Businesses of many types blog to establish long-term audiences. Conversely, more bloggers are launching companies as extensions of their blogs. And that makes sense.
Building a product audience is a major problem for new firms. New bloggers, on the other hand, create a following by constantly publishing valuable material before monetizing their visitors.
A side gig blog is easy to start. Creating inventive methods to generate money as a blogger requires strategy to put your site up for success.
This step-by-step tutorial will help you create and build a blog for traffic and cash. It’s for new company owners and current firms who wish to improve their blogging.
A blog is what?
Blogs are websites with constantly updated information on a certain topic. Blogs are more personal than news sources and other media, which allows organisations (blog owners) engage with their readers.
Many people and organisations establish blogs for various reasons:
To exchange thoughts, hobbies, or life stories
Teaching others their knowledge
Build an email list
To build their expert brand
To earn money online
Any combination of the aforementioned
Blogging may be rewarding—especially when outsiders read your content—but it’s also a commitment.
Be constant in your publishing frequency and content, whether you post daily, weekly, or monthly.
Bloggers seldom see immediate results from their company or personal blogs, so keep your eye on the goal to stay motivated.
Starting a blog
Make money with your blog.
Blog niche selection
Select a blogging platform and template.
Choosing a blog and domain
Strategize publishing
Get regular blog readers.
The hardest aspect of blogging is finding time and inspiration to do it regularly. Starting is easy, though.
You need to think like an entrepreneur rather than a blogger to make a site successful, which is why we start our tutorial with monetization.
1. Make money with your blog.
This may seem paradoxical, but if you want to make money blogging, focus on money first and content second. Before writing your first blog article, create a monetization plan to guide your content and growth. Start by seeing your new blog as a business rather than a creative expression.
You may monetise your blog in different ways, depending on its type. Couple a tiny company idea with a blog to expand sustainably for minimal investment other than time and energy.
Many believe Google AdSense is the only method to make money blogging. While advertising can provide cash, they need a lot of traffic to be profitable. Thankfully, there are many more methods to establish a blog and monetise it rapidly without a large readership.
Here are six monetization methods:
1. Selling books
James Clear exemplifies this. After years of running a self-development blog, James developed Atomic Habits to monetise it and capitalise on his knowledge.
This digital and print book made his blog profitable and put him on the New York Times bestsellers list.
2. Affiliate marketing
You get a commission when you sell a partner’s goods using affiliate marketing. Affiliate commissions may generate passive income if done well.
Bases Loaded Softball produces gear reviews to entice visitors and promotes Amazon products in every blog article. If a reader buys the product after clicking the link, the blog gets paid.
3. Digital goods
Bloggers naturally monetize with online courses. Successful bloggers create expert material, and courses build on your expertise. Visit CopyHackers.com for blog ideas from a successful transition.
4. Physical goods
Your blog’s theme and content can help you sell tangible things that match your brand and message. Glossier, a cosmetics business, originated from Emily Weiss’s fashion blog Into The Gloss.
5. Services
If you want to blog, you’re probably an expert and good with language. Consulting, coaching, and speaking are effective blog monetization methods.
6. Subscriptions
Patreon isn’t only for YouTubers. To monetise a blog, subscribers may pay a monthly fee for unique blog material if they find your content useful.
There are better and faster ways to generate money with your site that don’t require many pageviews daily. Building a devoted audience in addition to a huge one makes that true.
Who your audience is and how you serve them will matter more than generating money.
2. Choose a blog niche: What’s your “thing”?
The web is full of material. It may be difficult to stand apart, but you may do it by discovering a niche and providing unique content.
A niche should be an inch broad but a mile deep. This will help you keep coming up with material and impact your blog name (which we’ll discuss later).
Your specialty must also attract an audience that matches your blog monetization plan. Which items or services would this audience buy?
Do this numerous ways:
Focus your new blog on someplace like New York.
Your blog should focus on a narrow section of a wider subject, such as vegan recipes.
Put a funny spin on your blog postings.
Compete with quality (e.g., in-depth posts on a topic no one else would)
BlogTO covers many lifestyle themes but focuses on Toronto’s diversity.
Your specialisation will influence how you monetize and if you can sustainably offer your audience with content.
What items or services would your blog readership buy? This is a crucial question when choosing a blog niche, whether you plan to monetize with display ads or other methods.
Do not miss this final step. Competitive analysis can help you brand and stand out. Finding and filling perspectives gaps is the key to a successful blog.
3. Select a blogging platform and template.
Blog hosting and content management must be set up before writing your first post. Many would-be bloggers get stuck here if they’re not sure which platform to use.
Self-hosted or hosted blogging platforms are usually the options:
Self-hosted
These platforms allow more customisation, but you must pay a hosting company a monthly fee to host the site. A web hosting plan requires setup beyond this cost. WordPress is the main open-source platform for self-hosted websites.
Hosted
A hosted site speeds up blog setup. Shopify includes hosting in all plans. Hosted sites like Blogger and Wix limit customisation, unlike Shopify.
