Blogging is an excellent way to make money online. Starting your own blog has several advantages for your online business. It helps you create and grow your brand, drive traffic to your website, helps you network with influencers, generate sales and much more.
In fact, I make a full-time income from blogging as my primary blog BloggersPassion generates me over $10,000 every single month.
However, here’s the thing, there’s a huge competition. As a beginner, you may wonder if you can really create a successful blog if you don’t know where to start? The answer is a resounding yes, you can! In this post, I will show you the exact things I did to start a successful blog.
Are you curious? Let’s get started!
Step 1: Pick a Topic
When you start a new blog, no one is going to give you money for free. You have to work hard. Most of all, you need to pick a niche that resonates with you, as well as generates money in the long run.
The good thing is you don’t have to reinvent the wheel. All you need is a niche that’s profitable and fun to blog!
There are a few topics that are evergreen such as;
- Personal finance
- Marketing (or make money online)
- Travel
- Food
- Lifestyle
- Fitness
You can customize these topics according to your interests, and way of presenting. Furthermore, the advantage of picking a niche that interests is that, you will need to be prepared to work hard for at least 8 to 12 months before you start generating decent results. A topic of your choice will make this less taxing.
A word of advice, try to avoid competing with authority websites in your industry and pick a smaller niche that has decent searches.
For example, if you’re interested in launching a blog in the fitness industry, consider picking smaller niches such as bodyweight training, suspension training, yoga for gastric problems, etc.
You can get faster results if you pick a niche that is small yet profitable. You can also use tools like Semrush, Ahrefs, etc to find the monthly searches of any niche.
Use tools like Google Trends to find the popularity and trends of the topic you want to pick.
For instance, if you search for a topic like ‘yoga exercises’, you’ll notice that the worldwide trend for the topic is constantly growing.
Similarly, you can use Google Trends to find the popularity of any search term or topic you want to pick.
Step 2: Find a Memorable Domain Name
Once you’ve finalized a topic for your blog, you have to decide on a name for it.
A domain name can make or break the success of your website. So pick a domain that’s memorable.
A memorable domain is;
- Easy to type
- Easy to spell
- Easy to remember
- Short and sweet
Unfortunately, all easy and good names are mostly gone! That’s why you need to be creative (think out of the box) to come up with great domain name ideas for your website.
Here are a few tips to find a great domain quickly.
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Use domain name generators
You can use domain name generators like Lean Domain Search to find available domain names in seconds. Just enter any keyword and it will show you a ton of available domain names containing that keyword.
Here’s how it looks like;
As you can see above, for the keyword ‘blogging’, the tool suggested over 3000 .com domain names. Not only is this website fast it is also free.
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Try expired domains
If you want to find better domain names at affordable prices, try buying expired domains. Expired domains are domains that are not renewed by their registrants. There are many platforms such as BigRock, Hostgator, etc to easily find affordable expired domains.
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Copyrighted domains
Make sure the domain name you choose isn’t trademarked or copyrighted by any other company. Otherwise, it could lead to legal issues in the long run.
Step 3: Choose WordPress Hosting
When you start a new blog, it’s important to pick the right blogging platform. When it comes to blogging platforms, one of the most preferred options is WordPress.
WordPress is one of the most popular and powerful blogging platform in the world. It powers around 42% of all the websites in the world. However, to create a professional website you need a web hosting service.
So which is the best web host that fits perfectly with WordPress? WordPress Hosting is one of the prefered choices for a WordPress website. In fact, WordPress also officially recommends Bluehost as one the recommended hosting types since 2005.
WordPress Hosting offers a plethora of features that help you start and grow your WordPress blog from scratch.
Here are some of the amazing benefits you’ll get when you go with their WordPress hosting,
- Access to over 100 WordPress themes for free
- Free SSL certificates
- Free staging environment
- Free domain
- Free automatic daily malware scan
- Free CDN and many more
Above all, all our WordPress Hosting plans come with automatic WordPress installation upon the creation of your WordPress hosting account.
Here’s how you can get started with the creating your website with WordPress Hosting:
- Once you’re on the Bluehost.in website, choose WordPress Hosting under the ‘WordPress’ tab
- Once you’re on the WordPress hosting page, you’ll find the pricing plans.
As you can see above, there are three affordable hosting plans viz:
- Basic (this is the cheapest plan and great for beginners who want to install only 1 website)
- Plus (this plan allows you to install unlimited sites)
- Choice Plus (this is the most recommended plan which gives you access to extra features like free domain privacy, website backup, website migration, etc.)
