How to start a successful blog and make money

How to start a blog and make money

Blogging can be a very interesting & lucrative business if done correctly. To become a successful blogger, you must draw the attention of your audience & never do any salesman selling tactics. This article will help you teach the 14 most important & fundamental steps to be a successful blogger & how to start a successful blog and make money.

1) How to start ?

Let’s know how to start a successful blog and make money. There are many people, beginners who begin their blog with a free blog hosting service such as – Blogger. The best thing about starting a blog with a free blog hosting platform is that it allows you to begin blogging immediately without having any advanced knowledge of scripts, hosting, word press, or coding. You can focus on your article & not the internal maintenance of the blog. Also starting a blog with a free blog hosting platform is risk-free in the case your blog is unsuccessful & still, you don’t lose any money as there’s no investment from your end. Blogs are organized in chronological order & your latest blog post is displayed first.

When you slowly gain traffic on your blog page then you can decide to upgrade to your domain & you can make your last blog post by stating that all your blogs have been moved to your very own domain & don’t forget to mention the URL address of your Blog website. Therefore your visitors know where to find your latest & old blogs & you also have your audience & readers intact. So you can upgrade by purchasing your very own domain whenever you need to but only when it’s truly required. This is the 1^st step toward how to start a successful blog and make money.

2) How to start a successful blog and make money/ Discover your Niche

A niche is a targeted product, service, topic & your choice of interest. You should select a niche based on your expertise, a field in which you’ve good knowledge & that field should also be your choice of interest, in which you can enthusiastically write about regularly. You must do proper keyword research service on your area of expertise & that will be your niche. Your niche can be anything & also there should be an audience for your topic & subject matter. It can be a blog about your pet dog or best smartphones, health & wellness, online money-making tips, etc. You can even choose to build an audience for a topic where there’s a very little audience, but you must first build your website & blog. This is the most important step toward how to start a successful blog and make money.

3) How to start a successful blog and make money / Time for you to be a Professional

Now, if you’re confident about your writing skills & have learned how to do proper SEO, both on-page & off-page, then I suggest buying a domain from any good hosting service provider. There are many great hosting service providers available in the market like – Bluehost, GoDaddy, bigrock, HostGator, A2hosting, Hostinger, etc. If someone is on a tight budget & at the same time wants a very good hosting service then I suggest going for Hostinger web hosting. There are various plans for Hostinger & the prices are very reasonable & affordable.

4) How to start a successful blog and make money / Choose a domain name

Now, you’ve to choose a domain name for the blog. Your domain name should be short & easy to remember. Always avoid using numbers & hyphens in a domain name. Always strive to get a domain in the .com zone as .com is the most popular worldwide & also very good for Google ranking. In the worst-case scenario, you can settle with the .co zone. Anything like .net or .biz is an absolute No. Avoid using weirdly spelled or misspelled words just because the keyword you wanted is not available as a domain. Wrong spelling will always confuse people & they will end up on a competitor’s site. People tend to overthink while choosing a domain name. Your domain can be your full name if it’s not a very popular name. Under your name, you can write about anything & you can switch the niche easily whenever you want.

5) How to start a successful blog and make money / Start your Blog now

Now, start a Blog, once you’ve got an idea about your domain name. You can go ahead & register your blog. Just two important things you need to choose when starting a blog.

• One is called a content management system & for this, I highly recommend you to stick with WordPress. It’s the most compatible & suitable for what a blogging website needs.

The second thing to select is a hosting provider. For beginners, the best option is Bluehost. Even WordPress recommends Bluehost. Their plans are very affordable, & they offer 24-hour support through chat. You can even get a free domain name with your hosting package.

6) Theme of your website

The way your blog looks solely depends on your WordPress theme. There are lots of options out there. Some are completely free, & if you want to try a free theme, I would recommend checking out Astra or BAM theme. If you want to start with a premium theme right away, my top recommendation is- “Enigma-parallax” theme because it’s very flexible & user-friendly.

