2. Choosing your blog topic

As you can imagine, an important part of planning your blog is choosing the right blog topic or niche. What will you write about? What can you help your audience with?

When choosing a blog topic, you need to make sure it has a combination of 3 things:

1. Demand -> Are people looking for this topic, product or service?
2. Your knowledge or skills -> What can you help your audience with?
3. Profitability -> Are there opportunities to make money?

As you can see in the image below, your perfect niche sits right in the sweet spot.

How do you know if there’s demand for your chosen blog topic?

You can use a keyword analyser tool like Ubersuggest to see how many searches certain keywords get per month.

Make sure to type in questions and sentences that someone might type into Google, for instance:”How to write a blog to make money” or ” How to lose weight fast” or “How to save money”.

Keep in mind that a topic that helps your reader become a better version of themselves, is always in demand. People love improving themselves and learning new things.

Topics that are always in demand are called Evergreen Topics. To find out if your blog topic is evergreen, ask yourself: Will people still be be searching for this topic 2 years from now?

If the answer is yes, your topic is evergreen.

Another way to find out if there’s demand for your topic is by Googling it. If there are other bloggers writing about similar topics, there is a good chance that your topic is in demand.

For more inspiration, read:

Blog Niche Ideas (That Set You Up For Success)

3. Starting Your Blog On The Right Platform

After you spend some time planning your blog and choosing a niche, you need to decide on a blogging platform.

There are plenty of free blogging platforms like Blogger.com, Wix.com and WordPress.com, but these are not suitable for professional business blogs.

Free blogging platforms have lots of limitations on functionality, blog design and monetisation. They also don’t look professional in the eyes of potential sponsors or clients. And last but not least, on a free blogging platform you don’t own your blog and it can be shut down anytime…

Not what you want…

To compare the 4 most popular blogging platforms, read:

Best Blogging Platform for Beginners

If you want to be completely in charge of your blog and have unlimited functionality, you need to set up a self hosted blog on WordPress.org.

WordPress.org is the most flexible and most popular blogging platform in the world and offers the most functionality in the form of plugins and themes.

This means that when you start your blog on WordPress.org you’ll be able to add any functionality you need to your website (think sales funnels, email signup forms, ecommerce etc).

Setting up your blog is easy to do, especially with Bluehost because they do all the technical stuff for you.

Bluehost is the top recommended web host for WordPress and they are super affordable, you can start your blog for just a few dollars per month!

And if you use my special link below, they’ll even install WordPress for you for free!

>> Check out these super affordable hosting packages and claim a Free WordPress Installation! <<

4. Setting Up Your Self Hosted Blog

You can set up your self hosted WordPress blog with a few easy steps:

1. Go to Bluehost with this link that gives you a free WordPress installation and select their basic plan.

2. Choose a domain name.

To claim your free domain name, type your blog name in the box and see if it’s available.

If all your chosen domain names aren’t available or if you haven’t decided on a blog name yet, you can skip this step for now and click on the link: I’ll create my domain later.

If you already have a domain name, enter it in the box: I have a domain name.

If you need some help deciding on a domain name, read:

What Should I Name My Blog? 20 Tips For Finding The Perfect Blog name

3. Enter your personal details to create your account.

4. Choose your package.

5. Choose your package extras. You can untick all these boxes because you can add blog security and SEO with free plugins.

6. Add your payment details.

7. Create a secure password and write it down somewhere safe.

Congratulations, you now own a self hosted WordPress blog!

Bluehost will send you a confirmation email with a link to your website.

Click on this link and login to your website with the login details you wrote down earlier.

Next you’ll be asked to name your site and add a tagline. If you don’t have a tagline just describe in a few words what your blog is about. Click Continue.

Now you will be asked about the goals of your site. This is so Bluehost can recommend certain plugins for your site. Tick the boxes that are relevant for your blog and click Continue.

Next you need to pick a WordPress theme. You can select a free theme or if you want to install a premium theme, you can scroll to the bottom and select Skip this step. 

I highly recommend using a premium theme because this will make your website creation a lot easier. Premium themes have drag and drop elements that make it super easy to create page layouts and add tons of functionality.

I’ve been using Enfold Theme for almost 10 years and I absolutely love it! It has the best support and pretty much everything is possible with this theme.

Other great themes are Bluchic Themes (for gorgeous feminine themes, see image below)  and Astra and Kadence. These last two themes have a free version that you can try out and if you need more features you can upgrade to the premium theme.

After the theme page you’ll end up in the Bluehost Portal. To get to the backend of your website click on the blue WordPress button. This will take you to the WordPress Dashboard.

Anther way to login to your website is to go to a new browser window and in the top url bar you type: www.yourdomain.com/wp-admin (make sure to replace it with your domain name.)

5. Setting up WordPress correctly

After you’ve set up your hosting and Bluehost has installed WordPress for you, you need to configure your WordPress settings. This is super important for the correct setup of your blog, so don’t miss this step!

