You have luckily landed on the right page in order to build a superb blog. In this post, I will guide you in making a super blog that too with simple and easy steps. It doesn't matter whether you are in school, college, organization or even a retired person. The steps involved in building a blog is so easy that anyone can do it. You just need passion, interest and basic computer skills to start a blog.
This digital world has made it possible for all of us to make a great amount of money from the comfort of our home in various ways. Blogging is one of them. Presently there are more than 500 million websites that fall under the category of blogging. If you ever thought of starting a blog then start it today and share your wisdom to the world. In case, if you are wondering whether you should start a blog today and what are benefits of starting a blog then let us first understand why you must start a blog.
Why You Must Start Your Blog Right Now?
According to one of the survey study based on digitalization across the globe by
Hootsuite says
"Currently there are more than 7.6 billion people across the globe, out of which 4.3 billion are active internet users" which means more than half of the world is on the internet today. You can connect to the world through your blogs where you can share your thoughts to the world, you can solve problems of people through your knowledge and expertise. You can gain knowledge from other people as well. Blogging can help you earn fame, name, and money if done in the right way. So you must start your blog today in order to solve world problems, share your wisdom across the globe and earn decent money to fulfill your dreams.
I will guide you in this post about how to start a blog and make it run successfully for the long run.
When we talk about starting a blog then several websites like blogger, WordPress, Wix and many more come to our mind. Few of them like blogger and wordpress.com are free while the other has a paid yearly plan. I would recommend you to not go for free platforms because they have limited features which won't allow you to express yourself freely and they can shut down your blog at any time if they found anything on your blog that violates their policy. So it's better to have your own website then to rely on someone else.
While starting a blog you need 3 essential things to create your blog and those are Domain Name, Hosting Provider & Blogging platform. You can get each of them from different websites but I would recommend you to get it from Bluehost since they are a well reputed hosting company with great service response to customers.
Before getting started I would like you to follow me step by step in the other window tab and also bookmark this page in case you miss some steps then you can follow from previous last step in order to construct an amazing blog.
Here are the 10 steps that will guide you to build and set up a perfect blog.
1. Head on to
Bluehost. Click on Get Started.
2. Select the plan which suits you best. The current prices may vary with the following images since it was taken a few weeks ago.
3. Type your domain name which you wish to use for your blog. In my case, I have used supertechiez to show you an example.
4. If the domain name is available then it shows you the following screen.
5. Now fill up your address details and in package extras untick all except Domain Privacy Protection.
6. After you have done the payment. Login into your Bluehost account.
7. In the dashboard, Under the website section click on Install WordPress.
8. Select "Do it Yourself" and press the "Install' button
9. Kindly write your domain name, click on check domain and in the next page install WordPress.
10. Now, After finishing the installation, go to the login page of your WordPress. You can go there by yourdomain.com/wp-admin. In my example I have taken supertechiez.com, therefore I will type supertechiez.com/wp-admin. The similar screen will appear after which you have to enter your credentials and login into your WordPress account.
Now your Blog account has been activated and is all ready to amaze the world. Half victory has been achieved at this stage but still, a lot of work has to be done in order to build a superb blog.
After login, you will see a variety of options on the left side of the dashboard. You have to transform the basic theme into an attractive visual theme in order to appeal to the reader. For changing the theme, head onto the Appearance and click on themes.
Select the theme of your desire from the available themes and install it.
After installation, click on activation.
After activating the theme, give a site name and tagline to your blog by going in Settings > General.
Now add relevant pages to your blog that helps the user to navigate and get the information he is seeking from your blog. Add pages such as About Us, Blogs, Contact Us, Privacy Policy, Products or Services Page.
Add blog page where you will be publishing your posts. Kindly select the template as a blog on the blog page.
Now your website content and sections are enough to start your blogging journey. Now click on posts on the dashboard, write title and content. Publish your first blog.
Hence, you are a blogger now with your own blogging website. Cheers!!
Now you are done with building your blog but now the most important thing is to drive enormous quality traffic to your blog. Traffic for a blog is just like oxygen for humans. Your blog can do wonders for you if you learn the art of driving traffic. You need to learn SEO and many several factors for driving a crazy amount of traffic.