7) Update your Blog page

This is a mandatory step for every aspiring blogger. You should at least post 3 – 4 articles in a week if not daily. Updating your blog daily makes your blog more interesting & intriguing to your reader & subscribers & your website also gets fresh content very often if not daily & it helps your website to get a good ranking on Google & other search engines. If you don’t post fresh & unique articles regularly then your blog website is doomed to be unsuccessful. You’ll lose traffic for sure.

To get good traffic & retain your visitors, you must update your blog with various fresh articles daily or a weekly basis at least. You must schedule a time where you’ll dedicate yourself to your blog each day. It’s better to schedule a set time that you dedicate to your blog each day. You must treat your blog as a career & a serious job if you want to make decent money by blogging & make a living out of it. If you don’t come to the office for weeks then you lose money or at worse, you can lose your job. Similarly, if you don’t update your blog for days & weeks then you lose your subscribers, visitors & traffic. All your hard work will go to waste. Updating your blog page regularly is another vital point for how to start a successful blog and make money.

8) Do SEO of your website

Your SEO title must be 60 – 70 characters long & it must contain your primary keyword. The title has to be a phrase. Yoast SEO plugin is an excellent & very helpful plugin that you can use in Word Press. SEO is of 2 types. On-Page SEO & Off-Page SEO. Both are very important for your website to rank & also the major factor for how to start a successful blog and make money. Here, I’ll say about On-Page SEO.

The most important thing for On-Page SEO is your content. Content is always the King of your article. Your article should’ve anything between 1500 to 3000 words or even 5000 words. The more content you’ve got the better your chance for Google ranking. Your content should’ve value otherwise you can’t rank your website. A blogger should always write unique & fresh content. Don’t copy & paste other’s content because it’s unethical & if you do then Google will penalize your website & then you’ll never be able to rank your website. You must check the plagiarism of your content & the content should be at least 80 % unique.

You should use simple English for your readers to understand. Don’t use passive voice & always use active voice. Write small sentences of 10 – 16 words maximum. You should decorate your entire content into several paragraphs. Try to keep your paragraph only up to 120 – 150 words on each paragraph. Always use “Bullet Points” to mention the steps of your content. It gives a lot of value to your content for SEO. The 1st paragraph of your article must stand with a headline which will get a tag of “H1” & the 2nd paragraph will get a tag of “H2” & so on. Your article should be always grammatically correct & always avoid spelling errors. The punctuation of your article should be correct. No unnecessary color fonts & excessive capitalization should be there in your article.

In your blog, the Keyword is a very important factor for On-Page SEO. Your selected keyword should’ve proper density, placement & proximity. You’ve to use a minimum of 1 % to a maximum of 2.5 % of the keyword ratio. You can use your selected keyword a maximum of 13 times in your content. Heading 1 of your content must contain a primary keyword. The 1st line of the 1st paragraph must contain your primary keyword. Every paragraph must contain at least 1 primary keyword irrespective of its placement sentence.

9) Backlinks for your website

This is a very important factor for how to start a successful blog and make money. This is also Off-Page SEO.

The higher the amount of high-quality relevant backlinks you’ve for your website, the easier it will be for you to beat your competition & rank number 1 for your target keywords. Driving huge & free traffic to your website will be a piece of cake if you know how to build good quality backlinks. There are many people in their YouTube channel who’re talking about “comment backlinks”, “forum backlinks” & “directory submissions”. These are the worst backlinks that you can make. These used to work in 2011 & 2012. But especially in 2021, none of these works & it’ll rather give you a Google penalty. So, please stay away from comment backlinks, or forum backlinks & directory submissions.

So let’s say, you’re targeting an article like “best smartphone in India”. To find the link opportunities, what you’ve to do is 1^st search for your target keyword. Open the article which is ranking number 1 in Google. Copy the URL, open ahrefs, go-to site explorer, add the URL here & click on search. Then this will give you all the related domains that are directed to this particular article. Now, ahrefs is a paid tool & not every one of you can afford it. There’s also a free alternative, which is – “Ubersuggest”.

