This post may contain affiliate links, which means I’ll receive a commission if you purchase through my link, at no extra cost to you. Please read full disclosure here.
This post is all about how to start a blog that makes money.
Hey guys, if you’re reading this, you’re probably looking to start a blog. We all know blogging is such a great side hustle these days to make a lot of money. Maybe you wanna blog just cause you love writing. Maybe you want a blog because you hate your full time job. Whatever it is, blogging is def a great way to make money that more people should get into.
And trust me I know you feel. Before I started my blog, I read so many posts about how to start a blog. And it seemed really complicated and overwhelming. There’s just so much that goes into creating a blog that actually makes money.
Sure you could just throw together a basic blog that no one reads and call it a day. But if you want the chance to turn it into a profitable side hustle, then there are certain steps you need to follow.
But that’s why I made this post to show you how to start a blog that makes you rich. I wanna make it easy for you to set up a blog that makes you rich in no time. I’m literally gonna walk you through all the exact steps that I used to set up my own blog so you can do it yourself easy and fast.
You’ll learn everything you need to do and everything you don’t. People may say blogging is hard (and it is lol) but I will show you how to do it the easy way. I hope you find all of this helpful and more!
Oh, and if you have questions, feel free to join my email list and send me an email. I would be happy to respond and help you out!
This post shows you how to start a blog and make money.
How To Come Up With Your Blog Topic
Step 1: Come up with your niche
This is probably the most important step on here cause it’s literally what your blog is based around. Your niche is your main topic and all your posts and categories should be based on it. There’s lots of different examples of niches. Pets, travel, fashion, personal finance. But really it could be anything.
You just need to make sure its something you’re passionate about or something you have a lot of knowledge on so you can write a ton of stuff about it. And oh I wanna emphasize you should LIKE your niche. Don’t just pick something cause you think it will make money. Readers can tell if you’re interested or not.
You need to pick something that you yourself enjoy writing. Remember, as a blogger, you’re gonna be doing a TON of writing. Imagine spending days writing a long freaking post and hating every second of it cause your niche is “knitting” and you hate knitting! Pick. Something. You. Like.
Here’s a list of blog niches to choose from:
- Travel
- Fashion
- Food
- News
- Pop Culture
- Personal Finance
- Lifestyle
- Business
- Science
- Pets
- Sports
- Fitness
- Art
- Technology
- Parenting
- And so much more!
Step 2: Come up with a list of topics and post ideas
Honestly I can’t stress how important this is. If you get on a good blogging schedule, it means you’re gonna be doing frequent posting. Maybe once a week, maybe two times a week, maybe even three. You need to have an outline of stuff you’re gonna be covering in the future.
Otherwise you’re gonna be scrambling every week to think of what you’re gonna write about which takes away so much time from actually getting to write the post (and whatever else you have to do). And there is so much else you have to do when it comes to blogging. So thats why it’s important you have a long list of topics picked ahead of time so you can be working to prepare for them early.
Plus I’m the type of person who likes to get ahead. I love to be weeks ahead of my content schedule if I can. That means I have all my posts written for this week, next week, the following week, etc. It takes so much stress off my plate and allows me way more time to focus on the technical and marketing aspects of blogging.
But don’t worry this list doesn’t have to be super long. You can always add to it as you go along. Before I actually launched my blog I had a topic list of around 50 post ideas. And they were all separated under the different categories of my blog. This made it easy for me to know what I was gonna be writing about 6 months down the road.
Step 3. Write a few posts in advance
So this one isn’t absolutely necessary. You totally can just launch your blog and start writing posts then. BUT they do say you should probably have 5-10 blog posts already written before you launch just so people have some content ready to look at.
You don’t want your blog to be an empty skeleton and then you have visitors show up only to be like “Oh.. they only one post? Must not be that good a blog”. Of course like I said you don’t have to write tons of stuff in advance. I had about 6 posts written before I launched and then I put them out one by one each week.
But it is good just to have some stuff written up front. Especially cause when you first start setting up your blog (specifically launch week), you will be so many OTHER things that actually writing the posts should be the least of your concerns.
And if you don’t know how to write your blog posts, don’t worry we’ll get into that later. I just wanted to mention writing a few posts in advance is probably a good idea. And it’s what I did!
How To Set Up Your Blog
Step 4. Get self-hosted wordpress
Y’all, I can’t stress how important this is. If you wanna make a blog that actually makes money, this is essential! I’m sure you’ve heard of wordpress. It’s like the major blogging platform that most people make their blogs on. But there are some major differences between the two types.
