How To Start A Blog And Make Money In 2022
The Beginner’s Guide to Creating a Successful Blog and Make Money
Do you want to start a blog? Let's Find Out The Best Way To Do It.
Hello Everyone! I am a web developer and a digital marketing expert. Last few years, I have created many websites and blogs for my client on Upwork. Now I want to share my experience of how to start a blog that makes money.
When I was learning how to start a blog, I spent a lot of time finding helpful information online. I was only able to discover it bit by bit on a collection of websites and blogs. To save your time, I’ve been inventing this free step-by-step tutorial to help beginners how to start a blog quickly and easily.
How To Start A Blog Step By Step
- Select A Perfect Niche For Your Blog
- Choose A Domain Name
- Buy A Web Hosting
- Select A Blogging Platform
- Install And Setup WordPress
- Install A Free or A Premium Theme And Some Necessary Plugins
- Customize Theme And Design Your Blog
- Write And Publish Blog Posts Within A Regular Publishing Schedule
- Setup A SEO Plugin To Optimize Your Blog Post
- Connect Your Website or Blog With Google Search Console
- Promote Your Blog To Generate Traffic And Grow Your Blog
- Finally, Make Money From Your Blog(Affiliate Marketing And Email Marketing)
Select A Perfect Niche For Your Blog
The Blog Niche is the specific market topic that you are going to target. When it comes to selecting your blog Niche first, make sure to pick a perfect Niche that you are the most interested in–the one you are highly passionate about, Also make sure that your Niche has enough interest around it. And people search for topics related to your Niche.
Once you select your blog niche, it’s my suggestion that you should validate it. Below is this formula to confirm your Niche for success.
Niche Validation Process for blog Success:
- Check Niche Size.
- Explore Competition and -Competitors.
- Calculate the potential of monetization.
This process will help you to have an exact idea about your niche size, competition, and monetization potential for your blog. If you want to learn more about it, you can check our detailed guide about Niche Validation Process.
Choose A Domain Name
Naming your blog is your brand. It’s how people will remember you and your blog. A registered domain name means your blog’s unique address on the internet. No matter what Niche you prefer. Don’t overthink it. The magic of a brand will build over time. Still, if you feel stuck right now, keep moving forward.
The best way to land a perfect domain name is to start with analyzing. And check the availability of your desired one. Sometimes your desired one will be available or sometimes not. Keep trying your desired domain names until an option you like is available.
You can choose the most popular domain extension like “dot com” it may be country or niche-specific. I really prefer to use “dot com” because it is the most popular, But you can use some other extensions too, like (dot net, dot org)
Buy A Web Hosting
After choosing a perfect domain name, the next step is to select a reliable and fast hosting for your blog. A wrong hosting can cause many problems, which can cause a lot of bad experiences for your visitors.
The functionality and performance will rely upon your blog hosting.
The hosting service ensures your blog is accessible every minute of every day to potential readers. And it’s the place where your files and documents are stored online.
Most hosting companies will also provide you with a free domain for one year when you buy their service. And you can renew after the first year becomes expire.
Based, on my study and information available on the official WordPress website, also the opinion of many blogging experts, I have made a list of the top web hosting providers:
Nowadays cloud hosting is being popular day by day, so you can go within a cloud hosting for your hosting service. Most of the popular hosting companies and some big names provide this service like Google And Microsoft etc
Select A Blogging Platform
There are a lot of popular blogging platforms that you can use. I recommend you build your blog using the most common WordPress blog setup that I want to share in this tutorial.
Selecting blogging platforms (WordPress is currently the most popular blog platform in this category), you may have a few more alternatives to decide on.
Below are the usage stats showing the distribution of the blog platform worldwide.
I think this graph will help you to decide which blogging platform is best for you. If you want to know more about the blogging platform? Read More…
Install And Setup WordPress
Most hosting service provider gives you the freedom of one-click installation via their dashboard, where you will have to put some credentials such as blog name, database name, WP-admin name, password, and a theme to select for your blog.
There are plenty of attractive free WordPress themes to choose from, including free blog themes, such as Astra, OceanWP, Hestia, etc.
However, if you want to select your theme later, you can skip this step for now by clicking on the (Skip This Step) option at the end of the page.
After that, you will direct to a page where you need to click on the (Start Building) option.
Now you need to click the start building option, and it will take less than a minute to complete the installation and take you to the dashboard of your WordPress Blog.
From the dashboard, you can set up all the necessary things, such as install a new theme and plugin, customize a theme, set up widgets, create menus, set up the navigation bar, set up the footer, insert your site logo, set up permalink, set up your site home page and blog page.