How To Generate Traffic Towards Brand New Blog
A survey was done among the bloggers by
GrowthBadger about the importance of several factors related to the success of a blog based on a rating scale of 0 - 10. This survey study consisted of 1117 bloggers of different niches. Their responses were divided into two groups: bloggers who make $50,000 per year or more from their blogs (whether directly or indirectly) vs. lower-income bloggers. You can see in the image below how the quality of the content was the most crucial factor in the success of most money making blogger.
Therefore, while writing a blog always keep in mind that your words surrounding your topic of the content will be the biggest deciding factor in the growth of your blogging career.
Key Factors That Drives Traffic To Your Blog
- SEO (Search Engine Optimization)
We will discuss each factor in detail below where we will also try to figure out the best possible steps that can help us increase the visibility of our blog across the web
SEO (Search Engine Optimization)
What is SEO?
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization which basically means optimizing or adjusting your site content and structure in such a way that it improves your rankings in organic search results of search engines. SEO also includes social sharing of your content. As your rankings improve in search engines simultaneously your traffic increases.
What are the basics of SEO?
In SEO there comes two categories which are On Page Optimization and Off Page Optimization. Let us go through the basics of both of them.
On Page Optimization
On Page Optimization deals with changing and optimizing the content and structure of your website. Here goes the list of things that comes under On Page Optimization.
1. Meta Title and description
When you choose to write a blog on a particular topic then make sure the title and description is exactly relevant to your content. The optimal limit of characters for Title is 70 characters while for description the limit is of 160 characters.
2. Relevant URL's
Always try to use the url's which are user-friendly, easy to understand and relevant to your content.
3. Image Optimization
Adding up an image in your blog makes it more attractive to visitors. Try to reduce the size of images in order to achieve high-quality images with minimum size. Try to add alt text to each of your blog's image which will help search engines to better understand your articles and improve your blog's visibility across the web.
4. Mobile Optimization
Most of the visitors that come across your blog are coming through mobile. Make sure your blog is mobile friendly and works super smooth on mobile devices.
5. Sitemap
A sitemap helps search engines to understand and crawl your content. The sitemap is a kind of file where all sections of your site are listed. It presents your detailed site content to search engines in a sorted and simple manner.
6. Robots.txt
When you want some pages, texts or images of your site not to be accessed by crawlers and also not to be indexed then you can use robots.txt for this task.
7. Site speed
According to latest research findings if your website doesn't load up in 2 sec or less than 2 seconds than 50% of your visitors are tend to leave your site. So make sure your site is super fast. Check your site speed after optimizing your site content.
8. Unique Content
Content is the king. Always write your unique content without copying even a line from other sources since google can easily catch your copying and penalize you by not showing your content to users.
9. HTTPS
Instead of using HTTP protocol use HTTPS for your blog site where “S” in “HTTPS” stands for “Secure”. Google recommends that all sites should possess a secure protocol in order to tackle Hacking and Spamming. You can get a secure protocol through an SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) certificate. SSL ensures that any data processed between the web server & browser of the searcher remains private. You can see yourself that Google Chrome or any other web browser shows Not Secure while you access any HTTP site which appears to be untrustworthy to visitors and that ultimately force them to leave the site without any further navigation. So it's better to have HTTPS.
10. Depthful Content
Whenever you write a piece of content then make sure that you go in depth and share your vast knowledge at its best.
11. Quality over Quantity
It doesn't matter how long your blog post is until unless it doesn't have good quality content in it. If you are posting blogs frequently but of poor quality then it's not gonna help in getting more traffic. While if you are posting a few blogs of high quality then it has the capability to drive crazy traffic to your blog.
12. Infographics
Infographics help in presenting complex data in an attractive visual format. Always try to use infographics in your blog post since it combines facts, information with compelling attractive designs which attracts the visitors at your site and makes the blog more amazing from the perspective of a reader.
Off Page Optimization
Off Page Optimization deals with spreading your content across the web in the most efficient and tactful way. This step comes after you have completely done with the On-Page Optimization. We will be dealing here with Link building which means getting our site's link across other web pages through various ways. Here goes the list of things that come under Off-Page Optimization.