There are two distinct differences that I need to spell out for you. WordPress.com vs WordPress.org. VERY different. WordPress.com is basically for beginners, people who aren’t serious about their blog and people who just want something to throw together their thoughts. Sure that’s fine if you don’t care to make blogging anything other than a hobby. There’s a nice community there and its super simple to follow.
But if you wanna have a blog that makes you money, you need to set it up on wordpress.org. This is the professional platform where you have way more control over your blog and the blog itself is truly yours. When it’s on wordpress.com, it’s not really yours. It’s more just like an account.. on wordpress. But when you do it on wordpress.org, you get to set up your own domain. Your own everything. And it’s actually YOURS.
There’s more differences, but bottom line, you just need to know that if you want a blog that makes money, you need to set up your blog on wordpress.org.
Step 5: Get self hosting for your blog
Okay, this step is also super crucial. It’s one thing to have your blog hosted with wordpress and to have that creative control. But it’s another thing to literally have your own hosting ON wordpress. Self hosting is where you get to control over what’s on your blog and where everything is stored.
This is so important cause what happens if wordpress goes down sometime? Or there’s some kinda glitch? With everything stored on your own self hosting, you never have to worry about that.
And when it comes to self-hosting, there is no better hosting provider I recommend than Bluehost. Bluehost is literally what I use for my own blog and it’s so necessary if you wanna make money. They give you tons of different features and make it so easy for you to change your domain name if you want too.
I have so many great things to say about Bluehost, its not even funny. And you will hear tons of other bloggers talk about them too and we swear by them. Bluehost is literally what every blogger who wants to make money needs for their hosting.
Again, if you don’t know what hosting is, it’s basically the people who run the servers for your blog. So of COURSE you want the people doing that to be reputable right? Bluehost gives you 24/7 customer service and you can reach out to them anytime you have an issue.
There have been so many times when I’m having an issue with my blog, literally freaking out lol. And then I just hit up Bluehost, either by phone or through online chat, and they fix it for me in 5 minutes. I could not not live without them!
Also it’s super cheap! They have annual plans where you only have to pay less than $2.95 a month. Or you can pay every 3 months for only 30 dollars. It may sound like a lot but think of how much money you’ll be making through your blog from being self-hosted. It’s an upfront investment that will pay dividends down the road.
Now I will say that when you get a bigger blog with more traffic, you will need to graduate to a larger hosting provider that can handle even more traffic. (But that will cost thousands of dollars). But when you’re just starting out, or even if you have a medium-sized blog, there is no better hosting than Bluehost. It’s very user-friendly and perfect for beginners!
Okay I’ll shut up about Bluehost, but seriously I’m obsessed haha.
Step 6: Get a premium blog theme
Okay, this one’s not 100% necessary. You can def get away with having a crusty basic theme that you can get for free on wordpress. They even have some now that look decent. And I’ve def seen blogs out there with lots of traffic where you can tell they have a free theme.
But if you want your site to look pretty and professional, then you will want to look into a getting a premium theme for your blog. Basically a blog theme is the design of your blog. It’s how it looks with all the cute fonts and navigation menus. All the cool colors etc. It’s also one of the first things people notice when they come to your blog.
Yeah sure you can just put any old free theme, and if you have good info, people will still read. But if you’ve never been to a blog before you’re not gonna trust anything they say right. Having a nice blog theme can make people take your blog seriously and lead to more traffic sooner.
That’s why I totally recommend that people at least think about getting a premium blog theme. Oh, and don’t worry, these aren’t like hundreds of dollars. I got mine for only like 50. And yes, I know that still probably sounds a little high. But considering I plan to use mine for years and it just looks SO pretty, it was well worth the money!
Also, like I said, a lot of these purchases are investments. You put 100 dollars down now, or 50 dollars down now, to make 1000-10,000 dollars later. It’s a temporary investment. You could go cheap and say no I don’t wanna invest anything to my blog. And miss out on making WAY more money that would dwarf those expenses later on.
Idk, it’s totally up to you, but I would suggest getting a premium blog theme. They have all different ones and like I said, you want your blog to look pretty right? If you wanna know where I got mine, I got it from 17th Avenue Designs, which I totally recommend. But also, Pixel Me Designs is great too if you want custom-custom.
How To Create An Email List
Step 7: Set up your email list
If you’re a professional blogger, having an email list is so important. An email list is where you get to have access to all your most active readers (the ones that wanna subscribe) and where you get to announce special things coming up etc.
