Over the last few years, blogging has moved beyond it’s humble beginnings of providing a platform personal online journals and has developed into a sophisticated marketing tool. People have discovered that a good blog, properly monetised, can become quite lucrative when it becomes popular and is getting a good amount of visitors. Many people now make money from autoblogging. What is this and how does it work?

Most regular blogs only ever receive moderate traffic at best and income from them can be fairly low. $1 a day from a mature blog from advertisement revenue is about typical. Sounds a little dismal? But, if that holds true, what if you had 100 such blogs? What if you had 1000? then you are starting to earn very good money indeed.

This would seem an impossible task. Blogs, after all, by their very nature are entities that need a constant flow of content to keep them fresh. They need to be growing and evolving for visitors to return and to pass the word on to others. Content needs to be written and posted regularly so how could anyone have the time to properly manage more than a handful of blogs?

The answer to that dilemma comes in the form of a small orange icon which appears on most websites but which you may well have overlooked completely. The icon I am referring to is the symbol for a the sites RSS feed. There are RSS feeds on this site where you are reading this. RSS stands for ‘Really Simple Syndication’ and allows webmasters and blog publishers the facility of syndicating their work by way of ‘feeds’ – a standardised format. Bear with me here, I promise not to get technical.

RSS feeds allow readers to ‘subscribe’ to favoured websites and keep up to date with new posts and – more importantly for bloggers – allows content from different websites to be aggregated in one place.

With the proper software, you can have a blog which takes syndicated content from a variety of relevant sources across the net and publishes those posts (giving a link to the original post) on your blog. This has become known as ‘Autoblogging’. Properly set up, these blogs can be set on auto-pilot for most of the time, gaining content and visitors and subsequent income, without a great deal of management. It then becomes quite feasible to start a new blog every day, for example. Over a year that would be over 350 blogs. Some will make more than others but even if they only return an average of $0.10 per day per blog, that is a very nice extra $12,500+ a year passive income. That is the way to make money from autoblogging.

The key is to become good at finding profitable niche markets and the ability to set up a blog quickly and easily. With both Blogger and WordPress it is very simple to get a blog up and running in less than 30 minutes after a little practice.

The other important aspect to a project such as this is using the best software to provide the best results. There are free plug ins for WordPress available which are RSS parsing tools but all lack the ability to really set a blog on auto pilot. They will tend to bring with the feed adverts and scripts from the original post and obviously this is not desirable. So, if you want to do this properly, then you will need to invest in a professional autoblogging program. This would be a one off payment of typically $150 or less but that would be recouped many times over in the long run when you start to make money from autoblogging.

Many of us have aspirations to own our own business – to be our own boss. Every year hundreds of thousands of small businesses get started by people just like you and me; people who have an idea for a product or service and follow through on it.

You may have an idea for a business but think because you don’t have the money that your dream of starting your own business will never be a reality.

However, there are a number of things you can do right now to help you get started on the path toward building your dream business. There are many steps you can take to develop startup ideas and flesh them out. And those initial steps do not take any money at all — just time and effort on your part.

1. Start a journal.

You probably have two valuable tools sitting on your desk right now: paper and pencils. Many of the greatest business people and inventors of our time kept notebooks full of ideas, thoughts and sketches. If you are still investigating what type of business you might be interested in keeping a journal is a great way to come up with great ideas. You might be shopping at the local grocery store and have that “Aha!” moment for a product or service that would take the marketplace by storm.

2. Every good business needs a business plan.

In fact, when you are looking for financing from the Small Business Administration, or even local financing, many lenders want to see a business plan first. There is a wealth of information available online and at your local library to help you put together your business plan.

In fact, putting together a business plan is one of the first things you should do before investing a dollar of your money into a business. It involves a lot of research and number crunching but is well worth it. It not only allows potential lenders to see how you plan to run the business, but it may also give you a reality check. When you see the numbers and figures on paper it lets you see firsthand if your business has a good chance of surviving, because the reality is that sometimes we have great ideas but the marketplace just isn’t ready for them yet. A good example of this is the personal computer — the idea had been around for well over a decade before IBM and Apple found a suitable marketplace for it.

3. Do you know your competition?

This is another area you can focus on right now without money. Learn about your potential competitors, what they offer and how they differentiate themselves in the marketplace. Learn from them to not only make your business better but to also find out if there is additional room in the marketplace for your business.

While you may have a great idea for the next gadget you may very well find out that the marketplace is already saturated with similar products from other competitors. You could potentially save yourself a large amount of money avoiding a failed venture by knowing your marketplace.

4. Cut through red tape and delays.

Does your business idea involve a physical product? If so, are you up to speed on all the regulations and requirements to bring that product to market? Use this time to find out about not only federal but local regulations that might affect your product roll out. Food products, for instance, are heavily regulated by various agencies because of their potential to harm others if not properly manufactured, distributed and sold.

You can find out a lot of this information from the Small Business Administration and your state government. Ask your local librarian as well, as they may be able to point you to local rules and regulations that will also affect your product.

5. Build the infrastructure.

If you are new to the world of running your own business you can also use this time to find out more about how to keep bookkeeping records, comply with federal and state tax codes and get the proper licenses. You might find that local Chamber of Commerce groups have free, introductory classes on running a business you could take to learn about the behind the scenes work required to run your own business.

Even though funds might be tight, or even non-existent, there are a number of things you can do now to get your business off on the right track. Use this time wisely to investigate the proper way to run a business as well as to investigate how the marketplace for your particular business is currently looking, not only today but in the near future. By putting a little research into your business now, before you take the plunge, you may come out miles ahead when you finally open up shop!