How to Start a Blog and Make Money [Blogging Guide]

Are you looking for how to start a blog and make money? Then you have arrived at the right place. The world around us is changing, now people of all sets of ages are starting blogs and their entire businesses online.

It is possible to completely change your life with a blog? The answer is Yes. It has changed the lives of all those who started their blogging journey out of passion. In this blogging guide, you will find the best ways to start a blog, be a successful blogger, and make money with your blog.

Here are the steps on how to start a blog and make money

Step1: Choose a blog topic

Step 2: Choose the right blog name and domain name

Step 3: Choose the blogging platform

Step 4: Choose the right web hosting for your blog

Step 5: Select a good responsive WordPress theme

Step 6: Do the proper WordPress configuration

Step 7: Write your first blog post

Step 8: Add your blog to search engines and share it with your audience

Step 9: Run ads / Sell products on your blog (Monetize your blog)

Step 10: Drive constant traffic from search engines and other relevant traffic sources to earn regular money

Now, let’s discuss all these steps in more detail:

How to Start a Blog and Make Money: The Most important Steps

Step 1: Choose a blog topic or niche

Now, in your journey to start a blog and make money, this is the most important step. This step is often skipped by bloggers. Most bloggers start a blog on their daily lifestyles, travel, food, and everything on their blog.

However, you need to choose a topic that you are passionate about and stick with it. This is called a blogging niche. A niche can be anything that you are passionate about.

For example, I write about blogging and digital marketing tips. So my blog is about blogging tips and it covers related topics like SEO, SEM, blogging tips, WordPress, etc.

Now the million-dollar question is how do you choose your blog topic? If you looking to start a food blog, you can read my guide on How to start a food blog and make money.

Quick tips to choose a blogging niche:

• Choose a blog topic that you are passionate about. This should be something you must not be tired of doing. It can be traveling, food, fashion, digital marketing, smartphones, tech, etc
• A good idea is to pick up your favorite hobby or topic you read a lot online. This will help you arrive at your blog niche
• Now once you choose your blog topic, take a notepad, and try to write 3-5 articles about your topic.
• Once you feel that the topic is something that you can write about without getting bored. This means that you are truly passionate about it and you must choose it as your blogging niche

Step 2: Choosing the right blog name and domain name

This is the most important step in your blogging starting journey. Choosing the right domain name and blog name will provide brand value to your blog. So you must choose a name that is related to your blog topic. You can also start a personal blog with your name. Once you decide on a name for your blog you can go for a domain availability search.

Your domain is the URL people will find when they go to your blog. For example my domain name = is achaltomar.com. This is why you are at my website link: https://www.achaltomar.com

I would suggest choosing a domain name that is short and easy to spell or read. If it is your name as my blog then this can be ignored. Also make sure you are using a top-level domain like .com,.net, and .in for your blog. If you are targeting a country then choosing a domain ending in “.in” (India), or “.au” (Australia) is a good idea.

Step 3: Choose the blogging platform

To start a blog, first, you need to decide on the content management system (CMS) you want to use. CMS is just your blogging software that makes your life easy by providing drag-and-drop and easy tools to build your blog.

I run all my blogs on WordPress because it is easy to use, free and powerful. So, as per my suggestion, you should use WordPress to make your life easy while blogging.

Web hosting is the online space where WordPress will be installed. This is a server that will keep your blog running 24*7. This will store your blog files like images, plugins, text, etc.

Web hosting is a compulsory step to take in your blogging journey. Choosing a good web host not only helps you run your blog smoothly but also helps you scale your blog as it grows.

If you are looking for an excellent managed WordPress hosting provider like WP Engine read my list of Best Managed WordPress Hosting Providers. Also, you can check my post on cheap WordPress hosting providers.

I would recommend Bluehost for beginners as it offers everything you need to create your blog. Bluehost is the best choice which is powering more than 2 million websites worldwide with superb features like:

• FREE SSL
• FREE domain name with hosting (This is good as you don’t need to pay for your domain name here)
• Unlimited storage and bandwidth
• Excellent support over live chat
• Money back guarantee of 30 days
• Affordable hosting starts at just $3.95 per month
• Scalability (You can upgrade your hosting limits as you grow)
• Cloudflare support (Improves your website speed)

Now you can buy web hosting from Bluehost using the below steps:

Step 1: Click here to go to Bluehost and click on the “Get Started” button

Step 2: Choose your hosting plan

Select the Basic plan if you want to run a single blog. For multiple blogs, you can choose other plans like Plus/Choice Plus/Pro plans. 