You should choose a platform that:
Is easy to use
Doesn’t require coding or HTML skills
Will be able to grow with you
During your blogging journey there will come a time when you may want to change the look and functionality of your site as your brand matures, your traffic grows, and you have more posts to organize.
You’ll also want to ensure that your blogging platform offers a healthy ecosystem of plug-ins and apps—they can make a world of difference in optimizing your site’s performance, running site backups, marketing your new blog, and simplifying tasks.
4. Choosing a blog and domain
Companies like Bluehost will give you a free domain name if you sign up for a hosting plan. Bluehost also offers a 30-day money back guarantee if you’re unhappy with the service.
When choosing a domain name, think about what you’re going to call your website. Unless you’re trying to build a personal blog or a portfolio site, I would recommend against using your own name as your custom domain. You can still be the face of the blog, even if your personal name isn’t in the URL, and it’s a lot easier to build a sticky brand when you come up with a creative name that reflects your message.
Take a look at the Black Girls RUN! blog by Ashley Hicks-Rocha and Toni Carey. The blog, though a collection of Ashley and Toni’s personal experiences as Black female runners, falls under their brand name, Black Girls RUN!
When choosing a domain name, aim to make it:
Memorable
Fun to say
Easy to spell
Unique
Choosing a name for your blog can be tedious, but a good brand name makes a memorable impression on readers and allows them to know what to expect from your company.
Building a blog on Shopify
Shopify is a hosted platform that includes both an ecommerce website builder and a blogging platform, with add-ons such as hundreds of plug-ins and apps to help you grow and sell physical/digital products or services right away. You can start your free trial today.
Once that’s settled, you’ll need to pick a blog theme.
A “theme” is just a template for the blog design, layout, and features of your website. There are plenty of great Shopify themes available for free that you can set up with one click, whatever platform you choose. You can pick a theme in the Online Store tab in your Shopify dashboard, under Themes.
But if you’re not happy with those options, consider paying the one-time fee for a premium theme, as it will have a big impact on the overall user experience.
The design of your site can also affect your search engine optimization (SEO) and the engagement metrics on your blog content. Readers make a snap judgment on a site’s trustworthiness based on how it looks and feels.
Take The House That Lars Built. One glance at this interior-design-and-crafts blog and you know it’s going to be a fun experience.
From the quick load time to the soft colors and playful illustrations, The House That Lars Built is bound to appeal to readers who are into arts and crafts and design.
Most of us can also remember landing on a poorly designed website and bouncing when it became hard to find what we were looking for. Take some time when choosing a new theme, as it can make a world of difference in how your blog performs.
Some Shopify apps that can extend the functionality of your blog include:
Blog Studio, to spruce up your blog posts with a drag-and-drop article builder
Yoast SEO for Shopify, to improve your website’s SEO
5. Strategize publishing
Every blogger needs to keep a healthy supply of ideas, and it helps if you plan ahead to ensure you never run out. Create a content calendar to help you keep track of your ideas (and keep yourself on track, too). Your content calendar should include:
What content you’re creating
What audiences you’re targeting
Which distribution channels you will be releasing on and on what date
You can use a simple spreadsheet to plan out your content calendar. However there are a lot more effective tools available. Trello, Airtable, or Asana are good options because they make organizing content more intuitive.
Thinking about your content mix is also important to get a sense of the scope of your blog and what categories/tags you might use to organize it all as you add more great content in the future.
Some types of blog posts to include are:
Evergreen content
Evergreen content gets its moniker because it’s relevant without much modification over time. It often takes the form of educational, informative articles about topics that are not news-cycle dependent.
Topical content
Topical blog posts capitalize on currently trending events or topics. Topical content is that it can fuel quick growth on social channels when it’s addressing topics with a lot of public interest in a distinctive way. Use topical content strategically, but don’t lean on it for steady traffic as it can be more unpredictable and go stale more quickly.
Curated content
Curated content, or content that was generated elsewhere but is linked to and contextualized by you, can be a great way to augment your original content strategy. The web is a big place, and readers appreciate thoughtfully curated content that aligns with their values and interests.
Feature pieces
Interviews can be a great way to build rich content in an editorial style. Feature stories tell a story and take readers into the minds and lives of extraordinary people. Interviews with notable people can be a great way to build authority as you gain some credibility by association.
Visual content
Visual content is something that all bloggers should have in their strategy. Search engines reward blog posts that incorporate videos, original images, and graphics.
Interactive content
Quizzes can be a great way to increase engagement like time on page and unearth deeper insights about your audience.
Try to plan out each blog post at least one month in advance, and publish on a consistent schedule so your audience has an idea of how often to expect new blog posts. You can always tweak the calendar if a feature story pops up and needs to get published fast.
Before writing blog posts, start with an outline. While this is a step that some bloggers might opt to skip, writing an outline is an effective way to hit all the points you need to hit. It’ll help make sure you include any relevant keywords and liberate your mind from the destination so you can focus on the journey.
