Digital Marketing

How to Start a Successful Blog that Makes Money: Full Guide

To start a successful blog is not that hard, we will begin by learning how to start one with a full guide on how to make it successful at the same time.

Blogging is said to be an obsession or a passion, starting a blog isn’t that tough as you think, it’s all that is attached to blogging that is a little bit uneasy.

I’ve launched several blogs/sites, created for some people who you might call “client” and even some beginners. One thing I learned about blogging is the act of having a passion for it, that’ll make it blogging.

Things to take seriously while blogging:

Consistency

You must be consistent to start a successful blog or get a glorious blogging life.

Being consistent means you continue creating more entertaining, informative, helpful, and accurate content that your blog visitors would love.

Time

For you to reach your full blogging potential, you must invest your time.

Starting a blog without investing your time is like starting a farm, clearing the bush and then leaving it to grow, would you expect anything from the farm? No!

Blogging needs time, try to take aside some unnecessary things in your day to day activities, and then invest time on your blog.

Research

To have a successful career in blogging you need to research more often to get more insightful, informative, helpful, and evergreen content.

Do your own research by trying some of the things you’d post on your blog.

When you do proper research on your niche you’ll get a proper understanding regarding your niche and content you’re trying to create.

Apart from the knowledge, you’ll get from doing proper research, you also get to know what your blog users really want the solutions to their problem and the contents they want you to post.

Doing your researches will give you a professional title in your field of expertise; you’ll be able to answer all your blog’s visitor’s questions confidently and correctly.

Follow other successful bloggers in your field

To experience more understanding of how things work, you must follow other successful bloggers in your field.

Following them will make you understand some secrets that lead to getting a successful blogging life.

A thing you must understand is that you’re a beginner that you’re trying to learn not the other way round.

Never be intimidated by them as they started as a beginner like you, they started from nothing to something.

They didn’t get their success overnight, they started from somewhere too. Only follow them to learn and get a better understanding of things you don’t know.

Money

Just like every other business, blogging requires money, but only some you don’t have to be super-rich to start blogging.

You can start with the little you have for starter; for you start the full blogging business seriously you need to invest some money.

Requirements & guides on how to start a successful blog

Startup idea

To aim to start up a blog, you must have chosen to use an idea to build up your blog to be a successful one.

Starting a blog without an actual idea will lead you nowhere.

Once you have an idea of how to actualize and make your dream come true, you’ll definitely make it blogging.

Choose your niche (area of expertise)

If you intend to keep your blog running, in the long run, you must choose a niche.

An area you have knowledge about, where you are experienced, so you will always be ready and getting new content ideas.

Once you run out of ideas, there is no hope for the blog to continue.

Start-up fee

Like I said earlier, all business requires little to a high amount of investment to run.

Blogging requires little start-up investment for starters; it depends on your establishment or project.

If you’re creating your blog by yourself then it’ll only cost you hosting and domain fee.

But if you are using a website designing company, then it’s likely for you to expect a slightly higher amount for a start-up.

Strong internet connection

It’s a must to have a strong internet connection for things to run smoothly. Things might get pretty ugly and sluggish if you chose to run your blog using a weak internet connection.

You should understand that it is an online business and you have to provide all it will take for you to be active online.

Blogging device (Mobile or Laptop)

You will enjoy blogging from a laptop than a mobile; there are lots of things that can be done on a laptop that is not accessible for you on mobile.

The screen resolution is another advantage, the bigger the screen the clearer it is to you.

Choosing browsers (Chrome/Firefox)

Chrome is best for you blogging so is Firefox but there are some advantages that come comes with using chrome for blogging.

You’ll have access to many plug-in extensions that’ll help your blogging life greatly, those plugins can help you analyze, work, and monitor your blog and competitors without sweating.

Note: Plug-in extensions are only available for Computers/Laptops not for mobiles, that’s more of an advantage of blogging on computers.

Now let’s get started on how to create your website/ blog

Choose a domain name

A domain name stands as a name, address for your business online, it is where people searching for you, will locate you.

It’s only when you have a domain name when you will have a website for people to see, a domain typically cost you $9.99 per year.

Rules for choosing a domain name

Uniqueness and peculiarity

Make sure your domain name is unique and, it’s exceptional, different from all other websites online.

