Track and analyze your blog‘s success. Choose your blog topic and purpose. Decide who writes and manages your blog. Determine how often you’ll share blog posts. Don’t let this whole thing get the better of you.
You don’t have to reinvent blogging to be successful. The last step is monetizing your blog. Step two is to create content for (or rather about) these keywords. Note that Bluehost only offers options that allow you to pay 1, 2, 3, or 5 years in advance.
They don’t offer a monthly payment option (as most hosting companies that offer monthly payments tend to charge a bit more). Regardless of which plan you choose, the price is still a good deal to start your own blog and get it online today. Personally, I recommend choosing the 36-month “Prime” price if you want to set the lowest possible price for your new hosting plan.. And it secures your blog hosting for the lowest price (and gives you domain privacy) for the next 3 years.
And since these low prices for new customers are only for the first payment you make, your prices may go up after that first year if you opt for the 1-year plan. The sum you see now is the amount you’ll pay today. But remember that depending on the package you choose, you won’t have to pay again for 1, 2, 3, or 5 years. There’s also a 30-day money-back guarantee in case something doesn’t go as planned with your blog.
I recommend Kadence WP, Elementor for WordPress, or Astra (all 100% free blog themes, they’re lightning fast and also have the option to upgrade to their premium theme versions later at affordable prices). Take the blog niche you’re thinking about and come up with 5-10 keyword phrases or blog topics within that niche that you would write about. So if we wanted to start a blog about playing the guitar, you could choose keywords like “The best guitar books,” “playing the guitar,” “guitar chords for beginners,” which guitar should I buy, and so on.. Do this for each of your keywords and see the results.
If all of your top keywords have a monthly search volume of 5,000 — 10,000, you definitely have a potentially profitable niche. At this point, I usually have a fully featured content calendar. Need even more content inspiration? Here are more than 201 ideas for award-winning blog posts. Next, make sure your font size is big enough (you should use 16 points or more for your blog).
You should also be careful with line length. Most designers state that the ideal length of a sentence on your blog is 50-85 characters, as this helps get readers to read the post. See my guides on how to change the font size and color on your blog for a more detailed tutorial on how to optimize your visual typography settings. Then have a look at my tutorial, how long should a blog post be? for more.
Studies show that blog posts with images get 94% more views than posts without images. And when it comes to posts shared on social media, tweets with photos get 150% more retweets than those without photos, while Facebook posts with images get 2.3 times more engagement. Adding a few visual elements can almost double the number of views and increase the number of shares a blog post receives. One of my biggest breaks was my first guest post, which was published on the blog of the social media planning app Buffer.
Not only did I reach out to their audience of over 1 million readers, but I also connected with a brand that people in my niche look up to. For example, if you’re starting a blog about photography, you could consider joining Facebook groups like Nikon Digital Camera %26 Photo Enthusiasts (over 26,000 members), Nikon D750 Users (27,000+ members), and Nikon UK Photography (over 13,000+ members). Start building your email list with your blog from day one. It can be surprisingly easy. Place a subscription form in your posts and on important pages on your website.
I use a tool I love called ConvertKit to manage the over 150,000 email subscribers I now have on my blog, but Mailchimp is the best free email marketing tool to get you started. Since I started a blog here 10 years ago, affiliate income has gradually become the biggest source of income for my company. I’ve structured my blog to generate affiliate income because it’s so passive once you’ve done the (hard) work of finding a sustainable traffic source for your content.. I can only recommend doing affiliate marketing in your blogging niche carefully. As you’ll see, my first year of blogging saw a total of only around 9,000 readers, but in my second year, you’ll notice that traffic increases dramatically as I start to figure out who my audience is and which traffic strategies work best for me.
At that point, when my reading base had grown to around 10,000 monthly readers (on average), it became a viable option to start creating sponsored content. All in all, traditional CPC or CPM advertising only becomes very profitable (at least as a viable source of significant blog income) when you reach more than 1 million readers per month. So it’s not a good monetization channel to focus on in the short term if you’re just hosting a few ads on your blog sidebar. However, if you start a blog, it can be one of the easiest ways to earn money from your traffic without much extra effort. Just make sure you set the right expectations for now. If you can create a blog and build a relationship quickly with just 10 initial readers, then work with them to find a challenge that you want to develop a physical or digital product for.
Next, focus on solving this problem yourself repeatedly, and then develop an action plan on how you can personally help these 10 people solve this problem even in their own unique situations. Next, ask these 10 readers to “pre-order the product from you” and create a personalized coaching program with them that you’ll use to make sure your product has all the necessary features to successfully solve their challenge. At the end of this validation process, you’ll get a solution based on really helping your readers. You can make money blogging in just a month if you talk about the first time you earn anything from your blog.
But when you’re talking about reaching higher income levels (or repeatable revenue streams), it can take a lot of time to make money blogging. Finding a niche can be difficult or feel limiting, but it helps you build stronger credibility over the long term. You can certainly talk about more than one topic, but make sure your primary focus is consistent and specific enough to attract readers and encourage them to keep reading your work. However, if you generate income from your blog, it is considered self-employed income under IRS guidelines.
This attraction to being “liked” can lead you to try to make your blog attractive to as many different people as possible. Yes, you’ll talk about who you are, but your About page should be just as much about your readers and the value you create for them. I send my community an update whenever I post a new blog post, have a resource I want to share, or when new podcast episodes go live. This ensures that my content is quickly seen by thousands of people right from the start.. Of course, while you’re learning how to create a blog, you’ll still need to write blog posts and run your business (unless you hire them), but your workload can be significantly reduced.
WordPress is the most popular CMS in the world. Millions of bloggers use it every day (including me). Once you save this post as a draft, WordPress creates a permalink based on the keywords used in your title. Every single one of your posts — and especially if you’re starting a blog for the first time — should have a CTA.. All you really need to get a freelance client is a strong enough pitch. This is where the decision to start a blog (first) helps significantly.
However, with platforms like Shopify, this has become increasingly easier and can be a great way to monetize an audience of readers on your blog, especially with the rise of dropshipping and order processing services. While it’s realistic to get paid using various monetization methods that you can implement within a few months of consistent work, the reality is that most bloggers never make a life-changing income from their blogs.. It doesn’t hurt to talk a bit more about yourself and sell to them why you’re the blog they should be following. To do this, I’ll use a simple spreadsheet I call the Niche Market Demand Checker (you can get a free copy of this in my course here), which you can use to make sure you’re creating content that’s useful to your target audience.
After that, all you need to do is create content that uses custom links provided by your affiliate program. Try out my free AI-powered keyword tool to get dozens of research-backed keyword ideas. %26 topics you can write about on your blog today.