Starting a blog can be really easy today.
I’m saying this is because I had gone through all the tough part, which is trial and error and because of that, now I know the easy way to really start a blog and make money from it.
Who should read this guide?
This guide is specifically written for people who want to start their own blog where:
- they have completely nothing to start with.
- they don’t know where to start.
- they don’t possess any technical knowledge on web design or web programming.
- they don’t want to engage any web designer or developer and want to do everything by themselves for the start.
- they want to start a blog and make money from it.
If you fall into any of the categories above, continue to read on.
What you will learn here?
Basically, you will learn how to start a blog completely from scratch and make money from it.
Below are the topics that we are going to go through in detail:
- Selecting your niche
- Selecting your blogging platform
- Choosing your Domain Name and Web Hosting
- Installing WordPress and a theme
- Setting up the blog
- Generating & capturing your blog traffic
- Make money from your blog
Alright, let’s get started.
Selecting your niche
Blogging is a form of tool where you can showcase your expertise in the area or niche that you are really good and passionate at.
There are two-ways for you to find the niche that you want to blog about:
#1. Selecting only the super profitable niche
If you are an expert already in internet marketing, you know that niche like insurance, mortgage, loans and attorney are quite profitable where advertisers in those niche are willing to pay a lot of money.
However if you don’t really have good interest in such topic, it will be difficult for you to generate content for your blog and eventually will just stop blogging about it.
I personally rate this method of finding your niche as a HIGH RISK method and you should not attempt this if you are new to blogging.
Why?
My personal experience tells me that where I used to manage a cloud storage blog and it failed to generate sufficient content and even if I know what topic to write about, I still need hours of research into that topic before writing simply because I am not the expert in that area.
Hence, if you are new to blogging, use the method below to select your niche.
#2. Selecting among the niche that you are interested and good at
First, take a piece of paper and a pen and list down the things that you are either interested or good at.
Once you have the list already, try to list down at least 5-10 headlines that you want to write about.
There should be one niche where you can easily list down the headlines and I strongly suggest that you choose that.
Back to me, my list at that time was only two items which are football and IT Security.
My first personal blog is a IT security blog and one of the reason I started that niche is because I myself work as a security engineer in IT.
Since my full time job is the niche that I am blogging about, I can easily list out the blogging topic by just reflecting what I had doing throughout my full time job.
On the other hand on the football niche, I couldn’t even generate 5 headlines from that niche.
Therefore, I had chosen the IT security to start my first blog and I find this method of selecting a niche is quite effective.
Selecting your blogging platform
Today, you can blog for FREE on blogging platform like Blogspot, Tumblr, WordPress.com and etc.
In fact, these blogging platform existed since long time ago and they are nothing new today.
What’s wrong with them?
#1. Lack of control
When I first started my security blog, I wanted to further enhance my theme.
It was so frustrating at that time when I can’t modify my header and modifying the presentation of my content is another pain in the ass.
My experience tells me that modifying things in these platform is either you can’t do it at all or it takes you the hell of your time to do some simple editing.
#2. It is not easy to migrate
You probably have this mindset of:
Let’s start with free and once we make some money, we go for a better option
I had done that and it was not fun.
At that time, I only have 30 blog post to migrate from Blogspot to WordPress and it is already killing my time even though the self-hosted WordPress provides me a plugin to migrate over from Blogspot to WordPress because:
- Images are not migrated over. They are still hosted on Blogspot and I have to download 30 over images from Blogspot and upload into my self-hosted WordPress and finally link them manually. That took me couple of hours.
- Internal linking still pointing to Blogspot posts. I have to manually review post by post and re-link them manually to my self-hosted WordPress. It took me a couple of hours as well to re-link all my contents.
Which blogging platform to blog instead?
I might had accidentally leaked out the preferred blogging platform which is the self-hosted WordPress where you buy your own web hosting and domain name and install the open source WordPress into it.
The key benefit of having a self-hosted WordPress is you get a total control of your blogging platform up to the source code level (although most people don’t need it).
Apart from that, WordPress has tons of themes for you to choose and this ensures that your blog is not the same as any other blog out there.
You don’t have to rush and download it now because I will show you how you can install WordPress into your web hosting without the hassle of downloading and uploading the blogging platform.
So, read on.
Choosing your Domain Name and Web Hosting
A domain name is important because it represents the name of your blog or business.
You need to choose your domain name carefully because it will affect the rest of the life of your blog.
It should have the criteria below:
- It should not be too long.
- It should be a .com domain name only
- It should be brandable and not stuffed with keywords
You can read the details on how to choose a good domain name here.
Once you know the domain name that you want to use, let’s move on to web hosting.
There are plenty of web hosting out there ranged from super cheap to super expensive.
The web hosting that I would recommend for personal web hosting is the Hostgator Web Hosting where the price of this hosting is as low as $3.96 a month and you get:
- Unlimited disk space
- Unlimited bandwidth
- 1-click script install
- 24×7 support via chat/email
- 45 days money back guarantee
If you are going for other web hosting company, do ensure that they provide more or less the features above.
