Thinking of starting a blog? Wondering how to make money blogging? This blogging tutorial will give you a step-by-step guide to blogging for beginners.
So you’ve heard of many people who make money blogging and are thinking to yourself, I want to start a blog and do what they are doing. But blogging for money is not as easy or simple as it used to be even 5 years ago.
This is because there are too many blogs and too much blog content being generated every day. In 2019, there were over 500 million blogs. Today over 2 million blog posts are being published daily.
Despite the popularity of blogging, only 1 in 4 bloggers report that they get results with their blogs. This is because building traffic and making money blogging is not as easy as starting a blog.
Making money from your blog requires more than just writing a personal blog or even creating good content. It also requires good marketing skills and business acumen.
But if you don’t know anything about creating a blog, this tutorial on blogging for beginners will help you start blogging for money.
Here are 7 steps you must take if you want to make money blogging:
What is a niche and how do you choose one? The definition of a niche is “a specialized segment of the market for a particular kind of product or service.”
Some examples of niches are:
Food
Recipes
Travel
Lifestyle
Business
Finance
Health
Beauty
Fashion
The thing about these niches is that they’re extremely competitive and there are many large, authoritative websites competing for traffic and advertisers in these niches.
The key to success in blogging today is to know how you plan to make money with your blog even before you choose your niche.
Most successful bloggers who start a blog tend to focus on a micro-niche that they not only enjoy creating content for but one in which people actually spend money online.
After all, there’s no use getting a lot of traffic to your mom blog if you cannot make money with it, right? Some examples of micro-niches are given below:
Instead of a food blog, you could start a blog on vegan recipes in India
Instead of becoming a travel blogger, you could niche down and write about pet-friendly travel and hotels
Instead of a beauty blog or fashion blog, you could write about the challenges of sustainable fashion and beauty
Instead of writing financial blogs on all topics, you could niche down to create content on investing for women only
These are some examples of niches that may give you an edge over the competition and help you stand out in the crowded blogosphere.
Another way to set yourself apart is to start a blog in your native languages, such as a Hindi blog, Bangla blog or Telugu blog, as regional language blogs face lower competition.
You’re more likely to make money blogging if you can create excellent content and build a loyal readership in a micro-niche than with writing about everything under the sun.
There are many more blogging platforms today than there were a few years ago. From free blog platforms like a Google Blogger/Blogspot, Medium blog, Tumblr blog, or WordPress.com blog, to paid platforms like Wix and Squarespace.
It may be easy to start a blog for free using one of these blogging platforms. The problem with free blog platforms is that they are difficult to scale, optimize or monetize.
There are a number of reasons why free blogs can be bad for business and why they are not the best way of starting a blog – from lack of customization and lack of ownership to being unable to fully monetize such platforms.
Do you call yourself a fashion blogger on Instagram and believe that your Instagram account is a blog? Well, I’m sorry to burst your bubble. Yes, building a social media presence on Instagram is easier than setting up and managing a blog.
But remember that you don’t own your Instagram blog, and it could get hacked, taken over, or even deleted by Instagram for no reason, as many influencers have experienced in the past.
If all the professional bloggers and experts use self-hosted WordPress as their blogging platform of choice, there’s obviously a reason why they feel WordPress is the best blogging platform to make money.
WordPress not only has some of the most customizable blogger templates and themes, but it is the top content management system today with WordPress sites making up 14.7% of the top 100 websites in the world.
The advice I would give to a new blogger who is serious about starting a blog is to make your own blog and start a WordPress blog, instead of a Wix blog or a Weebly blog.
Once you learn all about WordPress for beginners and overcome the learning curve of setting up and customizing your WordPress blog, you’ll appreciate just how powerful this blogging platform is.
Also watch: WordPress tutorial in Hindi
Another essential skill you must learn as a blogger is creating great content – and this involves not only learning blog writing but also creating multiple forms of content, from long-form blog posts to video content and even podcasts.
Professional bloggers understand that people have different preferences when it comes to consuming content, so all of them not only have blogs but also YouTube channels and podcasts where they showcase multimedia content.
