How to Start a Blog and Make Money In 2023

Creating your own blog can be an intimidating thing to do if you don’t know what you are doing. I mean, where do you start?

In this article we’re going to go step by step on how to start a blog and make money including the best ways to monetise your blog and the best ways to drive traffic to your new blog.

We’re going to use WordPress to build our blog. WordPress is the most popular and best CMS (Content Management System) out there.

1. Pick a Niche

It can be good to blog about your passion as you won’t get tired of the topic and will like writing about it. But the thing about this is if you have a passion that is eating pizza, not many people will want to hear about you talking about eating pizza.

So what it should be is a monetizable passion that you know people are searching about and wanting to know more about. You can use a keyword research tool such as UberSuggest to find the most popular keywords to blog about.

UberSuggest has a limited version for free or you can also use SEMrush which is another awesome keyword research tool and is an all in one SEO tool and tells you what keywords your competitors are being ranked for and the traffic of each keyword. This is a paid tool and costs $99 per month but it does have a free trial.

However if you just want to go after the profitable niches, some of them are:

Health
Fitness
Food
Business/Personal Finance
Travel
Lifestyle
Personal Development

These are based on the amount of advertisers in each niche and the amount of money you can make. With that being said, these niches can be more competitive as more people will want to get into these niches.

That doesn’t mean you can’t stand out and make money. It just means it will be slightly harder and you’re content will have to be better.

2. Domain Name & Hosting

To start off you’ll need a domain name and web hosting. If they are both foreign terms for you, I’ll explain.

Imagine the web hosting as the house or building where you’re website or blog sits. Without web hosting your website wouldn’t be able exist.

The domain name is the address. For example our domain name/URL is www.getmoneysaving.com.

The hosting provider we use and recommend is Bluehost. Bluehost is one of the best web hosting providers as the sites hosted on their servers are super fast, they little to no issues and their customer service is excellent.

Bluehost are giving a massive discount along with a free domain name if you get your web hosting and domain name through this link.

Not only are Bluehost a great web hosting provider but they also have 1-click install for WordPress which is a content management system and it makes it super easy to start blogging.

Registering a Domain Name

A domain name is important and can be either your company name such as Fool.co.uk or a keyword rich domain name which tells the reader what it is about such as www.IWillTeachYouToBeRich.com. Not only will this be easier for the reader but it will also be better for search engines like Google to rank them. If you want to do a personal blog or brand it can be your name as well such as NeilPatel.com

There are loads of different domain name extensions available but the most popular ones are .com, .co.uk, .biz and .net.

We recommend you try getting a .com domain name as it is the most popular extension. If you can’t think about a good domain name, its no big deal. You can always choose a domain name later.

Domain name registration can normally range from $12-$20 but you can get a free domain name when you go through this link.

Set Up Hosting

Hosting is just as important as a domain name. Select the basic package from the drop down as it should be enough for what we are doing.

You can select any optional extras you want such as domain privacy.

To go ahead with the price you need to pay for at least 12 months.

With Bluehost you are in safe hands as they are a one of the most trusted hosting providers and are officially recommended by WordPress themselves. They also have a 30 money back guarantee.

Just fill in everything required and make payment. Once you have done this move to the next step.

3. Choose WordPress Theme

When you have set up hosting, you can install WordPress using the simple 1-click Install option. Once this is done you need to make website look good.

A good place to start is selecting a WordPress theme for your blog. A theme can change and alter your blog/sites appearance and layout. There is countless amount of themes out there including both free and paid. When starting off you can choose one of the many free WordPress themes.

But if you want something more premium or a better selection go to Envato Market. They have a wide range of beautiful WordPress themes and can provide you a theme for any niche you are in. Most of them are full responsive and multi purpose.

4. Content

Congratulations! You’ve got your blog up and now the whole world can read it. It’s now time to start editing the pages and adding content.

First thing you’ll want to do is Add some pages to your site like About us and Contact pages. These are important because it’ll tell potential readers who is behind the blog and how to get in touch with you if they have a question or enquire.

You can easily edit the menu off your new blog by going to Appearance > Menus > New Menu.

You can edit your blogs main menu from here as well as the footer (the bottom of the blog).

To add new articles to your blog from your WordPress dashboard go on Posts > Add New. You’ll be able to add any new articles here including writing, editing, formatting and adding new media. Aim to have about 5 – 10 articles to start off so your blog doesn’t appear empty.

Writing Content

Don’t know what to write about? Check out SEMrush as it can help you come up with ideas and see if it is worth writing about from a SEO view. It will show you how much competition the keywords have and which keywords you can write about that have low competition which you can rank easier for.

