How to Start a Blog | The Beginners Guide to Blogging

How (And Why!) To Start A Million Dollar Blog

In this post we’ll explain how to start a blog following 9 simple steps. These are the exact same steps we took to build this lovely website 😉. By the end of this post you’ll have all the tools necessary to start a money-making blog.

Quick aside… did you know the most common reader question we receive is “what type of business should I start?”. It seems everyone loves the idea of a side hustle with some extra passive income showing up in their bank account each month. But most people don’t know which type of business to start. Our #1 answer is to start a blog. We’ll explain more below but starting a blog is hands down our top choice.

Okay let’s get on with the business of not only how to start a blog but how to start a successful blog.

Why start a blog?

• Minimal financial investment. You can start a blog for less than it costs to buy a cup of coffee ☕
• Huge financial upside ($100k+ per month) 📈
• Can be done from home or away and offers major flexibility 🏠🏖️
• It’s a lot of fun! 😃

What makes a successful blogger?

• Preparation: Blogging isn’t complicated but without learning the basics you’ll likely never have a successful blog
• Persistence: The best bloggers often don’t see success on day one or month one. But they keep at it. At some point things flip and all of a sudden they are making more money than they did at their day jobs
• Continuous Learning: Top-notch bloggers keep reading, keep writing, keep learning, keep trying, & keep growing

“The will to win is not nearly as important as the will to prepare to win. Everyone wants to win but not everyone wants to prepare to win.” – Bobby Knight

Let’s face it: we’d all love to have a million dollar blog. Who wouldn’t? But the single biggest thing separates the pretenders from the successful bloggers is the will to learn, prepare, and execute. The will to keep going.

Blogging is incredible. What other type of business can you start with an investment of less than $100 and turn it into a majorly lucrative business simply by writing about topics that you already know and love? A content sit is such a cool business model. But it doesn’t just happen. You have to work for it.

How to start a successful blog… one warning 🚨

Warning: This is a long post! If starting a million dollar blog required no thinking or hard work then everyone would do it. People that dedicate themselves to learning the basics and then taking action will put themselves in a position to achieve success with blogging. A life changing journey starts with a single step; take that step and prepare for the ride ahead. You got this!

Do you need a shot of money motivation to start your blog?

Is the idea of making $1 million dollars or more enough motivation?!? There are some seriously incredible success stories of regular people like you and me starting a blog and turning it into a million dollar business. For instance, we love reading Michelle’s blog at Making Sense of Cents. In 2018 Michelle made over $1,500,000 from her one-woman blog! That is so awesome; kudos to Michelle.

And Michelle’s story isn’t unique. There are tons of blogs putting up eye-popping numbers. Reading Income Reports can be a great source motivation to help you get started blogging today.

Hopefully you are now fired up and ready to go start your own blog. Without further ado we present the blueprint to starting a blog. Settle in, get comfy, and prepare to absorb information that could literally change your life!

How to Start a Blog | The 9 Essential Steps to Starting a Blog

Ok let’s get down to business! Most people don’t want to just know how to start a blog but instead want to know how to start a successful blog. Here are the 9 steps we followed to launch our blog. This goes beyond the basics of just getting set up on WordPress; we also focus on how to make your blog a success. Why just start a blog when you can start a money making blog! Let’s dive in!

Step 1. Pick your niche

What is a “niche”?

Picking your niche is so important. What do we mean by ‘niche’? When we say niche we just mean the topic you are going to write about. For instance, WealthFam is about personal finance and therefore the blog is in the personal finance niche. Other common blog niches are cooking, travel, and home decor. You can choose almost anything as your niche.

Your Niche = Your Brand

Another way to think about your niche is to picture it as your brand. For example, McDonalds’ brand is about convenient, affordable, and tasty food. Imagine if McDonalds started serving $20 avocado toast. Do you think their avocado toast would be a top-seller? Me neither. Why not? Expensive avocado toast doesn’t fit with the McDonalds brand and isn’t what customers expect.