So let’s learn about ahrefs. This is 1 of the best technique to find backlink opportunities. Now since these websites are already linking to your target article, it’s much easier to email them, or contact this website & ask for a link to your website as well. And also you’ve to make sure that all the links that you’re building are “do-follow”. If you want then you can export this list as well. Here the anchor text is the “best smartphone”. So, whenever you’re looking at a backlink opportunity, you’ve to look at 3 factors.

• 1^st is the domain rank or the domain authority (DR). The higher the domain rank, the quality of the backlink will be much higher.

• 2^nd you’ve to look at the relevancy. Suppose, the article & the backlink should be relevant. So both these metrics are amazing. The domain rank & the relevancy.

• The 3^rd thing that you’ve to look at is the anchor text. Here, the anchor text is “Best Smartphone”. The keyword which is used to make the backlink is the anchor text.

You can check all other referring domains as well. You can open the website here & find the email address. There are multiple domain extensions available to find the email address. Google extension called “email hunter” can be used to find the email address. So all you’ve to do is find the email address of this website, & send them an email stating that you’ve also written a high-quality article & it will be great if they can link back to your article. Since this website is a very high authority website, there’s very least chance that they will reply to your email. Creating backlinks is not easy. Because people think that creating backlinks is a piece of cake, but then again it’s difficult especially in 2021 when a backlink is becoming more like a price commodity.

Be practical & don’t think that you’ll be able to create hundreds of backlinks in few weeks. It requires a lot of time & patience. Some particular software is for sending all the emails – “ninja outreach”, “BuzzStream”, etc. Both of these are paid tools. These are the tools that are used to send email scripts to thousands of people at a time. GMass is another free alternative software &  you can create various campaigns, various templates. So what it does is all you’ve to do is add all the websites & send an email. You can ask them for a link one way or another & a few of them will reply to you. They give the follow-up, sometimes people ask for money, sometimes people ask for a guest writer, sometimes they just give the link just because the article is high quality.

So, the best technique is to look at your competitor’s backlinks & pitch them to get your backlinks. So, whenever you’re building backlinks for your affiliate or blog, the process is to first make a list of your competing domains. People who’re already ranking in Google search engine. Then your next step is to take each domain, add it to the site explorer in ahrefs or Ubersuggest & start emailing them one-by-one. GMass is a very good free tool that you can consider. If you’re using automated software, you can use ninja outreach or BuzzStream. Also, download all the referring domains that are referring to this particular website. Then sort them from no-follow to do-follow. The best kind of backlink is highly relevant to your article & it should come from a high domain website & has a good anchor text.

10) Guest posting

The next technique for how to start a successful blog and make money will be guest posting & here the conversion rate of getting backlinks is comparatively higher. After all, you’re also providing high-quality content to the other person. So it’s a win-win situation for both the people. So to find a guest-posting opportunity, all you’ve to do is enter the niche. Your niche here could be anything. It could be a guitar niche. All of these websites are accepting guest posts. So go from each article by article. You can do this all by yourself or you can outsource it through freelancers. You’ve to go to the website. Click on the contact or the guest post. And you’ll see that they might even have an email address, like -“mike@guitaradventures.com”. Copy it at the contact data, add the name like “Mike” the URL of the website, domain authority, etc.

You must do as comprehensive research as possible & try to find as many opportunities as you can find. So once you’ve done this, all you’ve to do is send them emails for a guest posting page. And in the guest posting page, you’ll be asking them that you want to send a high-quality article on their website & in return you just want a do-follow backlink. So guest posts are highly recommendable for backlinks.

11) Guestographics

Now the next technique is Guestographics. In a guest posting, you’re sending an article to your website. In Guestographics, you’re sending an infographic. So you can create an amazing infographic on your website. There’s a fantastic article by Backlinko.com on how to get backlinks using Guestographics techniques. I highly recommend reading this entire article. It’s an amazing resource. I know it’ll require you to create an amazing infographic but then again, creating backlinks is not that easy. You got to invest some time, energy & money. The technique is all about creating a high-quality infographic& then promoting it, just like you’re reaching out for a guest post. And many of the websites will start giving you backlinks & then they’ll feature your Guestographics on their website.