Use Copy.ai, an advanced AI tool that can write copy, articles, descriptions or anything else you may need. Just input your keyword in and enter the tone of the article that you want to be written. Once you have done this, Copy.ai will work it’s magic and come up with a professional well written article.

Another great tool is Answer The Public. Simply type your keyword into this and it will come out with suggestions people you can write about.

Generally these are questions that people are asking search engines but it is very useful. The tool is free but it also has a premium version with some more features including the ability to compare data among other things.

If you need help with a logo or anything else concerning your blog, a good place to go is Fiverr. Fiverr is an affordable online marketplace with talented freelancers that can help you with almost anything on your business including graphic design, marketing and writing.

Plugins

A WordPress plugin is a piece of software that adds on or installs onto your website to add extra functionality to your blog. Some of the WordPress plugins we recommend you to install are

5. Making Money

Now that you’ve started your blog, you’ll want to start making some money from it. There are plenty of ways to start making. Here are 5 quick ways to make money from your blog.

Adsense

Google Adsense is one of the most popular ways to earn money from your blog. The premise is simple, you sign up to an advertising network like Adsense or Mediavine and they will display ads on your blog.

When someone clicks on those ads you get paid. How much you get paid depends on the niche you are in and how much the advertisers pay Google. Google gives you a percentage of the ad revenue.

While there are many different advertising networks to choose from Adsense remains one of the most popular and require no minimum visitors per month to your blog.

Affiliate Marketing

This is when you promote someone else’s product and you receive a commission if someone purchases the product through your link. We use affiliate marketing on Get Money Saving and you may notice some of the links off ours are affiliate links. We’ll get a small kickback at no cost to you.

Affiliate marketing is a good way to make extra money as you are recommend a product or service that you actually believe in and your audience benefit from it as they are getting a product that is fantastic and one that they need.

So it’s a win-win situation all around.

There are loads of affiliate marketing programs to promote but some of the most popular include

Sponsorships

For this to work you would need your blog to generate a good amount of traffic before you can get sponsorships. This includes brands sending you their products free of charge for a write up on your blog. Depending on the size of your blog you can start charging for write ups and mentions.

You can even bypass the advertising networks such as Adsense and instead start charging for including display ads yourself on your blog. This way you would be able to keep 100% of the advertising costs

A good way to get started with sponsorships is to make a seperate ‘Sponsorship/Advertise’ page on your blog. This will let any interested parties know that you are open to sponsorships and that they can just get in touch.

You can even design a media kit to let brands know you are available for sponsorship opportunties.

Another way is through HARO (Help A Reporter Out), this is a website where journalists/bloggers can connect with brands that would like to be featured on your publication.

While you probably won’t get any paid opportunities using this, you can get the chance to get free products from brands in exchange for a feature.

Digital Products

Digital products are anything you can download. This includes courses, ebooks, audio programs, software, digital planners, etc. Digital products can be a good way to diverse your income as once you create a digital product you can sell it again and again with little costs involved.

When creating a digital product you want to keep your audience in mind. Say you have a basketball blog, where you teach people how to play basketball. You could create a course or ebook around ‘Advanced Tips To Becoming a Better Basketball Player’.

As you already have an audience wanting to learn how to become a better basketball players people are more likely to want to get your course as it helps them solve a similar problem.

Physical Products

Just as the name suggests physical products is selling anything like apparel, books, board games or anything else. Basically a physical product is anything that is tangible. While there may be more costs involved with physical products than digital products they can still be very profitable.

A good place to start if you want to start selling your own physical products is Printful or Printify. These websites are print on demand platforms and they mainly do clothing, accessories and other miscellaneous products.

Print on demand is when you receive an order from a customer the print on demand company will print and fulfil your product for you and send it to the customer. Your customers will think it comes from you and there is no indication of the POD company.

Some companies that can help you with this are:

These just simply integrate with your WordPress blog by installing and setting up the plugin.

6. Promoting Your Blog

Now you know how to monetise your blog, it’s time to get traffic and visitors to your website. Traffic is like the life blood to your blog and without traffic you’re blog will just dry up. Here’s some quick way to get traffic to your website.

Email Marketing

Email is one of the best ways to get traffic to your website. Email Marketing is a great way to make people aware of your product, service or new articles you post. You can build trust with your audience more quicker than almost any other marketing channel.

Research shows every $1 you spend on email marketing, you get a $40 return on investment.

The best way to get great returns from email marketing is to build value with your audience by offering them free content, advice, videos, etc. Then promote your articles, services or products. The trick is to provide a lot more free value then you actually promote your services. A good book to read on this is Jab, Jab, Jab, Right Hook by Gary Vaynerchuk.

