I want to talk to you guys about how you can start a blog and start earning money in 2020.. So I have a blog. I started about. A year ago, uh that’s been making around four thousand dollars in pretty passive income per month, usd which is around 6 000 australian dollars. So in today’s article I want to you know: go through with you guys with about like seven or so steps encompassing how this is possible and using my experience over the last year in growing a blog talking to you guys about how you can start your own Blog, so a blog is a really good way to make money.
I’ve been trying to make money with youtube for a while, and it’s pennies, like you, make pennies per thousand people that you get to read a article, but with a blog you can make up to like 20 30 40 50 per thousand people. You can get to the blog, which is quite amazing, in contrast to youtube, which is only a couple of bucks with blogging. It has such a high monetization value. Okay, so step number one is picking a niche.
Now everyone says you got to pick a niche with blogging, it’s probably a good idea, and it’s definitely a preferable idea to pick some kind of topic that you want to talk about in in the blog. My whole idea about starting a blog is so that you can make money from what you love and that’s what i’ve done for myself in cycling. I have a cycling blog, but it’s much more niche than just cycling. For example, like you want to pick something like urban commuting or bike commuting, instead of just cycling i’ll get into a bit later about picking a name and stuff and hey you don’t want to pick a name, that’s too niche as well, because it’ll sort of narrow You down into a specific topic: if you want to grow later on and talk about other aspects of cycling, for example, then you know you can do that, but when we’re picking a niche, you want to start off writing about something.
That’s that’s very specific to a particular person, and you want to help answer their questions that they may have so, for example, some really profitable niches. If you’re wanting to get into making money it being more important than the niche topic. If that makes sense, then health wealth, those kind of topics around how to make money dieting working out all that kind of stuff, it’s very popular and one could say saturated, but that’s where you got to find a specific niche.
You want to service a specific type of person, so, for example, if you’re in like a cooking niche or something like that, you want to pick something. That’s like recipes for parents or something like that or recipes for couples without children or something even more specific, like that, you know what I mean now I don’t recommend a cooking blog or a recipe blog as your first blog i’m starting up one for myself, but I have previous experience building up other blogs, but you know if you love cooking, why not give it a crack and see how you go the way to get traffic? That way is probably through pinterest and youtube instead of trying to rank number one on google, because it’s very competitive and that’s where you need to weigh up the competitiveness aspects as well.
So, in order to do that, but also first, I should mention that i’ve just got some notes here. Some other niche ideas like home, decor, parenting, diets, diy gardening and i’ve got a list here of some other ones. You can just google something like um blog topic. Ideas or or blog niche ideas – and you got like um golf disc golf – you know how to train for a triathlon marriage advice, uh ghost hunting.
There’s you know whatever you are passionate about. You choose that well before you choose, it, consider its popularity and how we do that. We go over to something like google trends and you want to type in something like bike commuting, which is what I have here and, as you guys, can see. I’ll probably choose a different one here, let’s do ghost hunting. I just want to do that. One that would be very, very cool.
Did the supernatural stuff, as you guys, can see ghost hunting it’s very popular, so this is over um worldwide for the last 12 months and, as you can see like you want to try and aim for a topic that is over 50 over 50 there. The number 50., so you want anything over that. That indicates that it’s got higher search volume and, as you can see, this is very consistent and then you want to also go through to the last five years and see what it’s been like.
So look at that. How consistent that is! That’s that’s a really good niche to get into you know looking at those numbers and how good that is, it’s probably going to be competitive as well, so you want to which is what we’ll get to next. You want to do keyword, research and find keywords that are underserved and and what people uh or other bloggers aren’t writing about or they’re, not writing that much about and that’s where you can get in start ranking and start building up the blog and getting traffic.
That way, so step number two is picking a name for the blog and also your domain name, your com. So you want to pick something like I was saying earlier. That is not too specific to your niche, so, instead of doing so, for example like let’s talk about gardening, so let’s say you want to start writing articles about butterfly gardens which are planting flowers, that butterflies will love. So it’s creating a garden for butterflies.