1. Sharing on Social Media
Try to share your new piece of content on every social media platform across the common interest groups where users might be really interested in your article.
2. Backlink Exchange Strategy
You can exchange your site backlink with other bloggers of similar niche where both of you will be sharing links of each other on each other's website.
3. Guest Posts
You can reach out to other bloggers where you can offer them a unique article for their blog in exchange for a backlink.
4. Email Outreach
Do backlink analysis of your competitor and try to find out from where your competitor is getting high-quality links. Then reach out to those website owners and asking them to link your website as well in return of favor in terms of money or unique article for them.
While doing Off Page SEO make sure the platforms where your links are going to be placed are relevant to your blog content.
Your SEO part is also done. Now let's move on to other driving factors.
Content Marketing
Content marketing comes under the inbound marketing strategy. It is basically creating awesome content and then sharing that content to relevant audience through means of social media channels. In simple terms, once we are done with creating the blog post and it's on page optimization, we share it across social platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest, and Linkedin. You can share your blog link across these platforms.
Email Marketing
Email marketing is the most essential element in blogging since you directly connect with each one of your user directly through emails. Email Marketing comes under the outbound marketing strategy. In email marketing, we are sending promotional offers, latest blog notifications, and newsletters to our potential customer through emails. You can share your blog update with people through email marketing. You can use tools such as GetResponse, Mailchimp or Aweber for strategic email marketing where you will be creating a database of emails and then shooting up the emails to potential customers.
Video Marketing
In simple terms, Video Marketing can be termed as using video content in order to promote the product and services of a brand. According to a survey study by HubSpot Research team, more than 50% of consumers want to see videos from brands more than any other type of content. You can utilize this key information and promote your blog through video platforms such as youtube & Instagram. You can either create your own channels about your blog or you can share your blog update through the comment section of channels of similar interest. Video is effective, easily accessible and has emotional connect to users. Recently search engines are giving priority to video platform search results. You can utilize the benefit of it through video marketing your blog.
Forum Marketing
In Forum marketing you go to different forums that are relevant to your knowledge and expertise. Then you share your piece of advice and knowledge while parallelly promoting your content as well. The simple steps involved in forum marketing are - Find the right forum for your content, create an account in that forum and start answering the questions asked by users relevant to your knowledge. Try to share the links of your blog in your answers. This method will help you generate traffic and will also help gain recognition for your blog. You can use forum platforms such as Quora, Reddit, Yahoo Answers for Forum Marketing. You can also go to blogs of relevant content and promote your blog through the comments section.
Google Algorithm Updates That Every Amateur Blogger Must Know
Every blogger wants to rank on top in google search results while a keyword relevant to their blog is searched. Google search engine works upon certain principles and algorithms. Once you understand this then you will be far ahead of 60% of your competitors in terms of rankings since most of them are either unaware of it or ignoring it while writing content. Here goes the list of essential google algorithm updates.
1. Google Panda
Google Panda analyzes website and figures out what kind of quality content is present over the page. If the page is having high-quality content then google rewards it with top-ranking positions and if quality content is found out to be poor then it makes you invisible on top pages of search results. So make sure your every blog post you are publishing is having top-notch quality content.
2. Google Penguin
Google Penguin basically deals with links that are contextually used on your pages and are going to different domains. If links from your blog are taking the user to a trustworthy source then it is fine but if those links are taking the user to the shady or spammy site then be ready to face the heat from Google. It's going to create a bad negative impact on your site rankings. So make sure your outbound links are taking the reader towards trusted sites.
3. Google Pigeon
This Google Pigeon update basically deals with giving the best local results to the user. If a user is searching for hotels while being in California then google will figure out the best and nearest hotel to him in California. You can get the best out of this update is by listing your site in business directories. This algorithm improves distance and location ranking parameters.
4. Google Hummingbird
Google Hummingbird tries to find out the meaning behind the search query by interpreting the user's mindset behind the query. It tries to think like a human while delivering the results for a search query. The goal of this update is to match the pages with meaning rather than pages matching with a particular searched word.