I’ve written a separate blog post on setting up WordPress correctly, please read it here:

What to do after you install WordPress

Other tutorials that you might find helpful are:

How To Protect Your Blog From Hackers

How To Speed Up Your WordPress Site

How to set up a free email address with Bluehost

If you want more help starting your blog, you can enrol in my free blogging course here:

Free Course >> Kickstart Your Money Making Blog

And if you feel like you need a step by step WordPress course for beginners, make sure to check out my WordPress course for beginners:

Wonderful WordPress – From clueless to pro

With step by step video tutorial, this course shows you how to:

• Configure Your WordPress Settings
• Install & Configure Your Plugins
• Install & Customise A WordPress Theme
• Create And Edit Your Pages & Posts
• Create Your Menus
• Create Your Headers, Sidebars & Footers
• Secure Your Website
• Update & Back Up Your Website
• Get Your Site To Rank In Google Quicker
• Instal Google Analytics
• And More!

Don’t waste weeks building your site when you can get it done in a matter of hours or days!

And get 20% OFF for a limited time with coupon code: WONDERFUL20

CHECK OUT WONDERFUL WORDPRESS HERE

6. Creating Must-Have Website Pages

Before you start writing blog posts, you need to create a few pages on your website.

To help your reader navigate your site, I recommend having a Home Page, About Page and Contact Page.

If you’re not sure what content to add to these pages, look up a few bloggers in your niche and see what they’re sharing on these pages. Use their content to get some ideas, please do not copy anything, checking out other websites should be for inspiration only.

Besides these main navigation pages, you’ll also need a few legal pages on your blog. To make sure your blog is legal, you are required by law to have a Privacy Policy and a Disclaimer on your blog.

Another page that is good to have is a Terms & Conditions. This page lets your reader know what they can and can’t do on your website and helps you protect your intellectual property.

Getting your legal pages drawn up by a lawyer can get quite expensive, but luckily I know a lawyer who’s also a blogger and she’s created the Legal Bundle Value Pack which includes all legal pages you need for your blog for a very affordable price.

Check out the Legal Bundle Value Pack here.

Or if you’re not ready to buy legal pages yet, she also has a Free Legal Course to show you how to blog legally. You can sign up here.

7. Writing Your Blog Posts

Now your website is set up properly, it’s time to create content. Whoop whoop!

This is what it’s all about, this was the reason you started your blog, right?

So what are you going to write about?

If you planned your blog (with my Blog Planner Workbook) in step 1, and you chose a blog topic in step 2, you should have a pretty good idea who your target audience is and what you want to help them with.

When writing your blog posts, it’s important to be specific and cover your topic thoroughly. Aim to answer all questions your audience might have. This will benefit your reader and it will also help your post rank higher in search engines.

For a detailed guide on writing a blog post that is SEO optimised, please read:

How To Write A Killer Blog Post In 17 Steps

To help your blog succeed quicker, it’s important to create content with a purpose. Every blog post you write, should do at least one of the following:

• grow blog traffic
• promote an affiliate or sponsored product
• promote your product or service
• grow your email list

If you know what the goal for your post is, you can focus on that and you’re more likely to achieve it.

You don’t have to limit your post to one of these goals however, I have plenty of posts that drive me traffic and have an email sign up offering a freebie and a tripwire product and they include affiliate links.

As long as you’re guiding your reader towards one or several of these goals, your post has a purpose and you’re more likely to grow your email list and your income.

8. Monetising Your Blog

Finally, the part you’ve been waiting for: How to make money with your blog.

Every step you’ve taken so far is obviously important on your journey to creating a money making blog:

You need to:

• Pick a profitable niche
• Know who your target audience is
• Set up your website correctly
• Create helpful content

This is the basis of any money making blog. And all these steps are equally important.

But how do you actually make money with your blog?

Let’s have a look at that now.

There are several ways you can make money with your blog:

• Affiliate marketing
• Ads
• Sponsored posts
• Offering a service
• Selling digital or physical products
• Creating a membership site

Let’s have a closer look at a few of these…

Affiliate marketing

For most new bloggers the easiest way to make money is through affiliate marketing.

When you monetise your blog through affiliate marketing, it means that you recommend products, services or courses for other businesses. When you sign up to their affiliate program, you’ll get a unique link that you can add to your blog posts, email newsletters and even social posts. When someone clicks on your link and buys something, you’ll get a commission.

Affiliate marketing is a great way to monetise a new blog. It’s easy to set up, it doesn’t cost anything and you don’t need a lot of traffic to be able to make money.

To find the affiliate program for a product you want to recommend, you need to go to their website and check the footer. If they have an affiliate program, they’ll have a link in their footer like this:

You can also sign up to affiliate networks. If you sign up to one affiliate network you get access to lots of different affiliate programs.