You don’t want to like choose butterflygardens.Com, because if you want to broaden out and you’ve already, you know written a lot of content around butterfly gardens and you can’t really push that niche any further down the track. Then you don’t want to be stuck to just butterfly gardens. You want to do something you know create a name. That’s encompassing of just gardening in general would be my advice.
So then you can broaden out to container gardening. You can do water gardens organic gardening. You know fruit and veggie, gardens and stuff, like that. You can broaden out even further down the track. So pick a name, that’s a lot broader than what the niche is initially. If that makes sense, so you want to choose something like gardening, addict.Com or letsgarden.Com. You know something that’s just a lot more broader in the aspect of the whole niche.
Okay, so step number three is to set up the blog, so once you’ve got your name of the blog and the domain name, you’ve brought that I recommend going to somewhere like godaddy.Com or something like that to buy your domain name, it’s fairly, cheap to set up And get started with essentially hosting is is like rent space online for your domain name. I use hostgator.Com uh bluehost is very popular amongst bloggers.
Go to one of those two places set up hosting there’s a lot of like how-to articles on youtube about how to set up a wordpress blog um and get it you know set up through hosting and stuff like that. I recommend wordpress as a blogging platform to get started with um. You can do uh. I think it’s squarespace and wix they’re, more of like aesthetic sort of blogs that are sort of just have a couple of pages I found wordpress is great.
If you’re wanting to put out a heap of content and add value to the community, you want to build around your niche, so that encompasses a lot of blog posts. I have over 200 blog articles on my blog uh, so wordpress is great, for you know putting out a heap of content like that, so yeah just go to youtube type in like um how to set up a wordpress, blog and hosting and then follow. There’s heaps of tutorials online, where you can learn how to do that? Okay, so now you have your blog set up.
What you want to do is pick a theme for your blog, so this is going to this is going to entail what your blog is going to look like, and it’s pretty important, but it’s not it’s not something to get stuck on or get too carried away On uh, you want something: that’s simple, preferably pretty fast, although I don’t really care too much. If, if the blog speed isn’t that fast uh, a lot of people would disagree with me um, but I really think just you know.
Content is more important. That’s what you really want to focus on when you, when you’re starting a blog, is just the content which is next we’ll get to that next. But what you want to do is create a theme, so there’s a lot of free themes on wordpress. If you go to the themes dashboard there, you can scroll through and have a look and and see all the options that I have and see what tickles you fancy what you like there.
I personally have a paid theme, although I did get the free version that I liked and then i’m like uh, I might buy the pro version because it had a few extra features. The theme I have is called boston pro, which is what I use for my blog. It’s a pretty nice looking theme, I really like it, but there is you know many other options like divi themes. Uh is also recommended from a lot of bloggers. What I would recommend is get started with a free blog, you don’t want to.
You know, spend money uh in the beginning stages of your blog. First, you want to get the traffic start earning income and then once you’re making money. You can then start to invest that into a nice new theme and making the blog look much better. Okay, so step number five is probably the most important step and that’s creating content. But before you get carried away and start writing about your day or sharing like something great that happened today, you’re in your life, you want to avoid creating that type of content.
If you want to start ranking on google and getting traffic to your website, so i’m going to give you a couple of strategies that you can use a couple of keyword, research tools that you can use to start figuring out. What type of things to write about in your niche, but you want to create content or blog posts around what people are actually searching for on google now over 80 to 90 of my traffic comes from google seo.
If you don’t know what that is, it’s just search engine optimization, so it is essentially what happens when someone types in a query to google and you are ranking right up there in number one position, which is the goal, which is where you want to be so Uh, I have one article I wrote that gets over 10 000 page views per month and it’s a simple list post like the best uh 10 bikes. Something like that.
You know what I mean and it ranks near the top and it gets over. 10, 000 page views also on a second note that they’re really good type of blog posts i’ll get into that a bit later, but um. The best of sort of posts do really well for me, like best this best product in your niche and listing 10 products. Talking about them, then that’s also how you make affiliate income as well suggesting good products that people can buy, which is what i’ll get into very shortly as well.