For the guest post technique, you’ve to write a new article for every website & this is the best part about Guestographic. You can even go one step ahead if you can to create an animatic infographic. Now I know that creating something like this won’t be possible if you don’t have the design background, so you can outsource it and create an amazing animated infographic. So creating backlinks will be much easier if you go one step ahead & create & do the outreach process & send those email scripts & many people will be happy to lend to you.

Similarly, go into “ahrefs.com/blog” & read all the articles as well. They’ve some amazing tricks on how to build high-quality backlinks. And this will improve your SEO game.

There is this 3rd website called “robbierichards.com”. I highly recommend visiting & read all the articles on this website. So these 3 websites, if you’re reading all the articles, are more than enough for you to find all the tactics that work in building backlinks. There are no magic ways to backlinks. I can’t give you a list of websites where you can directly go & sign up to get backlinks. Getting backlinks is a very tiring & slow process.

1. Always, focus on quality, not on quantity. 1 quality & relevant backlink is 100 times powerful than 1,000 low-quality backlinks.
2. Focus more on do-follow backlinks & less on no-follow backlinks. This does not mean that you won’t be building any no-follow backlinks, because even having 100% do-follow backlinks will look shady in the eyes of Google.
3. Have patience. SEO is a marathon & not a sprint. You cannot expect to see results in just a few days, rather, the results will start coming after few months.
4. Don’t only focus on off-page SEO or creating backlinks. You should also focus on on-page SEO. You can write an SEO-friendly article, internal linking & doing SEO.
5. A relevant article for a low-quality website is more valuable than a non-relevant backlink from a high-authority website.
6. Don’t create each & every backlink using the same anchor text. It’s always smart to diversify your anchor texts, throughout your backlinks.
7. Don’t purchase backlinks from any of these services like Fiverr.com or SEOClerks.com. Instead of helping your website, these shady backlinks will instead give you a penalty from Google.
8. You should never make comment backlinks. They’re no-follow & they will not help your website, at all.
9. If you want to be good at link-building, you’ve to invest some money in a good SEO tool. The tool that I recommend is ahrefs.
10. You should also have 20% of your overall backlinks, pointing towards your homepage. It’s all about looking natural and organic. If you’re building all your backlinks to just the articles & not the homepage of your website, this looks shady. So make sure 20% of your backlinks are pointing towards your homepage & the rest 80% are pointing towards the articles.

12) Traffic for your Blog

Traffic is the key resource step toward how to start a successful blog and make money. When your website starts to get traffic & you’ve posted at least 20 articles then you can go for AdSense or media.net approval. But your website should be active & must be 3 months old. Your website should’ve important pages like – “Privacy Policy, Terms & Conditions, Disclosure, About Us, etc”.

After doing all that it’s time for beginner bloggers is to find affiliate products that to promote on your website. You can work with large affiliate networks like Amazon, CJ Affiliate, ShareASale, rewardStyle, WarriorPlus, ClickBank& others. You could even partner directly with some product sellers & it depends on your niche. Some products can cost a few hundreds of dollars & can come with generous affiliate commissions of about 30 & up to 50%. So, you could be making a hundred dollars or more per sale. If your content linked to an affiliate product like this is convincing enough, even with a small traffic volume you’ll be able to make your first $ 1000 on your blog, with good affiliate offers.

When your blog traffic gets to at least 10,000 monthly visitors then you can apply to either Ezoic or Monumetric advertising networks. If you want, you can skip applying to Google Adsense& it’s keeping your site safe from any kind of ban or problems with Google Adsense. When you work with Adsense directly as a new blogger, you can easily do something accidentally that will get your site banned & this will be a dead-end for you to any premium ad networks in the future. Because all of them including Ezoic, Monumetric, Mediavine& AdThrive work with Google as their biggest advertising partner. If your website has a bad history with Adsense, it won’t be accepted to any premium ad networks ever. Therefore, the $10 a month you could make with Adsense on a new blog, is not worth the risk for your domain in the future.

