How to Start A Blog and Make Money (Professional Way)

Blogging is an awesome field. You have complete control over your time and life. You are the real boss of your life… 🙂

Especially when your blog generates a good amount of income or minimum you have to need to manage your daily life requirements.

But most people fail to make four-figure incomes from their blogs.

According to studies, there are only 3% of webmasters who make more than $5000 every month and 30% can’t achieve the $100 milestone in a month. But if you are also one from them then read this guide till the last word.

In this guide, I will share everything which helps you to generate passive income from your blog.

But it’s not easy… and not difficult too…!

To make maximum money from your blog, you should choose a perfect blog niche (topic) for your blog. Perfect niche means, you have an interest in and knowledge about that topic as well as that niche have higher potential to generate income.

You know your interest that’s ok! But how to find the potential of niche i.e., is that topic (Niche) has the ability & sources to make money or not?

Keep in mind these points to check your interest level:

  • How much am I interested in that topic? (Can you write for hours daily about that?) if yes then go next…
  • Can I provide expert advice on that Topic? (your knowledge level) if yes then go next…

Users search on Google to find the solutions to their problems or to get help or buy something. If you are not expert on that topic then choose any other Niche for your blog.

Find answers to these questions to check niche potential:

  • How wide & popular is your targeted niche? (Local, national or global): Use Google Trends to check.
  • Traffic potential (A site can get maximum estimated traffic). It is just a rough idea to make sure that you are choosing a good niche where you have chances to get enough traffic to make money.
  • What earning methods you can use? Ad networks, Affiliate marketing, Services, or anything else. (More options mean more security and chances to make more money.)

Some of the Popular Niches are-

  • Technology
  • Health-Fitness
  • Fashion-Beauty
  • Food
  • Lifestyle
  • Finance

But you can also start a micro-niche blog. Micro-niche blogs are just focusing on only one specific topic or product but having a very targeted audience. But make sure that your selected micro niche can generate enough money for you…

You should make some research about that on Google.com. Just visit some websites or blogs that are related to your blog niche and how they are making money?

Are they using Ad networks, Affiliate Marketing, Selling something, offering Services or anything else? Then check these sites in  SEMrush & Alexa to get some more idea about their traffic, backlinking etc.

  For example, you choose “SEO” niche and you are expert and have an interest in SEO.

Check potential of niche SEO

  • The popularity of “SEO”: Global {Great}
  • estimated traffic for “SEO”: 100,000+ {GOOD} 
  • You can use ad networks, affiliate marketing, Sell your own products and offer services for SEO.  {Great}

You can determine the scope and competition on that niche. But if you have a different niche idea then you can work on that.

After finding a niche you should find a good name for your blog.

Choose a Domain Name

Choose a domain name which will be short and related to your niche. For example, seoguide.com instead of howtodosearchengineoptimization.com

In this example, seoguide.com is short and your niche related domain name that describes your blog nature and topic clearly.

Don’t buy an exact name match domain. But if you’re targeting visitors from a specific country then you can buy that country level domain name. Like as; xxxx.co.in (for India) or xxxxx.us (for USA)

You can buy a domain name at $7 normally. Godaddy is the best options to buy domains.

Choose Web-hosting

Web-hosting plays an important role in the success of a blog. If your hosting is powerful then your website will remain up all the time and loads very fast.

But if you choose a low-quality hosting that has more downtime then it means you are losing your visitors, clients and wasting money on that hosting.

You can buy a shared hosting if you are just starting. Siteground is the best options for hosting. But if have a large site or budget then you can buy managed, cloud or VPS for your blog. Then Kinsta, WpEngine are best options. 

Choose a Best Blogging Platform

There are many blogging platforms which you can use to start your blog. For example, WordPress, Joomla, Drupal, Blogger, etc. some of these are free and others are paid.

Blogspot, WordPress.com, Medium are the free blogging platforms. And WordPress.org, Squarespace, Weebly, Wix are the paid platforms.