Like McDonalds, you want to meet your customers’ needs by serving them quality product that fits with your brand and in your niche. This means that you’ll want your content to stay within your selected niche as your write and build your brand. For instance let’s picture an example related to this blog…

WealthFam readers might describe our site by saying “oh that’s the site where I learned some creative ways to make extra money“. If we at WealthFam started sprinkling in posts about our favorite smoothie recipes it would probably leave our readers saying “WTF is this?!?“. No matter how incredible of smoothie concoction we can make it’s probably safe to say our readers aren’t coming to WealthFam to learn our smoothie recipes 😂

It is best for your blog and your readers that you focus most of your content within your selected niche. Choose wisely!

How do you select your niche?

The perfect niche resides at the place where your passions and skills intersect.

I’m a total personal finance nerd. I just love it. If we met at a party I’d light up if you wanted to talk about starting a business, investing, or any other similar topics. Yes, I’m a nerd. 🤓 In addition to liking personal finance I also have experience in this field. I’ve started and sold a 7-figure business with less than $5,000 using only my $300 Chromebook (you can read about it here). Before being a full-time entrepreneur I used to be a CPA and have a day job in the accounting and finance field.

So in addition to having a passion about finance I also know a thing or two about it from my real life and educational experiences. The combination of passion and know-how makes personal finance a great niche for me and WealthFam.

Where do your passions and skills collide?

• Like to travel on a budget? ✈️ Blog about it!
• Love cooking for your kids? 👩‍🍳 Blog about it!
• Great at creative home design? 🏠 Blog about it!
• Enjoy doing product reviews? 🔌 Blog about it!

Choosing your niche is an important first step to creating your blog.

When I talk about understanding your skills I do NOT necessarily mean you must have a college degree or professional credential. For a niche like finance this may help but it certainly isn’t required. For most niches your opinions, personality or “voice”, and expertise gained through real-life experiences are all you need. In fact, being a beginner can help make you more relatable and you can bring your readers along on your journey.

Real life example: There are a few smoothie bloggers online that have highlighted some cool concoctions I never would have thought of on my own. Does it take a college degree to be knowledgeable about blending up awesome smoothies? Of course not! Find where your passions and real-life skills intersect and you’ll find your niche.

The bottom line:

Selecting a “niche” just means picking what general topic you’ll be writing about (e.g. travel, cooking, finance, etc). You’ll want to keep most of your content pretty closely related to this topic. A great way to select a niche is to write about what you know and enjoy.

Step 2. Set up your blog

Ok so you’ve selected your niche. Next we need to learn about the two main tools needed to answer the question ‘how to start a blog?’.

There are two main tools you need when starting a blog:

• A blogging platform
• A place to host your blog

The blogging platform is infrastructure that let’s you design your blog, write articles, and add photos. Hosting is what makes your blog available on the internet to readers from around the world. You’ll need both a platform and hosting to start your blog. The good news is both are very user friendly and inexpensive.

Our Pick For Blogging Platform: WordPress

WordPress is far and away the most popular blogger platform in the world. WordPress blogs look great, are inexpensive to operate, and can easily scale as your blog grows. In short, WordPress is awesome for us bloggers. We use WordPress for WealthFam and have been thrilled with how it’s performing. WordPress is a no-brainer for 99.9% of blogs. Honestly this is one decision you don’t need to spend any mental energy on… just use WordPress.

Cost: FREE with Siteground hosting (explained below). Otherwise plans start at $4/mo.

Our Pick For Hosting: Siteground

Remember hosting is what let’s you broadcast your blog to all your adoring fans so it is crucially important.

The combination of WordPress + Siteground is a killer combo. This is what we use and what we strongly recommend.

If you look around the internet you will find tons of sites promoting various hosting sites. You’ve probably heard of Bluehost as they are a really popular choice. Bluehost isn’t a bad option, especially for people on a shoestring budget, but for literally $1 more per month we think you get a far superior product by using Siteground.

And don’t just take our word for it. Here is a survey from the WPHosting Facebook Group which asks it’s super savvy members their favorite hosting company. Out of nearly 70 options, Siteground was the winner. Bluehost received a fraction of the votes and was waaayyy down the list. Take it from people in the know… Siteground is awesome.

