Whats the very 1st thing in starting a money making blog?

It is smart to put the content on your own website, but you could use Blogger or WordPress (hosted by WordPress) if you had to to get started (just keep a copy of all posts in case you somehow lose your blog).

You don't have to pay for a years worth of hosting upfront (although it may save you a little money), you can get plans that you pay by the month. Namecheap offers hosting for $7.45 a month, you can have up to 26 domains for one account. You could probably find something a couple dollars cheaper, if you are pretty sure that you only wanted to host one domain.

Namecheap is also a good domain registrar to use for registering a domain name. That will cost you about 10 or $11 a year full price, but just do a search for "namecheap coupon" on Google and you can probably save a couple dollars.

Creating content that you can somehow monetize is the idea.

There are many sites out there that can give you information on ideas to drive traffic to your site and how to monetize it (Google AdSense, Clickbank ads, etc.).

If you're just looking to make some money online, here are some ideas:

Are you good at writing? If so, you could write articles and blog posts for website owners for money. A well-written, 400 word +, optimized article will bring you about $5. It may take a little practice to write an "optimized" style - including specified keywords early on in your articles, including a couple "long tail" keywords in the article, etc. but not that big of a deal after a little practice.

I think Associated Content at least used to pay for articles, there are also plenty of writing gigs on freelance websites such as ScriptLance, Freelancer, Getacoder, etc.

You could also try fiverr.com. Go there and look at some of the gigs, and copy one that you think you could do.

Maybe give eBay a shot. Ask your buddies if they have anything that they want to sell, and offer to sell it for them on eBay for a cut.

You could even try "eBay arbitrage", where you buy something off of eBay and then resell it there for a profit. Some sellers do not include important keywords in the title, give a poor description, poor pictures (or none at all), etc. All this stuff can scare potential buyers away, decreasing the competition and probably the final price.

You could possibly buy the items and make a much better listing, and possibly profit.

Sellers may misspell the main keywords in the title as well, meaning most potential buyers will never find them. You could try a misspelling search using a site like Typojoe.com to hopefully find some of these items and possibly get some great deals.

You could also use a site like Ebuyersedge.com to set up saved eBay searches. You'd get an e-mail whenever a matching item is newly listed. Especially good for "Buy It Now"s that are priced right. You could set up your saved searches and then from there all you would be doing would be checking e-mails when you get them sent to you and looking at the items, so there should not be a whole lot of time involved in setting up your "system". You'd have the jump on other potential buyers.

Or, if you find something you want listed an auction format, use a sniping service such as Hidbid.com to place your bid for you. It'll bid in the last few seconds, helping you to save money and avoid shill bidding.

You could also try your local thrift stores, Goodwill, auctions, yard sales, Craigslist, etc. to source products. Having a smart phone with internet access would be a big help with this. You could check prices of completed listings immediately, deciding if there's enough room for profit for you to buy a particular item. It seems there should always be room for smaller sellers on eBay for used items.

Or, rather than selling a physical product, maybe try offering a service on eBay. Maybe writing articles, creating graphics, whatever it is that you would be good enough at to charge for.

For longer-term, you could learn search engine optimization, social media traffic generation, etc. and then charge webmasters for your services. If you are good, you can make some serious money doing those things.

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The first order of business is to do some research to identify a topic people spend money on, that you also have enough interest in to write perhaps 100+ original quality articles a month. You could also do some keyword research and have a list of 50 pr more phrases to feature in article for improved search ranking.

Bear in mind that many of the basic $8/month hosting accounts allow limitless domains, so you can spread out the cost over multiple sites.

It probably is wise to at least get a domain name to use with a free host so you can maintain continuity in the event you get shut down by the free host. Google's Blogger is the first one that comes to mind, they generally don't mess with your editorial content and don't levy any added profit sharing of ad revenue as some hosts do. Blogger is a proprietary platform, so if you do relocate to a new host the site configuration will look different to the search spiders, and may take a while to bounce back after re-indexing. Wordpress.com provides free hosting of a slightly limited multi-user version of Wordpress, the industry standard blog engine that is used in some 17% of the top million sites. Relocating to your own paid hosting account with less search rank interruption. I believe there are some added charges at Wordpress.com for a custom domain.

Choose your favorite topic Go to those affiliate networks that have banner promotions and place those banners on your blog and on top of these banners write short descriptions about the merchant's product or service. Or you can just copy their ad description and paste it on the blog ... simple as that. Don't forget to place Good key words that buyers may type at Google and find your blog. Hopefully