I recommend choosing the ‘BASIC’ plan as this is good enough for people to start a blog. Later on, you can easily upgrade your plan as your blog grows in size.

After choosing the hosting plan you will be asked to choose your FREE domain name. 

On the next page, you can claim your free domain name. If you are yet not ready with your domain name, you can click on ‘I’ll create my domain later

On the next page, you are required to fill in your contact information.

Now on the next step, it will take you to the payment page where you can choose to pay via your credit card or you can click on ‘more payment options to pay via other payment modes. Click the ‘submit’ button once you are done.

Now it is time to celebrate! You just bought hosting with a domain name for your blog. Here is the cool part of Bluehost: After you have completed the payment, Bluehost will automatically install WordPress to start your blog.

This means that your blog is ready to use after just the payment is completed. Now you just need to log in to your account and see your activated services.

You can also install WordPress manually on Bluehost by the below steps:

1. Log in to your cPanel account provided by Bluehost post-payment
2. Go to the website section and choose Install WordPress
3. Click on the Install button in that section
4. Leave the name blank next to the domain or you can create a subfolder if you like to use any other page to be the main page of your blog. However, normally we leave this blank
5. If needed you can edit the username, email, and password for your new WordPress installation
6. Read the license terms
7. Click on the Install Now button
8. Congratulations! Now WordPress is installed on your domain
9. Now you need to log in to WordPress with the details provided by Bluehost post installation

Step 5: Select a good responsive WordPress theme

Now running a good WordPress theme is extremely important if you are serious about your blog.

On my blog, I am running a theme which is called Newspaper. You can read my Newspaper WordPress theme review to know why this theme is ideal for any type of blog. You can get this theme here Newspaper WordPress theme

The factors which make Newspaper a very good theme for WordPress blogs are:

• You can install demos depending on your different business types and customize them as per your needs
• Drag and Drop page builder tool
• No coding needed to build a responsive and attractive website
• Excellent theme support
• Very easy-to-use theme panel

To install a theme you need to go to WordPress dashboard->Appearance. Click on add a theme. Either you can now upload the theme or just. Select any free theme from the WordPress dashboard.

Just either search for a theme on the WordPress theme search bar which you can see in the above image. Once your theme is found click on Activate to use that theme on your blog. If you are using a theme like the Newspaper, you can upload it using an upload option on the same page.

Now once you upload and activate the theme it will be live on your blog and you can customize it further.

Step 6: Do the proper WordPress configuration

You can use any theme in WordPress. When you install the WordPress theme you need to make sure some WordPress setting is done to run your blog properly. We will discuss them now.

1: Set your Timezone

For this, you need to go to Setting->General and set your country or city timezone.

2: Add your site Title, Tagline, and Email Address by going to Setting->General

3: Set up Yoast SEO

This is a very important step. You need to set up an SEO plugin that will optimize your WordPress posts for SEO. Yoast is highly recommended by me for this purpose.

To install this plugin all you need to do is go to plugins->Add New and search for the name: Yoast in the search box. You will get a result like this below:

I have currently installed this plugin on my WordPress website. But you need to click on the Install and activate button to get this plugin working. To set up Yoast you will see a new tab in your WordPress which is named ‘SEO’. Now you can just follow the step-by-step instructions from Yoast to configure this plugin.

4. Create Important Pages for your Website

It is now time to create a few pages that are needed for a good blog. These pages are the about page and contact page. On these pages, you can explain to your blog readers about yourself and provide a way to contact you.

You can also tell your blog audience about what you do. How did you start your blog? Your Achievements and also your social media links so that your audience can connect with you socially.

A contact page is needed so that people can contact you. You can add your email Id here so that people can directly email you. Or you can put a WordPress simple contact form.

5: Connect your website to Google Analytics

Now it is really important to connect your website to an analytics tool. For this guide, I will recommend Google Analytics because it is FREE to use and can be connected easily using WordPress.