Siteground and WordPress go together like peas and carrots. They really are a perfect combo for any new bloggers. As an added perk, with Siteground hosting you’ll receive WordPress installation for FREE. If you were to purchase directly from WordPress you’d pay $4/mo.

Cost: $3.95/month to host your blog on Siteground. Use THIS LINK to sign up and at the reduced price of $3.95/month AND receive free WordPress installation. Step #3 below will explain in detail how to purchase hosting and install WordPress.

The bottom line:

WordPress + Siteground = a super strong foundation for setting up your blog.

Step 3. Get Started with WordPress

At this point you’ve selected your blog’s niche. You also know to start your blog you’ll need both Siteground to host your blog and WordPress as you blog platform. What’s next? How to start a blog part three answers that question.

It’s time now to actually sign-up for the services needed to power your blog. In our case it’s signing up for Siteground hosting and installing WordPress. After checking these two items off our list we will be much closer to launching our blog and doing the fun stuff which will hopefully lead us to making extra money. Don’t give up here… I promise the sign-up process is something anyone can do.

And remember, when you sign up for Siteground hosting you will receive your WordPress installation for FREE. Siteground and WordPress work beautifully together. It’s what we use and recommend to all our fellow bloggers. So we’ll start by signing up for Siteground which in turn allows us to access WordPress for free. How do we do this?

Step #1: Go to Siteground.com | Click ‘GET STARTED’ under WordPress hosting

Use THIS LINK to sign up and at the reduced price of $3.95/month AND receive free WordPress installation

Upon clicking the link you’ll see a page like this:

Click on the ‘GET STARTED’ button under the WordPress icon (we put a red circle around where you should click). From there it’ll take you to the page shown in step #2.

Step #2: Click ‘GET PLAN’ under StartUp

We highly recommend the StartUp plan which you can receive at $3.95/month. This is more than sufficient for new bloggers and what we personally use for this site. In most cases there is no need to spend the extra money on the more expensive plans. Click ‘GET PLAN’ and from there it will take you to the page shown in step #3.

Step #3: Buy Your Domain

Next you’ll need to buy your domain. You’ll see a screen like this…

For simplicity sake we prefer buying a domain directly from SiteGround as opposed to bringing in a domain from somewhere else. But either way works. It’s really up to you.

How to select a good domain name?

It is best to select a domain name that will give readers an idea of what your site is about. If you are starting a cooking blog it would make sense to have words like ‘cooking’, ‘food’, or ‘recipes’ somewhere in the domain name.

Selecting a domain name that includes relevant words has two big benefits:

• Readers will quickly understand what your site is all about
• You’ll set yourself up for success with search engines which in turn will get your more readers (and more money)

Selecting a domain is important but it’s certainly not a make or break decision so don’t fret if you don’t feel like you have the perfect name. Make your decision and keep your momentum going.

After selecting your domain name you move along to Siteground payment.

Step #4: Enter your information and click ‘PAY NOW’

Congratulations! You now have hosting and access to free WordPress. You’re getting closer to launching your own business that has the potential to generate real money in the months and years ahead.

Step 4. Install WordPress, select a WordPress theme, & design your site

Installing WordPress

At this point we have Siteground hosting and our domain name. The next step is the WordPress install. WordPress will allow us to design our site and start creating content. The WordPress install process is a breeze and remember it is free given we purchased hosting through Siteground After signing up for the WordPress hosting package on Siteground you’ll receive everything you need to take the next step.

How to install WordPress from Siteground:

• Log into Siteground’s customer area (you’ll see the below pop-up)
• Select Start a new website and then click the WordPress button
• You’ll see an area that says Please choose your WordPress login details. This is where you need to choose your WordPress credentials (different from Siteground). These credentials you create here are what you’ll use to log into WordPress going forward
• Choose your login details and click confirm

Select Your Enhancements

• You do not need to select any enhancements
• Check the box and click Complete Setup

Look for the below screen. If you’ve see this you’re good to go and can get started with WordPress!

