide what advertisements show on your site based on the content it finds within. You need to be aware that Google will decline your application if your site is not considered to have content. Nobody outside of Google knows the precise rules on this. Once you have been accepted you get a javascript from Google to add to you site. Copy this & then log in to your blog and add the code. You might need to know a little bit of HTML to find the right location to paste your code. With a little experimentation you will figure it out. I suggest the ads be seen when the site loads but should not be too obvious or dominate your site.

4. Write more content. Try to keep your content coming at regular intervals as a number of directories will check on your site at regular intervals and the smarter ones will visit on a schedule based on your update schedule. They will probably determine this within hours after your first post.

5. Submit your site to blog and rss directories. Sometimes when you make a new entry they are automatically notified. Others you will need to manually submit to, some of which will require a link on your site to theirs. You can add links to your template. For a list of directories to get you started try searching Google.

6. Keep writing interesting content. Ideally you want people to come back again and again. As with customers its harder to get a new visitor than to keep existing visitors. So make it interesting, in fact make it so interesting that they can’t help but tell all their friends about it also.

As with most free ways to make money this will take time to get going, but if you can build a following you will make money.

If you have heard of hydroponics or other methods of growing plants without soil and want to try it out at home, you can. Hydroponics is easy to care for and set-up at home. There are materials you can buy or some you may be able to find around the house.

The dirt or soil that you use to grow plants in a traditional method is substituted for a growing medium (full of nutrients the plant needs to grow) in hydroponics gardening. The nuitrients are fed directly to the roots by method of a feed system. The system can be automated and the gardener can control how much water the roots receive within a specified time frame. The more growing medium the faster the plants grow.

Since the system can be automated, the amount of time and energy that is required to maintain a hydroponics garden is less than with a traditional garden. As long as enough water is present and growing medium the plants can be left unattended for a longer period of time.

A home-based hydroponics garden can grow vegetables year round. The concern about pests and the composition of the soil are not an issue with this type of gardening. Another bonus with this type of gardening is how fast you can have mature vegetables indoors (by increasing the amount of light and grow medium).

The types of plants that are best for hydroponics are ones with thin spider-like roots. Plants that have a bulb root system are still best grown in the traditional soil method inside a pot or outside. When you are ready to begin, germinate the seeds for your plants like you normally would. When the seed has started to sprout and has approximately 2-5 millimeters of growth it is ready to transplant to the hydroponics container and begin growing.