Business-minded

Make sure your domain name matches your business or niche.

It’ll become so helpful in the future when your site gets its popularity, it also helps your site rank higher based on its niche than other sites.

Short and catchy

Make sure the domain name is shot as possible, do not forget to make it look catchy, so people won’t forget your site easily.

There is a high probability that if people find your site name catchy and short they’ll come back.

Relevant domain extension

You must strive hard to make your domain extension clear and authoritative. I made this mistake once when I started blogging.

Once started using the .info extension only to realize that .info are mostly used by spammers and it rarely ranks on the first page on Google is the most used search engine worldwide.

I had to switch from .info to .com, losing most of my site traffic and starting to rank the .com based site all over again.

So I’d never chosen .info extension ever again, make sure you do your findings to know if you are choosing the right domain extension.

There are good domain extensions such as .com.net.org, and others.

Now let’s move on to how to set up your site

Step 1: Choosing hosting

Hosting for beginners can be regarded as a house you live; we all pay our house rent to remain living in the house.

I have talked about domain name being an example of your house address on the internet while hosting is known to be the house you live in on the internet, it helps store your website files.

Choosing to host is nothing like choosing a house you live in; you are expected to remain using your hosting company continuously not like the physical houses that you can change anytime you want.

Hosting is more delicate because if you keep moving from one host to another, your site might develop lots of issues that will take time for you to recover.

It is quite important for you to start your blog effectively, choosing the right hosting company shows how serious you are and determined you are.

HOSTING REGULAR FEE

Trust me it’s better for you to host your site on a good hosting company.

Hosting typically costs $7.99 per month but currently, it cost only $2.75 per month making it cheaper to start now, it doesn’t matter how you choose to start.

Step 2: Installing WordPress

It depends on the plan you signup for, you should have WordPress automatically installed.

The new version of host makes the WordPress installation process easy for beginners to create their sites without prior tech knowledge.

All you need to do now is to log in to your host account, and then log in to WordPress to begin.

Step 3: Adding themes

To make changes to your blog’s appearance you need to navigate to the Appearance section at the left sidebar.

Kindly note that for your blog visual appearance to change you need to use themes as a controller, themes define how your site will look to your blog visitors.

By default you have a theme that’s not so appealing installed for your blog; you can only change the theme to change the look of your blog entirely.

Making changes by customizing your blog look is exciting; you get to decide how your site appears and is a happy thing to do.

We have thousands of readymade WordPress themes available for installations; we have some of them which are provided for free while some are premium (paid).

To change your site theme proceed by going to your WordPress dashboard and then on to Appearance >> Themes

Move on by clicking the Add New button

The next screen to pop up will give a large search containing more than 7,500 free WordPress themes that are available for you in the large WordPress.org official theme directory.

You are allowed to filter themes by using the latest, featured, popular and other filters (layout, sidebar, category, and others)

To see more about your preferred theme, hover on to it and use the preview button to see the live appearance of the theme.

Theme Activation

It shows how your blog will look after you activate the theme.

You might not get the exact theme lookalike that you saw while previewing but with few customizing, you will be able to correct and adjust it to look as you want.

All you will do is find the customization button, the design, typography (fonts), color, sidebar, and other available elements.

To make your choice of theme wonderful, make sure the theme you are choosing is responsive, fast, easy to navigate, simple, and usable.

Once you see the theme you like, just hover on the theme and the Install button will pop up. Click on it and then wait for it to show installed.

Then after you’ll see Activate button which you will need to click so the theme will be activated.

As soon as you have the theme installed, you will be able to customize it by using the Customize link as it appears under the Appearance menu in the sidebar.

After you have your WordPress theme ready, now it will be great for you to start by publishing your first blog post.

Step 4: creating your first blog post

This is the beginning of the fruitful blogging life, creating your own very post is a good thing.

To get started with the writing and publishing of your new post, click on the Posts button by the left sidebar in the WordPress dashboard, and then onto Add New button to be redirected to your post editor.

Now you will see an editor area that will give you the option of creating your first blog post.

It is known that WordPress provides the use of a block-based editor that regards each element as a block, this will give you access to creating beautiful content layouts for all your blog posts you will be creating.

