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Rather than just a hobby, many successful bloggers prove that people can earn money online blogging. In fact, you can generate between $200–$2,500/month in your first year of blogging.
Blogging is such a lucrative business idea that companies who blog report having 97% more links to their websites than sites that don’t. What’s more, 77% of internet users reveal that they read blogs.
In this article, we’ll cover eight actionable tips to make money blogging.
1. Find the Right Audience and Niche
Finding a niche helps determine your blog’s purpose, target audience, and content. To research the most suitable and profitable niche, free online tools like Google Trends come in handy to help bloggers narrow down their choices. The most popular blog niches include digital marketing, traveling, health, and finance.
Make money blogging by choosing a niche that interests and motivates you. This will help you overcome writer’s block and ease the overall content creation and marketing process. To determine whether a niche is right for you, create a list of your hobbies, skillsets, or passions. Reading your favorite blogs can also help with finding inspiration.
In addition, engage in social platforms like Facebook groups, Reddit threads, or Quora to find discussions, concerns, or questions that people share about your niche. This will help you better understand the target readers and curate relevant content.
2. Purchase the Hosting Plan and Domain Name
Running a website requires a web hosting account and a domain name. While the latter serves as the digital address of your blog, the former provides the space to store all your site content, such as text, images, and videos. As such, it is best to choose a hosting provider that includes a free domain name in its hosting plans for an all-in-one solution.
If you are running a self-hosted WordPress blog, we recommend choosing a managed WordPress hosting planfor optimized website performance. This is especially useful if you have limited technical knowledge of hosting and prefer the web host to manage updates and security. This helps you focus on what matters the most – building your blog.
As for the domain name, make it simple and easy to remember. Brainstorm words associated with your blog’s niche. If you’re stuck on ideas, use a domain name generator and check its availability using a domain checker. Alternatively, opt for other domain extensions like .blog or .net while still keeping the initial blog name idea if .com is unavailable.
3. Choose the Blogging Platform
The next step is to find a blogging platform that helps you manage your blogging activities, from writing to publishing posts. Consider a range of factors like functionality, price, support, usability, integrations, and scalability when narrowing down blogging platforms. For new bloggers, it helps to use a platform that provides an intuitive interface.
A content management system (CMS) like WordPress is an excellent choice for most bloggers who want complete customizability. Use free or premium WordPress themes to enhance the look of your blog and take advantage of the platform’s various plugins to add more functionality, like adding comment sections or enabling multi-factor authentication.
4. Build and Design Your Own Blog
Create a good first impression right from the moment visitors arrive at your homepage by having a well-designed, easy-to-navigate, and mobile-friendly blog. Ensure to pick the proper layout, color scheme, and fonts to convey your blog’s style and tone. Luckily, beginner bloggers can easily design a blog using website builders like Zyro, Wix, or Squarespace.
These tools offer pre-made templates and provide a drag-and-drop editor so users can add or remove website elements like headers, photos, and buttons. To further enhance the user experience, provide page categories and a search bar to help users find what they need quickly.
5. Plan Blog Content
Now, it’s time to write down ideas for potential blog topics that will resonate best with the audience. Consider creating an editorial calendar to guide your content plan and help maintain consistency in publishing engaging and relevant blog articles.
Furthermore, utilize project management tools like Trello or Monday.com to organize your posts and set a schedule to publish new blog articles.
6. Optimize Blog for Search Engines
Implementing effective search engine optimization (SEO) strategies for your blog can help drive search engine traffic. Let’s look at some best practices to boost your blog’s visibility:
- Keyword research. Find content ideas that will help your site rank well on search engine results pages (SERPs).
- URL customization. Assign unique URLs to different blog posts to help search engines understand what each post is about so that they’re easily crawlable and properly indexed.
- Internal linking. Encourage visitors to read more of your content and boost your page views.
- Page title optimization. Insert the primary keyword in your title to communicate the post’s relevance.
7. Choose Your Monetization Method
Once your blog is well-established, it’s time to decide on the right monetization strategy. Here are some of the most popular ways that many bloggers make money online:
- Join an affiliate marketing program. Earn a commission every time a user clicks on an affiliate link. Find the most suitable affiliate program by considering the product or service and the commission rate.
- Sell ad space. Make more money online by selling ad space through networks like Google AdSense that connect bloggers with advertisers.
- Make online courses. Creating an online course helps generate passive income as you’ll only have to publish once to earn money each time someone makes a purchase.
- Write a sponsored post. Reach out to companies in your niche and ask them to sponsor posts like product reviews, video content, or tutorials.
- Do guest posts. Find blogs and websites that offer guest blogging opportunities. Explore their published posts to help you create blog content that matches their readership.
- Set up an online store. Whether physical or digital products, make money blogging by adding eCommerce functionality to your site and selling merch.
8. Create Marketing Strategies
Executing effective marketing is crucial to having a profitable blog. Learn from successful blogs in your niche and tweak the strategies according to your needs. For example, run paid ads on other platforms or share teaser campaigns on social media.
Once implemented, use Google Analytics to measure the campaign’s success and monitor your blog’s progress to pinpoint areas for improvement.
Conclusion
The key to making money blogging is knowing how to monetize your skills properly. This will help streamline all your blogging efforts – from finding profitable topics to marketing your blog.
To recap, implement the following practices to have a successful blog that drives profit:
- Determine your audience and niche
- Purchase a hosting plan and domain name
- Choose a blog platform
- Build and design your blog
- Plan blog content
- Optimize for search engines
- Select monetization methods
- Create marketing strategies
We hope this guide has given you helpful insights for starting a blogging business. Leave us a comment if you have any questions or tips to share.