When it comes to making money blogging, an email list is really the heart and soul. You can use your email list for all sorts of things. Sending out newsletters. Promoting new products you’re offering. Or just letting loyal subs know when you publish a new post. Your email list is yours to have fun with!
But when thinking about creating an email list, you obviously need to have a platform that will capture those emails for you and make it easy for you to send them out to people who subscribe to it. That’s where platforms like MailChimp and ConvertKit come to mind.
MailChimp and ConvertKit. These two are basically the top platforms bloggers use to create their email lists. I really can’t tell you which one to go with cause they’re both great. But the pricing is a little different.
MailChimp is cheaper up front and gives you completely free service up to your first 2,000 email list subscribers (which is a LOT!). ConvertKit is a little more expensive down the road and only gives you free service for your first 1,000 email list subscribers. But some people do say, ConvertKit has more features so it could be worth it to you.
Like I said, I don’t really have a dog in this fight. I like both of them and think they could be perfectly fine for whoever. Personally right now I’m using MailChimp but honestly I could switch to ConvertKit at any time. They’re both great!
Step 8: Set up your pop-up form
Part of building an email list is actually getting people to subscribe to your email list haha. Sure you can just sit back and HOPE that they reach out to do it themselves. But some people need that initial push lol! And that’s where pop-up forms can be your best friend and do the trick.
Pop-up forms are basically where someone is scrolling your site and then a random pop-up menu shows up on their screen asking them to subscribe to your email list in exchange for a valuable item. They get to get something they want (for FREE) and you get a brand new email subscriber! It’s totally a win win.
You can design your pop-up form in all different types of ways. I recommend not making it look so spammy. It should look pretty and something non-invasive. We all know pop-up menus can be annoying so you want this to look good.
But just as important, you want your pop-up menu to offer them something good! Something they would actually want enough to subscribe to your email list. And really thats gonna depend on your niche. If your niche is about cats, maybe its you offering them a free download of a cat essentials list if they sub to your email list. It just depends! You’ll know what could be a good offer based on your own audience.
And this isn’t something extra you need to purchase. This is standard feature that comes with those email list platforms I mentioned before, ConvertKit and MailChimp. You just go to the section for forms and set up a pop-up form for your site.
How To Write Content For Your Blog
Step 9. How To Write A Blog Post
So we’re finally on to the writing the actual blog post section haha. As you can see, there’s a whole LOT that goes into making a blog that actually makes money beside just writing the posts. Everything from getting your actual blog set up to the marketing which we’ll cover later.
But now, when it comes to writing a good blog post, you wanna focus on providing value. Thats really the whole point of a vlog anyway. You have something to say and hopefully what you say is impactful enough that it helps someone or informs them. You don’t just wanna write fluff content.
And that’s why it’s super important to write with your readers in mind. (And I’ll repeat this later on.) Don’t just write what YOU like, or what YOU did, or what YOU want. Readers see “I.. I.. I” and think “what am I getting out of this?”. You need to write stuff FOR them, to help THEM out.
Now, yes you can sprinkle in your personal experiences and things to show you know what you’re talking about. And def should add that personal touch. But you wanna make sure you don’t get into the habit of “what I did today that made me smile”. Instead, you could turn that into “15 Incredible Things That Could Make YOU Smile”. See the difference?
With the first, you’re just talking about yourself. And let’s be real, for people that don’t know you, no one cares! With the second, you’re writing with the reader in mind and catering to THEIR needs. In that post, you could always throw in stuff that worked for you when talking about what could make them smile but you get the point. You need to focus your posts on the reader.
And you should experiment with this, no one’s expecting you to write a perfect blog post overnight or really ever. You just gotta put effort into it and try to provide as much value as possible.
Step 10: Find your writing voice
This step is honestly just as important as the one above. The two go hand in hand. Part of writing a good blog post is having your own unique voice. Something to distinguish yourself from other bloggers (some of whom may be doing the same topic as you). You want your readers to read a post on your blog and instantly know its you!
What good is to write a blog if your writing is so generic that they would have no idea who it is if it was posted on someone else’s.
But that’s why it’s important to develop your writing voice. How you wanna sound you when you go through your posts. What tone you want to give off. You wanna put some character and personality into it. No one wants to read a blog that sounds like they’re just reading a textbook. It should sound like a real person, like you!
Of course, a lot of that does depend on what niche you have. If it’s a super educational science blog, yeah you’ll wanna avoid the slang and just stick to the facts. But if you have a casual fashion blog, don’t hesitate to show your personality! Readers will feel like they actually know you and can relate to you.