Pick a plan that suits your budget and website needs and in the next step, you’ll be asked to set up your domain.
- Now, it is time to register your domain name
You can either create a domain at that moment or create one later. With WordPress Hosting you can avail a free domain name for a year from the time it is created.
4. The next step is to create your hosting account. You can also use Google Single Sign-On if you want to link your account with your Google address. Once you process the payment, you’re done.
5. The final step is to log in to your account, and start customizing your website. The best way is to choose a good theme that goes well with your website’s niche. With WordPress Hosting you get to choose from as many as 100+ free and premium themes for your website. After designing the layout of your website, it is time to install plugins.
Step 4: Install Essential WordPress Plugins
One of the biggest benefits of using the self-hosted WordPress platform is that it gives you access to a ton of useful plugins. Plugins help you add several functionalities to your website easily without any coding efforts. There are a wide range of plugins available ranging from security to speed to SEO and more.
Here are some of the essential plugins you can install on your WordPress blog.
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Rank Math
Rank Math is the most powerful SEO plugin for WordPress sites. If you want to optimize your content for specific keywords in order to rank well in search engines, you need to install a plugin like Rank Math.
It also offers a free version which is useful for beginners. You can also integrate this plugin with Google Analytics, Google Search Console, etc. Unlike other SEO optimization plugins, Rank Math lets you optimize your blog posts for unlimited ‘target keywords’ per post.
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WP Rocket
Website speed matters a lot. If you want to speed up your page loading times within a few clicks, you should definitely try WP Rocket. WP Rocket is a premium caching plugin that is used by over 1.7 million websites worldwide. It offers exceptional features like LazyLoading to load your blog images faster.
Alternatively, you can also install W3 Total Cache if you’re looking for a free plugin to improve your page loading times.
- UpdraftPlus
It’s extremely important to have website security tools like backup plugins to secure your site. A website backup can help you recover your website after a security vulnerability. UpdraftPlus comes in handy which simplifies the backup and restoration process.
Using this plugin, you can easily take a backup of your website files and databases into the cloud such as Dropbox, Google Drive, Amazon S3, etc, and restore with a single click.
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iThemes Security
Thousands of WordPress sites get hacked every single day. To safeguard your site from hackers and security vulnerabilities, you can install a security plugin like iThemes Security which gives access to over 30 ways to secure your WordPress site.
This plugin offers various security features like brute force attack protection, turning off file editing from within the WordPress admin area, and many more.
Apart from the above plugins, you can also consider installing the following plugins,
- Akismet (to prevent spam comments)
- Social Snap (to add social sharing buttons)
- Google XML Sitemaps (to improve your site SEO)
- Broken Link Checker (to check broken links on your site)
- Smush (to compress any image)
Step 5: Create Engaging Content
Content is king. No matter what niche you pick, you need great content to rank well and build your audience from scratch.
Here are a few tips to create engaging content that ranks well and caters to your audience.
Come up with solid content ideas
To create great content, you need powerful content ideas. Here are a few quick tips to come up with brilliant blog post ideas.
- Use Quora to find problems in your niche and create content around those things
- Check out competitor websites
- Use a topic generator tool such as HubSpot’s Blog Ideas Generator
- Get ideas from YouTube
Create irresistible headlines
On average, 8 out of 10 people will read headlines, but only 2 out of 10 will read the rest. If your headlines are not powerful enough, you’ll lose readers before you even start.
Create headlines that capture your audience’s attention.
Here are some easy ways to create magnetic headlines for your blog posts.
- Include numbers in your headlines as they work like a charm
- Use headline generator tools like CoSchedule Headline Analyzer, Portent Content Idea Generator, etc
- Use power words while writing headlines. Power words include amazing, incredible, stunning, dangerous, cringeworthy, etc
- Try to come up with at least 3 to 5 headline ideas for every post you write and pick the best one
Proofread twice
Nobody likes to read a blog post that’s full of spelling, punctuation, and grammatical mistakes. You need to proofread your final draft multiple times. You can use tools like Grammarly, Grammar Checker and more to create grammatical error-free content.
Above all, identify your ideal readers. That way, it’ll be much easier for you to create content that will make them stick to your blog.
Final Thoughts
It doesn’t matter what kind of business you run. Whether it is an online business or a local offline business, you should start a blog. Blogging is a great way to build your brand, increase sales, and generate more traffic. And starting a blog on WordPress is probably the easiest way to grow your presence online.
So what do you think? Are you excited to start your own blog? Do you have any questions? Let us know your thoughts in the comments.