If you can tie in your blog posts as part of your email marketing strategy it can be a good way to drive traffic to your blog.

A good platform to use for your email marketing platform is SendInblue. Sendinblue is an all in one marketing platform that can do your email marketing and SMS marketing.

Sendinblue allows you to create landing pages and signup forms for you to increase your email subscribers as well as tools to build your engagement with subscribers and drive traffic to your blog.

Sendinblue are offering a free trial to if you sign up through this link.

Social Media

You cannot ignore social media anymore. Over 4 billion people use social media worldwide and this number is just expected to rise. We recommend for you to make accounts with all the popular social media sites for your blog such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, Pinterest and TikTok.

This can help with SEO, while not directly it can increase your presence online and put you on the online map.

Social Media is a great way to find an audience and build a community for your blog. The best way to do this is to build provide value through posting useful content and tips. Remember to post consistently on social media.

Video is another great thing for social media and it can be more engaging.

Since TikTok came on the scene vertical video has become very popular as Instagram introduced Reels and YouTube introduced Shorts. This can be a good way to grow your account and drive more visitors to your blog.

You might be thinking it’s a lot of social media platforms to manage. While you don’t necessarily have to be on all social media platforms it is good to be on the ones best fit for your blog or brand. Choose 3 platforms and try to stick to them and see which ones bring the best results.

A good way to manage all your social media pages is through SocialPilot. SocialPilot is a social media management and scheduling tool which helps you post and schedule posts at the click of a button. It can save you a ton of time and links up seamlessly with all the major platforms.

You can get a free 14 day trial to use SocialPilot when you go through this link.

SEO

SEO or Search Engine Optimization is the process of ranking your website higher on Google and search engines so you can get traffic from there for free. Ranking your website can take longer to see traffic coming in but once you start ranking it just free traffic.

You should install Yoast SEO which is a free WordPress plugin that optimizes your content and website for SEO.

The key is ranking is to quality build backlinks. Backlinks are when another website links to your blog. This should be a high authority website. Check out this article if you want to see how you can easily build backlinks to your blog.

Another thing to increase your ranking is to publish high quality articles that are optimised for long tail keywords. Long tail keywords are search terms that are more specific and receive less traffic but because they are more specific it is easier to rank for them. An example of this is “best running shoes for bad ankles”.

SEMrush is a great tool to use to find long tail keywords that you can easily rank for while it also shows you who your competitors are getting backlinks from. This makes it easier to reach out to them so they can then possibly link out to you.

Get a free trial of SEMrush when you go through this link.

Facebook Groups

Facebook Groups are online communities on Facebook that share a similar interest and are part of a specific group to discuss about the share interest. Think of it like forums but on Facebook.

There are Facebook groups about almost anything including movies, sports, business, medicine, landscaping, etc. Any obscure interest you can think of, there’s probably a Facebook Group out there for it.

There’s two ways you can use Facebook Groups to drive traffic to your blog.

You can create your own Facebook Group and build your own community. While this may be slower it does mean you have more control as you to what gets posted.
The second way is to join existing Facebook Groups and start adding to the conversation and provide value. Some groups do allow you to post your links to articles but you will have to check with the individual Facebook group rules before doing this as some groups don’t allow it.

Quora

Quora is a questions and answer website that allows users to ask any questions and anyone that has knowledge of the answer can answer it. People ask thousands of questions daily on Quora and there are millions of questions in total on Quora.

Search for questions that people ask and have something to do with the topic of your blog and answer it to the best of your knowledge. Make your answer useful and include a link of your blog so people can head over their if they want to learn more.

Since Quora is one of the most popular websites on the internet, if your answer gets a lot of views, you can potentially get tons of traffic back to your site.

Reddit

Reddit is an online forum where users can discuss anything and everything. Reddit is a tricky one to master. Especially if you are a beginner and you don’t know the rules of Reddit. Redditors (as they like to be known) are known to be ruthless when it comes to self promotion. You cannot just promote your blog unless you want your head bitten off or ignored!

But if you do it right Reddit can be a fantastic traffic source that can bring you thousands upon thousands of hits to your blog. A good article that tells you how to market your blog on Reddit properly is this one.

Wrapping Up

We hope this article help you to start a blog and make money. Blogging can be a very lucrative way to make money, especially when your blog has consistent traffic going to it.

Driving traffic to your blog and getting visitors to your blog can take a little while at times and it is good to be patient. If you’ve always wanted to start a blog and make money, we hope this step by step guide has helped you do that.

Nowadays a blog can be simple to start as you do not need any coding know-how or technical skills. All you need is a good hosting provider and WordPress. Be sure to claim your free domain name and discounted hosting offer.