How to Start a Blog and Make Money Online in 2022

Have you ever considered starting your own blog? Have you ever wondered what it takes to not only establish a blog, but also to grow it successfully over time in order to make money online or produce a passive income? You’re obviously not alone. Millions of people try their hand at blogging, but only a small percentage of them ever make a significant profit.

You’re mostly wasting your time if you’re creating a blog to make money and you’re not truly passionate about writing in the first place. Blogging isn’t only a scientific or formulaic endeavor. You’ll be frustrated and irritated if you don’t have a great enthusiasm for your work.

Why? While starting a blog is pretty simple, generating any form of traffic and profiting from your labors is a massive undertaking. To establish an audience or attain mass saturation with your prose, you’ll need laser-focus and perseverance. It requires time, as well as long, drawn-out hours spent burning the midnight oil.

Take my word for it. I can bask in the warm glow of success as a blogger who has created a big platform with hundreds of thousands of monthly visits. However, I can’t sit on the independence and passive money that my blog has provided for too long. Any blog can die if it doesn’t keep adding new material.

So, what does it take to build a profitable blog and earn money online? I believe it depends on how successful you perceive yourself and how much money you make. If you’re like the millions of other aspiring bloggers out there, you’ll have a long road ahead of you.

But if you’re ready to put in the time and effort, and if you can stay consistent over time (and yes, I meant years), you can make a significant amount of money online. In fact, your blog could be one of the best sources of passive income, and if done correctly, it can bring in the proper clients and consumers regardless of the business or niche you’re in.

Related: 5 Ways to Make Money as a Content Writer

Step-by-Step Instructions for Starting a Blog

Okay, if I haven’t yet convinced you, and you’re serious about starting the next Mashable, TechCrunch, or whatever other blog you think would be a huge success in your eyes, then here’s what you need to do in a step-by-step method. The more you plan and prepare, the more likely you are to be successful in the long run.

1. Select a Topic

Make sure you know what you’re going to write about. Define a topic or specialty and build your entire content strategy around it. This will assist you in not only laser-focusing your writing but also in developing digital products and services to complement your content.

This allows you to draw clients in by luring them in with your informative blogs, then luring them in with a lead magnet before putting them into your sales funnel (more on that shortly).

2. Choose a platform

While Wordpress is by far the most popular blogging platform, there are others to consider, including microblogging platforms like like Tumblr, Blogger.com and even Medium. If you’re serious about blogging, however, you’ll probably want to use a self-hosted Wordpress installation with a custom domain.

While you could set up a blog on Wordpress.com with a subdomain like myblog.wordpress.com, a self-hosted solution will earn you greater attention and allow you to use subdomains on prominent platforms for content marketing.

3. Decide on a domain name

If you’re serious about producing money from your blog, you’ll need a custom domain name. Find a short but relevant keyword-rich (if possible) domain name that is descriptive of your intended topic, industry, or niche rather than relying on a third-party-hosted subdomain. You can get your domain from BlueHost, HostGator, 1&1 Hosting, or any other number of domain name providers.

If you’re concerned about things like SEO, you should consider the following ideas when choosing a domain name:

• Make use of a well-known top-level domain (TLD) like.com or.net.
• Keep the domain name to a maximum of 15 characters.
• Avoid buying a domain name with hyphens, as they’re more likely to be connected with spammers.
• When ranking or categorizing posts, avoid utilizing self-hosted subdomains.

4. Locate a Reliable Web Hosting Company

There are plenty decent hosting firms available. There are nearly limitless alternatives if you’re launching a self-hosted Wordpress blog. The most important thing is to do your homework and get the correct one that fits your budget while also ensuring that the service level and uptime guarantee are met.

You’ll probably want to start with a Managed Wordpress solution or a Virtual Private Server (VPS) and work your way up from there. Once you reach a few thousand daily visitors, you’ll probably require a dedicated hosting option with a CDN (see below).

5. Content-Delivery Networks and Caching (CDNs)

To ensure that your webpages are delivered quickly, use a solution like W3 Total Cache or WP Super Cache and enable browser caching. This may not appear to be significant at first. However, when your business grows and your daily traffic reaches thousands of people, this will become increasingly important. To test things before and after the installation, use Google’s Page Speed Insights.

It’s also critical that you set up a CDN, which will speed up your content’s global delivery. For example, your page might load rapidly in the United States, but what happens if someone in Australia attempts to view it? CDNs make content delivery ultra-fast by replicating data across numerous repositories throughout the world.

This is vital for the user’s experience because most people will abandon a website after waiting merely a few seconds for it to load and go on to the next one in the search results. W3 Total Cache interfaces with Amazon Web Services (AWS) and MaxCDN, two excellent CDN alternatives.

Related: How to Make Money With a Small Online Following on Social Media

6. Permalinks should be enabled.

Before you get started with Wordpress, you should enable permalinks, which will give you lovely SEO-friendly canonical URLs. Permalinks may be found in the settings > permalinks section of your Wordpress admin, and the post name option should be selected.

