How to Start a Blog and Make Money in 2023 (Step-by-Step Guide for Beginners)

Do you want the freedom to earn some extra bucks and ditch your soul-sucking job?

If your answer is YES, congratulations, you’ve decided to start your own blogging business. And that can make you a hundred thousand dollars every month.

However, if you’re confused about where to start, then hold on! Here in this article, today, you’re going to learn how to start a blog without killing your inner charm.

If you want to start a food blog, I have written a special post for you.

With this framework, you’ll understand the entire process and take rapid actions where needed.

So, without further ado, let’s dig deeper!

How to Start a Blog That Makes Good Money in 2023

Beginning with your blogging journey shouldn’t be daunting. With a proper tutorial and step-by-step guide, you’ll learn the entire process in a simple way.

Just follow these steps, and until you finish this post, you will get your blog ready.

So, without further ado, let’s jump right in!

1. Select a Perfect Niche

Most beginner bloggers make a huge mistake here. I made it too. And with my experience, I can tell you how important this is to choose a perfect niche.

If you don’t know, a niche is a particular segment of the market on which you will provide information—for example, Fitness, SEO, Food and recipes, Pet cats, Skincare, etc.

And if you choose it right, almost half of your blogging efforts will fade away.

However, there are some points you need to consider before finding ideas for your blog topic.

• It would be best if you chose a particular topic. e.g., if you’re choosing health as a topic, then thyroid care can be your niche. Highly specific.
• Decide on a niche that you are sincerely interested to know about.
• Analyze your competitors and know your audience, traffic, and content gaps. You can do this by using tools like Semrush, Ahrefs, Buzzsumo, etc.
• Validate the earning potential of your niche.

How to choose a profitable niche?

Complete the exercises along with reading, and finally, you’ll find your niche. 🙂

Exercise 1: Brainstorming

Create a list of topics that you love reading about, your hobbies, expertise, and passion.

Exercise 2: Choosing a small niche

Strikethrough those topics, which you don’t want to talk about. Now, these are out of your list.

Now create more branches and think about subcategories. Again refine your list and choose those which interest you most. (don’t worry, you can change it later)

Exercise 3: Validation

And the final step to decide your niche is validating whether the niche is profitable or not.

Research the market and jot down 20-30 topic ideas on that niche. In this way, you have a clear idea about the niche size.

Now research about the niche potential and monetization techniques.

Analyze your competitors: more competitors mean you’ve to put more effort, and too few competitors mean the topic has significantly less potential.

In the end, you would find your niche, and let’s celebrate your first win.

2. Choose a Blogging Platform

Now that you’ve decided on a niche, now it’s time to start building your blog. And the first thing here is a blogging platform.

There are multiple ways you can start blogging. Choosing the right blogging platform is often an essential step. But, before hopping right away, you need to understand your blogging goals.

What to consider before selecting the right platform?

• It should be flexible for future setup.
• Easy to design and maintain.
• Have monetization options
• Have more features to change when needed

So, basing on these requirements and your goals, I’m going to breakdown two types of blogging platforms;

# Free:

If you’re aiming at blogging to improve your knowledge in this field or just to share your thoughts and opinions and aren’t ready to invest right now, these free sites might help you reach your goals.

However, most of these use your blog name as a subdomain to their brand name.

• Blogger.com

This is the most popular and free-to-start blogging site. However, your domain name will show as yourdomain.blogspot.com. Still, it’s easy to start.

• WordPress.com

This is another simple and accessible platform to blog every day.

• Medium

Medium is quite famous among writers for a lot of reasons. It’s similar to YouTube, except it’s a platform for blog posts or articles rather than videos. It has a minimalist interface that is relatively easy to use and manage.

• LinkedIn

If you’re an active user of LinkedIn, then it’s an excellent opportunity for you to share long-form articles. You can add an article by clicking on the article option, and publish! Super easy.

• Tumblr

Tumblr is yet another platform for blogging, just similar to medium. It’s free and easy to use and manage, too.

• Weebly

Weebly is a freemium platform. That means you can start with a free plan with their subdomain and upgrade to a premium plan in the future.

# Need a little investment:

If you’re ready to take your blog as a serious business and earn both active and passive income through this, then our recommendation is to invest in it. Here is a list of platforms you can use to thrive as a pro blogger.

• WordPress.org
• Wix
• Web.com
• Squarespace
• Gator by Hostgator
• Ghost

Each one of the above has different technical aspects and a slight learning curve.

Today, we’re going to show the step-by-step setup of the most famous blogging platform – WordPress.

3. Pick a Domain Name

Let’s say you’ve chosen a niche and now want to start a blog on wordpress. Now what?

Well, the next step is to pick a business name that will ultimately be your domain name.