Step 11: Pick a posting schedule and stick with it
Y’all, I really can’t express how crucial it is that you BE CONSISTENT. Thats one of the important things when it comes to anything. But especially when it comes to putting out blog content!
Your readers, your subscribers, people need to know when you have an upcoming post and they need to know they can count on you to actually get it done. If you’re someone who barely posts (maybe you post consistently for a couple weeks then drop off the face earth for 6 month, then come back to posting), your readers will not feel a need to check up on you.
And you need people to come to your blog expecting good, fresh content if you wanna make money blogging. Your posting schedule doesn’t have to be the same as everyone else’s. You can choose how you want it for you. What works best with your schedule, your post length, everything.
But once you choose a posting schedule, you NEED to stick with it. Personally I put out 2 posts every week and thats the schedule I stick with. My readers know they can expect at least 2 posts every week so they know to check up on me and know my content is fresh.
You can easily choose to post once a week, three times a week, once a month even. It really doesn’t matter. All that matter is that you BE CONSISTENT.
And you may be thinking it might be hard to stick with that. It’s a big commitment. What if something comes up in your life? Some kind of emergency. A scheduling conflict that makes it difficult for you to get any writing done. Maybe you get sick.
But thats where it helps to follow the other piece of advice I mentioned earlier, which was to write blog posts in advance. That way you’re prepared in case one particular week you don’t actually have time to write a post. You will still be able to put something out there cause you had it pre-written.
Step 12: Make a content calendar
This is kinda related and goes hand in hand with the list of bog topics I talked about earlier. But you wanna also set up a content calendar. This will be a calendar that lets you see what posts you have coming up, on what days, what you posts you’ve already written. And will help you plan out how to get ahead.
You wanna always be AHEAD of your content calendar. The farther ahead you are in your content calendar, the more time you have to do OTHER stuff related to your blog. Stuff like working on your pinterest strategy (which we’ll talk about later). Creating products you can sell to your email list subscribers. Maybe coming up with your own courses that people can buy.
But you only have time to work on that if you’re far enough ahead with your content calendar that you don’t have to worry about writing a new post week to week. You’ll already have them created at least a few weeks ahead in advance.
How To Get Traffic To Your Blog
Now, this section is important, cause it’s how you actually get readers onto your blog. If you wanna learn more about this, I have a whole separate post just on how to bring traffic to your blog. But the steps down below cover all the basics!
Step 13: Make your blog SEO optimized
So many people skip out on this and thats why they don’t see any significant traffic come to their blog. Think about it. What is the number one way find new websites to check out. Google, right! Search engines. People search up stuff they’re looking for and then google will show them a list of good website to try. You want yours to be on there.
But yours will only show up on that results page (out of the millions of other blogs out there) if your content is SEO optimized. What does that mean? It means that your content is structured in a way that makes it easy for search engines to see what you’re writing about. If the search engines can easily tell what it is you’re writing about, they will think it’s more valuable and you will rank higher on the search results.
Now, there’s a whole bunch that goes into making your site optimized. But one of the the best things is having a good SEO strategy. Something you follow each time so that you know your posts will always be good for google, and you don’t have to think about it.
You can read tons of posts on this and you can even read more about in my blog post specifically on how to drive traffic to your blog. But if you just want simple, I recommend installing the Yoast SEO plug-in on your wordpress. It’s what I use and makes it so simple for me to have good SEO.
This plug-in looks at your post before you submit and tells you what to change so that it will be SEO optimized. It will tell you things like “add more relevant keywords” or whatever else. And then when you change them, it will update to show if your post is SEO optimized now. That’s the easiest way to make sure you have good SEO. But like I said, there’s a whole lot more you can read about it as well.
Bottom line, you just wanna make sure you have good SEO so that google and other search engines can actually find your blog. You could write the best post on any topic ever. But if no one can find your blog in google search results, what good is it? SEO is how you make sure people find your blog in google.
Step 14: Use social media (Pinterest!)
So, once you get the SEO thing down, the next important thing you can do to get traffic to your blog is using social media! Most of us probably already use social media. Maybe facebook to catch up with friends. Twitter to rant about your thoughts. Pinterest to get new ideas for stuff. Social media is such a powerful tool.
But using social media to drive traffic to your blog will take it to the next level. And I don’t mean using your personal accounts to say “hey guys, please come to my blog” (which you can totally try as well). But I recommend setting up a separate business account with your blog name that is ONLY focused on your blog. Then you make posts about your blog with that account and hopefully as you get followers, they will check out your blog as well after seeing your post.
