Let’s Start Blogging – To Make Money Online!
Before beginning with the definitive guide on – How to start a WordPress blog and make money online? Let’s answer this question – “Why blogging?”
It’s the most frequent question asked to every blogger! Isn’t it?
A question that everyone asks us frequently! 😉
Nowadays, blogging is not about writing some content and publish it.
To my best, blogging is a place where you can honestly express your thoughts, information, news, experience, and much more. It helps you connect with people and later becomes a great source to make money online!
Now if you agree to this, and wanted to launch your blog website then..
Today, I am going to introduce simple yet effective steps that will help you to set up a perfect personal blog in no time!
Table of Contents
The Big Change About Blogging..
- Blogging is the future. It is not dead but changed with time.
- The Web pages with just links and content are now more expressive.
- They’re enriched with content, links, images, music, videos, slideshow, PDF files, doc files and what not.
- This is an era of online business and making tons of money where the blog is playing a crucial role between them.
Power Step 1 – What Should I Do To Start A Blog From Scratch?
People say, starting from scratch is always the toughest and I believe it’s the easiest way to grow.
How? Just go through the following points –
Step 1. Which Blogging Platform You Should Choose?
What is a Blogging Platform? A blogging platform or a Content Management System(CMS) is the service that you use to publish your content onto the internet in the form of a blog.
If you’re going to write a blog, you need a platform where you can write your blogs, right?
So, you need to choose a blogging platform. WordPress & Blogger are famous among all
Step 2. Why Should You Opt For A Self-Hosted Blog Over Free Alternative?
What is a Free Alternative? As the name suggests its free that means – you don’t actually own your blog! It’s hosted on someone else’s web space and they can even delete it if they want to.
WordPress, Tumblr, & Blogger all offer free blogs to everyone.
Awesome, right? It’s perfect for those of us who are writing as a hobby or learning and are less severe about blogging.
Free Alternative Has Limitations.
What is a Self-Hosted Blog?
A self-hosted blog hosted on your hosting service and no one can delete or remove your blog except you. You’re the king.
Check out the complete guide on – WordPress.org vs. WordPress.com
If you’re going to take blogging seriously, then you should self-host your blog.
And to self-host your blog, you’re going to need –
- A domain name, and
- Web hosting.
Step 3. How To Choose A Memorable Domain Name For Your Blog?
What is a Domain Name? In simple words, it is the name of your website which gets uniquely identified on the internet.
Ex: google.com, facebook.com
Here – google & facebook are domain names.
Follow the tips which I have shared in my post – Domain Name – How to Search, Choose & Register, if you want to pick the best domain for your website!
Step 4. How To Choose The Best Hosting Service For Your Blog?
What is a Hosting Service? A web hosting service can be defined as a service where your website resides on the internet. Avoid free hosts and blogging platforms if you want to succeed and buy a hosting service instead.
A Complete Beginner’s Guide to Choose Right Website Hosting!
HostCron – An affordable web hosting. Plan starts at $2.50/month with Free SSL.
Step 5. How To Install WordPress Blog?
Here I will be covering two sections in depth –
From choosing the best WordPress theme to the complete WordPress installation and activation guide.
Step 6. What Settings Do You Need To Setup After Installing WordPress?
You are not yet done by installing WordPress!!
You are all set to go only if you complete the following important settings after installing WordPress –
Check Out – 13+ Essential Settings After Installing WordPress.
Step 7. What Plugins You Should Install After WordPress Installation?
Below is a list of must-have WordPress plugins, every beginner, business, and blogger must install in their website regardless of their niche –
a. Yoast SEO
Yoast SEO WordPress plugin makes your WordPress Website SEO Friendly.
It takes care of –
- Title and meta description of post and pages,
- Metadata for Google Knowledge Graph,
- Snippet preview,
- Focus Keywords,
- Breadcrumbs,
- XML Sitemaps and
- much more.
b. UpdraftPlus
UpdraftPlus is one of the best backup and restore WordPress plugins.
UpdraftPlus lets you take backups of WordPress files, Databases, Plugins and Themes right from the WordPress dashboard.
UpdraftPlus lets you take backups of WordPress files, Databases, Plugins and Themes right from the WordPress dashboard.
Plus, you can save these backups in the cloud services like Dropbox, Google Drive, Amazon S3, etc directly.
c. Sucuri
Sucuri Security WordPress Plugin secures your WordPress website from hacking, server hijacking, and data-stealing by blocking phishing, SQL Injection, and malware attacks.