When you have finished writing your blog post, before hitting Publish, here are some simple things you should do:
Edit your work
While coming back with fresh eyes and using a tool like Grammarly can help to catch syntax and grammar errors, having a human editor to bounce ideas off of can help take your blog posts to the next level.
Organize your blog post with headings
Subheadings make your posts more scannable and approachable for readers.
Workshop headlines and social sharing images
A headline and image can make or break your blog post distribution. While we wouldn’t advise creating clickbait, successful blog headlines and images that stand out on social feeds and inspire curiosity are vital to getting people to read your work.
Keep in mind that you won’t grow your audience overnight. You’ll have some hits and some misses, but you need to keep going to keep growing.
6. Get regular blog readers.
We usually talk about growing an audience after publishing. But if you want to start a blog and build momentum quickly, you need to consider your strategy before you launch.
Many bloggers struggle with distribution for two main reasons:
They don’t have a concrete, repeatable distribution strategy within their publishing process.
Publishing a new blog is already a nerve-wracking experience, and amplifying your reach makes it that much scarier.
The latter is something you eventually get over, but the former requires some initial thought and investment of time before you launch.
So let’s walk through some of the ways you can plan for growth and get the most out of every blog post you create.
Start collecting emails as soon as possible
Regardless of what platform you’re blogging on, you should be focused on getting email subscribers. Every new subscriber is a sign that you’re doing something right, and is a potential repeat reader you can easily reach.
Even if you switch platforms down the road or decide to start something new, your email list remains with you. But it’s not enough to just have a subscriber list. You need to capture these emails at every turn and you do that with contact forms.
A good habit to get into is embedding contact forms directly into your content or homepage with a call to action to subscribe. You can even embed one in an exit pop-up to convert abandoning visitors into subscribers.
Many email marketing solutions allow you to create and use these forms easily. You can even generate a link that directs to a separate contact page you can link out to in your blog posts, social media, and email signature.
Remember that people aren’t going to subscribe to your blog if you don’t ask and if you don’t make it easy for them. Every time you hit the Publish button, you should email it to your list—a process you can automate down the road once you get into the swing of things.
Brainstorm opportunities to go after search engine traffic
Using keyword research, you can get an idea of how much search volume there is for particular search queries in your blog niche. The higher the number, the more demand there is for a topic and the more traffic you can potentially generate long term.
The easiest way to do this is using Ubersuggest and entering search terms from your audience’s perspective to try to unearth interesting blog post ideas. Queries that start with “how to” or “best” are a good place to start.
Even if you don’t land a spot on the first page of the search engine results, you’ll have a content idea with proven demand. But if you want to aim high, you can learn more about SEO.
Set up your social media strategy
While it might seem like a smart move to market your new blog on every social media platform, this can be difficult to manage and isn’t always effective. Instead, focus on the channels where your audience spends the most time. Do they join specific communities or forums? Are they on TikTok versus Facebook? Depending on your niche and your resources, your choice of channels will vary.
For example, Oh Happy Day, an online party-goods shop, taps into its growing list of more than 1.7 million followers every time it publishes a new blog post.
Don’t neglect your personal networks either—your friends and family make a great early audience as you start a blog.
Reduce, reuse, and resurface your content
You can’t put up an extensive and unique blog post every day. A good blogger knows how to reuse and repurpose their content to get the most mileage out of it. Here are some blog post ideas to keep in mind:
Post a roundup of past blog posts with a common theme (e.g., “Our Best Posts of [YEAR]”).
Recreate blog posts as other types of content, such as infographics or quizzes.
Occasionally update and republish old content after a good amount of time has passed to boost ranking in Google Search. This works great with seasonal content (e.g., “10 Lazy Halloween Costume Ideas”).
Consider accepting guest blog posts once you’ve started to amass a following. Guest authors will likely share this content with their own audiences, too.
Add links to related content within and at the end of your posts. (If you’re on Shopify, install the free Related Blog Posts app.)
Become a podcast guest and discuss a few blog topics you already wrote about.
When time is money and you’re in the business of blogging, you need to constantly squeeze more value out of your efforts.
Understand analytics to understand your audience
The best opportunities are hidden in your data, waiting to be discovered.
Whether you’re using a WordPress blog or the Shopify platform, take the time to set up Google Analytics on your site (it’s free). With a Google Analytics account, you can get deeper insights on your new blog, like the average amount of time people spent reading your posts, the quality of readers coming from different sources, and even the number of readers in real time.
Data can also be used as leverage for bloggers. The ability to prove how much traffic you bring in is a huge asset that makes others more likely to want to work with you or gain access to your audience.
How much money do bloggers make?
Full-time bloggers can earn a healthy living writing online content. In fact, according to finance blog Millennial Money, people who start a blog can earn up to $50.000 even in their first year, while bloggers who have built traffic and subscribers earn more than $100.000 the following year.