Free platforms have limited features and control to customize. So I personally not recommend for professional blogging.

WordPress.org is the best option and WordPress sites have more than 60% share on the web. Because it allows you to create, customize, and manage your blog as you want.

And you also get unlimited choices of themes and plugins to design or add functionality to your blog.

After choosing your platform to create a blog, add logo, favicon and customize as you want but professionally.

Now you have a blog… you did an amazing job!

Write Amazing Content

Now you should want to create content for your blog. No one will come to see your empty blog. So create amazing content which engages your blog visitors.

Before starting anything, plan a complete strategy according to your goals and sources. And follow that strategy & time to time make changes to your strategy if requires. It is the easiest method to get success with blogging.

You should know everything that what are you doing and why are you doing? And what is the best for you at that time?

Before writing content do some keyword research. The success of your blog directly depends upon your keywords. Good keywords can make you a successful blogger and can easily generate more money for your blog. But the wrong keywords can break your blogging strategy and your success. You can use SEMrush to find the right Keywords for your site. You can also find the keywords of your Competitors with the help of SEMrush and then can use those for your Blog & Content.

To find Competitor’s Keywords, Search the Domain of your competitor in SEMrush. then You can find all the Top organic Keywords of your Competitors. it is the best way to choose the right keywords.

During the Keyword research, keep in mind that you are choosing related keywords according to your niche or topic. And choose those keywords which are easy to rank for your blog.

After keyword research write content on that keywords. Your content must be well explained or detailed but not lengthy (there is a difference between detailed and lengthy content).

Write SEO friendly content to rank Higher on Google. As well as engage your visitors. But remember that your preference must be your users not search engines. Learn How to Write SEO-friendly Content with SEMrush to rank Higher.

Your content must be written for users as well as optimized for Google. In SEO copywriting, first, plan a structure of the content i.e, how you will write and what related topics or points will cover in that content. Then start with an interesting intro that will make familiar your audience with your content. And write content in short paragraphs to increase its readability.

Use your main Keyword & their LSI or related keywords in your content, Headings, Title, and Meta. But avoid keyword stuffing that can be harmful to your blog. Use keyword variations instead of the exact same keyword, use keyword or LSI where you can, But don’t add them forcefully.

Add media to your content to make it more attractive and rich-media content.

After writing a great piece of content you have to need to make some optimizations to make it SEO-friendly. For example, add image alt text, Use H Tags etc.

Start SEO

SEO is the best way to get high-quality organic traffic on your site. In SEO, you have to need to optimize your blog for search engines to improve the positions of your keywords.

But before start doing SEO of Your blog, Make sure that there is no technical Issue on your blog and your blog is Mobile Friendly, Responsive, Secured (https) & having load time under 3 sec. You can perform an SEO Audit to find & fix all the Issues on your site.

If there is everything alright then you can start SEO of your Blog. You should start with On-Page SEO and Then Off Page SEO.  

There are various SEO techniques; some are genuine (called White hat SEO) and some are spammed (known as Black Hat SEO). You should focus on white hat SEO techniques to rank in Google and for the long run.

Final Words

Blogging is one of the best & safe methods to make money online. For that, you should want to plan everything.

Use right Blogging Platform & Webhosting and Publish High-Quality Content around your Keywords can help you to get success with Blogging.

Choose the right keywords to get success with blogging. If you are choosing right keywords then you can make $$$$+ with the only small amount of visitors or can drive huge traffic to your blog from search engines… but your keywords must be perfect for that.

your earnings will depend upon your niche, Keywords & Monetizing methods. So First of all Plan a Strategy then start work according to that… Try & Test everything and Find out What works for you & what not!

In the Beginning, blogging can take some time to give you any output so you should keep patience. Without patience, you can’t be a successful blogger.

Always think long term & focus to learn things. Set small Goals & achieve them… You can earn as much as you want from your Blog…J