When you get at least 50,000/monthly visitors on your site, you can apply for Mediavine. This is a premium ad management company & you’ll be paid about 10 times more for the same traffic than you could get with AdSense. Keep in mind though that 80% of your audience should come from the USA to be accepted to Mediavine. In this regard, Pinterest can be very helpful because it’s much more popular in the US than in other parts of the world.

Driving Traffic to Your Blog when it comes to getting visitors to your website, I recommend you to focus on 1 platform at a time otherwise you’ll spread too thin & see very low results on all of them. It does depend on your niche of course, but my recommendation for beginners is to start with Pinterest because this platform can give you traffic fast. Pinterest doesn’t work for some niches & in that case, your first option would be Google traffic. You’ll experience your first traffic generate with Pinterest within a few months but with Google, you might need to wait at least 6 months or even a year. With Pinterest, it doesn’t matter if you have an old domain name & what is the domain authority. It works fantastic for almost any niche.

My 2^nd favorite traffic source is Google SEO or Search Engine Optimization for Google. It’s good that Google traffic is more stable but it takes so much more time & effort to make Google SEO work. A brand-new website might need to wait for at least 6 months or even a year before seeing any significant traffic & start ranking in Google. And by waiting it doesn’t mean just starting a blog & doing nothing. It means that you’ll be working hard optimizing your site & writing content optimized for keywords & building backlinks to your website.

The next one after Google comes to YouTube. Probably you realize that Google owns Youtube. So, you can often rank your videos higher than your blog posts for the same keywords because Google gives priority to its platform. Many bloggers start adding display ads from Google Adsense or Media.net because it’s the easiest thing you can do with a new website. Usually, it’s enough to have about 20 posts on your blog & something a lot of people don’t know about. You also need a Privacy Policy page before you apply. But you should even bother applying to Adsense when you have very low traffic because they pay very little for every 1000 visitors. When all your traffic is a couple of hundreds or 1000 visitors a month, you’ll be earning less than $10 a month. It’s not worth sending your paltry audience away for so little money.

13) Have patience & faith in yourself

When you are just starting a blog, it’s often months of work without a single paycheck & it can be frustrating. While building your audience, you can also offer your services on the blog. For example, you could reach out to some established bloggers & offer your services as their content writer, as an editor, a virtual assistant. You could also offer many other services & promote them through your blog – like making voice-over, translations, graphic design, or anything else you are skilled at. The best part about selling your services through your blog is that you don’t pay commissions which is a must if you use freelance sites to find clients. Many beginner bloggers make a chunk of their income by selling their services in the first year or two.

They’re working from home & earning enough to replace their 9-5 jobs. The most amazing thing about blogging is that you can build your career & skyrocket your income to the levels that would take you decades in the corporate world. While it requires some hard work upfront without getting paid from the first month of blogging, but you should never allow your limiting beliefs to stop you from making more money, then you can scale your business fast. Now you’re almost on your way toward how to start a successful blog and make money.

14) Sell your products

Now, how to get to the advanced way of making money from your website. It’s selling your products. You can even sell physical products like – manufacturing, branding, delivery, dealing with returned products, customs, etc. I recommend everyone to sell digital products online. The ROI is usually very high & if you’ve built your blog or website to help you sell your products, you can have a great income without spending anything on paid advertising. You can sell lots of different products that don’t require a lot of support, for example: – EBooks, Printable files like binders, guides & so on. You can sell stock images through your site if you are a photographer. Many bloggers delay creating products for too long until they almost get a burn-out from chasing page views to monetize their site with ads.

Selling an online course is also a very good way to earn money but you should’ve sound knowledge of the field in which you’re selling the particular online courses. Stop doubting yourself & procrastinating. Now you know almost everything about how to start a successful blog and make money. Don’t waste even 1 more day thinking about starting a blog. If you want to start it, just do it & you’ll understand everything along the way. Yesterday was the best time to start your blog. The 2nd best time to start is today & now you know how to start a successful blog and make money & you need to implement the following steps.