I think having multiple hobbies is awesome, although sometimes there’s just not enough time to enjoy them all. Hobbies, for me, give my mind time to relax from my busy work from home business schedule. Fishing, playing guitar and home gardening are three hobbies that allow my mind to reach new levels of enjoyment.

When I learned that I could make money through my hobbies working from home in my spare time my hobbies became even more important to me.

Millions Are Making Money With Hobbies

It’s really unbelievable just how many work at home marketers are making money from their hobbies and interests these days, so cool. I have a couple of friends who love finding making jewellery from semi-precious stones and metals.

I even have friends who are poets and make money online sharing their gift with others.

Pick Hobbies You Spend Money On

Pretty much any hobby can be turned into a work from home money maker, as long as people spend money on the hobby you plan to work. I make money with each hobby I mentioned at the beginning but I tried a few that I don’t spend money on and guess what, I didn’t make a cent.

Blogging about your hobbies and interests is how I make my living today. I get to work from home full time now which gives me even more time to enjoy my hobbies as I can drop what I’m doing most of the time and just go fishing or join a guitar jam, maybe even get out into my home garden, if it would stop raining.

I Started Blogging About My Hobbies

I didn’t start my work from home business to talk about my hobbies. No I started as an online marketer trying to sell ebooks with resell rights. I started my first hobby blog about backyard gardening as we were new to gardening and was eager to share what we were learning.

Before long I had people wanting to write guest posts for my blog and then I was contacted because someone wanted to pay me for a link on my blogroll. How cool was that. So I started adding a few affiliate links and started earning affiliate income from my gardening blog.

I didn’t even use a new domain for my garden blog, I just used an old domain that didn’t work for anything else. Once I started making money I immediately bought a new domain specifically for backyard gardening tips. In less that a year my target traffic and income flew right past my first garden blog. That’s when I started creating blogs for all the hobbies I spend money on myself.

If you enjoy fly fishing like I do it just makes CENTS to blog about it. Once you start getting targeted traffic you can monetize your blog, just like I did and start making money through affiliate marketing.

Personal Recommendation: Affiliate marketing wasn’t nearly as easy as I thought it would be and for that reason I mess up quite a bit. Eventually I found Rosalind Gardner’s Super Affiliate Handbook and learned how to make the most of affiliate marketing.

Related articles

• My Work at Home Affiliate Marketing Business (workfromhomemoncton.com)
• Learning And Applying Is How Affiliate Marketing Makes Us Real Money (workfromhomemoncton.com)
• Work From Home Moncton – Working Part Time (workfromhomemoncton.com)
• Affiliate Marketing: Selling Other People’s Products (workfromhomemoncton.com)
• Step by Step Tips For Starting Your Own Blog (stepbysteptips.com)
• Learning How To Make Money Online (blogpronews.wordpress.com)

As a work from home marketer I started my business with static websites but once blogs came on the scene I gave blogging a try. I loved the idea of a blog and found it so easy to update which wasn’t the case with my static sites.

Before long I was converting my static sites into blog and the rest is history. I also found that search engines, like Google, love blogs, probably because they are updated so frequently. Just a couple of months I had better ranking than any of my non-blog sites.

Since then blogging has seen more and more attention and quickly grew into a great way to communicate with your visitors. I’m into affiliate marketing as a work from home marketer but not every one has a blog for profit.

Whatever your reason for blogging you can always benefit from a few blogging tips that will help you get more visitors. After all it’s a real pain to write content that no one sees, right. It’s kind of a blow to the ego and self esteem. Might as well get it right if you’re going to blog.

1. It’s All About The Blog Post Title

When people are using search engines to find what they are looking for they will be shown sites based on their search criteria in the search results page. It’s your blog post page title that is shown and needs to be keyword focused as well as catchy enough to attract the click.

I pass right over many sites listed in search results because the title doesn’t match my search criteria, even though they were listed. It’s so worth your time to come up with a title that will grab me by the eyes and make me click it.

Example: I am looking for some helpful tips about bass fishing and search Google for the phrase ‘bass fishing tips’. When I look at the listings I look for titles that match my search text. If the first site listed says ‘Bass Fishing Boat Tips’ I might just ignore it and move down the listing until I see something closer, such as, ‘The Bass Fishing Tips That Netted Me My First Trophy’.

If you can’t get people to click your listing you need to work on your blog post titles.

2. Add A Description And Tags

All my self hosted blogs are WordPress blogs. I like them because I can have so many great themes, a different one for every blog if I want. But I also focus on SEO by using my favourite plugin called All-In-One SEO.

I make sure I add a keyworded description and keywords. Next I add relevant tags under the tag section.

The combination of your keywords and tags make it easier for search engines to determine your real focus.

3. Use Headings To Break Up Text

As a work from home blogger I put in a lot of time reading and learning from other blogs. I, like so many others, tend to be in a hurry most of the time and I can’t stand looking at an entire page of text with no breaks.

I don’t care to read through too much fluff and want to get to the meat of the post or article. For this reason I like to see heading that not only break up a page of text but also indicate what’s in the following text.

Keyword your headings and you will find search engines love your blog even more. Add in our next tip and you have real power in your blogging.

4. A Picture Says A Thousand Words

That’s me on the right. I didn’t have time to comb my hair so please excuse me. Okay it’s a picture from our last Halloween. It was fun watching the expressions on kids faces when they saw this open the door.

Yes headings are important and great for quickly scanning an article or post for the info you need.

You can also add images to your post. An image can say a lot but using the ALT tag with images allows you to say more by adding a keyworded phrase, which the search engines can read.

A picture is also a great way to break up your post and adds value to your post as it can keep your reader reading longer. The longer you can keep your visitor on a page the more likely they are to click a link or banner ad and you make money.

