How to Start a Blog and Make Money

Are you looking to start a blog but don’t know where to begin? Or maybe you’ve created a blog but aren’t seeing the financial returns you were hoping for? In either case, this post is for you. I’ll walk you through how to start a blog and share some tips on how to make money blogging.

Content

1. What is a Blog?
2. Know the Niche Market You Want to Pursue
3. Build a Website
4. Submit Your Website to Search Engines
5. Set up Google Analytics for Your Website or Blog
6. Brainstorm Some Topics to Write About for Your Blog
7. Do the Keywords Research for Those Topics
8. Write the Content Using those Keywords
9. Post Those Content in Your Blog
10. SEO (Search Engine Optimization) Every Page of the Blog
11. Launch Your Blog
12. Do the Link Building
13. Grow Your Blog
14. Monetize Your Blog

1. What is a Blog?

This question can be difficult to answer because the definition of a blog can vary based on who you ask. It might simply be a website for which people post their thoughts and articles. Others might think of blogs as websites used explicitly for journaling or keeping track of personal opinions and experiences. And still, others might see blogs as being more like online magazines, with multiple contributors and regular posts on specific topics. In reality, these definitions could be correct because there is no one-size-fits-all answer to this question. Essentially, a blog is whatever its creator wants it to be.

2. Know the Niche Market You Want to Pursue

• What topic do you want to write about and share with the world? You can start by knowing what your interests or passions are. On the other hand, you can start from scratch and do the research to write it.
• Do you have the expertise or experience about it? (a) If you can write about where your expertise lies or have lots of experience with it, much better. (b) If you chose a topic that you love but you’re not that very familiar with it, would you be willing to do the research so you can write about it?
• Research if you can earn in that niche market. Is this something that people are interested in? Three niche markets to consider personal development, relationships, and health. You can consider other topics but do your diligence if there are many searches for it every month. How to know? Do keyword research. If the niche market doesn’t have a good search volume every month, you will have a hard time earning and will just do the blog as a hobby.
• Blog niche ideas to write about. Some of the blog niche ideas: entrepreneurship, saving, and budgeting, travel, pets, relationships, parenting, food, health, fitness, etc.

3. Build a Website

Anyone can build a website these days. All you need is an idea and some basic web design skills. It can be overwhelming to try and figure out everything by yourself, but there are plenty of resources available to help you. You can check out my blog post on How to Build your Own Website. I’ll walk you through the basics of creating a website from scratch, such as choosing a domain name and hosting plan, installing WordPress, etc. Let’s get started!

• Choose a name for your new blog. Most of the time, you will use this as your domain name (or URL – this is what you can see on top of the Google browser, e.g., www.startupsfailures.com). It takes time to choose a name for your new blog. Most of the time, the name you can think of has been used already. So, I suggest that you use a combination of your name and what your blog is all about. At the end of the day, it’s not the name that counts but the massive value you offer. Like the name “Apple,” who would think it could be a tech company name?
• Find a Good Web Hosting Company – Bluehost (Recommended). It’s easy to use. Uptime is high, cost-effective, excellent customer service, etc. On top of that, they always have a promotion for their customers!
• Pick a Domain Name and search in Bluehost if it’s available. What is a domain name? A domain name is the location of a website. You can see this in the URL bar of a web browser when you visit a website. Again, the name of your blog is usually the domain name. Now, go to the Bluehost website, and under the main menu that you can see on the upper left, click on the “Domains” link. When you’re on that page, you can input the name that you think of in the search bar and then click the search button. You can see whether the domain name is available or not. Tip! Go for .com and not .net, .org or another top-level domain unless your website is about education (use .edu) or organization (use .org). Also, users or readers usually type .com at the end of a blog name.
• Purchase Web Hosting and Domain. So, what is web hosting? Web hosting is a service that allows individuals or organizations to create and post a website or web page (whether it’s a blog, eCommerce, etc.) onto the Internet. Website contents such as photos, videos, infographics, text, etc., are hosted or stored in the web hosting company’s servers (e.g., Bluehost). When someone wants to view your website or blog, all they need to do to access or view it is to type your website domain name into their web browser (e.g., Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, etc.) URL bar. The web hosting company servers then will connect to their computer, and your blog will be delivered to them through the browser. If the domain name you chose is available, sign up for the Basic Plan in Bluehost. Tip! Go for a 3-year plan to save money because if you choose one year only, you might pay for the regular price after one year, and there might not be a promotion just like right now.
• Install WordPress (your blogging platform). What is WordPress? WordPress is an application or software that you can use to create and publish a website or blog online. It’s a powerful tool to use for eCommerce, blogging, etc. In a technical term, “WordPress (WP, WordPress.org) is a free and open-source content management system (CMS) written in PHP and paired with a MySQL or MariaDB database.” How to install it? You can use this step-by-step guide from Bluehost itself – https://my.bluehost.com/hosting/help/wp_install/track/prorefguy
• Find and install a WordPress theme. What is a WordPress theme? In a simple explanation, a WordPress theme is an overall layout and design that you can see on a website. You can use it to customize the appearance of your website or blog, such as the theme color, design elements, typography, etc.
• Customize your new theme. You can customize your theme if you want to or use the exact theme that is awesome already! It will save you time and effort not to customize at first.