Login to your WordPress site & select a theme

Logging in to WordPress

Now is the point you can officially log in to your WordPress account and begin the fund of creating your site. To log in go to wordpress.com/log-in. Use the login credentials you set up in the prior step and get logged in.

Selecting a WordPress theme

What even is a WordPress theme? A WordPress theme is essentially a template you’ll use to impact the display and appearance of your WordPress blog. The theme has a big impact on how your blog will look and feel.

To select your WordPress go to Appearance (on left sidebard). When you hover over Appearance you’ll see Themes pop out to the right. Click on Themes and you’ll get to a screen like this one:

Next you’ll need to select your theme.

Free vs Paid/Premium Themes

If you are a beginner on a budget a free theme is a perfectly reasonable way to go. Free themes are just that: free.

Why would someone use a paid theme when there are literally thousands of free ones available? Responsive premium themes tend look highly professional right out of the box. The good ones don’t require much customization and are easy to use. Remember our end goal here is to get people to our site which will allow us to make money. A premium theme often looks a step above the free themes which is why we recommend upgrading to a premium theme when you have the budget. After your hosting cost then next best place to spend money is on a strong paid theme.

Our Favorite Paid WordPress Themes

• Divi
• Genesis
• Astra

Pro Tip: It can feel overwhelming to choose your theme. My advice is not too caught up on this theme selection step.  One great thing about WordPress and themes is that you can always change or update your theme later on. So if you don’t have the money for a premium theme now no sweat. Select a free theme and upgrade if/when you have the budget.

Let’s recap our progress from Steps #1-#4:

• Hosting: you now have your hosting from Siteground so the world can visit your blog
• Platform: you now have your WordPress account set up which is the foundation of your site
• Theme: you now have your WordPress theme which impacts how your site looks to your audience

Congratulations… you have officially set up your blog!

Step 5. Perform keyword research | SEO basics

Are you creating your blog with the hope that it makes your money? Would you like to be one of the success stories earning thousands of dollars per month from your blog? If the answer is yes there is an important equation I want to share with you:

Traffic = Money 

If you want to earn money from your site it is essential that you get traffic. 🚗 = 💲 There are various ways to make money from a blog and all of them require traffic. One incredibly important piece of this puzzle is what is called keyword research.

Keyword Research Overview

Keyword research simply means doing some checking to see if people want to read whatever it is you are thinking of writing about.

If you are serious about making money from your blog, keyword research is critical. There are some amazing tools to help with keyword research (we use and LOVE KWFinder). When we started WealthFam, the concept of keyword research seemed really confusing. It took a long time for it to click. To make it easier we’ll show you a super simple real life keyword search example below. I think it will help it click for you. But first we need to give you a quick primer on SEO as it closely relates to keyword research…

SEO Introduction

Search engine optimization is another important topic to have baseline knowledge in when thinking about how to start a successful blog.

In layman’s terms SEO is all out writing and optimizing your articles in a way that make search engines like Google happy. Making Google happy will make your content appear higher up in Google’s organic search results and in turn you’ll get more traffic to your website. And more traffic means more money. 🤑

You could literally spend years learning about SEO but I’ll give you the cliffs note version of what is important for new bloggers. Here is what is most important: spend some time researching keywords before writing and then strategically inserting those keywords into your post.

The Winning Formula: Keyword Research + Implementing SEO = Traffic!

The formula you need to remember is this one: pick good keywords (we’ll explain what ‘good’ keywords are below), then write your articles in a SEO friendly way (again, explanation below). This will generate traffic to your site.

Again, you don’t need to be an expert in SEO. Take time to do keyword research and then write great content around those keywords. That will put you ahead of 99% of other bloggers out there.

Keyword Research Example

This idea of keyword research can seem confusing at first so let’s walk through a simple example to bring it to life…

Say we had a home decor blog and wanted to write about great ways to decorate our kiddos room. Before we spend time writing about this topic we want to learn if people are actually interested in reading about it. How do we know if people are interested? We check to see if they are searching for this topic.

