So you want to make a living writing? Writing a book can be time and resource-consuming so you may want to have an easier start – blogging. But how to make money with a blog? Here’s a small blog post(!) that will show you the steps you have to follow to make money with a blog.
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Find your niche
Where you want to get started is picking your niche first. Do some niche research and look for something that you’re somewhat interested in. When you’re choosing a niche you always want to try and choose something that you want to learn about. It can also be a niche you’re already interested in an have some experience with or you’re very very passionate about. It’s important because later on, when you’re creating content for your site, it becomes easier to write content for something you know or care about. Also, you’re going to be able to connect with your audience better.
Once you’ve got your niche, you also want to make sure that your selection has chances of being profitable. Therefore, you want to make sure there are products in that niche.
When you’re writing your content you want to target questions that answer certain pains and struggles; you want to tap into people’s desires so you want to make sure there’s plenty of that available in your niche. A good way to do that is to take a look at the trends through Google Trends. YouTube is another great source. Are there reviews and unboxing videos? Do people talk about the products? If there are people talking about the products, there’s a good chance a lot of people are buying it. Especially if these videos or the products have good ratings and lots of views, you can tell that there’s a big market and demand in that niche.
Keyword research
After deciding what your niche is going to be, next comes the keyword research. For a start, see what type of search volume there is. Find out how difficult your niche is going to be for those keywords. Furthermore, you have to investigate buyer intent type keywords.
What you should also keep in mind is things like reviews, testimonials, coupons, and discounts. Those kinds of keywords can reveal what type of search volume they get. Pick a couple of keywords for a start.
Domain name & hosting
Now it’s a good time to see how your blog will be called and get yourself a domain name and a hosting service. When choosing a domain name, try to include a keyword in the domain name as part of the keyword. For example, if your blog is about forex trading, then a good blog name good be ‘’Golden Forex” or “Time to Trade.”
Once you’ve got your domain name you are going to need to host your blog somewhere. There are many websites hosting providers to choose from, at an affordable price. The prices are usually cheap. They range from $1 to $5 a month. In case you want to know, these are the most popular host providers in the world:
- Bluehost
- HostGator Cloud
- Hostinger
- GoDaddy
- SiteGround
Building your website
Now it’s the fun, albeit tricky, part. In this very stage, you may get overwhelmed and start over-complicating things when you shouldn’t. Web design, widgets, footer descriptions – this is not a good time to add all these bells and whistles to your site.
During this stage, your motto should be “Nothing but the basics”. The most important thing that you can do for your website when getting started is to start adding content to it. Start writing content that people are searching for. Answer their questions and help them as much as possible. Link to other pages within your site that have buyer intent type keywords or link out to products that are going to help them.
Your purpose is to bring as much organic traffic as possible. Organic traffic means traffic from Google. Google, for the most part, cares about valuable content and user’s experience – not whether your logo is going to be blue or teal.
To offer a good experience, you only need clean web design, a nice theme, and fast loading. Installing WordPress and choosing a theme and plugins from there are highly recommended.
Blog structure
Now that you’ve got the WordPress setup, a nice theme and some basic plugins installed, it’s time to examine the structure of your blog and content. You want to make sure you’ve got a few categories to write about. Choose about three or four categories. Later on as you progress you can add more categories. These categories can target different topics, but always within the niche. Once more, keyword research can reveal possible categories you can expand upon.
Writing a post
It’s now time to focus on your blog per se and start writing really good content. When it comes to writing a post should range between 1,000 – 3,000 words. Your flagship content can have as much as 5,000 – 6,000 words.
Naturally, all these words need some basic structure. They have to offer a good reading experience. Start practising these points and you’ll get the hang of it in no time:
- Use headings and subheadings (H2, H3, H4)
- Break your text up into small paragraphs
- Bullets and columns always help
- Use bold to emphasize your points
Blog promotion
Next, comes promotion. Promotion is all about spreading the word about your blog.
According to Alexa’s blog promotion tips, the best tactics to promote your blog are as follows:
- Target popular search terms and phrases
- Use on-page SEO
- Leverage search engine marketing
- Implement a strong social media plan
- Promote content through paid social media ads
- Tap into the power of influencers
- Actively guest post
- Set up a consistent email marketing plan
Blog monetization
Now it’s time for the million-dollar question: how do you monetize your blog? You can’t really make money with your blog if you can’t find a way to monetize it.
Everything that you read above is a necessary condition to make money with a blog. However, how do you actually make money off of it? These are the 7 most popular ways to do so and each one has its own procedure that you should investigate separately:
- Affiliate marketing
- Advertisements
- Google Adsense
- Sell
- ebooks
- Courses
- Digital products
- Coaching services