7. Download and install the AMP plugin.

The Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) Project is a Google initiative to make a major portion of their material mobile-friendly. With scaled-back JS and minified CSS code, the AMP specification, which you can read more about here, helps to slim down a webpage to its fundamental structural components, resulting in lightning-fast page speeds.

8. Download and install Google Analytics.

Install Google Analytics to keep track of your progress as you build out your blog. This is a terrific way to keep track of your results when you’re using the URL campaign builder to drop links in social media and other places so you can figure out where your traffic is coming from.

9. Create a Google Webmaster Tools account.

Anyone serious about making money from their blog should use Google’s webmaster tools to determine what keywords they’re ranking for and any messages that may affect their ability to rank. You’ll be able to upload an XML sitemap and track keyword impressions and click-through rates as well. This is one of the most essential tools for increasing your site or blog by analyzing your efforts on a regular basis.

10. How to Do SEO Correctly

Although you shouldn’t start a blog with the goal of optimizing it to the point of oblivion, you need at the very least be aware of the fundamental concepts of search engine optimization so that you can focus on the major factors that will affect your ability to rank on search engines like Google. Begin by reading with Google’s Webmaster Guidelines, then digesting and implementing what you’ve learned. Learning SEO is a long and winding road. You should continually be learning new things and broadening your skill set.

Related: 20 Best Website Monetization Platforms for Publishers to Make Money Online

11. On a regular basis Create Valuable Content

If you want to be successful with your blog, you’ll need to create meaningful anchor content. It must be interesting, keyword-focused, intelligent, original, and well-written. Write your material for people, not for search engines. Rather, write material for humans while simultaneously paying attention to what search engines desire. Simply put, it’s a skill that improves with practice over time. It’s also critical to post your material at least once a week.

12. Create an account using an email marketing platform.

Simply put, the greatest way to make money from your blog is through email marketing. This is, without a doubt, one of the quickest and safest ways to make money from your blog. But first, you must sign up for an email marketing platform such as Aweber, ConvertKit, MailChimp, Constant Contact, InfusionSoft, or any of the other numerous platforms available.

13. Construct a Lead Magnet

Rather than running ads on your blog (which won’t make you any money unless you have hundreds of thousands of visitors per day) or engaging in affiliate marketing, you should create a topical lead magnet that will sell a digital product or offer that you create in the back-end if you’re serious about marketing anything online. People will be enticed to join your mailing list and furnish you with their email address if you offer a lead magnet.

14. Create a digital product and strategically place your offers

Email marketing and lead magnets are both intended to aid in the development of an automated sales machine. To do so, though, you’ll need a digital product, service, or other type of offer in the backend. You can design a variety of offers or items to bring people up the value chain to your high-ticket sales.

15. Create a Sales Funnel

Spend some time developing your automated sales funnel. There’s a lot that goes into sales funnels, but the basic idea is that your visitors will find your content, enter your sales funnel through an offer via your lead magnet or another tripwire, and then be guided through a journey with drip-fed messages at a set interval that will allow you to sell your products and services on autopilot.

Related: How to Start and Make Money with YouTube?

16. Participate in social media

Building a blog isn’t easy by any stretch of the imagination. You must become social in order to assist you on your path to success. Not just by connecting with other bloggers who are interested in online marketing, but also by sharing and communicating with others on social media platforms like as Facebook, Instagram, and others.

17. Publicize Your Content

Content marketing is the single most crucial approach for creating a blog and increasing your exposure on search engines like Google, and it’s also my go-to strategy for rocketing up the search ranks on Google’s SERPs. Marketing your content is a time-consuming process that entails putting in lengthy, apparently endless hours to create more helpful off-site material that links to your major anchor content, but it’s definitely worth it.

If done correctly, you may utilize this one approach to rank number one on Google’s searches for practically any phrase. There is undoubtedly an art to this, as well as a technical outline and proper execution. In order to advertise your content, don’t try to spam or overstuff keywords in any way.

Content marketing can be done in a variety of ways, including writing essays for Medium.com or Scribd.com, answering questions on Reddit or Quora, and uploading movies to YouTube or Vimeo, among other things. The point is that all content must be beneficial in some way. Don’t try to get the most bang for your buck by doing the least amount of work. If you want to achieve, you must do the exact opposite.

18. Make Money From Your Content

Let’s be honest: creating and maintaining a blog may be expensive. You shouldn’t expect to become wealthy overnight. You can, however, take steps along the way to monetize some of your work. Make sure your material is timely, and that your lead magnets assist in funneling individuals into a sales funnel that will eventually sell your high-ticket items.

Apart from that, you can always generate small amounts of cash flow by doing other things like writing articles that direct people to your courses or audiobooks, or creating video tutorials that lead to the sale of a larger package or system that will help people learn whatever it is that you’re really good at.

There are a variety of ways to monetize your material and make money from your blog, but don’t try to cut corners. If you’re serious about your long-term goals, don’t look for a quick buck. If you want to succeed and attain your goals, you must take action and persevere.