4. Submit Your Website to Search Engines

No matter how beautifully designed your website is and how crafted the contents are, if search engines (Google, Yahoo, etc.) don’t know about it, readers will not find it, so it’s useless, right?

• Reasons to submit your website or blog to search engines. To answer this, we need to understand how a search engine works. Search engine like Google crawls the world wide web with hundreds of billions of web pages using robots (known as crawlers or spiders) and collect, parse and store those data in the search engine index. The search engine index is like a Yellow Page. So, if you submit your website or blog to a search engine like Google, it will be easily known and crawled compared to not submitting it. To make it simple, when you submit your website or blog to a search engine like Google, you can see it in Google search when you Google your website or blog. Of course, there are many other factors to consider for this to happen.
• How to submit your website or blog to Google? To submit your website to Google, you need to submit your sitemap using the Google search console. Google search console is a powerful tool that focuses more on search engines. It provides insights to help site owners improve their visibility and presence in the SERPs.

Verify your site ownership

• Log in to Google Search Console, hit “Sitemaps” on the left menu, paste in your sitemap URL, then hit ‘submit.’
• Log in to your Google account that you will use for your blog or website.
• Go to https://search.google.com/search-console/
• Enter your website’s domain to add a property.
• Under Verify domain ownership via DNS record, click the Copy button to copy the TXT record provided to you by Google.
• Log in to your web hosting company (Bluehost).
• Click on Domains and then scroll down to the TXT portion on the left side.
• Click on Add Record, put “@” under the Host Record, and paste the TXT record provided by Google.
• Lastly, click Save.
• Now, go back to the search console and click on Verify button.
• That’s it!

Submit your sitemaps

• Go to https://search.google.com/search-console/
• On the left side, click on “Sitemaps.”
• Add your site map
• Tips! To get your site map, add sitemap.xml to your domain name – mywebsite.com/sitemap.xml.

• How to submit your website or blog to Yahoo – There is no need to submit your website to other search engines like Yahoo.
• How to check if your website or blog is indexed? To see if a search engine like Google has indexed your site, enter “site:” followed by the URL of your domain. For example, “site:https://startupsfailures.com/” to the Google search bar.

5. Set up Google Analytics for Your Website or Blog

Google Analytics provides data related to those who visit and interact with your website. It focuses more on users than search engines.

Reasons to set up Google Analytics.

• To know who your website’s visitors are. Google Analytics can provide you with how the visitors to your website found you. Without this information, you wouldn’t know whether your visitors come from social media, directly typing your domain name into the Google browser URL bar, clicking on a link into Google search results, etc. So, knowing the visitors who visit your website will help you know which of your efforts are working or not.
• What content do they view on your website? This is a piece of very powerful information. Knowing what content your visitors view or always view on your website, you would know what type of content they want to devour, and you can capitalize on this. You can create more content related to those topics and keep your readers stay longer on your website, and hopefully, they will become a fan.
• How do your readers behave when browsing your site. Just imagine, using Google Analytics, you can track what people do when they’re on your website. You can follow the first page they access, the following pages they view, how long they stay on those pages, and how they exit your website.

These are essential information for the success of your blog. Knowing the first page, your visitors have access to imply that you’ve caught their attention and satisfied what they’re looking for. So, your job is to optimize that page and create more articles related to that page. On the other hand, knowing the pages on your website that are not being viewed would mean you need to improve their content, load time, and market it more.

How to set up Google Analytics? Click here for the step-by-step guide from Google.

