Have you ever thought about starting a blog to make money online? Have you ever wondered how to start and grow a blog so you can make money online or get passive income? You’re not the only one. Even though millions of people try to blog, only a small number grow to make a good living with it.
Meanwhile, starting a blog is easy. It is to get traffic and blog to make money online that is hard. You will waste time if you only want to start a blog to make money online and don’t like writing. Blogging is not a simple, formulaic thing to do. It will be hard to deal with frustration and anger if you don’t love it. You need passion to succeed as a blogger.
How much do online bloggers make
The work put into a blog mostly determines how much is made. Why? Even though it’s easy to start a blog, it can be hard to monetize a blog. To build an audience and reach saturation with your writing, you must be very focused and consistent. It takes time, and you will have to work late into the night and “burn the midnight oil” to get it done.
Let me explain. If you blog on a site that gets hundreds of thousands of visitors every month, like medium.com, you will make money blogging. So, you can enjoy the results of your hard work. But you won’t enjoy the freedom and passive income that your blog can give you. Any blog can get stuck if it doesn’t have enough content to keep readers interested.
Related: 6 Effective Ways to Earn Money in 2024
How to blog to make money online
How do you start a successful blog and make money online? It all depends on how you think about success and how you think about making money online. You can make a lot of money if you want to be an affiliate blogger. Like many others, you can make money blogging via guest posting. The monetization list is endless.
Similarly, you can blog to make money online if you are willing to work hard and put in the time (yes, years). Your blog could be a great way to make money without doing anything. If you stick with it for a long time, you can make a good living online (yes, years). You can live your dreams and travel the world as a full time blogger.
A step-by-step guide to starting a blog
Meanwhile, I hope my factual tips about starting a blog is not harsh? I hope it doesn’t stop you from starting the next Mashable, TechCrunch, or another blog that you think will be a huge success. Here are the steps to follow. If you plan and get ready well, you have a better chance of success.
1. Pick a subject
Choose what you want to write about. You can choose a topic or niche and build your entire content strategy around it. This will help you focus your writing and make digital products or services that go well with your content.
Moreover, it will allow you to get customers by attracting them with interesting posts and then luring them with a lead magnet before putting them in your sales funnel (more details soon).
2. Choose a platform to use
WordPress is the most popular blogging platform, but Blogger, Wix, Square, or Medium can also be used. But if you want to blog seriously, you should use a self-hosted WordPress installation on a custom domain.
For starters, you could set up a blog at WordPress.com with a subdomain like myblog.wordpress.com, but you’ll get more traffic with a self-hosted solution and be able to use subdomains on popular platforms for content marketing.
3. Choose a website name
If you want to make money from your blog, you need a custom domain name. Instead of using third-party subdomains, find a short domain name that describes and suits your niche, industry, or topic and is full of keywords. Domain name providers like BlueHost, HostGator, Namecheap, and Godaddy Hosting can help you get your domain.
These tips can help you avoid problems with SEO when choosing a domain name.
- Use a top-level domain, such as.com or.net.
- Don’t use more than 15 characters in your domain name.
- Don’t buy domain names with hyphens in them. They are often linked to spammers.
- Don’t rank and organize posts with self-hosted domains.
Related: 24 Ways to Make Money from Home
4. Find a web hosting service you can trust.
There are many hosting companies you can trust. There are many different ways to host WordPress blogs. It is important to do your homework and choose the best option. If you do not have any money to start, you should start with Managed WordPress and move up from there.
However, when you can afford a domain name and hosting, get one for your blog. You will almost certainly need dedicated hosting with a CDN when you get a few thousand visitors per day. I use Namecheap hosting plan for some of my blogs. You need one to effectively blog to make money online.
5. Networks for storing and sending content (CDNs)
You can speed up the delivery of your website by using a W3 Total Cache or WP Super Cache plugins. This might not seem important at first. When you get thousands of visitors a day, this will become more and more important. You can test how well it works before and after installation with Google’s PageSpeed Insights.
Meanwhile, a CDN is also a key part of speeding up your content delivery worldwide. Your page might load quickly in the U.S. But what happens if someone tries to load it from Australia? CDNs can copy data to multiple repositories worldwide, making it possible to deliver content quickly.
Besides, this is important for the user experience. Internet surfers who have to wait more than a few seconds for a page to load will give up and move on to the next website in the search results. W3 Total Cache works with Amazon’s AWS, MaxCDN, and other CDNs.
Related: 8 Simple Skills to Earn Passive Income in 2024
6. Enable permalinks
WordPress lets you set up permalinks before you start. This will get you nice URLs that are good for SEO. You can find permalinks in Settings > Permalinks. Pick the option with the title. And where you are not sure of what to do, seek help. Contact me if you want my guide.
