How to start a blog with bluehost

✅ How To START A Blog in 15 Mins Step By Step Newbie Guide [ 2022 ]

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Through this detailed guide on How to Start a Blog, Jitendra Vaswani wants to help newbies who wants to get started in blogging  2022 and are willing to make money in blogging. 

The world of blogging : Can you Really Make Money From Blogging ? I will explain everything here 

How to start a blog with bluehost

About 20 years ago the Internet used to be just an informational tool. During those days, when “World Wide Web” was just approaching puberty, websites were simple, basic and provided a one-sided conversation. As time progressed, Internet became evolved into a more comprehensive and interactive mode with the introduction of transaction-based websites and online shopping.

Then came the moment when the online world experienced a sudden boost and changed with the evolution of Web 2.0 (the social web). This was the time when user-generated contents became a crucial part of the online world. Today, we have reached a stage where websites provide a two-way conversation and blogs are taking over. In this detailed guide of blogging you will learn how to start a blog under 15 minutes in WordPress.

Internet & blogging today

Over the years, internet has seen an all-time boost with social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, etc. taking over the ranks. News, education, entertainment, knowledge, health, etc. have found a new and concrete platform for showcase through Google and YouTube.

The internet has grown faster than ever before and today anyone can build a website for free. Since the late 1990’s, blogging has created a new and unique platform to share and spread knowledge and opinion through online contents and posts. It has now become a genuine profession that earns you both income and respect.

If you go out on a survey, you will find millions of blogs being created every day across the globe.

A QUICK RUN THROUGH GUIDE ON HOW TO START A BLOG  2022

(Tips and tricks)

Once you have read through all the necessary steps and requirements for building your blog, let me take you through a quick and brief run through for revision purposes. The following steps are more of tips and tricks, rather than a typical guide.

  • Choose your website platform.
  • Get a domain name.
  • Use a cheap and reliable web hosting solution.
  • Choose the advertising that is right for your blog.
  • Sign up to and use affiliate programs to sell other’s products.
  • Choose and contact reputed and established potential advertisers.
  • Market your services to your readers.
  • Use your blogs to deepen existing relationship with your customers.
  • Write and upload relevant and good quality contents.
  • Update and optimise your blog on a regular basis.
  • Install and add useful plugins for added features and functionalities.
  • Use SEO techniques to attract more visitors and traffic to your blog.

“Feel free to comment down below if you have any kind of doubts or queries. You can even contact me through email([email protected]) . I will be really glad to guide you through your problems.”

Blogging in detail

With the advent of Web 2.0 and social networking, blogging has gained much popularity. Blogging has become an online diary for thousands of people. It has also had crucial impacts on the world of politics, business and society with their contents. People and businesses are recognising the power of bloggers as online influencers.

Just for some extra knowledge, there are a few popular and important variations of the term “Blogging” that you should be aware of, if you are thinking to start your own blog.

Blogging is simply the act of writing a post for a blog.

A blogger is simply a person who writes/creates content for a blog.

Blogosphere is an online community consisting of blogs and bloggers.

Types of bloggers

There potentially 5 types of bloggers recognised according to the existing trends and technologies today:

These people consider blogging as a hobby and blog for fun. Their works mostly include blogs on personal musings, etc. and don’t earn an income from it. More than 60% of these bloggers spend less than 4 hours a week on blogging.

  • Part time professional bloggers

These are the people who use blogging to earn a side income to supplement their primary source of income.

  • Full time professional bloggers

These are the people who have taken up blogging as a full time profession and treat it as their primary source of income.

These are the people, who blog as a part of their full time job. They can even work full time for an organisation. Work from these bloggers make up to almost 8% of the total blogs.

These are the people, who blog for a company they own. This is most commonly seen in cases of start up entrepreneurs. Work from these bloggers make up to almost 13% of the total blogs.

Why is blogging good for business?

Since the past half decade, blogging has evolved as the next big thing for various startups as well as for well-established businesses. Businesses have taken up blogging and social media as an aid to reach the masses and promote their products and services virally on and through the internet. Here is a comprehensive list of points to prove why blogging is good, or rather great for any kind of business.