Installing WordPress and a theme
As been said, WordPress is the blogging platform that you should be using to build your blog.
You don’t have to go into the hassle of downloading and uploading here.
With the 1-click script install from Hostgator, you can install WordPress in just minutes.
I had written a step-by-step guide on how to install WordPress in just minutes (with screenshot) here.
As for the theme, you can choose from the list of free WordPress themes here.
If you want a high quality and professional looking one, try the Genesis Framework of Studiopress themes.
All my blogs run on Studiopress themes and the reason being so is because they don’t limit me with the number of sites that I can install.
On top of that, they also don’t limit with the duration of the license as well.
This means that you can re-use the themes as many times as you want and for as long as you want.
For more information, you can check out my review on this theme here.
Since I’m a big fan of this WordPress theme, I had written a quick guide on how to get started with this theme.
Setting up the blog
Once you had installed WordPress, it is not the end yet.
It is like just install a fresh Windows Operating System into your computer where it is usable but not entirely yet until you have all your software and apps in place.
Same goes to WordPress but the challenge is, what are the things that you need to configure and install further?
Especially when you are new, you totally have no clue what you need to do next.
I’m aware of that because I was once a newbie and this is one of the common problems newbie has with WordPress.
As a result, I compiled a list of things that you need to configure on your WordPress blog and put them into this step by step guide on how to setup your WordPress blog.
In that post, you will learn how to:
- Setup Google Analytics to measure your blog traffic.
- Setup permalinks.
- Create sitemap.
- Secure your blog.
- Protect from spammers.
- Speed up your blog.
- and other basic configurations.
Generating & capturing your blog traffic
Generating traffic through blog commenting
For a new blog, it is difficult to rank well on search engine and get traffic from there.
Hence, the best way for you to get traffic is through referral link and one of the easiest way to build such referral link is to comment on other people’s blog.
Here is how you do it:
- Go to the search engine and search for all the blogs that has the same niche as yours. Submit these list of sites to Feedly and categorize them under one category.
- Check this category as frequent as possible. I usually do it on a daily basis but you can do it more often.
- Once there is a new post, click on it and read the post.
- Drop a comment there on what you think of the post and remember to put your URL into the ‘website’ section of the form.
I had been generating early traffic to my blog through blog commenting all these while and it is quite effective.
You can read the details here.
Generating traffic through social media
Social media takes time as well but definitely not as long as SEO.
What you need in Social Media is to get a lot of followers and you will be able to promote your blog to them.
Therefore, the first achievement you need to do is to gain followers.
Here are the things that get you started with Social Media:
- Pick 1-2 social media platform that your niche is performing well at. If you are really new to this, you can start with just one platform first.
- Start following the people who are in the same niche as you.
- You will be able to get some followers following you back.
- While you are following these people, you should also share things on your Social Media profile. Things that you share should be 80% of other people’s content and 20% your own blog content. This is to ensure that you do not over promote your blog.
- Engage and reply any messages if there is anyone talking about you on that Social Media platform.
Generating traffic through SEO
Getting traffic from search engine takes a lot of time and effort because to get into the first page of Google is tough enough and in order for you to maximize the traffic you could get, it will be best that you rank at least 3rd place from the top.
But the return of this toughness is that you will get a consistent and targeted traffic especially when you target long tail keywords to rank on.
How do you get traffic from SEO?
Here are the things that you can start with:
- Write a good content. It should not be just a great one where anywhere else can be found. You need to write an extremely unique and fantastic content that after people reading it, they want to share out to their readers or they wanted to link to you.
- Ensure your on-page SEO is ready. Follow these 10 tips to prepare yourself.
- Build backlinks. Avoid black hat SEO and grey hat SEO. they will only give you temporary happiness. Only perform white hat SEO and here is one great article that you must read to learn how to build links the white hat way.
Capture your traffic
Web traffic comes into your web page, read the content and leave your site after that.
It is very normal and because of that, you should capture the contacts of those visitors so that you can get them to visit your blog in the future.
How do you do that?
Easy. Just create an email list and start getting email address of your visitors into the list.
You can use tools like GetResponse auto responder to save and send email to the email list.
On top of that, you should also place a lot of opt-in form around the web pages so that you visitors can clearly see that.
By capturing their email address, you can always send them private email and blog update.
This also means that your visitors are no longer your come-and-go visitors.
And Finally, make money from your blog
Once you have a blog with great contents and traffic, it is time to make money then.
There are lots of ways for you to make money today on your blog and I’m going to reveal them on my next post.
Subscribe to my newsletter below so that you don’t miss it.
Conclusion
Now you know that creating a blog is not a difficult task.
Generating traffic can be one hell of a problem but as long as you consistently create valuable contents, traffic will come in together with your marketing and promotion.
As been said, my next post will be on make money from your blog.
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