6. Brainstorm Some Topics to Write About for Your Blog

After knowing the niche market you want to pursue now, you need to develop some topics to write about for your blog. Depending on your situation (financially, available time, etc.), you might need to write those topics first and give that responsibility to others in the future, or some bloggers do the writing full-time.

Since your blog is new and you just created your website, you can’t ask your audience or readers what they want to learn because you don’t have one yet.

How to come up with blog post ideas? There are many ways to do this, such as:

• Create a mind map. “A mind map is a diagram used to organize information visually. A mind map is hierarchical and shows relationships among pieces of the whole.” For example, if your blog is about cats, making a mind map will include the following: Cats: dislikes (injection, durian, etc.), likes (fish, mice, etc.), sounds (meow, hiss, etc.), physical features (fur, short or long legs, etc.). So, with these, you can already create some blog posts about cats’ dislikes, likes, physical features, etc.
• Create an editorial calendar. Create an editorial calendar for the consistent creation and posting of the blog. What is an editorial calendar? An editorial calendar is a publishing or blog post schedule that you can use to be on top of your content creation for your blog. This is where you can add your ideal topics for your blog and when you will publish it. You can simply do this using an excel file and include these headings: title of the article, description/outline, post date, comments, and distribution targets. You can add more headings according to your needs.

7. Do the Keywords Research for Those Topics

What is keyword research? Keyword research is finding and analyzing the keywords or terms that users use when they search the search engines like Google and Yahoo for content, product, or service.

• Why should you do it? If you’re not using the keywords in your website that users use when they search the search engines, your website or blog will not have a chance to rank for those keywords in Google or Yahoo search results. And if you will not rank on the first page of Google search results, people will not see your website or blog. So, the only chance people will know you have a website or blog is to tell them directly by marketing your website or blog through social media, email marketing, etc. But don’t expect free traffic from Google or Yahoo since people don’t see your website there.
• Come up with seed keywords. What are seed keywords? Seed keywords are general keywords that consist of one or two words. They are relevant to the content that you’re trying to produce. You can grow the list of your keywords for your keyword strategy using seed keywords. For example, coming up with blog post ideas white creating a mind map can be used as seed keywords for your keyword research. You can search for other keywords using the seed keywords cat’s dislikes, cat’s likes, and cat’s physical features.
• What are the tools I can use for keyword research? There are many tools that you can use to do this. But for now, I have shared some of the free tools below. They are free, but it doesn’t mean that it’s less powerful or effective than a premium tool.
• Google Keyword Planner. The Google Keyword Planner tool is a free but powerful resource for building your keyword lists.

How to use Google Keyword Planner

• Log in to your Google email account first.
• Copy-paste this link to the Google browser – https://ads.google.com/home/tools/keyword-planner/
• Click on the “Go to Keyword Planner” button.
• Confirm your business information and click submit
• Then click on Explore Keyword Planner button.
• Click Discover new keywords box on the upper left.
• Change the country where you want to find keywords, delete the country you don’t want to include, and click the save button.
• Just below the start with keywords tab, enter your seed keywords, and press the get results button.
• You can see all the keyword ideas with their average monthly searches, etc.

• Google Trends. Google Trends is a powerful tool from Google that you can use to see the trend or how popular and how often the keywords are used in a given region over time. It’s easy to use; go to https://trends.google.com/, type in the search term or topic you want to know in the search bar, and click enter. You can change the region and time duration to know the statistics about the term or topic. To get more ideas about the keywords you’re searching for, you can also consider the related queries section.
• Google auto-suggest or auto-complete. This is another Google search feature wherein while you’re typing the keywords you’re trying to search in the Google search bar, it will auto-suggest some terms or phrases until you finish typing what you want to know. For example, if you Google “how to start a blog,” you can see the auto-suggest such as how to start a blog post, how to start a blog and make money, and more. These auto-complete keywords or phrases come from how people search. So, if people are searching for those keywords, it only means that there’s a need or problem to satisfy. And you can take advantage of that by using those keywords in your website or blog.

8. Write the Content Using those Keywords

You can begin writing your blog’s content and optimize it through those keywords.

Content is king with regard to the success of your SEO strategy. Your blog post should be well-written and have substantial-quality content. It should be fresh, authoritative, helpful, engaging, and trustworthy.

Remember, when users are engaged for the first 2-3 seconds on the page, they consume more content, interact, and share it. This is one way you can get and maintain traffic to your website and rank higher in search engine results.