Multi-format content creation is a must-have skill for all bloggers who are serious about blogging for money.
The next essential skill you must learn as a blogger is how to build traffic to your blog because a blog that doesn’t get traffic is like a shopping mall that no one visits.
If you don’t learn traffic-building skills, your blog will never be a success. Building traffic is all about promoting your blog content.
In the blogosphere, there’s a saying that you should be spending 20% of your time on content creation and 80% on content promotion. This is what it will take to build traffic, especially when you first start a blog.
Here are two traffic-building skills that all bloggers must learn:
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of ensuring that your blog content gets ranked highly by search engines like Google. Writing a blog post that can achieve this requires skills such as Keyword Research and SEO Copywriting.
You also need to learn guest blogging skills or how to guest post on other blogs to build links to your own blog.
Learning and practicing SEO takes time and this topic is beyond the scope of this article, but there are some experts and gurus who offer the best information on this subject, including Brian Dean and Neil Patel who offer a Free SEO Course.
Pinterest Marketing
Pinterest is not a social network, but a visual search engine. It is an excellent source of traffic for bloggers and many professional bloggers use it to get hundreds of thousands of visitors a month.
Pinterest marketing also has a learning curve, but if you put some time and effort into learning SEO and Pinterest, you can start building traffic to your blog quickly and effectively.
Once you’ve started blogging, it’s time to build your subscriber list, so you can send your blog updates to subscribers every time you post a new article on your blog.
You can choose to build a list via email or messenger or both, as many people prefer to get notifications via WhatsApp nowadays.
But it’s important to have a list that you can message again and again, so you can also send them offers for products or services you want to sell when you want to make money from your blog.
There are a number of ways to build a subscriber list by using free services and WordPress plugins such as Jetpack, which allows you to create a subscriber box in the sidebar of your blog.
You can even start a free newsletter on sites like Substack which allows you to send out a newsletter with your latest blog updates or promotions.
But the best way to build a list that you can monetize is to offer something free – either a free webinar or a free course that you can use to upsell your readers into a paid offer.
As the saying goes, “The money is in the list,” so having a list is essential for anyone who wants to build a loyal following like other popular blogs.
There are many ways to monetize a blog and I’ll list just a few of them here:
Feature advertising on your blog
Sites like Google Adsense will display contextual ads related to the content on your blog. So when a visitor clicks on their ads, you get paid a small percentage of the advertising revenue.
Besides Adsense, there are many other sites that will pay you for text and banner placements on your blog. The downside of advertising revenue is that it doesn’t pay much and varies depending on the content of your blog.
Another form of advertising that pays better than Adsense is featuring sponsored posts or branded posts on your blog. If you decide to accept sponsored posts on your blog, ensure that you set guidelines and don’t allow advertisers to diminish your content standards.
Affiliate marketing
If you have a blog where you review products or services, you can often earn 10 to 15%, or even more, of the product price by joining an affiliate network or program and adding affiliate links to your blog.
Some of the better affiliate networks include Shareasale, Clickbank and Rakuten, but you can also approach individual advertisers and offer to feature their products for a percentage of the revenue.
Sell your own products or services
If you’re an expert or consultant in any field, or a creative person, such as an artist, author, or photographer, you can sell your own products and services on your blog.
If you’re a freelance writer, you could offer blog writing services. This is one of the most profitable ways of monetizing your blog as you get to keep most of the revenue (minus transaction fees).
Most successful professional bloggers make hundreds of thousands of dollars offering courses and services from their blogs, so this is really where you should aim if you want to become a full-time blogger.
If blogging is more than just a hobby or a side-hustle for you, the ultimate goal of having a blog is usually for the sake of building your personal brand and promoting a business.
Your blog can help you become a thought-leader in your field, get interviewed in the media, get invited to speak at conferences, collaborate with other thought-leaders and open up opportunities that you never thought possible.
If you want to achieve fame and build a powerful personal brand for yourself, becoming a well-known blogger is one way to do it.
Did you find this tutorial on blogging for beginners helpful in showing you how to make money blogging? So start blogging and let us know which blogging tips you found most useful in the comments below.