But essentially you want to create content around what people are searching for so think about what problems are people going to have in this niche? You know what I mean like you’re, hopefully choosing this niche because you’re passionate about it and you know a lot about it or you know enough about it to create some content right, so think about what you, maybe when you were just getting into this niche, what You were searching for in the beginning stages, maybe check your search history and see like what things you were trying to search back.
Then that’s really cool sort of indication you want to sort of get into the shoes or where the hat of your potential audience potential. Customer you want to you want to think how they think and try and understand, like what their search behavior is on google. So some keyword tools, I recommend, is keywords everywhere. This is like a google chrome add-on thing where you can install it and whenever you search something on google, it will show you how many searches it gets a month which is not accurate, but it’s a good indication.
I wouldn’t solely use that as a gauge, because i’ve written, like I said, a blog post against 10 000 page views a month and when I typed in that keyword, it got a couple of thousand page views a month. It said in the search bar and keywords everywhere, but it gets like five times that. So just keep that in mind. It’s not that accurate. Then you can also use something like ahrefs, which is what I highly recommend.
It is a costly keyword tool. Have that in mind, maybe it’s a good idea to get that later later on down the track when you’re starting to make money from your blog, you can also use something like uh, the pinterest search, so you can go into pinterest, but what I recommend getting started With is just using google, because google wants people to find content right and it wants to help them in that aspect.
So if you type in your niche topic, so for example, you choose, let’s go with butterfly garden, okay, so just for example, let’s go to google and type in something like so, if you just type in butterfly gardening and press space. Now I have keywords everywhere installed and, as you can see on the left side here, you’ve got like a search volume indication so right here. This could be a good article right here, like butterfly gardening gloves, so you can type you can create an article like the best butterfly gardening gloves.
Do a list of the top 10 talk about like how they’re the best, and then you can link to the product on amazon and get amazon affiliates set up where you can make commissions from each time someone buys and if you’re ranking number one in google. For this keyword, i’m going to get into this a bit later on, but there is a sandbox period when you’re starting a blog and it takes a bit of time to get started but, for example, like um.
This is just one example of keyword. Research now uh the course I took for blogging at income school project 24. They show you some much more in-depth strategies towards how you can do keyword. Research like this, using just google, which is completely free, uh the course isn’t free, of course, but the strategy is free, which is what I highly recommend. If you want to check out that course it’s linked down below.
I am an affiliate, so I get a commission from that, but there is some really in-depth sort of keyword. Research strategies in that course that are really amazing is what I just used for doing my blog and it’s giving me really good results. But let’s blog articles – and this is what I recommend when starting out when creating content – is to create blog posts around very specific questions – uh, that not many people are trading articles about so, for example, what are the best plants for butterfly gardening? That’s that could be, you know pretty popular uh blog topic.
If you know what I mean, is it good to have butterflies in your garden? What is the purpose of a butterfly garden that could be a good blog post right there, so you can write a blog post about that now, obviously you’re going to have competition, so you need to weigh up whether or not you can rank for this or not. If you know what I mean so yeah, you want to do keyword, research, that’s just one strategy and it goes a lot more in depth.
That could be a completely whole different article, but you want to figure out what people are searching for, create blog posts about that start, ranking on google – and I must say this is going to be step number six create more content. You want to also promote your content, and the whole idea here is just to get more traffic, but my main emphasis on in this article, with starting a blog, is just to create more content.
You need to just create, create, create, create, create can’t emphasize that enough. When I first started off my blog uh, the first two months I barely got out, I think it was 10 articles. Uh it’d be great to see. You know if you’re starting a blog to get out like 30 plus articles over two months or even 60 articles. Just write an article a day really commit in the early stages of your blog. That was a mistake that I made.
