To kick my quest off I googled how to make money writing a blog. One of the pages that came up was an interesting article by Kyle Pott which claims that a beginner blog writer can make $100 in the first month if they follow the following rules:

• Select a blogging platform (wordpress in my instance)
• Select a hosting service
• Choose a memorable domain name
• Get advertisements immediately
• Get Google Analytics immediately
• Write 50 posts
• Submit every article to Digg

On the face of it this seems to be a fairly straightforward list and has quite a few things that seem intuitively correct, so I have decided to try it. The only problem is that as newbie to making money online a lot of this stuff seems to take forever to do.

As I have previously mentioned selecting wordpress and hosting it took me 4 hours significantly longer than a reasonably techie person I am sure (probably 3hrs 59min longer!). To add to my problems working out how to upload Google Analytics to this page has taken me the best part of today (6 hours to be precise).

The reason is that WordPress has a Analytics plugin which has the following installation advice ‘Drop the google_analyticator folder into /wp-content/plugins/, and activate the plugin.’ The only problem with this is that I had no idea how to do the ‘drop’! 6hrs later I have now worked out that I need to download a ftp management system (told you I was a newbie!) to manage moving the file from my computer to my hosted server. For anyone interested I used SmartFTP which was pretty easy to use once I finally figured things out.

So my running totals now are hours spent 10hrs, money spent $84, money earned $0 and google tell me that it will be 2 days before adsense can be approved – that road seems to be getting longer by the minute.

But in the spirit of Can It Be Done I will give it a shot.