7. Get to connect your blog to Google Publish.
Google’s Accelerated Mobile Pages Project (AMP) aims to make more of its content easier to access on mobile devices. However, Google publishing is here now. You can configure your blog in line with Google Search Console and get your content instantly indexed.
Alternatively, you need a Jetpack or RankMath plugin to regularly index your content. Here, you can find more information about these plugins online.
8. Get Google Analytics set up.
Google Analytics lets you keep track of all the work you do on your blog. This is a great way to track your progress when using the URL builder and posting links on social media.
9. Get Google Webmaster Tools.
If you are serious about making a website and making money from it, you should use Google’s Webmaster Tools to determine which keywords your site ranks for and what messages might affect your ability to rank.
Similarly, submit your blog’s XML sitemap and track the number of times a keyword is shown and how many times it is clicked. This tool is great for continually analyzing how to improve your blog or website.
10. Learn SEO in the Best Way
You shouldn’t start a blog just to optimize it for search engines alone. But you should know what search engine optimization is and how it works. Pay attention to key factors affecting your blog’s rank on Google and other search engines.
Start by looking at Google’s Console. Then, think about what you’ve learned before you use it. SEO can be hard to learn and take a lot of time. Always try to learn and get better at things.
11. Make content that is helpful regularly.
If you want your blog to be successful, you need to create useful anchor content. It should be clear, focused on keywords, interesting, and written well. Search engines are not your content’s audience. Instead, write for people while keeping search engines and their needs in mind. With time and practice, you can get better at it. You should also make changes to your content once a week.
Related: How to Develop a Winning Mindset
12. Sign up for an email marketing platform and create an account.
Email marketing is the best way to make money off of your blog. This is definitely the best way to blog and make money online. You need to sign up for an email marketing platform like Aweber, ConvertKit, MailChimp, or Constant Contact.
13. Build a Lead Magnet
Don’t run ads on your blog if you are serious about online marketing. Ads won’t make you any real money unless you have hundreds of thousands of visitors per day. Do not depend completely on affiliate marketing. Instead, make a lead magnet that promotes a digital product you made in the back-end. To get this lead magnet, people will want to join your mailing list and give you their email addresses.
14. Make an electronic product and sell it.
Email marketing and lead magnets help you set up an automated sales funnel. But to do this, you’ll need a digital product or service on the back end. You can make a lot of different offers and products that lead to high-priced sales.
Consequently, promoting digital products on your blog to make money online is one of the most effective monetization models. It can be your products: online course, books, podcast, vacation trip, digital services, etc.
Related: Never Stop Trying to Achieve Success
15. Create a sales funnel.
You should be serious about your automated sales funnel. It can be hard to understand how a sales funnel works, but the profit can be overwhelming. The basic idea is that people will find your site and then enter your sales funnel through a lead magnet or other tripwire.
Over time, you’ll be lead them down a path that will make it easy for you to sell your products and/or services without doing anything. Email marketing automation will do all the lifting, while you earn consistently for a long time.
16. Get involved with other people.
Building a blog is not an easy task. Social media can point you in the right direction. You can connect with other bloggers interested in Internet marketing. You also have to share and interact with other people on social media sites like Pinterest, TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, and others.
17. Promoting content
Content marketing is the best way to build a blog and make it easier for search engines like Google to find you. It’s also how I like to improve my search engine rankings the most.
Marketing your content is a complicated process requiring you to spend long, seemingly endless hours making more useful content that links to your main anchor content.
However, it is well worth it. If you use this strategy right, it can help you get to the top of Google searches for almost any keyword. It’s not easy to do this. There are many technical details, but there is also an art. When marketing your content, don’t use keywords too much. Do not look spammy.
Blog to make money online with content marketing
Content can be marketed with articles on Medium.com and Scribd.com. You can also do this by giving answers to questions on Reddit and Quora. Videos on YouTube and Vimeo can be used, among many other things. Every piece of content has to be useful. Don’t try to get the most out of your money by doing as little work as possible. If you want to succeed, you need to do the exact opposite.
18. Use your content to make money.
It can cost money to start a blog and keep it going. You won’t get rich in an instant. You can make sure your content brings in money. Maintain your content and use lead magnets to get people into your sales funnel. This will let you sell expensive items in the long run.
Blog to make money online with digital products
You can also make small money by writing articles that lead people to your audiobooks or courses. Or by writing about your video tutorials on YouTube, that can lead to the sale of a digital product or package that helps people learn what you’re really good at. You need digital marketing skills too.
There are many ways to blog to make money online, but you shouldn’t take shortcuts. Don’t try to make money quickly if you want to succeed in the long run. If you want to succeed and reach your goals, you need to act and keep going. Learn creative to make money online.