Free blogging is a huge business with the leading free blogging platforms like Blogger and Wordpress still mightily outnumbering self-hosted blogs. And for good reason - as the vast majority of bloggers are actually not in it to make money or gain recognition as writers or anything else for that matter.

But for those in the internet marketing business, in order to have any sort of shot at true success, the emphasis has generally been on creating your own self-hosted blogs. This is for many good solid reasons, such as control over content and advertising, as well as having access to huge amounts of disk storage and bandwidth as well as guaranteed uptime for often 99.9% of the time.

But free blogs still have their place in the promotional side of internet marketing as well as being excellent foils for making additional income through PPC and affiliate advertising.

Using free blogs intelligently can boost income for many marketers. Their strength is in the fact that they are free and reside on a different IP address as your own hosted blogs, which means links from them will not carry the search engine penalty that interlinking blogs on your own host can bring.

What’s this? Penalty?

After doing some research, it seems that Google at least will actually see interlinked blogs that all live on the same IP address as blog farming which they frown upon. All the more reason to get out into the blogosphere and make lots of new contacts and comment in lots of other blogs.

Generating links from lots of different sources is the only safe way to boost your future page rank.

There is a way around this though. By creating blogs on different platforms, you can interlink more blogs together in a circular fashion. Here is a simple example: blog1 links to blog2, blog2 links to blog3 then blog3 links to blog1. Each blog has it’s own one-way link from a different blog. With multiple blogs, this circular linking can get more complicate, but you’ll have to go figure that one out for yourself.

I tried it with my menagerie of Squidoo lenses and it took ages to figure all the different one-way configurations so that each lens got the maximum number of links!

Incidentally, on that note, Squidoo lenses should also be used in your free blogging empire as they also count when it comes to creating your own inter-link system without triggering the Google red flag.

Surely the best use of free blogs is to use them as adsense (or comparable PPC advertising) revenue generation machines. To do it correctly, you’ll need to spread your blogs over several different niches. Then you’ll need to make the best possible use of your niche keywords by using them in all titles, headers, descriptions and posts and in liberal amounts, but not overdoing it.

Then you have to do what all blogger do and that’s get writing!

After all, it’s no use creating a load of free blogs if you don’t populate them with content relevant to the niches that you’ve worked so hard to create for yourself.

And if you’re not prepared to work like crazy to keep them all up to date as well as promoting them through the several free channels already outlines in previous articles at this site, then don’t expect to see much of a return on all that research.

Nobody said that free meant easy!

Terry Didcott
Author and Creator of Blogging Web 2.0

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Filed under: Blogging