  • Small businesses and start ups with blogs generate 126% more leads.
  • An interesting content is one of the top 2 reasons why people follow brands on social media.
  • Over 30% of marketers and companies believe that blogs are the most important type of content marketing.
  • More than 75% of consumers today trust advice, information and reviews from blogs.
  • Around 90% of consumers find the contents useful and reliable.
  • 60% of consumers feel a company’s credibility and positivity after reading their site.
  • Around 80% of consumers today enjoy reading relevant contents from brands and companies.
  • Around 70% of consumers learn about a company through blogs and articles rather than ads.

Blogging: Facts and figures

Blogging: Facts and figures

  • Over 6.5 million people across the globe blog on blogging sites.
  • Around 12 million people across the globe blog on social networking platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, Tumblr, etc.
  • Surveys reveal that people spend around 23% of internet time on blogs and social networking.
  • Around 75% of internet users read blogs.
  • Around 53% of bloggers from across the globe are between the age group of 21 – 35.
  • The majority of bloggers today are women.

Top 10 highest earning blogs  2022

Here is an updated list of the top 10 highest earning blogs in the world.

  • The Huffington post (Monthly earnings: ~$2,330,0000)
  • Mashable (Monthly earnings: ~$560,000)
  • Perez Hilton (Monthly earnings: ~$450,000)
  • TechCrunch (Monthly earnings: ~$400,000)
  • Smashing magazine (Monthly earnings: ~$190,000)
  • Timothy Sykes (Monthly earnings: ~$150,000)
  • Gothamist (Monthly earnings: ~$110,000)
  • Tuts Plus (Monthly earnings: ~$110,000)
  • Car advice (Monthly earnings: ~$70,000)
  • Venture beat (Monthly earnings: ~$60,000)

If you are reading this guide, then here’s why you will find this BLOG setup guide useful.

BLOG setup guide

  • This blog setup guide is simple and PERFECT FOR BEGINNERS.
  • Direct and easy to understand. This guide is not complicated and we guarantee you will have a well functioning blog by the end of this guide.
  • This guide is up to date with the latest facts and trends and is updated on a regular basis.
  • This guide has been created primarily focusing on the WordPress platform to get you best results.
  • Help on demand. Contact me via email or drop your comments down below. I will be glad to help you with your queries.
  • IT IS FREE!

Steps to build a blog

Steps to build a blog

Just like any other normal web site, there are various steps and requirements to create a blog. In this guide, I have compressed that list of requirements into 3 major steps with all other general steps revolving around it. So let’s jump right into it without any further ado.

Step 1: Choose your website platform.

Step 2: Choose a domain name and hosting.

Step 3: Customise and tweak your website.

A blog is just another type of web site which requires a basic set up platform, domain name, hosting and customizations. Once you’ve set up these things, it’s your choice to make it a blog or an online store.

 

Step 1 : Choose your website platform

website choose platform

The first thing you need to worry about is deciding which platform you’re going to build your website with. You should preferably choose a user-friendly platform for building your website and managing your own online content.

A Content Management System (CMS) or website building platform has made website building accessible to literally anyone and allows you to create your website and handle it instead of using a bunch of loose HTML pages.

There are numerous website building platforms in today’s date, each having varying difficulties, functions and features. Here is a percentage breakdown of the most popularly used website building platforms today.

HubSpot CMS is one of the most user-friendly content management systems in the market. It allows you to create all sorts of pages and automatically optimises your content for mobile and search engines. Additionally, you can personalise your content for each website visitor based on location, source, device, language, or any other detail stored in your HubSpot CRM, from demographic information to your contacts’ interactions with your brand.

WordPress is clearly the most preferred and used website building platform and leads the chart by a huge margin. Let me list down the key factors that give WordPress such a comprehensive lead over other rival platforms like Drupal and Joomla. There are a bunch of advantages to be pointed out.

platform percentage

Anything that’s free, garners massive attraction. WordPress is no exception. You will not have to worry about creating a paid account for it. You won’t have to pay any downloading or installation cost. IT’S COMPLETELY FREE.