To avoid thin content, make it a practice to have at least 1500-2000-word in-depth topic coverage. Narrow content is considered as having little or no value to the user.

• Use keywords in the URL. When you start creating a blog post, the first thing you will do is put a title to that blog post, and that will automatically become the URL and title. But don’t worry; if you don’t like that as your URL, you can change it later to optimize it. Use simple and relevant keywords in the URL of your blog post. This will tell Google and humans what is the blog post all about.
• Use keywords in your blog post title (Title Tag). Each page on your website or blog should have its unique title tag – not a duplicate. The title tag tells search engines what the page is about, which helps it rank better in Google search results. To display the title in Google search results correctly, keep its length under 60 characters to avoid truncation. Don’t overdo your keywords in the title. Google can easily recognize keyword stuffing. Keyword stuffing happens when someone puts excessive keywords into a title to increase their blog post ranking in Google search results.
• Use keywords within the first 200 words. This idea is to emphasize what your blog or article is all about. It will help both your readers and Google bots understand what your blog is all about. Even though you have included your keywords in the URL and title, it’s only logical that your introduction in the blog would be about the title, right? And it makes sense to put your keywords within the first 200 words to avoid confusing Google bots.
• Use keywords in headings (H1, H2, H3). H1-H4 tags are not designed to control the font size in your blog but to help organize the structure of your blog. H1 tag is usually used as a blog title (but it can be different). H1 should only be used once in an article. Imagine putting 2 or 3 H1s in your article, and how would Google bots decide what title to choose from? To avoid this, just use one H1 tag. H2 tags are the sub-heading or main points to elaborate the topic on hand, the title. H3 tags are the sub-points of the H2 tags.
• Insert keywords naturally throughout the content. This means that the keywords’ insertion throughout the content is relevant and that the sentences and paragraphs’ flow is consistent. For example, your blog’s title is Chocolate Donuts from Liza’s Bakery. You can disseminate some of the relevant keywords like chocolate donuts, donuts, baked chocolate doughnuts, double chocolate doughnuts, etc., in the body of your blog. But you can’t just sprinkle your keywords anyhow just for you to use those keywords and expect Google bots to understand it and rank your blog on top of Google search results.
• Use keywords in anchor text links. An anchor text is a text that appears highlighted (usually in blue but can be changed to another color and underlining through HTML code.) in a hypertext link, and that can be clicked to open another page where you can find more information regarding that keyword. Use keywords as anchor text as much as possible. Two types of links: (a) Internal links are hyperlinks or links on a web page to another page or resource, such as an image or document, on the same website or domain. This will help your web pages not stand alone or be recognized by a search engine to be a separate website or web page from the rest of your web pages. Add at least 2-3 internal links per post for higher ranking power (b) External links are links that are meant to take you elsewhere. These are links that will direct you to another specific webpage or website. Recent research found that websites with external links outperformed those without external links. Add at least 2-3 external links to authority sites (popular blogs, .edu, and .gov resources) in every piece of content that you publish.
• Use keywords in image alt-text. Alt text or alternate text describes images to visitors who cannot see them for some reason. It should be relevant and use keywords so that it can be found in search engines. Alt text should not be over 100 characters and should not be missing.

9. Post Those Contents in Your Blog

How to create a blog post or page on your website? To write a blog post or page, sign in to your WordPress Dashboard, go to your WordPress dashboard and click on the Pages » Add New. Then add the title of your page or post and the content of your page or post in the text editor. Click on the Publish button when you’re done editing. Your blog page or post will be published and live on your website!