I didn’t write enough articles early on because there is this sandbox period, like I mentioned earlier in google, where google doesn’t trust you, yet it doesn’t know what you’re all about. So if you can create a heap of content, it starts to give google this idea that oh, it’s we’ve got a serious blogger here and they’re adding value. Let’s start ranking their stuff, normally takes six to eight months.
I found around eight months before you can start seeing any results on your blog traffic specific results, so you need to be prepared for that half a year to eight month period of nothing. You know what I mean like you’re, not going to see much traffic at all, because it takes that long for google to start trusting you and for your articles to start ranking in google. Now you can sort of speed up this process if you like, not recommended.
If you want a long-term traffic sort of generating strategy, you can use the likes of social media like facebook and instagram, but really those platforms are starting not to work as much because they’re wanting their audiences to stay on their platforms so linking out to your blog, They don’t like that and they’re sort of cutting down on it, which is you know, not great, but I would recommend pinterest is almost a mix between a search engine and a social platform, so you can go to pinterest and if you’re, in those blogs that are Like diy home, decor recipes those sort of blogs uh those sort of niches work really well with pinterest, so you can start putting out pinterest pins.
That’s where a lot of bloggers get most of their traffic from is just pinterest. I’r not sure if I recommend it. I would probably recommend the longer term strategy, which is google search once you get something to rank in google. Google is a monster right, so everyone searches something on google. It’s like the number one place to go to find something out. So if you can get up there number one for a keyword, you’re going to stay there for a very long time and that’s the goal once you get ranked up the top, it’s a long term play where you’re just going to get this certain amount of traffic Month after month, it might dip and might get more traffic each month, but it’s going to be consistent and that’s where you’re going to get your passive income, because if you’re ranking there in google, the passive income comes in month month after month.
You know what I mean, so that’s the strategy right there is to go for the google seo and ranking number one on google. Also I didn’t mention but youtube as well. Youtube I found is pretty good um. It’s all it’s like a visual search of google. If you know what I mean and then also you can uh, if you do youtube articles, you can get them to rank in. You know right up there in the google search as well, which is also good, so youtube, google and pinterest is what I would focus on the most when you’re starting off your blog um.
If your blog is in that those those niches that work well with pinterest, not every niche works in pinterest, but you know like the home decor and lifestyle blogs and all that kind of stuff does really well so have that in mind. But if you’re starting a blog, just write content, you need to write content that people need help. People in your niche be a service to others. Uh, you know just add value, and that is how you’re going to get the traffic trust me.
That is how it works. Okay, so step number seven is to start making money from your blog. This is where it gets exciting. So it’s going to take a few months before you start seeing any income at all. I think it took me I i’m guessing here, but maybe four five, maybe four or five months before I started seeing my first couple of dollars coming in. Yes, it’s a long term game right. It’s not get rich overnight.
It’s going to take some time if you’re in it, for the long haul you’re going to be successful. Trust me not to give up. Okay, like you need to be committed to this. If it’s your passion right, you’re, writing about what you enjoy. It’s probably not going to feel like work right and you’re, going to have more energy to keep going and keep plugging away to create content. So also on the content. You want to try and set a goal for 100 plus articles on your website before you can start to expect any money.
To be honest with my blog, I had 180 articles on there before I started to see that 4 000 a month. If you can manage to write 180 articles in a couple of months, you’re not going to expect to make four thousand dollars, you know what I mean the next month. It takes a few months half a year or so before your articles start ranking. And if you do the keyword, research correctly and you’re targeting keywords that people are searching for that isn’t very competitive and you’re finding those cracks, then you can, you know, expect to see some pretty awesome results.
But when it comes to making money, I make money from my blog in two ways at the moment: it’s through ads and it’s through affiliate commissions, which is what I was touching on a bit earlier. So ads number one. I wouldn’t recommend using google adsense in the beginning stages because it’s just pennies on the dollar and it’s really not worth it. In my opinion, in the beginning stages you blog you’re not going to get much traffic and using adsense to monetize it.