To connect your website to Google Analytics follow these simple steps:

1. Go to the Google Analytics website and log in with your Gmail ID. 
2. For the first-time setup, you need to provide your website details and other required details
3. If you already have an account you can click on Admin Tab and add a new property to your account. This property will have the details of your website which you want to track
4. Once you fill in the required details. You will get your tracking Id. This is needed to connect your WordPress blog to Google Analytics
5. Install a plugin called Google Analytics Dashboard for WP by ExactMetrics this will make the process of connecting your Google Analytics account to WordPress easy
6. Once you install the plug-in, You will see a ‘Google Analytics’ tab on your WordPress dashboard
7. You need to go to the general settings of this plugin and authorize the plugin to connect to Google Analytics
8. Check the on-screen instructions and your Google Analytics account will be connected to your WordPress website.

6: Set WordPress permalinks

I don’t recommend using the default permalink structure of WordPress. Follow the screenshot below to set up your permalink to ‘post name’. I have chosen the type ‘post name’ because if you choose this permalink structure your keywords will be visible in Google search.

Step 7: Write your first blog post

The foundation stones to make money blogging are now laid and you need to build a house. Building a blog is somewhat the same as building a house of stones.

For building a house initially we build the foundation and then use bricks to build it. Getting web hosting and Installing and configuring WordPress was the foundation of your blog. Now ow you need to write some content to bring it to life and drive traffic to it.

Follow my blogging tips below to learn how to write and grow content visibility for your blog

• Write blogs for a person rather than a search engine. In the end, it is the person who will read your blog and not the search engine. You can use a tool like Articoolo which is an automatic article creation software to generate some content for your article fast. However, you need to change it a bit to adjust to your content rather than just using it as it is. This saves a lot of content creation time. View my Articoolo Review to know more about this tool
• Use copyright-free images on your blog. Try to take pictures from your camera or use free stock images that you get easily from Pexels. Also, you should create videos around your blog content and upload them to YouTube or other social media channels.
• To create awesome videos you can use the excellent video creation software Camtasia. Get a FREE Trial of Camtasia. Also, you can read my Camtasia Review to learn more about this video creation tool.
• Now writing a blog requires SEO skills as well. You can learn the same from my blog posts How to do Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Top 10 Important Search Engine Optimization Tips For Your Website
• You can also use online keyword research and keyword monitoring tools like Long Tail Pro and Accuranker to do SEO better. Check my Long Tail Pro Review and Accuranker Review to learn more about these tools. Check Semrush Tutorial to know how to use Semrush in your SEO efforts.
• Always check for grammar and spelling mistakes while writing your blog articles. Using punctuation checker tools like Grammarly can help you to correct these mistakes while you write your content on WordPress. You can check my post on Grammarly Discount to get this tool.
  

Step 8: Add your blog to search engines and share it with your audience

After you have written 2-3 blog posts on your blog. You should add your blog to Google Search Console and Bing Search Console.

For this follow the below steps:

1. Create a sitemap for your blog

A sitemap is needed to help search engines crawl your blog. When a search engine like Google crawls your blog it will decide on what page rank it should have on a search query.

So as you are using the WordPress Yoast plugin you can easily create a sitemap in it. To create the sitemap go to Yoast SEO->General-> Features tab->Now you need to click on a switch ‘XML Sitemap’ switch and turn it on-> Save changes

Once you do the above steps you can refresh the page and you will see an option of ‘SEE the XML sitemap’. After you click this you will get your website sitemap on yourdomain.sitemap.xml

2. Add your blog to search engines

Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster tools are excellent tools to get your website indexed by Google.

2.1 How To Submit Sitemap To Google Search console?

Here are the steps to follow:

• Sign in to the Google search console using this link
• Select your website from the list (If you have not added your website to Google Search Console then you can check this guide from Google itself)
• Select your Website
• Click on a button called Sitemap from the left sidebar
• Add your sitemap link (yourdomain.sitemap.xml)
• Click submit

Your sitemap is now added to Google and you are all set to get into Google Organic Search results.