But there’s so many different kinds of social media right? So how do you know which one is worth the effort. That’s easy. Pinterest. For me, Pinterest is the number one social media app I use to bring traffic to my blog. (No, Pinterest is not just that app you use to find recipes).
Pinterest is so powerful if you use it correctly and for a lot of bloggers, this can be their #1 traffic source. Thats why it so important to develop a good Pinterest strategy so you can start making use of this amazing platform.
I can tell you first hand that when I first started my blog, literally 90% of my traffic was coming just from Pinterest pins. People seeing my pins that advertised my blog posts and them deciding to click on them and come to my blog.
I should’ve mentioned before that it takes time for SEO to work. It doesn’t happen overnight. It can take several months before you start seeing organic traffic just from google search results. In the mean time, if you want people to see your blog, you have to get people to come from social media.
If you wanna learn how to create a good Pinterest strategy that brings traffic to your blog, check out my post on how to drive traffic to your blog. I cover it more in depth there. But also, I would check out different blogging courses on Pinterest. I took one and thats how I learned everything I need to know about getting traffic with Pinterest. There’s no shame in looking to people who’ve done it to find out what works best!
Step 15: Get quality backlinks
Another thing that helps with getting traffic to your blog is having high quality backlinks. What are backlinks? Well they’re basically when a different site that’s already reputable links to your site. Then google sees that that reputable linked to your new site and automatically that your site must be good.
If you get enough of these backlinks from other reputable sites, you will start to see your ranking in google search results go up. Also your domain authority (which is how trustworthy google thinks your site is) will improve as well.
Now, this isn’t something you have to focus on right away. I would recommend first focusing on SEO and your pinterest strategy. Especially when you’re just starting out. But as you start to grow your blog and get more traffic, you wanna also start trying to get good quality backlinks.
How do you do this? Well, you have several options. You can reach out to these reputable website yourself and offer to write them a guest post (where you can then link to your blog on there). Or you can wait for it to happen naturally as those sites see you have a lot of value to provide and start linking to your blog on their own. OR you can even use different social media sites with different domains to try and “fake” backlinks.
But whatever you do, it will take time to do this. Building quality backlinks does not happen overnight. But if you want long term success on your blog (and you want google to take you more seriously), this is def something you wanna start thinking about.
Step 16: Get google analytics
This one isn’t essential but how will you know if your strategies to get traffic are working if you can’t see what your current traffic is lol? Thats where Google Analytics comes in. It’s basically a super cool site from Google where you can see exactly what your website stats are.
Google Analytics will show you things like your number of pageviews, the number of sessions you’re getting, how long people stay on your site, and where your traffic is coming from. There’s literally so much stuff on there I can’t list it all.
Oh and its totally free lol. All you have to do is go on and link your blog. (Theres a few steps in there that could be confusing tho lol so I recommend following my guide in the post on how to drive traffic to your blog. I walk you through all the confusing stuff so it’s easy to set up.)
How To Improve Your Blog
Step 17: Take good blogging courses
Lastly, if you wanna know how to start a blog that makes money, you will need to constantly learn more. There’s so much that goes on in this blogging game. And you need to invest your knowledge and treat it like a business.
And one of the best ways to get this knowledge and constantly improve your blog is taking good blogging courses. I mentioned earlier that I took a good one that taught me everything I know about my Pinterest strategy. (Of course I learn my own stuff later on through trial and error. But that course really helped me get on the right track and avoid months of unnecessary mistakes.)
There’s SO many good blogging courses out there. So many. Some of them are expensive (like stuff you’d have to save up for) but others barely cost anything. You can even find free ones on youtube that can be just as helpful.
And not just courses. Reading insightful helpful posts like these can help when it comes to improving your blog and making it better for your readers. I read new posts on strategies etc all the time. And its def helped me get to where I am today!
Anyway, one of the most important takeaways I can leave you with is knowing that’s it’s a marathon not a sprint. I wanna stress that. It’s a MARATHON, not a sprint. Even if you don’t get good traffic and start making money overnight, you don’t give up. You keep going. Keep showing up. And keep being consistent.
It’s the people that realize this and blog just because they love it that will succeed. You can make money blogging, you can even turn it into your full time job, but you have to be willing to put the effort in the meantime to get there.