What might people search when looking for this type of content? We started by searching ‘kids room ideas‘ in our favorite keyword research tool, KWFinder.com. Here’s what comes back (we’ll explain what it all means below)…

You only need to focus on a few key things on this screen:

• Search Volume: For the term ‘kids room ideas’ there are 12,100 searches across the world each month. Said differently, over 12k people a month are interested in learning about ‘kids room ideas’. For our site we try to only write articles around keywords that have 1,000 or more monthly searches. Again, if nobody is searching for what you want to write about you won’t get traffic.
• Keyword Difficulty (KD): If you only considered search volume you’d logically say ‘why not just try to write articles around keywords that have millions of searches?‘. Sounds obvious right? Well the thing about keywords with huge search volume is that many other websites are also targeting those keywords. All that search volume gets websites excited and they create content in hopes of getting a piece of it. The result is lots of competition for that keyword. And competition means it’s harder to rank in Google. Keyword Difficulty is KWFinder’s indicator on how difficult it may be to ‘rank’ for this keyword. If the keyword difficulty is really high it’s probably best to pass on writing and trying to rank for that keyword.

Here are the keyword difficulty ranges for KWFinder.com. We typically like to only target keywords that have a difficulty under 40.

So where does this leave us?

Should we write an article about ‘kids room ideas’? In this case I would pivot to another keyword that showed up in our KWFinder search. That keyword is ‘baby girl room ideas’. Look at the chart. You’ll see it has pretty solid search volume (5,400) and a low keyword difficulty score (19). That is exactly the type of keyword you are looking for when doing your keyword research.

The name of the game in keyword research is to find keywords with sufficient traffic AND low keyword difficulty. 

Why KWFinder?

We’ve tried so many of the keyword research tools. There are lots of good ones but personally we love KWFinder. It is easy to use and a good value compared to the competition. My other personal favorite is Ahrefs; it’s an amazing tool but it’s pricey. For a beginner is has more features than you really need.

If you’re interested in trying KWFinder for free you can click here to get a FREE trial. If you don’t love it you can cancel anytime during your free trial and not pay a thing. We would encourage you to sign up and use it as much as possible in the free period and then decide if it’s a tool you want to keep going forward.

If you are serious about blogging you’ll want to use KWFinder or a similar paid tool in the future. After hosting and a solid theme, we would put our next dollar to keyword research tools like KWFinder. They can pay for themselves many times over and immensely speed up the time from starting your blog to seeing real money flowing in.

SEO Basics & Example

There are actually two types of SEO:

• On-page SEO: This is where we will focus. On-page SEO refers to measures that can be taken improve how a search engine will perceive your content. I’m talking things like using appropriate keywords, including keywords in the title of your article, and in general making your content and site user-friendly
• Off-page SEO: This refers to what is called link building. Essentially search engines give priority to content that has a lot of links to it across the web. The thought being that this content must be good and relevant… hence all the links. For many bloggers obtaining these links comes organically when once they have good content. If the content is good people will naturally share and link to it. It’s good to be aware of off-page SEO but personally I’d advise you to place your focus with on-page SEO as that is more easily controllable.

Yoast SEO example:

The bottom line

Keyword research is vital to your success as a blogger. Without it you’re really flying blind and have minimal hope at growing your blog into a big income producer. When starting out you’ll want to target keywords that are low competition. Those will be easier to rank in search engines. A tool like KWFinder is essential if you’re serious about blogging and making money.

Step 6. Publish your first post

Now that we have a hosting plan with Siteground and done our free WordPress install it is time to get to the fun stuff. What time is it? It’s time to write your first post!

This is your chance to share your knowledge, passion, and creativity with your audience.

How do you post in WordPress? It’s easy!

Simply to go Posts > Add New > Publish. Write a few words and publish it. You now have content on the internet. 😃

Step 7. Create a content calendar and write, write, write

The next step is simply to write. Write and then write some more. Ultimately your content site will live and die on the quality of your content. You should always aim for best on the internet content. It’s a high bar but should be your goal when writing.

If you have the budget consider hiring a writer as well. Content is king; you need content on the site to get traffic and revenue.