Install A Free or A Premium Theme And Some Necessary Plugins
Install a Theme:
You have a WordPress Blog website now. The next step is to give your site a professional look. Pick a free WordPress theme or buy a premium theme to install. There are plenty of marketplaces (Envato Market, Elegant Themes, StudioPress, MOJO Marketplace) where you can buy a premium theme.
Within some best website recommendations and real-time experience, I have given the top 10 best free and premium themes listed below:
10 Best Free WordPress Themes:
10 Best Premium WordPress Themes:
So, it’s time to talk about the installation process of a theme. Just go site dashboard and click appearance, then click the “Add New” button. You will find two options to install a theme. Search a Theme to install or upload a theme file you downloaded earlier.
Tips For Choosing the Best Theme:
- Read the theme description to know about its features and functionality, which will give you an idea of whether it will match your requirements or not.
- Check the reviews and user ratings to get an idea about their support and update.
- Before installing a theme, make sure is it responsive or not, and also check all the demo or live previews to know what it is going to look and like.
Install Some Plugins:
You can install any plugin from your blog dashboard. To install a plugin, you can follow this step:
Go to your blog dashboard, click Plugins, click the ‘add new’ button, type a plugin name into the search box, and press enter. Click the install button of your desired plugin. You can upload a plugin also that you downloaded earlier.
Here I have created a list of plugins that every blog website must have:
1. Classic Editor:
The Latest WordPress version comes with the new Gutenberg editor. Some people might have some issues with it. If you have enough knowledge about it, you can stay within it. If not, you should go within the classic editor. It’s free to use.
2. Elementor Website Builder
Elementor Website Builder is the best plugin to build a WordPress website or blog via drag and drop. I used this plugin to create my blog website.
They offer you the both ‘Free’ and ‘Paid” plan. You can use the free version to build your blog, but the pro version takes it to the next level with more extra features like template modules, etc.
Pricing:
You can use it for free. If you need more advanced options, you can also access one of its premium versions, which starts from $49 to $199 a year.
3. JetPack
When you are concerned about WP Security, Backup, Speed, and Growth for your website, JetPack is the best solution for all of these tasks. It comes with various security features such as malware and spam protection, backup, and activity logs.
JetPack gives you a faster page load. Shorter load times can lead to happier readers, and more page views, which is very important to a website owner
Pricing:
You can use it for free. If you need more advanced options, you can also access one of its premium versions which starts from $9 to $99 monthly.
4. Rank Math SEO
To rank higher in google search engines, you need to beat the competition. You will need a better, faster, and stronger website than the people who do the same kinds of things as you.
Rank Math SEO can give you a faster, better, and stronger website, as it has served more than 1+ million website owners.
Rank Math SEO is the best SEO plugin for a WordPress website to rank higher on google rank. The 1 million active installations tell you its popularity of it. The 4.9-star rating on more than 4900 reviews tells you about its status.
The free version contains everything to manage your SEO, and the premium version and its extension unlock even more tools and functionality.
Pricing:
You can use it for free. If you need more advanced options, you can also access one of its premium versions for $59 yearly.
WPForms is the most powerful drag & drop contact form builder plugin for WordPress. Even if you are a novice WordPress user, you can create a contact form using one of the many pre-built WordPress form templates.
WPForms plugin comes out within all of the fields and features required to create your desired form.
WPForms also includes several types of functional add-ons. You can implement smart CAPTCHA and honeypot techniques for fighting spam and allow for multi-page form creation.
Within WPForms Plugin, you can:
- Use the drag and drop form builder to create a form instantly
- Use instant notification feature for making fast responses to encouraging leads, etc.
Pricing:
You can use it for free. If you need more advanced options, you can also access one of its premium versions which starts from $79 to $599 yearly.
6. WP Super Cache
WP Super Cache generates static HTML files from your WordPress blog. Your web server will serve the generated html file rather than processing the relatively more complex and heavier WordPress PHP scripts.
Within this WP Super Cache plugin, you can instantly boost your website’s baseline speed.
This WP Super Cache plugin is essential for all site owners to increase their site speed and enjoy all of the benefits that come with it.
Pricing:
You can use it for free means absolutely free. If you want to know more about this plugin, please click on this link
7. Smush
The Smush plugin is really cool when you need to optimize your website images, turn on lazy load, resize, compress & improve Google Page Speed.
Smush has been tested number one for speed and quality. And also the award-winning, back-to-back proven crowd favorite image optimization & image compression plugin for WordPress.
This plugin also gives you a lot of cool features such as:
- Lossless Compression
- Lazy Load
- Image Resizing
- Incorrect Size Image Detection
- Directory Smush
- Automated Optimization
- Bulk Smush
- Gutenberg Block Integration
- Multisite Compatible
- Process All Your Files
This image optimization plugin gives you a lot of easy ways to optimize images and gives your site a super-fast loading experience for your audience.
Pricing: You can use the free version. It also offers a premium version which you can use monthly or yearly.