How To Make Money Blogging
Finally, this section is all about how to monetize your blog. Different stuff you can do to make money from your blog once you have it up and running. This part is super important obviously but you need to make sure you have the other stuff down as well or none of this stuff will be possible.
Step 18: Put display ads on your blog
Yep, everyone knows. This is one of the most common ways to make money blogging. Displays are when you see those little ads show up on the bottom of the screen with big blogs or along the sidebar. You might ads for relevant you were searching for or different stuff you might wanna buy.
Putting displays ads on your blogging is one of the basic ways everyone knows about to make money blogging. But not all display ads are made equal. You can have display ads from something basic like Google Adsense (and pretty much anyone can get those) but they don’t pay much. If you’re just starting your blog, it might take you 6 months to even see $5 from Google Adsense display ads.
A much better way to put display ads on your blog is getting them from a premium ad network. I’m talking platforms like Mediavine or Adthrive. These are big ad agencies that when you put their ads on your blog, they will pay you BIG money.
Now, not everyone can qualify for those right away though. So thats the catch. You have to have at least 50,000 sessions to your blog a month now to qualify for those big agencies. I know.. a lot.
But you don’t have to focus on having ads right away. You can build up to that, producing good content, and then join a good ad agency for display ads like that once you reach their metrics.
Another thing I just wanna mention about display ads is that you should be careful that you don’t have too many that it ruins the blog experience and drives people AWAY from your blog. I’ve seen some blog where they just have too many ads EVERYWHERE!
Sure they might make some nice money from the people who do visit but you can guarantee with all those ads, those people will NOT be coming back. You wanna strike a nice balance between having tasteful ads that don’t ruin people’s experience on your blog but also give you a chance to make some money.
Step 19: Affiliate Marketing
This is such an important step and something a lot of people miss out on. There are people I know where the NUMBER one source of their blog income is from affiliate marketing. So you def want to pay attention to this.
Affiliate marketing is basically where you put affiliate links on your blog to products people might wanna buy and then you make a small commission from the company if they purchase the product with your link.
This could be stuff like clothes you recommend (if you have a fashion blog). Travel gear you recommend (if you have a travel blog). Just something related to blog niche that you think your readers would wanna buy. Then get an affiliate link from that company that makes the product and boom, you can make a sweet commissions every time someone buys from your link.
You might’ve seen a bunch of youtubers doing this. Where they tell you about a product that sponsored the video and then tell you to use their “code” to buy it. That’s affiliate marketing too. They make money if you use their link to get the product or use their code at checkout to buy it.
And the more expensive item is, the more money you can potentially make from it in commission. However you don’t wanna get carried away. You wanna recommend products that are actually good and stuff people can actually have use for. Preferably stuff you use yourself.
You want people to trust what you have to say. And it’s not worth losing your trust with your readers just to promote a crappy product for a few bucks. You could missing out on hundreds down the road cause now your readers don’t trust you anymore and won’t come back.
Step 20: Market your own products
The next thing you can do to make money blogging is to think about coming out with your own custom products you think your readers would be interesting in buying. It’s one thing to use affiliate links to promote OTHER people’s products. But it’s a whole other level to promote your own products and get the full income from that.
And these products can be all sorts of things. Printables that people pay for to help them organize their lives better. Ebooks to help them learn a particular concept from your perspective. Physical products that you sell to them through your email list that they’d want have. Lots of different options.
Bottom line, you just wanna market stuff that you think they’d wanna have. Obviously, thee’s no guarantee you’ll have success in sales. But as you get more traffic to your blog and loyal readers on your email list, branching out into this side of blogging is def worth your time. There are people doing this that make thousands of dollars a month just from sales of one product on their blog!
Step 21: Make your own courses
And finally, I couldn’t not talk about this as a way to make money blogging because the potential is just too good. Making your own courses to teach people stuff can be one of the most profitable ways to make money blogging.
Even if you don’t have display ads, even if you have no affiliate links, even if you don’t have any other products.. having your own course can bring in TONS of income with your blog.
Of course, you can’t really do this until you have an audience that trusts you and knows you know what you’re talking about when it comes to the topic you’re offering a course for. But once you do reach that point, you can def your experience into a profitable business offering people courses to help them learn something you know how to do.
Frequently Asked Questions
Should I get self hosting for my blog?
Yes! You absolutely should get self hosting for your blog. Having your blog be self-hosted is absolutely essential if you want a successful blog that makes money.
Like I said earlier, my top choice when it comes to self hosting is doing it with Bluehost. It’s the hosting provider that I use and its perfect for beginners! They make it so easy and provide you with 24/7 customer service for whenever you have an issue.