What is my process for writing?

• I have a Google doc where I drop in all the interesting keywords I find during my research on KWFinder
• Each keyword is mapped into one of the big buckets on my site (e.g. Making Money, Financial Independence, etc)
• I review the competition and see if I can write a better article or an article with a unique twist
• Longer is better; I aim to write at least 2,500 words for most posts
• Blocking out distractions is key; when I write I often turn ‘do not disturb’ on and try to get into the zone for a few hours!

How to start a blog if aren’t a good writer?

Hire a writer! There are many talented writers out there that would happily write for your blog. Upwork is a great place to find blog writers.

What is the “best” blog content?

There is no one size fits all answer as to what constitutes best on the internet content. Generally the best means your content has more of one or more of the following traits:

• Comprehensive
• Engaging
• Visual
• Timely
• Relevant

The bottom line

Writing is where the rubber truly meets the road. The success of your site will hinge on good content. You can find loads of great keywords but if you content is crap in the long run you’ll be sunk. You need to find good keywords AND write great content. And dont fret; if you’re not a great writer you can hire great writers.

Step 8. Backlinks; outreach to other bloggers and influencers in your niche

One great way to get some immediate traffic is to reach out to other bloggers or influencers in your niche. Remember when we talked about “off-page” SEO up in step #3? If you recall, off-page SEO is essentially all about backlinks. Backlinks are links from other sites back to our site. Increasing backlinks, especially from important websites (sites with  high “domain authority”How do you go about doing this? Here’s what we recommend:

Blogger outreach best practices:

• Be kind and courteous
• Keep it brief but have something that may spark their interest
• Introduce yourself and mention something you admire about their site
• Provide value

Blogger outreach example email:

Here’s an example email we might send to a fellow blogger we’d love to work with 📧:

Hi Michelle,

I hope you don’t mind me reaching out. I’ve been a long time fan of your site. I love how you are able to run your business AND travel the world at the same time. It’s so cool and something I aspire to. 

My name is Paul and I’m the founder of WealthFam. We have content about personal finance, finaicial independence, and online business. I’d love you to take a look at our site and let me know what you think. If anything catches your eye I’d love to guest post and/or do anything else you think would be valuable for your audience. 

Let me know!
Paul

P.S. I noticed you have an affiliate relationship with Company ABC. Have you heard of Company XYZ? We are part of their affiliate program and have seen our earnings increase substantially compared to Company ABC. Just thought I’d share in case it helps!

The Bottom Line

When you think about how to start a blog it’s important to understand the role of backlinks. This isn’t something you need to do day one or even year one. If you have great content and provide value the backlinks will come. If there are bloggers you genuinely admire and think would be a great fit then there is no harm in reaching out. You might score a backlink which will bring more traffic and authority to your site!

Step 9. Increase content, traffic and profits!

At this point you know virtually everything there is to know about how to start a blog. There is just one thing missing… the money! 💵

While it’s fun to write and build a site at the end of the day we all want to make some money. How do we make money from a blog?

Increase Content | Keep Writing & Be Patient!

One of the most important character traits we’ve noticed in bloggers is persistence. Blogs don’t go from $0 to $1 million overnight.

Blogging Takes Time

• Multiple weeks to develop a few articles
• Up to six months for Google to rank your site
• Months for other other bloggers and the general public to learn about your work

Blogging requires patience. Having the persistence to keep going is the number one separator between blogs that burn out and blogs that blow up. Keep going. And then keep going some more. Remember you’re playing the long game here and in time you’ll reap a payoff.

Increasing Blog Traffic

Remember that in blogging, traffic = money! The more traffic to your site the more income potential you will have. So it makes sense that we’d want to increase traffic to our site, right? Right!

How To Increase Traffic To My Blog?

Once you’ve got your blog humming along you’ll be asking yourself how to get more traffic to your site. Here are six tips to get more traffic to your blog.

#1: Keep Writing!!!

It’s a numbers game. The more content you have, the more opportunities to get readers to  your content. A blogger with 50 articles is likely going to have more traffic than a blogger with 5 articles. So keep writing!