Apart from stopping attacks, it also –
- Create logs of critical activities like logins, failed login attempts,
- Check file integrity
- Remove Malware
- Remove Threats and vulnerabilities
- and much more.
d. WPForms
WPForms Contact Form WordPress Plugin helps you to establish communication between you and your website visitors.
WPForms is a drag and drop contact form builder plugin for WordPress with which you can create both basic and advanced contact forms for your website.
Some of its key features are –
- Multi-page forms
- Smart conditional logic
- Spam protection
- File Uploads
- Entry Management
- Form Pages
- Survey and Poll Forms
- Email Marketing Integration with multiple services like Aweber, GetReponse, etc.
- Payment Integration
- And much more.
You can read more about it in my WPForms Review.
5. WPRocket
WP Rocket caching WordPress plugin that improves your WordPress website speed and performance.
WP Rocket is a feature-rich plugin that offers –
- Page-level and browser caching,
- Sitemap and cache preloading,
- Gzip compression,
- Database and Google fonts Optimization
- Lazyload for images
- File minification and concatenation
- Defer JS loading
- CDN compatibility
- Ecommerce Friendly
- and Much more.
Read more about features and plans in my WPRocket Review.
Step 8. How To Secure Your WordPress Blog?
Secure your WordPress blog from being hacked by malicious people.
I’ve bundled some simple to advanced security measures that help to prevent hacking attacks and keep your content safe.
Check Out –
The Ultimate WordPress Security Guide – 27+ Tips to Keep Your Website Secure!
Power Step 2 – How You Can Generate Traffic On Your Blog?
Alright so before heading on to know various strategies, tips, and tools to generate traffic one should know why website traffic is important?
Well, we all know that – to make an online presence over the internet we create a website or blog and ultimately start grabbing audience attention with time.
But what is the use of investing time if you are not able to generate traffic for your site! Right?
So, website traffic matters!!
Benefits to hit targeted traffic –
- Targeted traffic gives a hike in your revenue.
- Targeted people will more likely prefer your website and stay long – which gives a hike for your site rankings.
- Finally, hitting a targeted audience helps you to connect them for the long term as they easily sign up for your newsletter in order to receive promotional content.
Moving ahead – How actually we are going to grab traffic?
On the internet, you will find lots and lots of talks, recommendations, and discussions on generating traffic.
To be honest – I believe there are 5 main sources you should target on –
- Search engines (Organic Traffic)
- Google Search Engine (Major Source of Traffic)
- Bing Search Engine
- Social networks
- Quora
- Pinterest etc.
- Email marketing
- Quality content
- Generate effective topics & titles (Blog Topic Ideas)
Now each source has different strategies and tools to get things work!!
Let’s get started –
1. How to boost your blog traffic through social media?
2. Launch your Email Marketing tool which will help you communicate with your subscribers?
Power Step 3 – How You Can Promote Your Blog?
Once you are done with well-written, unique and helpful content it’s time to promote them.
Promotions help you to grab new audiences or even customers if done correctly.
Now as you already know how to boost traffic to your website, But, if not?
Goto -> Power Step 2 – How can you generate traffic on your blog?
Here, I’ll be sharing – A Complete Guide: Featuring 12+ different ways to promote your blog and make it viral!
Power Step 4 – How You Will Monetize Your Blog ?
Ok, now that you have started generating traffic it’s time to learn how to make money!!
I’ve listed out some familiar ways that will drive money. But doing them in right way matters!
So, Keep Calm and Read On –
1. How to make money by Pay Per Click Advertising?
2. Try out Best High Paying Google AdSense Alternatives to make money blogging!!
Power Step 5 – Best WordPress Blogging Tools For Successful Blogger!
I am presenting some ultimate blog tools or plugins that have helped us to manage and grow our blog.
Tools that play significant functionality from backups to blog editors, content idea to post title generator, proofreading to free stock images, getting visitor stats to website outsourcing and much more.
Hey Ankita,
Great job here on TMS. You know what?
I LOVE this post you made about the startup bloggers.
Thanks for being a frequent reader of TMS Pradeep!
Hope this post inspires other too..
Great Work.. Really looking forward to see more great posts..!! Keep it up..
Thanks Chaman 🙂
I’ve been browsing online greater than three hours these days, yet I by no means found any interesting article like yours.
It is the pretty value sufficient for me. In my view, if all web owners and bloggers made excellent content a material as you probably did, the net might be a lot more helpful than ever before.
Glad you liked the content, Laurence! And thanks for appreciating my work. 🙂
Enjoy reading.
Nice article. 5 steps that cover all. There are many finesses in between 🙂
Thank you, Colen!