• Create a compelling title. The first thing your readers will see is the blog post’s title. That’s what brought them into the article in the first place. They clicked a hyperlink or image (with a link to your blog post) posted on social media or other media simply because you got their attention and got interested due to the title. So, spend more time creating that title.
• Add appealing graphics like photos, videos, infographics, etc. These will capture your audience’s attention and provide more life and sound design to your blog post to keep your readers longer in your blog. But primarily, these will help them visualize and understand the topic easily on hand. Tips! Don’t forget to optimize those graphics so the load time of your blog post will not be slow!
• Where to find photos? You can use sites like Unsplash, iStock, or Shutterstock to improve the user experience of your website through those photos. They offer free and premium images.
• What is the ideal number of images or videos to add? It depends on many factors, such as how many you are going to include, how big or heavy the photos or videos are, and whether your blog post’s load time is affected. Another factor is how willing you are to pay for a premium plugin like WP Rocket to make your website load faster (especially if you’re planning to upload more pictures)? Also, how long is the blog post, and what type of blog niche do you have. Many bloggers out there say one image per 150 words; well, I’m thinking, if you have an 8,000-word blog post, that would be around 54 photos! And if you don’t have any premium plugin to speed up the load time of your website, it would be a disaster! So, bottom line, I can’t answer this for you. At the end of the day, you have to consider the many factors I’ve mentioned above and decide wisely.
• Add relevant internal links. Internal links are links from one of your pages to another page on your website of the same domain. Again, this will help your web pages not stand alone or be recognized by a search engine to be a separate website or web page from the rest of your web pages. Also, adding relevant internal links will make your audience stay longer on your blog. You can add at least 2-3 internal links per blog post for higher ranking power.
• Create an Effective Call-to-Action. What is a call-to-action for? A call to action or CTA is the one you want your readers or audience to take after reading your blog or article. It’s usually written in a column of a blog page with a button or hyperlink that indicates Sign Up or View Work.
• Create an opt-in form. What is an opt-in form? An opt-in form is a way you can collect email subscribers from your blog. Upon getting their email address and name, you can add them to your email list. You can contact them through email whenever you have a new blog post, free training, or promotion.

10. SEO (Search Engine Optimization) Every Page of the Blog

What is SEO? SEO or Search Engine Optimization is simply optimizing (to improve efficiency and effectivity) your website or web pages for search engines such as Google and Yahoo.

• What is the importance of it for my blog? When you have an optimized website or web pages for search engines, your will get more traffic from the “free,” “organic,” “editorial,” or “natural” search results on search engines. So, when someone searches in Google using keywords relevant to your blog post, your blog post will rank higher on Google search results for those keywords.
• Should I do it right away upon starting my new blog? Yes! Even though you’re not familiar with SEO yet, there is some basic SEO process that you can implement right away. These are very easy to do but will have a very significant effect on your website regarding SEO.
• How to SEO my blog? Below are the three stages or phases of doing SEO: (a) Technical SEO. This is where you improve your website’s technical aspects, such as the load time speed, sitemap creation, responsive design, etc. (b) On-page SEO. On-page SEO (also known as “on-site SEO”) is where you will optimize the web page content elements like title tags, headings, keywords, images, internal links, etc. (c) Off-page SEO. This is where you will do all the optimization outside the website or web pages, just like link building and relationships building with other relevant blogs.
• Tips! SEO should be done chronologically:
  1. Technical SEO
  2. On-page SEO
  3. Off-page SEO
• It’s great to have a lot of content (on-page SEO) on your website. Still, if that web page’s loading time (technical SEO) is above 5 seconds, potential readers will not wait to see that content, no matter how fresh, authoritative and useful it is!

11. Launch Your Blog

You want to get as much traction as possible for your blog and build momentum. How to launch a blog? Announce the launching of your new blog using different platforms and get readers and subscribers from day one:

• Send the link or URL of your blog to your family and friends. This is a no-brainer. There’s a big difference between zero visiting and reading your blog to 5 or 10 reading it by your family and friends. So, send that link or URL of your blog to them and ask them to share it with others using their Facebook, Instagram, etc.
• Social media: Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, Instagram. Social media like Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, and Instagram have an enormous fan base that you can leverage to drive more traffic to your blog. It can help you spread the word about your blog quickly. Create an account on those social media networks, customize your profile, and connect to those relevant people in your niche. Help them with their pain points or inquiries and be of massive value to them. You can earn their trust, gain credibility in your niche, and generate more traffic to your blog.
• Email blast. Since your blog doesn’t have subscribers yet, you can use your existing email list from your contacts to do an email blast about your new blog. An email blast simply sends a single email message to your entire email list.

12. Do the Link Building

What is link building? In SEO or search engine optimization, link building is simply acquiring quality links (inbound links) from other websites to your website. This will increase the search engine rankings of your web page or website and bring more traffic from search engines like Google.

So, how to build links?