#2: Start a Newsletter

We’d recommend signing up for a newsletter service from the start. A newsletter is a great way to stay in touch with your readers. You can use it to tell them about a new post (which increases traffic), ask for their feedback, or promote a course you have created. I cannot stress enough how important it is to begin collecting emails from the start of your blog. We use ConvertKit and highly recommend it. In the past we’ve used MailChimp and honestly were pretty underwhelmed. ConvertKit on the other hand has been awesome.

#3: Use On-Page SEO

First, make sure you are targeting ‘good’ keywords. By ‘good’ we mean keywords that have some traffic but are not super competitive. Jump back to step #5 if you need a refresher on keywords (KWFinder.com is our preferred tool and it makes keyword research a breeze). Where does ‘on-page SEO’ come in? When writing make sure you are smart about using the keyword in the title of the article, URL, and headers. Proper usage of the keyword and related keywords is what people mean when they talk about ‘on-page SEO’. If you install the free Yoast plugin and follow the Yoast SEO tips within WordPress you’ll be doing great when it comes to on-page SEO.

#4: Explore Off-Page SEO

Spend some time working to get backlinks. This could mean messaging your favorite bloggers, doing a Reddit AMA, posting on social media, posting in relevant forums, etc. Off-page SEO just means getting other places on the internet to link back to your site.

#5: Leverage Social Media

Make sure you create social media accounts for your blog. Pinterest in particular can be very powerful to driving traffic.

#6: Experiment with Paid Traffic

You could dedicate a small budget (less than $5 a day) to buying Facebook ads and driving traffic to your site.

Profit | Making Money Blogging

How do we actually make money off our blog? You’ll often hear bloggers use the following fancy term: monetization. This is just a big word for ‘how I make money’. The bottom line is this: once you have the traffic you’ll be able to make money. There are a few different ways of doing so. Let’s explore each one.

How Do Blogs Make Money?

• Affiliate Links: If someone clicks your link and buys a product on Amazon or another affiliate site you’ll earn a commission
• Advertising: You blog serves ads. How much you earn is dependent on your traffic.
• Courses: Many bloggers earn good money selling courses via platforms like Teachable
• Sponsored Posts: Bloggers partner with big brands to feature their products or services for a fee

When you’re starting how focus on the traffic. Once you have the traffic the money will follow!

Summary: How to start a blog

Thanks for reading our post on how to start a blog. You rock 🤘 We wish you huge success as a blogger. Now get out there and do your thing! 😃

P.S. in case it’s helpful, here is the TL:DR Q&A version of explaining how to start a successful blog.

Q: Should I start a blog?
A: Yes, you should start a blog.

Q: How much money can I make blogging?
A: There is a wide range. Most people quit and make virtually nothing. Top bloggers can make over $1 million dollars per year working from wherever they please.

Q: How much does it cost to start a blog?
A: You can start for less than $100.

Q: What should I blog about?
A: You should blog about a topic that both excites you and you have some level of knowledge about.

Q: How to start a blog?
A: Get Siteground hosting, get a WordPress site, and start writing.

Q: How to start a successful blog?
A: In addition to the answer above, perform keyword research and then write best-on-the-internet content for your keywords. Stay on brand and within your niche. Bonus points if you outreach to other bloggers or press to get backlinks.

Q: What is the most important tool I need as a blogger?
A: Hosting (Siteground) and a platform (WordPress) are table stakes and required. After that a good keyword research tool is vital. For beginners we like KWFinder and for more experienced users we like Ahrefs.

Q: What is the point of keyword research?
A: You need to write about topics people care about (i.e. they search the internet for). You are looking to write about topics that have some search volume but not too much competition. That is the sweet spot.

Q: What prevents people from having a successful blog?
A: Three common things… 1) They don’t do keyword research 2) The content is not good 3) They quit. Blogging takes time… if do keyword research, write great content, and KEEP GOING you will almost certainly have success.

Q: When I make my first million from blogging can I let you know?
A: Yes! I’ll buy the first round of drinks 🥂