5. Google Payday Loan
Google Payday Loan was introduced to clean up spammy queries such as "casino". People used highly searched queries in order to bring traffic to their website. This update focuses upon removing such spammy sites from appearing in top results.
6. Google Mobile-Friendly update (Mobilegeddon)
It was termed as a mobile-friendly update which focused upon experience of viewing web pages from smaller screens. It was an innovative update and approach by Google in 2015.
7. Google Fred
Fred is all those minor updates that take place every moment to google search algorithm
8. Google Top Heavy
This update is a kind of filter which prevents sites with heavy ads from ranking well in Google rankings. So make sure you don't place too many ads on your blog site.
9. Google EMD (Exact Match Domain)
Google EMD update prevents poor quality content sites from ranking well simply because they had words that match search terms in their domain names.
10. Google Pirate
Google Pirate Update focuses upon new and unique content. This update prevents sites with different copyright infringements from ranking on top results in search rankings. So make sure your content is always unique.
Always consider the above algorithm updates while writing your content and publishing your blog. Half of your competition is gone after you strictly follow the above updates while writing each one of your masterpiece articles.
The 3 things to always remember for a blogger.
1. Write the content that will be really useful to someone who lands on your page in search of solutions to his problem.
2. Try to follow digital marketers and Google updates since they might be having a solution to your problem related to blogging.
3. Try to engage with your readers through the comment section and try to resolve their queries with perfect solutions.
This is just a first step towards your blogging journey, there are plenty of things ahead to learn and evolve in the quest to become the Pro Blogger. You need to sharpen up the edge of your knowledge every day in order to stay ahead of your blog competitors and provide the best useful content to your visitors.
How To Monetize Your Blog
No matter which group you’re in, making money with a blog – whether it’s a hobby blog or a business blog –is possible. It’s not a get rich quick ordeal, but if you do it right, you could make enough to support your family and more. Let’s dive in and see how you can make a profit with your blog.
Monetize with CPC or CPM Ads
One of the most common ways bloggers make money is through placing ads on their site. There are two popular types of ads:
CPC/PPC Ads: Cost per click (also called pay per click) ads are usually banners that you place in your content or sidebar. Each time a reader clicks on the ad, you are paid for that click.
CPM Ads: CPM Ads, or “cost per 1,000 impressions,” are ads that pay you a fixed amount of money based on how many people view your ad.
Perhaps the most popular network for placing these types of ads is Google AdSense. With this program, you do not need to be in direct contact with advertisers; you simply place the banner on your site, Google chooses ads relevant to your content, and your viewers click on the ads. There are countless similar programs available if you find that AdSense doesn’t work for you, such as Chitika, Infolinks, and Media.net | One of the largest ad-tech companies worldwide.
Sell Private Ads
Working with advertising networks isn’t your only option when it comes to selling ads. If you end up with enough traffic, advertisers may come directly to you and ask you to place their ad on your site. You can also contact advertisers yourself. The biggest difference from the above mentioned option is that there is no middle man, which means you can set your own ad rates.
Selling private ads can come in the form of banners, buttons, or links. You can even make money writing sponsored posts where you write about or give a review of an advertiser’s product or service. Another option is to write an underwritten post or series, which is where you can write about any topic, but the advertiser pays for a “Brought to you by” mention in the content.
The ways you make money with this can vary. For instance, you might charge a one-time fee for a link within a post. If you are hosting banner ads, you might charge your partner monthly.
Bonus tip: To maximize your income, you can also choose to sell sponsorship space in your email newsletters (here are 5 best email marketing software), podcasts, and videos.
Include Affiliate Links in Your Content
Affiliate marketing is also another great tool for monetizing your blog. Here is how affiliate marketing works:
An advertiser has a product she wants to sell. She agrees to give you a commission from each sale if the buyer is coming from your site.
She gives you a unique link that tracks your affiliate code. That way, she knows when a buyer used your link to make a purchase.
You include your affiliate link on your site. You can do this directly in the content or through banner ads. If a reader clicks on your unique link and buys the product you have recommended, you earn a percentage of what she purchased.
