How To Start a Blog and Make Money Online

Blogging is increasingly becoming popular as a method of earning money online. There are thousands of bloggers who have already turned to blogging as their full-time career. However, there is still the majority lot who claim to not being able to live solely on blogging. Making money through blogging is obviously not easy. However, by following all the steps in this guide thoroughly and wisely, you’ll be able to start right from scratch to even earning a living off blogging. This can be considered as one of the best careers, especially considering that it has a great job outlook. Below is a comprehensive guide outlining how you can start a good blog and make money from it.

The Basics

Selecting Your Niche- As a new blogger, you should not follow some advice blindly to blog about what you are passionate about. Instead, you should choose to blog on a passion or interest that you know will be profitable. If you have no idea on what niche would be profitable, you can go through Clickbank, under the Marketplace’ category. Look at the niches in which people are selling things in.

Selecting the Right Domain Name- There are ultimately no hard rules when it comes to choosing your domain name. The conventional rule however, is to make use of a suitable keyword in your domain. For instance, if you plan to blog about relationships, it would be wise to include that keyword in your chosen domain. A perfect domain name would be one that combines two or more keywords.

Hosting Your Site- Once you’ve registered and owned a domain name, the next thing would be to seek services of a reliable hosting provider. For instance, you may choose SnapsHosting, one of the most reputable hosting providers. You should select a hosting provider that meets all your preferences and needs, including affordability and reliability.

Changing your Domain Name Server- This involves pointing your domain to your choice of hosting provider. This is actually quite a simple process which will just take a matter of few minutes.

Blog Set-up- No real technical knowledge is required to carry out this step. Installing WordPress is not difficult as you would probably think. You can also make use of some neat little scripts such as SnapsHosting’s Softaculous to easily set up your blog.

About Me Page- One of the privileges and most fun parts of blogging is anonymity. However, it would be wise to let your readers know who they will be talking to. Just a little introduction is enough to make your relationship with your readers more personal, hence improving your credibility as a blogger.

ptimizing Your Blog

Choosing a WordPress Theme- This will certainly make a remarkable difference as you blog to make money. The first impression always counts a great deal. It is essentially important that you convince your readers to stay engaged for some duration of time. You can easily take care of that by selecting a nice and appropriate theme. There are both free and paid themes. The paid ones are obviously better. You can easily install your selected theme by heading to WordPress Admin’, clicking on Themes’, uploading the theme as a zip file and lastly, activating it.

WordPress Plug-ins- A plug-in is basically an external code which adds specific functions, hence expanding the overall functionality of your blog. You can practically do virtually anything you imagine to your blog using plug-ins. You should select plug-ins that best serve all your blogging needs.

Google tools- These are great indispensable tools that will help you track how your blog is performing. These include Google Analytics and Google Webmaster Tools. Such tools work primarily to improve your position in search engine results.

Setting up RSS and Email Subscription- The ultimate goal in blogging is to drive traffic to your site then convince the visitors to subscribe to your blog. You can make use of Google Feedburner to manage your RSS subscription. The email subscription form would be a better approach, considering that some of your site visitors may know very little about RSS. You can make use of services such as Aweber to take care of email subscription.

SEO

Submitting Your Site to Google- Google is constantly indexing and updating billions of content pages every now and then. Submitting your blog to Google is quite worth the effort. This is a simple process that will take just less than a minute with the help of Google Webmaster Tools.

Writing for your reader as well as for search engines- Wise choice of your posts’ titles with proper keyword research is inarguably part of your SEO effort. This title is what the search engines’ robots will view and it’s still what your readers will see.

Creating a Robots.txt File-The main purpose of this is to improve your site indexation by instructing the search engine crawler to index your content pages alone, and ignore other pages that you don’t want to appear on the search index. If you fail to do this, it might lead to your site having issues with duplicate content.

Creating a Sitemap- A sitemap instructs search engines on where you want them to go. This is very useful for faster and better indexing. You can make use of the Google (XML) Sitemaps Generator if you’re using WordPress.

romoting Your Blog

Blog Commenting- You can promote your blog by commenting on other blogs that are closely relevant to your niche. You can add constructive opinions on the subject at hand by commenting on it. This is one of the most powerful, yet least expensive tools to create awareness on your site, especially when you’re new.

Guest Blogging- This is where you undertake to write an article that will be published on other blogs. By doing it with a reputable host, you’ll start noting a gradual increase in your blog traffic and gain some extra subscribers. Through guest blogging, you’ll be able to gain the highly important exposure.

Article Marketing- This is an effective method of link building, which is, acquiring links pointing back to your blog. You’ll get your article published on hundreds or thousands of other sites. This will greatly depend on your article’s quality. This will come in quite handy if writing is one of your greatest assets.

Marketing Your Site in Forums- Although this might take some time to particpate and join the forum, it’s one of the most intensely used promotional methods by majority of new bloggers.

Social Media- You can indulge in creating a nice and appealing profile in various social media sites such as Twitter and Facebook. You can then promote your product, services or blog as a whole on such sites to gain some considerable degree of recognition.

Making Money Online

Freelance Services- In case you are skilled in copywriting, coding and design, it would be wise to leverage your blog in such a way that you can still showcase your portfolios. You can then make use of your blog to sell your services and earn quite some decent income from it. To make money, readers have to know that you’re offering services in which you are skilled in.

Google AdSense- As one of the best Pay per Click programs (PPC), this is the top-most source of income for most bloggers. It is an excellent advertising program that can easily run on your blog. It is the most preferred choice of blog monetization. Your content is regularly read, enabling Google to find relevant ads to that content. It then displays them within or next to the article. Your earnings from Google AdSense can be pretty minimal without traffic. The much you’ll earn depends on how much and what kind of traffic you’ve driven to your site.

Affiliate Marketing- This involves promoting another person’s products. You are then paid for each referral sale you make. The referral commissions you earn may be high or low depending on the product you’re marketing.

Sponsored Reviews- This is another great venture if you are a good writer. You get to do reviews for other advertisers, people’s products or services. It could be your lucrative source of income if you do it right. You can ensure this by writing honest reviews and offering constructive criticism.

 Conclusion

Creating your blog is not a hard task. In fact, it is the easiest part. Earning from a blog demands a lot of patience, commitment, technical know-how and passion to help see you through the ups and downs in your journey. Following the above guide to the letter will bring you a step closer to your dream of making money through blogging.

Follow the link below for Step by Step Guid  -  Blogpress