It seems easy, but this is another place where you need to be careful. I’m going to describe some best practices while choosing your blog name (domain).

Do’s

• Choose an easy-to-remember name.
• Keep it short (domain names of 6-14 characters works well)
• Think if it’s brandable
• Use your niche keywords
• Consider if it’s easy to type
• Choose the right extensions

Don’ts

• Don’t use hard to pronounce names
• Don’t use hyphens
• Don’t use numbers

When you know where to keep your eyes, it’s time to choose a great domain name.

But, how?

Simple. Brainstorm a few names that come to your mind while thinking about your niche.

Now combine 2-3 words and check them for availability. Here is how you can do this.

>>Go to Bluehost here<<

Now check your domain name as shown in the image below:

Click search and see if it’s available.

And repeat until you find an available domain name of your choice.

Once you find it available, add it to the cart. I’ll show you in the next step how to get it free.

4. Get a Web Hosting Account

Web hosting is a service in which one or more websites are hosted, or the web files are stored and managed. It’s like the land you purchase on the internet, which can be easily accessed and transferred when needed.

There are different types of web hosting, and based on the type and features available, the price also varies. For instance, the major types of hosting include shared hosting, VPS hosting, and dedicated hosting.

Most small businesses start with shared hosting, and when their audience grows, and begin earning, they upgrade it to either VPS or cloud hosting services.

There are various companies providing web hosting services; however, we recommend Bluehost. That’s because it’s the most affordable option for beginners. Starting at $2.95/month, you can enjoy the high speed with SSD storage and 24/7 customer support. Further, you’ll get a free domain name for the first year.

Now, let’s know how to purchase your web space from Bluehost.

Visit the official website of Bluehost.

Now you can see the menu tabs. Click on the “hosting” option.

Scroll down, and you can see three types of options. Choose the shared hosting one.

Again scroll down, and you can see four different plans to choose from. The most popular one for small businesses is the second one – plus – where you can get unlimited websites and SSD storage.

But if you’ve decided to work for just a single website (yes, your blog) for at least one year, then you can surely choose the cheapest option (the basic plan).

Click on any of these.

Now you’ll land on this page. Either you can choose the domain name you saved on the cart, or if you already have a domain name, you can select it here.

Now sign up either with your Google account or by filling your account information manually.

Choose your account plan. If you click on the small arrow on this option, you’ll see three plans. If you choose it for three years, then you get a special discount on the way.

Whatever you select, a domain name and SSL encryption (https:// site lock) will be your bonus materials.

Now finally, choose your payment methods. You can pay either through a credit card or PayPal. Then tick the small box and then submit.

After payment, you’re all set. 😉

5. Install WordPress

According to the recent stats, wordpress covers about 34% of websites on the internet and is known as the world’s most famous content management system (CMS).

Most bloggers start with other cheaper options like blogger or medium but soon migrate into wordpress. It’s primarily because of a single reason – it’s flexibility.

You can design your blog as you want, even if you’re not tech-savvy. And after purchasing your hosting account and owning a domain name, the only step that keeps you away from starting the fun part (designing) is installing the wordpress.

This can be done in multiple ways. But, let me show you the most straightforward option.

Login to your Bluehost hosting account.

Now choose the “my sites” tab on the sidebar menu.

Click on the “Create site” button.

You can see a setup where you’re asked to fill in the “site name” and “site tagline.” Fill it and click on the advanced option to fill in your email address and generate a password (that will help you log in directly to your wordpress dashboard next time). Now click on next.

Then another page will open and ask you to choose a domain name and a few free plugins. Untick the plugins (we’ll install them manually later). And finally, click on next.

Now you can see the successful wordpress installation message with your login information.

Click on login to wordpress, and in the next step, I’ll show you the setup process. 🙂

6. Select a Theme and Design Your Blog

You can log in to your wordpress dashboard any time by entering your URL along with “/wp-admin” (Example: yoursite.com/wp-admin).

After logging in, you can see the dashboard. Congratulations, now you can begin with creating a beautiful blog for yourself. Let me show you how;

Your first step is to choose a theme. If you don’t want to make it expensive, you can start with a free theme and upgrade to a premium theme later.

I have written a separate post in which only the best WordPress themes have been given place.

The best free themes for blogs are GeneratePress, Astra, Kadence, Colormag, etc.

But if you want to invest in a beautifully designed website, you can choose a good premium theme from theme forest. Yet, these are not the only options.

Now let’s design our blog from scratch.

Go to appearance < themes from the sidebar. You can see some themes are already activated. For adding a new theme, you need to click on the “add new” option on the top of the page.

Now you can either upload a theme you purchased by clicking on the upload theme option and then choosing the file from your computer, or simply choose a free theme available there.

After installing the theme, you need to customize it according to your preference.