5. Get Your Reader Involved In Your Post

I love it when my readers take an interest in my blog post and take the time to leave a blog comment. When I am writing blog posts I want to get my readers taking part so I try to word my content so that they will want to make a comment and get involved.

I also do my best to offer content my readers like enough to return in the future for more. As a work from home affiliate marketer this is part of how I make my living. If I can’t get return visitors it’s unlikely I will make money as people don’t usually buy on the first visit, sometimes not even until they have returned 5 or 6 times.

This is part of why it’s important to keep your niche focus and don’t go off topic much. I have left many blogs because they strayed too far from their niche and I lost interest.

Now it’s time for you to get involved in my blog which can result in visitors to your own blog.

What’s a blogging tip you can add that would help others be better bloggers?

Like most people I enjoy my hobbies. As a matter of fact for my entire life I have always wanted to make money with my hobbies. It just wasn’t happening until the Internet came along and my dreams started becoming a reality. Today I make most of my income from my hobbies.

Let me ask you a couple of questions. 1) Do you have an Internet connection? 2) How about at least one hobby you and others spend money on? If you answered yes to both questions you could work from home and make money online like I do as the two work so well together today.

Personally I have found most of my hobbies and interests can make money and they do. I didn’t start my work from home business around my hobbies but instead my interest for building websites. It wasn’t until about 5 or 6 years later I started focusing on my hobbies and affiliate marketing.

Hobbies I Make Money Blogging About

1. Sport Fishing

Fishing means a lot to me. I have been enjoying fishing since I was a young boy of about 8 and was hooked as they say immediately.

I was introduced to fishing after 3 years of being moved from one foster home to another before being placed on a farm in Ontario where an older foster brother took me under his wing.

Taking me fishing and just being there changed my life for the better as it gave me an outlet for my frustrations and building anger issues. So you can imagine how close to my heart fishing is. The Joy of Fishing

2. Home Gardening

While living on the farm we had a huge vegetable garden, so big that my foster dad used to work it with the big farm equipment used for the fields. Even though it was a lot of hard work I fell in love with gardening and couldn’t wait until I had a garden of my own.

Well that took about another 30 years before I owned home with a yard we could plant a vegetable garden in and now I have my own little home vegetable garden I blog about. It’s actually my most profitable blog.

BTW: I don’t have just one site in each of the niches I blog about. I have 3 fishing sites and 2 home gardening blogs.

3. Playing Acoustic Guitar

I have no natural talent for playing music and what I know came very hard. I tried learning guitar back in the early 70s, long before the Internet was available. That didn’t go well at all but you can read about that on my Learn How To Play Acoustic Guitar blog.

The next one is not so much a hobby as something I needed to learn in order to control our son’s over active pit bull Honey.

4. Problem Puppy Training Tips

When our son came home one day with a pit bull he had rescued from the SPCA I had mixed feelings to say the least. My first reaction was anger. I couldn’t believe he would bring home a dog that would most likely eat us in our sleep.

On the other hand the fact he rescued her from certain death kind of melted my stone heart and we now have a big baby called Honey that’s so much a part of our family that it will hurt to see them move out.

I had some training to do as she was abused and needed some guidance and is a big part of the reason I started Effective Puppy Training Moncton.

5. Travel in New Brunswick

Traveling is something that both my wife and myself love to do. Loving it and getting the opportunity to travel is a whole other thing. We did do a bit while our son was growing up but work schedules made it tough.

We are now at retirement age and eager to start traveling once again, this time just the two of us and we can’t wait. Our Travel New Brunswick blog is only just getting started because we are only just getting started.

Well those are five of the niches I work from home to make my living online. What’s really cool about blogging about one’s hobbies and making money is that it gives me more money I can spend enjoying my hobbies.

So many people today work from home blogging, myself included. However, blogging today is no longer a new method for people to get together online for sharing experiences through stories and photos but I feel it’s about the best way for a work at home marketer to make money online. I understand they started as web logs for documenting programming progress, I prefer it as a blog.

I use my blogs to make money and have blogs in a variety of niches that I know enough about to blog for profit. During this process I use multiple methods to make my earnings. So I have listed a few ways I make money blogging today.

Adsense Advertising – Google is my best friend for so many reasons, mostly because they send me the traffic I need to make money so it’s only right that I make money with my blogs though Google’s Adsense program.

Now when visitors are reading my pages they will see relevant ads displayed by Adsense, if and when they click an ad I make a little more income. The more targeted visitors I get the more likely I am to increase my income.

Write Product Reviews – I love affiliate marketing as it just seems to go hand in hand with blogging. I find products that help my business or make me a better gardener or fisher, what ever it is I use affiliate products to make money money online by writing product reviews for my readers.

I earn commission for each product I sell from my reviews. Some commissions are tiny because sometimes products are rather inexpensive, like $2.00 fishing lures I only make 10 cents with. However there are things I sell, like horse saddles where I can make hundreds per sale.

Contextual Text Link Ads – I belong to a few text link ad sites and earn money having these services sell contextual links and ads on my pages. I just list my site, add info about my site and they match my site with advertisers and I earn money every month.

Paid Links – As my blogs started gaining ranking in the search engines I started getting emails with request for links within my blog posts. All they want is a hyperlink and are willing to pay me for that link a year at a time. How cool is that.

Sell Your Own Products – A product could be something as simple as an ebook or report that is useful to others. I have a friend that wrote a short ebook teaching others how to potty train their small dogs to use a litter box.

He sells his ebooks on the Clickbank marketplace and a few other spots like eJunkie and DayDotCom.

Not only can you sell your own ebooks you can have others sell your ebook as affiliates. This can make you a lot of extra money over and above what you earn yourself.