They don’t pay. You much in the beginning anyway, even if you have a lot of traffic, so it’s just going to be sense, really not worth it. You wan na wait until you get 25 sessions a month. I don’t know what that is in page views, but 25 sessions. You want to try and get to that goals, try and set that as your first goal for traffic. So then you can start to put ads on your site and then you want to reach out to someone like mediavine and agency, like company, that puts ads on your website and they pay you pretty good money.
For you know each thousand sessions you get to your website so try and aim for 25 sessions in the beginning, and then once you hit 100 000 page views, you might want to change over to add thrive or just stick with mediavine. I use add thrive for my website because I get over a hundred thousand page views per month and it’s pretty good money, i’m making around twenty dollars per thousand people I get to the website or thousand page views I get to the website.
So just from ads. My website makes around you know: 2 000 us dollars a month with the 100 000 page views that it gets now. I’ve heard people making 30 plus per thousand page views, which is incredible now in the early stages of setting up your add thrive, account or mediavine account the rpms or the earnings per thousand, aren’t going to be the greatest they’re going to take a bit of time. For you again to find that rhythm and stuff like that, but once you um get going like i’ve been on anthra for just under or just over a month, so i’m still seeing that you know early stage period of rpm growth over time.
So that’s a passive way to make the money. So once you write the articles, you can sit back and just collect ad earnings month after month. If you’re, you know getting enough traffic in which is great and then you have affiliate commissions, and then you also have selling your own products, which are all sort of a passive way to make money. Once you do the work it kind of keeps coming in and then you can also do sponsored blog posts as well, which is you know, takes some work to do.
Um, it’s not as passive. I don’t do that. I don’t even sell my own products, yet I just do affiliate as well as the ads so with affiliate. You want to, like I said, before, write articles about the best 10 butterfly garden, gloves list the 10 gloves write about them, then link to them. You can use amazon affiliates, they just cut their commissions right down in pretty much half, so you make half the commissions that you did, which is terrible, but i’m still on amazon associates, and I still do that.
It’s not as much you might want to reach out to brands that are selling the products and you want to go to their website and look right down the bottom, and sometimes I have an affiliate link down the bottom. Then you want to reach out to them and and sign up to their affiliate program. If they have it now, some don’t you might want to just like search brand and then affiliate program in google and see if they have it.
That way, it’s hard to find it takes a bit of working out to find if they have an affiliate program if you’re liking an outdoors niche or something like that dot com has an affiliate rei for me is where I make a lot of my commissions, and It’s almost like four or five percent, so, for example, if you sell a bike for over a thousand dollars, you know that’s some pretty good commissions there. So that’s just an example, but you can also go into like share a sale commission junction and those these other things.
I’ve never used them. Some bloggers do, but you know I don’t really use them. I use event link, which is that’s actually. What you guys should check out is event link. This is where rei is set up with so they’re like the middleman between the online seller and you as the content creator. So they sit in the middle there and they join up to a lot of online retailers. And then you can search their in-depth collection that they have there and find whatever brand you’re looking for and if they’re on there they’ll be on there.
So that’s also another way. I definitely recommend checking that out. But then again you can sell your own products once you start getting traffic into your website, which is also good. You know, create your own ebook and course, and do that kind of stuff, which is what i’m working on with my blog at the moment. I want to create a a book and a course to help my audience a lot more in depth, so that’s also something else to think about and then, if you’re, if it is a digital product, obviously you can sell as many as possible.
You don’t need to print out books to ship them out and worry about all that stuff, like you would with a physical product. That’s also another one. You can sell physical products, which is something that I might be considering a bit later on down the track as well, but yeah guys that’s about it um you can also do sponsored blog posts. I don’t do any of that. I’ve also heard that’s a good way to make some income as well, but yeah guys.
Hopefully, this article was helpful if it was make sure to give us a thumbs up, drop a comment down below if you’re getting started with your own blog and you want to start making some income, I definitely recommend getting started and doing something around your passion. It’s a it’s an incredible way to make money from something that you know a lot about, or something that you’re passionate about.
So keep that in mind that thanks guys for reading and i’ll see you in the next one bye
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