To know about the block editor you can refer to this page. You will be able to add Title and edit the post permalinks.

While on the post screen, you will have sections that will allow you to add Categories and Tags to your post. The category option allows you to help organize your blog posts in section, to make things less clumsy.

Step 4: creating your first blog post

This is the beginning of the fruitful blogging life, creating your own very post is a good thing.

To get started with the writing and publishing of your new post, click on the Posts button by the left sidebar in the WordPress dashboard, and then onto Add New button to be redirected to your post editor.

Now you will see an editor area that will give you the option of creating your first blog post.

It is known that WordPress provides the use of a block-based editor that regards each element as a block, this will give you access to creating beautiful content layouts for all your blog posts you will be creating.

To know about the block editor you can refer to this page. You will be able to add Title and edit the post permalinks.

While on the post screen, you will have sections that will allow you to add Categories and Tags to your post. The category option allows you to help organize your blog posts in section, to make things less clumsy.

Plugins that are essential for your site

SEO- These plugins help get your site on search engines such as Google, Bing, Yahoo, and others.

They help you control how search engine bots see your site, how they crawl and index them.

I recommend you to use the Yoast SEO plugin for easy and better SEO setup.

Security – These plugins help keep your site secure, you should understand that hackers, spammers, and attacker will try their best to tamper with your site and then ask for money in return.

It is your responsibility to fend them off and prevent them from having any inappropriate access to your site. One of the best security plugins to use is Sucuri.

Performance– These plugins help to keep your site speed optimized all the time, this makes your site accessible, fast, and online as possible.

I have monitored and detected that one of the best free plugins to use for best performance is WP Super Cache and premium plugin WP Rocket.

Backup – It is essential and important for you to backup your site regularly as the server can’t be predicted and a slight error in settings can damage your site.

I recommend you to use UpdraftPlus as your backup plugin.

Design & customizing plugin – If you have a theme that doesn’t have a pre-made template, your need for page customizing plugin might arise.

You can use a plugin that offers design and customizing options to create your site homepage, design, and beautify every part without touching any code or going through stress.

Step 6: Optimize your site SEO

When I started as a beginner, I forgot to optimize my site’s SEO and it took me a long time to understand what I was missing.

Optimizing your site’s SEO helps search engines find your site, crawl it and then index it for it to show up on their search result pages.

SEO brings your site more site traffic, this is a great thing because you will enjoy blogging when people with interest comes visiting your site.

This is the most joyous moment in blogging and it can be found to be hard if you are doing it wrongly.

Getting started with it is easy, first, you need to install and activate the Yoast SEO plugin.

The plugin is the most used SEO plugin in WordPress and also it is regarded as the simplest to use.

Once the plugin is activated you will have a new name “SEO”. When clicked on it will redirect you to a page that consists of the settings.

Yoast SEO plugin comes with a pretty easy configuration wizard that helps you get started in no time, just follow the process and you will be done as soon as possible.

Step 7: Start making money from your blog

Once you start blogging and you continue to get traffic to your site, all you will think of now is how to start making money from your site.

I have analyzed and sort out the ways you can make money from your site using the below

  1. Affiliate marketing

Making money from your site is easy with affiliate marketing once you get targeted traffic.

All you need to do is sign up with an Affiliate Company that offers the same as the product that matches your site niche. Read more about affiliate marketing

  1. Displaying adverts

You can make money from your site with ads display, there are lots of ads companies online you can choose from.

Ads companies allow you to display ads your site visitor might like and then. You either get paid when a user clicks, views, or performs an action.

Google AdSense is a sure company to get started with; they’ve been the most trusted in the game.

They have been in existence for years now and they don’t seem to be stopping anytime soon.

  1. Selling courses or EBooks

You can start making money from your site users by selling your own course or eBooks.

This only requires your teaching knowledge and experience to get started, this is easy to start as you need time and space to create more amazing stuff for people to start.

Conclusion

Starting a blog is easy but maintaining a blog is hard.

There are other contents you need to read to help you in your blogging journey.

To make blogging work for you, you need to be consistent, patient, and willing to spend a little that means regarding it as a business.

With all the guides above you will be able to create a successful blog that will make you enough money.

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