  • Highly customizable and easy to use.

WordPress is the easiest platform I’ve worked with. It has an easy user interface and is highly flexible and will suit everyone’s purpose. When it comes to customisation, WordPress offers a huge community who have designed attractive themes, layouts and templates that you can choose from, to beautify your website.

It’s more important to be “Beginner friendly” than being “User friendly”. WordPress has an entire collection of useful and free plugins that enable you to handle any type of site you wish to create. “Plugins” enable you to add contact forms, subscription forms, image galleries, etc. and offer a more interactive set up to your website.

  • Great for both, small and large websites.

WordPress can easily handle light sized blogs to large scale business websites and online stores. In fact, WordPress is used by large scale sites like eBay, Mozilla, CNN and even NASA.

  • Responsiveness and compatibility.

Once you build a website, you would want it to function on almost every mobile device possible. Websites built through WordPress are responsive and work on smartphones, tablets and laptops .

You don’t need any technical coding to create a website on WordPress. Perhaps this is the prime reason why WordPress is the most preferred website building platform today.

WordPress provides you the best search engine optimisation (SEO), which makes your website more likely to attract more customers.

WordPress though is NOT THE ONLY OPTION to create a website. Choosing a platform depends solely on your knowledge, preference and comfort.

Drupal is a powerful platform popularly used by experienced coders and web developers. It relies on a lot of basic understanding of HTML to create any substantial content. Unless you are some IT geek or a software professional, I would strongly suggest not to use Drupal.

Joomla is a website building platform that is one of the best for developing E-commerce websites and does have some user-friendly elements as well. In terms of difficulty, Joomla falls somewhere between WordPress and Drupal. It is an easy platform to work with, but you will need a little knowledge on technical coding to make your website work the way you want through this platform.

So if you are a beginner and do not want to get into any coding hassles and complex technicalities, I would suggest you to stick to WordPress.

Step 2: Choose a domain name and hosting

Step 2 puts in front two important requirements for the proper existence and functioning of your website:

  • A domain name (Something like yourblogname.com)
  • A host (To connect your site to the internet)

A domain name is simply the web address that you will type into the search or URL bar to navigate to your site. It will be your personal blog address where people find you over and over again. It defines the very existence and identity of your website.

A domain name can be chosen by either purchasing your own custom domain name through your preferred website builder, or you can purchase it on your own through online domain registrars GoDaddy or NameCheap.

A host is a medium that connects your website to the internet server. Having a hosting server will make your website load quickly and people can access it easily. Without web hosting, you’ll be unable to use your domain.

I would strictly suggest NOT TO create a “FREE” website/blog as it has a list of disadvantages that will put you down.

  • Free websites are owned by the provider, NOT YOU.
  • Such websites can be taken down any time without prior notice.
  • The provider will put their own ads on your site.
  • You can’t make money from a free website.

Where can I get my domain name and hosting?

If you search on the internet, you will find there are countless of authorised and reliable sites on the internet from where you can get your Domain name and hosting. But if you ask me to pick one out of the lot, my personal preference would be www.Bluehost.com

Bluehost is one of the oldest hosting company on internet and they have millions of customers vouching for their outstanding services.

This is the best web host for beginners, and the easiest way to get a great blog up and running.

Customer support need improvement

Bluehost have FREE Domain, FREE SSL Certificate and 1-Click WordPress Installs for their first time users. Their exclusive technology gives you the proven performance, reliability, and functionality you need.

Why Bluehost.com?

step-1-bluehost-homepage

Bluehost is an online hosting and domain registrar that offers hosting at reasonable and pocket friendly costs just around $2.95 – $3.49 per month and they even offer you a FREE domain name. Their hosting management is seemingly one of the best I have come across. On the technical front, Bluehost provides and offers unlimited storage & bandwidth. I always prefer buying my hosting and domain from Bluehost for my various projects.

Once you are done buying a domain name and hosting, you will also be provided with a personal email account(s): [email protected] specifically for your website. Email accounts like these, offer a far more professional approach to your business.