Popular affiliate networks are:

• Share-a-Sale
• Awin
• Impact Radius
• Rakuten

If you want to learn more about affiliate marketing, read:

How To Start With Affiliate Marketing

25 High Paying Affiliate Programs

Offering a service

Another popular way to monetise a blog is by offering a service.

Services that you can offer digitally tend to work well because you can help clients from all over the world. Examples of these services are:

• Virtual Assistant
• Web Designer
• Social Media Manager
• Book Keeper
• Graphic Designer
• Business Coach

To sell your service on your blog, you need to create a services page and outline what you can help your clients with. You can also create a special offer and promote it on your home page.

Selling a (digital) product

Instead of only selling affiliate products, you could also create your own product. This may sound tricky but it can actually be pretty simple. Especially if you create a digital product like an ebook or course.

The beauty about creating a digital product is that you don’t have any up front production cost. You only have to invest your time to create the product. And you only have to create your product once and after that you can sell it over and over again, possibly for years.

If you’ve signed up to get my free blog planner or my free blogging course, you might have noticed my tripwire page that you landed on after signing up. On this page I offer my Ultimate Blogger’s Checklist for $5. This is a good example of a very simple digital product.

Small tripwire products are a great way to get started with digital products. You get to test out what your audience is interested in and what a good price point is.

Examples of digital products are:

• ebook
• online course
• planner
• stock photos
• social media calendar
• checklist

To be successful with digital products you need to make sure that your product is closely related to your blog content and will help your audience.

Related reading:

How To Make Printables To Sell

Ads

A lot of new bloggers think the best way to monetise their blog is by displaying ads.

I don’t agree though…

To be able to make money with advertisements you need a lot of traffic, and that is something new blogs usually don’t have much of…

Ads also direct your hard earned visitors away from your blog, and all that for just a couple of cents…

Not a great way to make money.

Ads can also get very distracting and annoying and they can slow down your website.

… another reason I’m not a big fan of ads.

But…

If your blog gets lots of traffic (at least 50k sessions per month) and your niche doesn’t have a lot of high paying affiliate programs, then joining an ad network could be right for you.

Food bloggers for example can get lots of traffic to their recipes, it would be a good idea to monetise these pages with ads.

9. Growing Your Blog Traffic

Last but not least, let’s have a look at how you can grow your blog traffic.

Promoting your blog can be an overlooked step by new bloggers. But it’s actually the most important step, because without promoting your blog, your audience is not likely to find your blog.

There is actually an 80-20 rule for bloggers. You should spend 20% of your time creating content and 80% promoting it.

That is a lot of promoting.

There are a lot of different ways to promote your blog, you can read here how to promote your blog in 10 different ways.

The most important promotion techniques to learn are Pinterest and SEO.

Pinterest Marketing

Pinterest is not a social media platform as some people might think.

Pinterest is a search engine.

People go to Pinterest to look for things. And they could be searching for your content.

So what you need to do is create a Pinterest business account and create about 20-30 Pinterest boards that are relevant to your niche. Then you need to fill your boards with relevant pins and create your own pins that you add to your blog post, like this one:

Pinterest images should be vertical at a 2:3 ratio, which is 600 x 900 or 1000 x 1500 pixels. A great tool to design your pins is Canva, you can use it for free here.

Once you’ve added your pin image to your blog post, you need to share it to Pinterest. Here’s a quick tutorial on how you do this: How To Add A Pin To Pinterest.

Now it’s important to pin regularly and consistently, between 5 and 12 pins per day should be enough, but see what works for you. You can pin your own pins and share other people’s pins. Once you have more content, you’ll want to share more of your own pins.

If you’re new to Pinterest marketing, I highly recommend grabbing my free guide: Pinterest Set Up For Success. In this guide I’ll  show you how to set up a Pinterest business account, how to claim your website without using code, how to enable Rich pins and how to use Pinterest SEO. You can get the free guide here:

Pinterest Set Up For Success

Search Engine Optimisation

Search engine Optimisation or SEO is the process of optimising your blog for search engines such as Google, Bing, etc.

It is obviously very beneficial for your blog to rank high in Google. Ranking organically without paying for ads means you get free traffic. Plus the traffic you get from Google is highly targeted and this audience is more likely to buy from you.

So how do you get your blog on the first page of Google?

To get your blog post to rank on the first page of Google you need to learn two things:

On-page SEO and off-page SEO.

On-page SEO is everything you do on your website, like using keywords and improving site speed and user experience.

Off-page SEO is everything you do outside your website to improve your ranking, like building backlinks and your social media presence.

The main thing to remember is to create high quality content that answers a specific question. Long in-depth articles are more likely to rank than short superficial posts.

To learn more about SEO please read my SEO Beginners Guide here.

This is how you write a blog to make money

I hope you liked my step by step guide on starting a successful blog and you now have a greater understanding on how to write a blog to make money.

To get more guidance on starting your blog, make sure to sign up to my free blogging course here or sign up with the form below:

Free Blogging Course For Beginners

Please share this post and let me know what you think in the comments below.