2.2. Submit your blog to the Bing Webmaster tool

Most people are not aware of this tool. It should not be ignored that Bing and Yahoo collectively can drive traffic to your website if you add them to Bing Webmaster. You need to follow the below steps to add your website to Bing Webmaster:

• Go to Bing Webmaster tools here
• Sign in or sign up with your Google or outlook account
• After signing in you will get an option to import your website, if it is already verified by Google Search Console
• Click on import and follow the on-screen instructions. That’s it your website is now added to Bing webmaster tools without much effort 

3. Share your blog with your target audience to gain traffic

Now once you write a blog post. To increase traffic to your website or blog. You should share it on social media channels, with your friends, and on forums as well. Here are a few steps to get your blog traffic:

• Create your blog pages on Social Media channels like Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, and LinkedIn to name a few
• Follow people in your niche and share their posts, if you feel they are good for your audience
• Every social media channel serves a different purpose. if you are a fashion blogger, it makes more sense to be more active on Instagram and Facebook. For a tech blog, it makes more sense to be active on Twitter or LinkedIn
• Be active on forums like Quora and try to answer questions related to your blog topic. This will help you gain trust and followers
• You can also go guest blogging. This is approaching popular bloggers in your niche and asking them permission to write a blog on their website. In this way, you can drop your website link and get a backlink
• Last but not least keep writing valuable content. If your content adds value to your audience, no one can stop you from earning money in blogging

Step 9: Run ads / Sell products on your blog (Monetize your blog)

Now let’s come to the point that you are eagerly waiting for. For all your hard work working on your blog writing content and optimizing it for SEO, you can earn money once your blog gets some traffic. 

You should wait for at least 500 visitors per month to your blog (This you can track by Google Analytics). And this is easy to get if your content is good.

Now, once you have some visitors, let’s earn some money. Follow my steps below to Monetize your blog and learn how to start a blog and make money:

1. Ad Networks

Ad Networks have various advertisers who bid on their platforms to get their ads running on a publisher’s website/blog. 

There are ad networks that are the simplest and most widely used method for monetizing a blog.

The two most popular Ad networks are:

• Google AdSense (Offered by Google)
• Media.net

Both of these require approval so you need to have a quality blog with decent traffic to get these approvals.

Once you sign up with them, they will give you an ‘ad code’ which you can install on your WordPress blog easily with any good plugin. If you are using a WordPress theme like Newspaper you can easily add this code to your WordPress website using its theme panel. You can check my Newspaper WordPress Theme Review to know more about the Newspaper theme.

You will get paid for clicks from visitors on your Ads when they visit your website. You just need to drive quality traffic to your blog and you will get paid regularly.

2. Affiliate Marketing: Now this is my favorite way to make money blogging. With Affiliate marketing, you can earn more money than with Ad Networks.

In Affiliate Marketing you will get money from companies when somebody acts like signing up or sells through your affiliate links in the form of a commission. This can be anything from 10%-60% and sometimes more on the sale value. Let’s look into the affiliate networks which you can sign up and earn money online:

A. Amazon Affiliate program

B. ShareASale

C. ImpactRadius

D. Commission Junction

This is not the end of the list, but these are the most popular affiliate programs. If you want to promote any product you can also search for “product name affiliate” on Google and it will show you whether that product or company has an affiliate program or not. 

You just need to sign up for an affiliate program and you will get banners, and links to products/pages which you can promote on your blog.

Here is a pro tip, You can write reviews like: ‘<product name> review, and product comparison posts to get more traffic from search engines to your blog posts.

Depending on your niche the 4 Affiliate networks which I have mentioned will have products that you can easily promote on your blog and earn commission on each sale.

The best part of affiliate marketing is you don’t need to own a product you just need to promote it on your blog and it will automatically drive money to you.

Step 10: Drive Traffic to Your Blog

Now once you are getting some traffic from Google and other search engines you need to make sure that you are getting regular traffic from Google and other search engines. To do this you need to implement proper SEO on your blog. Implementing SEO will help in increasing traffic and help you make money from your blog.

Learn SEO from my blog posts How to do Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and the Top 10 Important Search Engine Optimization Tips For Your Website so that you continuously improve your search engine ranking and earn money online through your blog.

BLOGGING VIDEO TUTORIAL

Check my video tutorial to learn How to Start a Blog and Make Money.

FAQ about creating a blog

I have covered everything on how to start a blog and make money online. Have a nice day.