You can utilize affiliate marketing through ad networks like Amazon Associates, or you can create private partnerships with advertisers and businesses with an affiliate program.
Sell Digital Products
If you would rather not advertise other people’s products on your site, or if you are looking for another stream of income, consider selling digital products. This can include items like:
eBooks
Online courses/workshops
Images, video, or music people can use in their own content
Apps, plugins, or themes
Just remember that if you are going to choose one of these avenues that you make it relevant and useful to your readers. A lot of bloggers make the mistake of assuming they are developing a product their readers need; listen to your readers first, and then create a digital product that will meet their needs.
Use it as a Content Marketing Tool for Your Business
It is also possible to sell physical products on your blog and to make money that way. Instead of thinking of it as making money from your blog, however, think of your blog as a content marketing tool that will drive visitors to your business website.
The possibilities are practically endless when it comes to developing a business blog. You could sell hand-made products, books, manufactured products, and so much more. Or you might already have a business and decide to start a blog to convert loyal customers.
Lets say, for example, that you refurbish and resell used smartphones out of your home. You could use a blog to attract visitors to your website where you list your current phones for sale. Your blog might cover topics about DIY refurbishing. On one level, it seems counterintuitive because you want people to buy your phones, but it also helps you build a brand and gain recognition. Social media guru Jay Baer explains the concept on Copyblogger:
I was at a conference a few years ago, and this is where I first sort of started thinking about this concept, and their founder, Robert Johnson, was speaking…
He said, “Well our best customers are the people that think they can fix it themselves.”
But eventually you are going to get out of your depth either on that project on a project down the road, at which point who are you going to call? Are you going to call somebody randomly that you discovered on Google or are you going to call the guys who you just watched their logo in the corner of a 14-minute instructional video?
This concept can also be applied to services in all types of industries. For instance, if you offered electronic repair services as opposed to physical products, you could still use the same blogging concept to increase brand awareness and convert more clients.
Sell Memberships
Another option to make money is to sell memberships to exclusive corners of your website. For instance, a career blog might charge $10 per month for users to gain access to their job board. A startup business blog might sell memberships to their forums where people can get personalized advice about their business.
The key here is that your exclusive membership has to be more valuable than something your visitors can find for free somewhere else, so be sure you̢۪re developing something of value and worth the price.
Use it to Build Your Credibility
Blogging to build credibility can lead to many money-making opportunities. For instance, let us say you start a blog in the finance industry. People start reading your content, and your blog becomes very popular. You are now a recognized figure in the finance industry.
Once you have that authority, people might approach you to co-author a book on debt management, or you could charge to speak at conferences or to run employee financial training days.
This certainly isn’t a direct form of making money blogging, but it has worked for many well-known bloggers, and it can work for you, too. If you’re looking for a direct revenue stream, popular blogs have sold for 4-7 figures (sometimes more) by selling their branding and content.
The biggest thing to keep in mind is that making money blogging is not possible by putting your site up and letting it sit there. The “if you build it, they will come” mentality doesn’t work here, so be sure you’re willing to put in the time. Most bloggers don’t see a spike of income for several months (sometimes years) after starting their blog. Before you dive too deep into blogging, remember these little bits of advice:
Create Quality Content
You are not going to make any money from your blog if people don’t read it. After all, your readers are the ones who are going to make you money, whether they’re clicking on your ads or buying your products. Always put your readers first.
Don’t Spend Your Time Exclusively on Your Blog
Developing a successful blog has a lot to do with building relationships. That can include relationships with sponsors, affiliate partners, or simply other bloggers who will direct traffic to your blog. Be sure some of your time is spent on forums and other blogs (or whatever works for you) to build these relationships and your blog.
Don’t Be Afraid to Experiment
Not all of these tips and avenues of income are going to work for you. Don’t be afraid to tweak your methods to see what works best for you and your readers.
Making money blogging can take a lot of persistence, but it can pay off in the long-run if you’re starting out from scratch. Just remember that you don’t have to use all of these money-making avenues at once. Consider what other people in your industry are doing, and start from there.