Having your blog be self hosted is an absolute must if you wanna make money blogging cause you need full control over your blog. Bluehost is 100% the number one host you’ll hear bloggers talk about cause it’s the best for when you’re just starting out.
So if you can’t tell, I highly HIGHLY recommend Bluehost lol.
Oh and its super affordable. They have plans where you can pay for 3 MONTHS of hosting for just 30 dollars. That 30 dollars may sound like a lot now but it’s pennies compared to what you could be making in the future by having your blog be self-hosted. Or you can just do their annual plan and only have to pay 2.95 a month!
Either way, you can’t go wrong with Bluehost to self host your blog!
Do I need a premium theme for my blog?
No, you don’t HAVE to have a premium theme for your blog. But I would totally recommend it if you want it to look pretty and professional. A lot of time when it comes to the internet, it’s all about first impressions, right?
If someone brand new comes to your blog from google and sees a crusty theme that makes it look amateur, they’re way less likely to spend time on it and probably won’t subscribe to your email list.
However, if they see you have a pretty, professional theme that looks nice and organized, they will probably just enjoy spending more time on your blog. And subconsciously, they will think it feels more legit.
That’s why I def recommend getting a premium theme for your blog (so people will take you more seriously), but no it’s not absolutely necessary.
How Long Should Your Blog Posts Be?
Well, the length of your blog posts kinda depends on your niche and what you’re writing about. But generally speaking, you wanna make sure your blog posts are long-form. The longer they are, the more helpful they are, and the longer people will spend on your blog.
If your blog posts are too short, people may think it doesn’t have enough information and they won’t visit often. Google will see this too cause your bounce rate will be high. Bounce rate is the measure of how fast people leave your blog after clicking onto it.
So overall, you wanna make sure your blog posts are long enough to be as helpful as possible. If you want your posts to rank well in google, you need to be one of the valuable search results people could click on. That means lots of content.
Personally, I like to write posts with AT LEAST 2,000 words. But most of my posts are easily over 4,000 and as I write more, the average could move towards 10,000 words a most. I know.. sounds like a lot. But really your goal should to be to provide as much as value as possible so you wanna be thorough.
And it won’t take you forever trust me. If you have a good content schedule (which we talked about earlier), you should be way ahead in your blogging schedule, which will give you more time to write longer more detail blog posts.
Of course, if your blog is about current events and news, people don’t wanna spend a bunch of time reading a long post. They just want the information quick and fast. Thats why I said it depends on your niche.
How long does SEO take to work?
So, this really can vary and it all depends on how much effort you put in to your SEO strategy? Are you constantly trying to learn more about SEO and crafting your posts around it? Did you install the Yoast SEO plug-in like I suggested to make it easy for you to see what to tweak on your posts to make them SEO friendly? It really just all depends on how much effort you put into it.
Assuming you ARE doing all the stuff, generally you should start to see results within 4-6 months. And sometimes, they even say 6-12 months. That depends a lot on your niche. Blog niches with more competition will take longer for you to breakthrough and rank in google.
It’s just super important that you come up with a good SEO strategy early on and stick with it. It will help you get results the fastest. And like I said, don’t fret. It’s a MARATHON, not a sprint. As long as you keep doing what you’re supposed to, you will see that SEO start to work. Most times 4-6 months.
If you wanna learn more about this, again check out my post on how to drive traffic to your blog. I go way more in depth in that post on SEO strategy and how long it takes, etc.
How long does it take to make money blogging?
And this is the big question that everyone wants to know haha. Last but not least. Of course this will depend again on how much effort you put in. You can’t expect this to happen overnight. And you can’t expect this to happen but not giving your blog your 100% effort.
You have to treat your blog like a business and that starts with learning who your audience is and how to make posts that appeal to them. You need to know how to reach them. What things they link, what they would be willing to buy. All of that is important.
And then from there, you need to think about different monetization strategies you can implement to make money blogging. Display ads, affiliate marketing, custom products, courses, etc.
Like I said earlier, it’s not gonna happen overnight. But if you stick with it and really put effort into all the strategies we went through, you can DEF make money blogging!
If you want an exact timeframe, typically it can take 12-24 months to make some decent side income from your blog. Then 2-3 years to make enough to replace your job and have it be your full time income!
Of course’s there’s no exact date on this. It really depends on you and how much you put into your blog. There are some people that make a full time income from their blog in the first year, some in a few months, others in 5 years or longer. There is no set timeframe. You should just focus on putting out the best content you possibly can and the financial success will follow!
