How to Start a Blog and Earn Money Online

Ever thought about launching your own blog? Have you ever thought about what it takes to start a blog and build it over time so that it helps you make money online? Have you ever thought about earning a passive income through blogs? Especially with the ongoing Coronavirus crisis across the globe, the safest and most pragmatic way to earn money is by working from home. Running a blog is a great way of doing that. What’s more, even after the Coronavirus crisis is over and things return to normal (or whatever will be the new normal), your blog can be a great source of passive income generation. And it will keep doing so until the world suffers an irreversible apocalyptic fate. In that scenario, what good is money anyway.

How to Start a Blog and Earn Money Online: Quick Tips

Blogging, on the surface, is essentially writing. While that is partially true, that’s not all there is to it. A lot more than just good writing skills go behind running a successful, income generating blog. However, not being passionate about writing might prove detrimental in the long run, as far as making a blog which generates money is considered. Successful blogging doesn’t have a straightforward formulaic approach. You can’t just complete a checklist of things and arrive at a successful blog. If you lack the passion for writing, all the other techniques can only take you a certain distance. If you don’t have at least some interest in writing, you will reach a plateau quite soon. In case you want to use blogging purely as an investment avenue, you can invest some money in a pre-existing, successfully running blog or start your blog but let some dedicated bloggers run it on your behalf. You can pay them for their services and enjoy the rest of the revenue as consistent, passive income.

While blogging is a great way to earn money, only a small number of people are actually able to generate some consistent income through their efforts. Why? While starting a blog might seem simple and straightforward, it requires a mammoth amount of effort to produce significant traffic and profit. You need laser-focus and persistence to build an audience and generate sufficient revenue through your content. For a blog to reach a critical mass of traffic and revenue, it takes a significant amount of time and some serious hard work.

Take this site for example. It’s a substantially large platform with hundreds of thousands of monthly visitors. However, if we sit around basking in the warm glow of success and celebrate with the consistent passive income supply, the blog will meet an untimely end. So it’s very important to add new, exciting and engaging content. Even the most successful blogs can wither away if they aren’t constantly in a creative flux.

So, how to actually start a blog and start making  money online? What are the key factors? The answer to that also depends on what you might consider successful, and how much money is ‘making money’ in your opinion. If you want to generate piles of cash through it, the road is long and hard. But if you’re willing to put in the time and the effort, and you can stay persistent over the years (yes, years), then you can most certainly generate a substantial income online. In fact, if you go about it the right way, your blog can become a fantastic source of passive income generation. It can attract the right clients and customers no matter what industry or niche you might be operating in.

How to Start a Blog: Important Steps

Since you have reached here, it means that you haven’t been dissuaded and you are really serious about starting a blog and earning money online. Here’s what you need to do in a step-by-step fashion. The more you prepare and plan, the more likely you’ll be to succeed in the long term.

1. Choose a Topic 

Get clear on what you’ll write about. Select a topic or a niche and ensure that your content revolves around that and doesn’t stray too far from the central theme. This will help you with focusing your writing on the field that you are interested in and you can produce your best work with a lot more ease than if you are asked to write about something you detest.

This allows you to attract customers, enticing them with your highly-informative posts, then tempting them with a lead magnet before dropping them into your sales funnel. 

2. Choose a Platform

As far as blogging platforms go, WordPress is by far the most popular. However, other micro-blogging platforms like Blogger, Tumblr and Medium are also pretty good. If you are really serious about blogging, a WordPress installation on a custom domain is the way to go.

While you could set up a blog at WordPress.com with a subdomain such as myblog.wordpress.com, you’ll get more traction with a self-hosted solution, and then be able to use subdomains on popular platforms for your content-marketing efforts.

3. Select (or Create) a Domain Name

If you are really serious about making money through a blog, a custom domain name is indispensable. Don’t rely on a domain name hosted by a third-party. Try and get a brief yet relevant domain name (preferably keyword rich). It will be best if your domain name describes your intended niche, topic or industry. If your blog is about cars, you are better off with a domain name like movingpistons.com rather than shinyredlipstick.com. The latter can be a good name for a fashion oriented blog. Use BlueHost, HostGator, 1&1 Hosting or any other number of domain name providers to source your domain.

If you’re at all concerned about things like SEO (and you should be), when selecting your domain name, you should adhere to the following suggestions:

  • If possible, go for a top-level domain (TLD) such as .com or .net
  • Keep the domain name within 15 characters. Long names are tougher to remember and type.
  • Try not to purchase a domain name with hyphens, since they’re more often associated with spammers
  • Avoid using self-hosted subdomains to rank or categorize posts

4. Find a Good Web Hosting Company

Don’t worry, finding a good web hosting company isn’t like finding a needle in a haystack, there are a lot of good ones. There are a lot of available options in case you are planning to start a WordPress, self hosted blog. The important thing is to do your due diligence and pick the right one that’s suitable to your budget and to ensure that the service-level and up-time guarantee is there.

While starting up, you might want to go with either a Managed WordPress solution or a Virtual Private Server (VPS). You can scale up from there in time. Eventually, you’ll probably need a dedicated-hosting solution with a CDN (below) once you break through a few thousand visitors per day.

5. Caching and Content-Delivery Networks (CDNs)

Use a system like W3 Total Cache or WP Super Cache and turn on browser caching to ensure that you speed up the delivery of your webpages. When you are starting up, this might seem trivial. But as you grow and your traffic increases to thousands of visitors per day, this will be critical. Use Google’s Page Speed Insights to test things before and after the installation.

Setting up a CDN is also extremely important. It will go a long way in speeding up your content’s global delivery. What it means is that your page will be able to load at the same rate in different countries. What CDNs do is replicate data around the world in multiple repositories. This results in much faster content delivery. 

Hopefully, this post has answered some of your doubts regarding starting a blog and earning money online. Use the info provided here and get started as soon as possible. There is no better time than now for doing this. Don’t lock your financial prospects down during the lockdown. Starting a blog might just prove to be the key that unlocks a future of wealth and happiness for you. Here’s to your successful future as a blogger. Cheers! 

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