• Easy ways but have little value in search engines like Google. Don’t get me wrong, these are still important, but they have small value concerning SEO.
• Social Bookmarking Sites. Yes, social media sites like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, etc., have high DA or Domain Authority, etc. But the thing is, when you create profiles on these sites, it doesn’t mean that the profile page that you’ve created will have a high DA as well. It makes sense, right? So, even though you will include the link of your website in those social media sites, it has a very low value in the eyes of Google or other search engines. But claiming your brand name on those social media sites would be very beneficial to your website or blog since you will secure the name for your brand. You can use it for marketing your blog and monetization strategies, and use it for your followers to share your blog for a social mention, etc. So, the bottom line is this will improve your online presence and increase the traffic to your website.
• Major Directory Submissions. It means submitting your business details such as name, address, contact information, type of business, etc. To websites such as Yellow Pages and Yelp. If someone is searching those directories, they may find your listing on those directories via a Google search, leading to an increase in traffic to your website or blog.
• Harder Ways but with significant value in search engines like Google. This is where you need to focus your link-building strategy.
• Manual “outreach” link building. This is probably one of the most common types of link-building we’ll perform as an SEO. It involves contacting website owners and bloggers manually and asking them to link to us. Again, we need to give them a reason to link to us. To be successful, we need to contact relevant people. We need to ask an appropriate website if they can provide a mention of our site and provide the URL we want as the link. We can think about our friends, relatives, colleagues, partners, and clients with relevant blogs or sites. All we have to do is ask for a backlink. Ask for in-content links instead of links in the sidebar or footer. We need to give them a compelling reason to link to us (quality content, promo in your service, etc.).
• Guest blogging. Guest blogging or guest posting is creating useful content for another website. This will help you in so many ways, not only to acquire inbound links but also to build relationships and online exposure. Before you write an article, make sure that the website or blog is relevant to your niche or topic. Focus on quality (well-written, professional, and interesting). And lastly, keep in mind that a poor article can bring a bad reputation.
• Natural editorial links. This is the result of manual “outreach” link building and guest blogging. These are the links that we don’t even have to ask for because other website owners editorially give them. This type of link is the Holy Grail for SEOs.

13. Grow Your Blog

How do you go about growing your blog? How to attract more readers and build your audience?

Here are some tips to help you get started.

• Create Content with High Search Volume. Creating content with high search volume will allow you to rank in Google search results and have organic traffic from search engines like Google and Yahoo. To know what keywords to use with high search volume with lower keyword difficulty, you can use Google keyword planner or other tools out there like Ahrefs, SEMrush, etc. It’s tedious to start a blog for a new blogger, especially if you do the keyword research right away. But the earlier you can learn how to do keyword research or SEO in general, the better. On the other hand, if this will hinder you from starting a blog, skip this part first while testing the water.
• Repurpose Content on other Channels. Repurposing content only means using your existing content in your blog post and using it on other channels like YouTube, Medium, LinkedIn, social media, etc. For example, if you have a YouTube channel, you can create a video using your existing article by combining it with pictures, videos, and some texts from your blog post. When you do this, you will find out that you don’t have to or can’t use all the content for the video, especially if your blog post is too long; that’s ok. All you have to do is include the gist of the article in the video.
• Learn SEO the Right Way. You have done some SEO in your blog already, but you can’t just stop there. SEO is a continuous process. Many things to learn, especially if you’re still new to doing it. So, don’t stop learning! Be like a sponge – absorb knowledge or information as much as you can but don’t overdo it and make you quit.
• Regularly Pinning Images on Pinterest. So, what does pinning mean on Pinterest? “Pins are bookmarks that people use to save content they love on Pinterest. … If you have a business account, you can create Pins that link back to your website to share your products and ideas with people on Pinterest. If you see a Pin performing well, you can promote it to Create an ad.” Now, the question is, how many times should you Pin on Pinterest? It depends on some factors, such as how much content you have on your blog, how often you can create Pinterest-ready images, etc. But if you want a number, the recommended minimum is 3 Pins per day or a maximum of 30 Pins per day.
• Publish on LinkedIn Pulse. LinkedIn Pulse is a blogging and publishing platform created by LinkedIn. You can share and publish your content on LinkedIn and leverage their enormous traffic. Aside from getting your content in front of many eyes as possible, you will also build your authority in your niche; in return, you’ll reach a broader audience to your blog.
• Attract Readers from Facebook groups. Facebook groups are a powerful marketing tool to help you attract a new audience to your blog. Not only can you draw a new audience, but you can also highly target the right specific audience. Find the groups where your niche market hangs out and help them with their pain points by answering their questions in the groups. You can include your blog post URL relevant to the topic you’re answering, and one way or another, someone will click the link to your blog and add some traffic to it. By answering questions in Facebook groups, people will learn to appreciate you, trust you, and in return, you’ll become part of a community that hopefully will be a fan of your blog.
• Medium. Medium is another blogging and publishing platform where you can post content, but the great thing about this platform is you don’t have to reach out to the owner or admin of Medium to ask whether they will allow you to post content or not. All you have to do is sign up for their website and post your content right away.
• Answering Questions on Quora. Quora is a well-known discussion forum site where people can ask and answer questions. You can leverage this website by answering or commenting on some questions out there related to your blog niche. You can include the link or URL of your blog where you want the readers to know more about your answer to their inquiry. Doing this will give your blog more exposure, gain authority concerning your niche and increase the traffic to your blog.
• Start Building an Email List. An email list comes from two words, email and list. It’s a list of email addresses that you got from your blog subscribers. Those email addresses can be from other sources, like your contacts’ emails or other businesses you have. The purpose of building an email list is to capture your audience’s contact information so you can send them information directly to their inbox whenever you have a campaign like free tutorials, promotions, online courses, etc. I can’t overemphasize the importance of building an email list because you can’t only use it to engage your audience but also to monetize your blog.
• Guest Posting. Guest Posting or Guest Blogging is writing an article or a blog post as a guest to another person’s blog. This will help you in many ways, like building a good relationship with the blog owner, driving more traffic to your blog, and building high-quality backlinks (in SEO).