How do I start a blog?
Again, I tried to make this super simple for you by laying out everything in this post. But basically if you wanna start a blog, you need to first come up with your niche. Your niche is basically what your blog is about, your main topic.
Then you need to come up your domain name. Your domain name is the actual website title. Like “blah-blah-blah.com”. It’s the website address that people type in to go to your website.
Once you come up with both of those you’re ready to move on to the next step which is installing wordpress. I talked about it a bunch of times but it’s so important. If you wanna make money blogging, then you need to get the self-hosted version of wordpress.
That means wordpress.org, NOT wordpress.com. WordPress.com is for casual blogs that don’t care about making a lot of money. If that’s you, go ahead. But chances are you probably would like to make money with your blog. And in that case, you want to make sure you instal the self-hosted version of wordpress.
After installing wordpress, THEN you need to choose your website host. I already told y’all what I think is the best one for new bloggers but you can choose any one you want. I recommend Bluehost because they have 24/7 customer support and they’re absolutely perfect for new bloggers.
They make everything super easy for you. You can purchase your domain name from them, get website protection, and they’re always there whenever you need them. And it’s only $2.99 a month with the annual plan! Super affordable.
Okay and now once you’ve purchased your domain name and set up your hosting through Bluehost, then you need to focus on your actual blog. Yep, that means picking out the design and theme of your blog.
You can pick out a free theme but if you want readers to trust you more, it’s recommended you go with a professional premium theme. Don’t worry though, these don’t have to cost a lot of money. There are super affordable ones out there. I got mine for less than $100.
Again, this isn’t 100% necessary that you get a paid theme. You can def get by with a free theme but readers, like everyone, def judge a blog on first impressions. And do you think they’re more likely to take your blog seriously with a professional paid theme or just a simple basic free theme that a million other blogs use? You decide.
Anyway, once you get all that stuff taken care of, it’s time to start working on your actual blog posts. You need to decide what your writing voice will be. What you’re going to sound like. Are you gonna sound more professional? More casual? You need to decide so you can pick a tone.
You need to make sure your style sounds interesting enough that readers care to read and continue reading your blog. It should fit your niche. Don’t sound super casual if you run a science blog where readers expect you to sound professional. And vise versa.
Then once you’ve done this, you should come up with a topic list. (Or maybe even before). Come up with a topic list of post ideas. Basically just a list of all the posts you’re going to do (maybe scheduled out for like the first month to start). This will make it so you’re not scrambling to come up with a new post idea right when it’s time to produce new content. You have an easy list to refer to.
Then once you’ve come up with that topic list, it’s time for the main deal. You need to start writing content. Yeah, this is easier said than done. But trust me, it’s not that hard. Def look further up on this post where I have a whole section that goes over content writing.
Of course, there’s more to it than just writing the post. You want to make sure you’re implementing good SEO throughout so that once you hit publish, search engines are actually able to find your content (and think it’s valuable enough to show readers).
But basically you need to write with your reader in mind. Focus your post on them and helping them, not yourself. When you’re just starting out, people care very little about you and more about whatever it is they’re searching for. Cater to that.
I suggest writing a few of these posts in advance before you actually launch your blog. That way you already have content ready and waiting for your readers, and new people don’t stumble onto your blog only to see one post.
Once you’ve gotten those posts taken care and you’ve actually launched your blog, it’s time to focus on getting traffic. You can get traffic multiple different ways but the best is to focus on an SEO strategy for long-term traffic, and a social media strategy for initial traffic.
For SEO, I recommend installing a good wordpress plug-in like Yoast SEO. Yoast SEO is great cause they’re literally tell you after you finish writing a blog post if it has good SEO or not. And they will tell you what to change to make it optimized.
SEO is important cause again this is how you tell google your site is valuable to readers so they show it to them. If you don’t have good SEO on your posts, no one will see them.
For your social media strategy, which is good for initial traffic to your blog, I recommend coming up with a good Pinterest strategy. There are many good courses on this and I actually learned mine from taking a course.
But coming up with a good pinterest strategy and sticking with it can do so much for your blog. For a lot of bloggers, Pinterest is the #1 traffic source. So it’s important to know how it works and how to use it effectively for your blog.
Finally, just stay consistent. If you want your blog to be successful, readers need to know they can come to it and expect good fresh content. So important. If you say you’re going to post 2 times a week, stick with that. If you say you’re gonna post 1 time a week, stick with that. Just BE CONSISTENT.