Bluehost Website Hosting Shared Web Hosting With cPanel

You may even try to host your site by yourself, but that may turn out to be a very complicated and time-consuming process. Hence it would be rather better and sensible for you to save some money and time and get a proper host that meets your Website requirements.

How do I choose a domain name?

step-4-domain-name (1)

Like I mentioned earlier, a domain name defines the identity of your website. You should always think of a domain name that is SIMPLE AND DIRECT. People should be able to easily find your site and remember the name so they can share it with others.

Your domain name must.

  • Be relevant to your business/service.
  • Justify and reflect the idea and purpose of your website.
  • Be easy to remember.
  • Be simple and direct.

If you are creating a website for non-commercial activities like broadcasting views and contents through blogging, then the domain name of your website should be something like Yourname.com or Yourblogname.com

NOTE:

Always remember to secure your domain name and web hosting before you continue with your website setup. This process is called Domain Privacy Protection (DPP). It hides your registration information in the “whois” database. It is worldwide database that everyone has access to.

I would strongly recommend this if you want to keep yourself secure and anonymous. Bluehost.com allows you to do this without any hassle.

Setting up WordPress and customisation

Step 1 and 2 described the basic foundation of your website/blog. Now let’s get it up and running. The next important thing you need to do is set up WordPress by installing it to your domain.

This can be achieved in two ways. One is very easy and direct, while the other one is very hard and complicated.

It must be clear from the name itself that this process is a direct and quicker way to install WordPress into your domain. Most hosting websites offer integrated “One-click installation” options to make the installation process faster.

  • You will need to visit Bluehost.com (Or your chosen hosting site) and log in to your account to get started.

Bluehost Hosting - Blog Setup Guide

  • Head to the cpanel (Control panel)

Bluehost Hosting - Blog Setup Guide

  • You will find the “WordPresss” icon.
  • Choose your domain where you want to install your website.

Wordpress Setup - Login

  • Click on the “Install now” button.
  • You will now get an access to your WordPress website.

Wordpress Installation

In some really rare and mysterious cases, a hosting site does not provide the “One-click installation” option. In such a situation, manual installation shall be used.

Manual installation is also possible if you are unable to go for the “One-click”. This process though is needlessly complicated, but it has to be followed when required. Here is a quick guide on how to go ahead with it.

  • Download WordPress from here: 
  • Create a new folder on your desktop and unzip WordPress in it.
  • Look for a file named wp-config-sample.php
  • Rename it to: wp-config.php
  • Open the wp-config.php and fill the following lines:
  1. define(‘DB_NAME’, ‘database_name_here’);
  1. define(‘DB_USER’, ‘username_here’); – Enter your hosting username
  2. define(‘DB_PASSWORD’, ‘password_here’); – Enter your hosting password
  • Now save the file after making the above changes.

Now, let’s get you in with the login process.

  • Go to com/wp-admin
  • Enter your username and password which you used to create your WordPress account.

WordPress login

  • The first page that will load up for you will be showing your WordPress admin menu.

Wordpress Dashboard

General settings and customizations

Wordpress settings

You will find a list of various options in the menu sidebar to click and explore, but for now, let me take you through the initial customizations and settings.

Let us start with applying a theme to your blog.

Theme - BLog Setup

  • Scroll down the dashboard to find the “Appearance” option.
  • Click on “Themes”

Wirdpress Theme settings

  • Now click on the “Add New” button on the top and choose from the various themes displayed. You can even search for themes according to your preference.
  • After you have chosen your preferred theme, install it and activate it.

How do I create pages for my blog?

WordPress allows you to add pages to your blog according to your preference. You should add pages to your blog that are relevant and make sense. Pages like a “Services” page, “About me/us” page, “Contact me/us” page, “Contents” page, etc., all can be added to your blog.

Add pages - WordPress Blog Setup

Free Premium Theme – Themify Ultra

If you’re looking for a WordPress theme, chances are it’s rare to find something that is both beautiful AND free. We’ve partnered with Themify to offer you a free version of their most popular theme, Themify Ultra. The free version we are currently offering is a stable version of the official and most recent version of the Ultra theme.