7. Write and Publish Blog Content

Now, as you’ve created a minimalist design for your blog, it’s time to write and publish your first blog content. Let me walk you through how.

Pro tip: If you are not able to write content for your blog or want to increase your writing speed. Without wasting time, you can generate good quality content using AI writing tools.

Log in to your wordpress dashboard.

Go to the “posts” tab on the left sidebar.

Now click on the “add new” button.

You can see the Gutenberg editor – a word-processing software just similar to ms word. However, here you can find blocks. Each element is a single block, and this eases the formatting process.

So, input a working headline on top of the page. And from the bottom, start writing your article.

In the end, click on publish on the right. Here you can either schedule your post or preview how it looks on your site. When you feel satisfied with the preview, click on publish.

8. Optimize Your Blog Content for SEO

Now, as you know how to use the editor on WordPress, let me show you how you can incorporate SEO into your content.

Before that, what is SEO?

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization, and it means optimizing your website to rank on Google or other search engines.

You might be asking, “why is it important?”

Well, how will people find you and your business? You need to tell the algorithms you even exist, and your blog is relevant to these search queries.

So, optimizing your content with SEO is highly recommended. But how could you do that?

It’s easy. Install a plugin called “YOAST.”

After installing, you can see the insights of your content.

When you input your primary keyword (for which you want to rank your post), you can see whether the keyword is evenly distributed throughout the content.

Besides, several other on-page SEO factors include image alt tags, title tags, headers, inbound and outbound links, etc. You have to fix these for optimizing your page for search engines.

You can even check how your content sounds and work on its improvement.

Check out the complete On-page SEO guide to learn how to do this step-by-step.

9. Promote Your Blog

After all those planning and efforts, the actual time comes when all your efforts will bring you sparkling colors.

Blog promotion is often the most exciting task if you put yourself on the right track. It’s also the most challenging part where most bloggers start finding excuses.

There are several ways to promote your blog; however, we’re going to share the most proven methods today. So, let’s know them briefly.

• Guest posting on famous blogs

Domain authority is a score given by MOZ, which provides a number from 1 to 100 based on several ranking factors. And the blog with high domain authority is likely to rank higher on webmaster tools.

So, it’s vital to increase your domain authority. And the best way to do so is Guest posting.

Not only will you get quality links from popular blogs, but also you can get massive exposure through this method.

• Answering questions on Quora and other web forums

Quora marketing is a great way to increase traffic and raise brand awareness. And answering questions on platforms like Quora and other blog forums can create you as an authority of your niche. This can ultimately increase your chances of gaining loyal customers to your business.

• Post on subreddits

Similar to quora, regular posting and engaging on Reddit can help you reach your target audience. You can also find some great content ideas from such platforms.

• Share your content on social media

Reaching a larger audience is easy when you know the proper usage of social media. Share your blog posts immediately after publishing and get a large amount of referral traffic.

There are more advanced techniques through which you can create brand awareness and build your email list.

• Create a connection with influencers

As a blogger, you will be your boss. But that doesn’t mean you’re going to work all alone. Blogger outreach is one of the best ways to increase your reach to a large audience. Just list out a few influencers. Create a genuine connection with them, and boom! Half of your effort will be gone.

• Network with other bloggers of your niche

Like influencers, you need to create good connections with bloggers of the same or similar niche. This can ease your link-building efforts and give you an excellent chance to generate leads.

• Start creating backlinks

Backlinks are the links you get when other websites point to any of your content. It’s an off-page SEO tactic that is highly essential for a successful blog. So, begin your journey with SEO and get organic traffic directly from google.

• Promote content through email marketing

Email marketing is so powerful that it does not just help you increase traffic but enables you to create sales in the long run. Start building your email list as soon as you launch your blog. Then share content whenever you publish new content.

Besides these, tons of other content promotion techniques can increase your chances of reaching a bigger audience.

10. Monetize Your Blog

After all of your planning, content development, and content promotion efforts, when your blog starts getting on people’s radar, now it’s time for monetization.

According to the blog income report of Ryan Robinson – a famous entrepreneur and blogger – the income he generates through his blog per month is $35,218. That’s great! Isn’t it?

How could you reach that amount?

Simple. Just follow the above-said techniques and monetize your blog through the following methods:

1. Advertisements
2. Affiliate marketing
3. Sell products such as ebooks, courses, etc.
4. Sell coaching or consultant services
5. Get sponsorships
6. Sell physical products
7. Start a podcast

There’s a comprehensive guide on the methods of blog monetization. You can check this out for detailed information on this topic.

Final words

So, this is all about how to start a blog and earn a lot of money to get the freedom to travel full time and quit your dull day job.

If you’re confused anywhere, leave a comment down below or refer to our comprehensive guides.

Do the proper planning and start hustling.

You CAN do it!