So how's your progress with your monetized blog? I last wrote about starting a monetized blog to add another revenue stream to your arts and crafts business a few weeks ago. Since then I have been able to publish 30 blog posts and 4 pages.

Based on my experience, I thought I'd post updated tips (check out my first page containing tips and techniques) that hopefully will save you some time and trouble.

Image Management

It's a good idea to include a great image with every blog post. Not only does It increases your user experience, having images will come in handy when you start promoting your blog on Pinterest, Facebook etc.

I will often shoot my own images. When I can't or it's too much work, I usually buy images from Dreamstime. I can normally find an image I like at an affordable price. While there are images you can use for free posted on the internet, I prefer to just buy my images and avoid any copyright issues if I inadvertently misunderstand the image owner's allowable use.

I like to wrap the blog text around my images, aligning the image to the left. If using Wordpress.org, it's a simple matter to go into the Text tab for your blog to create this wrapping and alignment.

Look for .... width="XXX" height="XXX". Just add the alignment. It will look like this: ... width="XXX" height="XXX" align="left".

I also like to add padding around my image so the blog post text doesn't butt up against the image.

To do this, just add style="padding: 6px;" to your image description. For example, it might look like this: img class="alignnone size-full wp-image-100" style="padding: 6px;" alt="sampleimage">

Pages You Need for Your Monetized Blog

If you want to monetize your blog, you must add at least these pages to your site to increase user and affiliate confidence:

About Us Page

The page introduces yourself and gives your users thumbnail sketch of what you are trying to accomplish with your blog. Users love a back story. Plus, explaining your interest, experience or credentials in the area in which you are blogging will increase user confidence.

Policies Page

Just about all affiliate programs, such as Google AdSense mandate your blog have a policy page. This page gives your users information about how you use their personal information. For example, do you collect IP addresses to establish a database of user habits to sell to other organizations?

Do you drop cookies? You also have to advise your user that If they follow links from your site to other resources or to outside sales pages, they understand that the privacy policy from your site is no longer in force - they should read the terms of use or policy page of the website to which they were redirected.

Not sure of the legalese? Do a search using the key phrase 'sample policy page' and you should find a bunch of ones that you can modify for your blog.

Contact Us Page

Here's my contact us page: I'm very interested in hearing about your XXXX. If you have a general or specific question about XXXX or about something I have published on this site, please send me an email at maire@XXXX.com. When I apply for a Google AdSense account, I'll also be adding my Google Voice telephone number.

Engaging with User Replies

As a general rule I don't - that's why I have a Contact page. Although I also don't respond to any email appearing to be spam. A response to even the most benign of post can lead to a ton of garbage/spam posts since by responding you've turned on the 'I'm home' light.

Unless the post directly addresses the blog topic, I spam it. If the post addresses the blog topic and includes a link that is not relevant, I spam it.

Blogging and Social Media

After you have at least 20 posts up, it's time to promote your blog. I don't have a lot of time, so I'm using Pinterest to start - which will be the topic for my next article in this series.

After I have 100 blog posts, I'm going to send out a press release. More about writing and issuing press releases in a future article.

Parting Words - Advice from Problogger
You'll want to check out this post from Problogger, 3 No-nonsense Strategies for Profitable Part-time Blogging.