The Ultra is loaded with a number of instant demo import sites that actually function and work for their intended use. Use their shop to market your affiliate product links and make the most of your E-Commerce WordPress site. Perhaps you need to set up a quick portfolio site – this is easy using their instant demo import. Create a site with identical features and layout, and use Themify’s industry-recognised Builder to tweak as much or as little as you want!

themify-ultra-image

It is intended for personal and educational uses only. It has all the features of the premium version except the 12 bonus Builder Add-ons are not included. If you like it and would like to take your relationship with Themify to the next level, we have a 20% off coupon code for you. Please use this coupon code for your 20% off today: BLOGGERSIDEAS

Ultra Theme Features

The Ultra Theme will give users access to the following:

  • 19+ Skins/Demos (Including the New Ultra Coffee Skin, Lifestyle Blogger Skin, Horizontal Skin for photo bloggers, and so much more!)
  • 12 Free Bonus Builder Add-ons (Not available in this free, educational version of Ultra)
  • Use On An Unlimited Number of Sites
  • Access to One Year of Downloads, Updates, and Support
  • 30 Day Money Back Guarantee!

How to Install Themify Ultra:

  • Download the themify-ultra.zip and save it on your computer (don’t need to extract the zip file)
  • Go to Dashboard > Themes, click “Add new“, then click on themify-ultra “Upload Theme” button
  • Upload the themify-ultra.zip and activate it

Themify Ultra documentation: for more information on how to use the Ultra theme, refer to their Ultra theme documentation.

  • Just go to the “Pages” option in the dashboard side menu.
  • Bring your cursor over it and click on “Add new”.
  • When you do so, it will open up a blank screen that looks similar to what you have seen and used in Microsoft Word.
  • You can add text, images and more to build the page the way you want, and then save it when you’re done.

Create your homepage

A homepage is the face of a website or blog. It makes your website look more organised and acts as a neat entrance to your blogs and posts. If your website doesn’t have a homepage, then your posts will show up there each time you create one. This looks kind of untidy and unprofessional.

Creating a homepage for your website involves 3 very simple steps. Here’s how you can do it.

  • Go to“Settings” and then “Reading”.
  • You will find two options for creating pages. Front page is your home page and Posts page is the page for your blog.
  • Choose the page you want to add.

Add home page

How should I add posts to my blog?

Once you have learnt how add a page to your blog, now let’s learn how to add some posts and edit them. There is nothing to tricky about this. The first thing you need to do is decide the appropriate category of the post you are going to write. Your blog posts can be organised into different categories based on the topic you are writing on.

  • To add categories for your posts, just go to “Posts” and then “Categories”. You can add as many categories as you want to this list according to the contents you come up with as your blog matures.

Add category

  • You can also choose to add your categories after you are done writing your entire post.
  • Check the proper box in the categories section when you are finished writing your post.

Blog categories

  • Every post you write keeps getting saved automatically after every change you make. But I would still recommend you to manually save your draft changes after every update.

Adding media to your posts

Add media In WordPress

Posts having images and media are catchy and can easily attract audiences. A good content should always have relevant media and images along with it to keep readers engrossed and let them relate to your posts easily. Images also make your posts more understandable.

Here’s a full list of files supported by WordPress that can be uploaded to your posts:

Images

  • .jpg
  • .jpeg
  • .png
  • .gif
  • .ico

Documents

  • .pdf (Portable Document Format; Adobe Acrobat)
  • .doc, .docx (Microsoft Word Document)
  • .ppt, .pptx, .pps, .ppsx (Microsoft PowerPoint Presentation)
  • .odt (OpenDocument Text Document)
  • .xls, .xlsx (Microsoft Excel Document)
  • .psd (Adobe Photoshop Document)

Audio

Video

  • .mp4, .m4v (MPEG-4)
  • .mov (QuickTime)
  • .wmv (Windows Media Video)
  • .avi
  • .mpg
  • .ogv (Ogg)
  • .3gp (3GPP)
  • .3g2 (3GPP2)

NOTE:

Always remember to add an image title, a description and caption to the image. But it’s more important to add an “Alt text” to it. This helps search engines identify your images.