The monthly subscription will charge you from $6 to $19.
And the yearly subscription will charge you $60 to $190.
8. Google Analytics Dashboard
This plugin is valuable to grow website traffic and sales when you know exactly how people find and use your website. It shows you all the stats that matter to grow your business with confidence.
There are a lot of plugins that you can use.
But I would like to use that one which is powered by MonsterInsights.
It makes analytics easy and your site performance at a glance right in your WordPress dashboard, without needing to edit any code. So you don’t need to navigate away from your WordPress site to see Google Analytics data.
From your WordPress dashboard, you can monitor your:
- Page view over time
- Top posts and pages
- Top traffic sources
- Top countries
- Important conversion stats
- Ecommerce analytics
- And so much more!
Everything you need to make data-driven decisions to help grow your site, all in one place.
Pricing: You can use it for free or a premium version with more features which can cost you $199 to $799.
Customize The Theme And Design Your Blog
Let’s go to customize the theme and design our blog. Before that, I need to access the WordPress dashboard. WordPress dashboard is the back-end area where you will manage your blog. It presents you with fast access to all of the tools you need to add content and fine-tune your blog functionality for the ultimate user experience. Your primary step towards mastering WordPress is learning the dashboard.
WordPress has extensive customization opportunities that you can try. And it is also difficult to cover all the changes in this guide. But I will try to cover most of the things you should try in your blog.
In the very beginning, I am going to make some general customizations. That includes: uploading the logo you just created (or I will do it in the future via Canva), editing the blog title and tagline, changing colors, uploading the background image, and making homepage settings changes.
I am going to use The 7 Theme to design our blog. I will show you how to apply these changes to this theme. You can choose any theme to create your blog. If you have picked another, all the processes might not be the same. Although, in most cases, all the Themes have related customization options.
Write And Publish Blog Posts Within A Regular Publishing Schedule
In this, how to start a blog tutorial one of the most important parts is, that you need to publish a blog post regularly, like daily, weekly or monthly. All the successful bloggers publish at least 2 posts weekly. Now you should learn how to write a good blog post step by step:
There I will discuss some essential tips for writing a good blog post, that actually gets noticed and read!
- Find out a low-competition and high-interest topic
- Write an outstanding title for your post
- Hook your readers with the opening paragraph
- Use videos and compelling images
- Get structure and word count right
- Setup SEO to optimize your blog post
- Promote your blog post
- Share your blog post on the social media platform
Setup A SEO Plugin To Optimize Your Blog Post
Nowadays SEO is incredibly important to small business owners, content writers, bloggers, and also marketers when they are looking to optimize their websites- including the blogposts – it means they are making their website more visible to these people who are using a search engine to find their desired service or product. SEO will help their business to rank on search engines organically.
There are some important SEO tips that everyone should consider to wring website content, service, or product description:
- Use number and power-word in your content or blog post title
- Use at least one or two long-tail keyword
- Use the focus keyword in the content title
- Check keyword density level
- Optimize the meta description
- Include image alt text
- Use user-friendly URL
- Create an internal link to related content or blog post
Now I am going to share a list of some best SEO plugins and tools that you should use. Some of these plugins and tools offer similar functionalities, so we will also emphasize which one is the best and how to set it up perfectly.
Rank Math SEO
Let me explain why I would like to suggest Rank Math over the rest of all SEO plugins for a website or blog.
Since its launch, Rank Math has been growing incredibly fast and retains over 1+ million active users in just four years.
The number of features that Rank Math has is more than all the others SEO plugins, particularly when comparing the free versions of both plugins. But, it is important to mention that having extra features doesn’t necessarily mean you will employ them on your blog or website.
If anyone wants to go within a pro version from one of these plugins, I suggest you, go within the Rank Math Pro version, because it has the best pricing plan that other plugin doesn’t have.
I have listed some important features of the Rank Math free and pro versions.
Free Version:
- SEO titles/meta descriptions Setup
- Focus keyword analysis
- Free Content AI Credits
- Google Analytics Integration.
- Social Media Descriptions
- Create XML Sitemap
- Structured Schema
- Local SEO Setup
- Image SEO Setup
- Internal Link Suggestions
- Breadcrumb Setup
- Redirections
- 404 Monitor
- WooCommerce SEO Setup
Pro Version:
- Advanced Google Analytics Integration
- Keyword Rank Tracker
- Tracked Top 5 Wining Keywords
- Position History for Keywords & Posts
- More Content AI Credits
- Advanced Schema Generator
- Import Schema From Any Website
- Custom Scheme Builder
- Validate Schema With Google
- Advanced Image SEO
- Google Trends Integration
- Google News SEO Sitemap
- Google Video SEO Sitemap
- Advanced Local SEO with Multi Locations