14. Monetize Your Blog

If you’re like most entrepreneurs, you probably want to start monetizing your blog as soon as possible. But before you can do that, you need to understand the different ways you can make money from your blog. There are many different ways to monetize a blog, so explore your options and find what works best.

• Affiliate marketing. Affiliate marketing is one of the most popular and easiest methods to monetize your blog. Affiliate means “officially attach or connect (a subsidiary group or a person) to an organization.” So, with affiliate marketing, you will attach or connect your web page or blog post to an organization or company with a ready product that you can sell to earn commissions as high as 90%. Many websites offer this, like ClickBank, Bluehost, etc. At the end of the day, whatever products you’ll provide to that specific web page or blog post should be relevant to its content. For example, if your blog is about fitness blog, research a reliable affiliate website that offers quality products, a great resource like the one that will provide you with a landing page, etc., and a great commissions package.
• Sell Advertising Space. Before selling ad space to advertisers, ensure that you have enough traffic to your website, quality content, and many others. You can do this by searching and asking companies to buy ad space on your website. These ads can be a banner, sponsored content, or a video, and they can be placed on the top, bottom, or sidebar of your website or blog.
• Create and Sell eBooks. What is an eBook, and how does it work? An eBook comes from the two words; electronic (for “e”) and book. So, an eBook is an electronic book. Compared with a traditional book which is printed on paper, an eBook can be downloaded from a website and can be read using a computer, tablet, or mobile phone. You can earn by creating and selling eBooks about your niche market. After completing your eBook, you can sell it through Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing, Lulu, Blurb, etc. There are many benefits of creating and selling eBooks, such as (a) you will become more authoritative or credible in your niche, (b) you’ll provide massive value to your readers and hopefully help them to improve their lives, (c) and of course, you’ll have a passive income.
• Allow Google AdSense to run on your blog. What is Google AdSense? You can see the ads on top, in between, or on the sidebar of the article on a website. It’s one of the easiest ways to earn money blogging, provided that you have good traffic on your website. There are many factors on how to get paid using this strategy, such as “how much traffic you get, what type of content you provide, where your users are located, how you set up your ads, and so on.”
• Sell physical products. Selling physical products in your blog is a more advanced approach. There are many moving parts to consider in making this approach, such as will you outsource it, will you get it from a supplier in your country, or will you sell something that you’ve created? Depending on your answer, you will also need to consider how to manage the inventory properly, come up with a competitive price, ship the product, and hire someone to help you do everything we have mentioned.
• Sell digital products. What is a digital product? A digital product is an intangible resource like online courses, videos, graphics, software, eBooks, etc. You can build your digital products or sell others’ digital products. There are many platforms to sell your digital products, such as Udemy, Teachable, etc. At the same time, you can use your blog and social media to promote your digital products.

Conclusion

When you start a blog, you open yourself up to a world of opportunity. A blog can help you build your personal brand, connect with new people, and learn new things. So, what are you waiting for? Start blogging today!