Adding links to a post

It is always necessary and recommended to insert useful and relevant links into your posts. These are called “Chain links” and are often required to provide an extension to your research and knowledge by adding video links, news links, links to other well recognised blogs and many more.

Insert link

It’s easy! Simply click on the “Chain link” icon in the tool bar to insert a link into your post.

DO NOT add unnecessary or extra links. The links you add should be relevant to your content and must help enhance the readability of your posts.

Page title/Site title setup

A page title will be what people see on search engines when your site or its pages show up in the search results. You should always remember to use the appropriate keywords for the page title of your website. Make sure to keep it SIMPLE AND DIRECT.

Taglines

A tagline is added to the page title to simply add a little more meaning to it.

You can manage both your page title and tagline by heading to Settings”, then “General”.

Page title and tagline

Enabling/Disabling comments

Comments are a very integral part of any website. It gives a more interactive feel to your website, be it a blog, niche website or even and online store. Allowing your readers to post comments often lets you know how good or bad your post is. Comments also help in improving your future posts and website optimisations, based on the views and opinions from viewers. It is a useful way to stay in touch with your readers.

Comment settings

While many find having people commenting on their posts pretty useful, some may not want people commenting on pages or posts. Access to settings for comments can be easily found in the WordPress menu. Just click Settings”, then “Discussion”. Now check or uncheck the “Allow Comments” option according to your preference, whether you want to enable or disable comments in your posts.

How to Add Plugins In WordPress

What is a plugin? Why is it important?

Plugins are codes that will enable your website or blog to perform various functions. If you want to add more features and optimise the functionality of your website, then adding plugins is a must. These are simply extensions that allows you to enhance the capabilities of your website.

If you install plugins, you will be able to get your website to do what you want to. Plugins are very useful for almost everything including adding photo galleries and submission forms.

How do I install and add plugins?

Add plugin In WordPress

If you want to start adding new plugins to your website, you will need to first install plugins.

  • Go to “Plugins”, then “Add new” and start searching.
  • You will find thousands of plugins to choose from. Once you have found the plugin you like, just click on “Install”.

HubSpot All-in-One Marketing

Hubspot

HubSpot All-in-One Marketing offers all the free tools you need to do marketing on your WordPress website. It allows you to create lead capture forms and popups, add a live chat to your site (even chat bots!), and it syncs all of your contacts’ information in a CRM so you can stay organised.

There will be hundreds of different plugins that can perform the same function. To help you save some time in choosing and installing the ideal plugins, here is a list of the most popularly used plugins bloggers use today.

1) Yoast SEO (WordPress specific)

WordPress Yoast SEO

This plugin allows you to edit your title tags, meta descriptions and a lot more before publishing the post. All this can be done from within the page itself.

2) Google analytics

Google Analytics for WordPress

This is a very important tool if you are interested in tracking the visitors/traffic to your website or blog. All you need to do is install the plugin and link it to your Google account.

3) Backupbuddy

backup-Buddy

Helps you create an automatic backup for your website or blog. It offers you 1 GB of free cloud storage to store your backups.

4) W3 Total cache

w3-total-cache-free

Helps optimise the speed, performance and functionality and also provide advanced control options to your website.

5)Floating social bar

Example-of-Floating-Share-Buttons

This plugin will let you add share buttons for social media like Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, etc. FCB will be very crucial for publicity of your blog or posts to various social media platforms by your visitors.

 

6) Disqus

disqus blog comments

If you are blogging, then you are bound to have a number of comments and opinions posted by your readers on your posts. Disqus helps manage your posts when a large amount of comments drop in. It also provides a voting system for displaying the top comments.

 

7) 404 Redirection

404-Redirection-WordPress-Plugin-Subdirectory-Fix-Plugin-Edit

This plugin simply helps redirect broken pages back to your homepage.

 

These plugins will help expand your site’s features and give you new and enhanced capabilities for a better and smoother growth of your website.

 Also read: 

Top 5 WordPress Plugins To Make Your Website Responsive

Top 12 WordPress Plugins for Your Business Blog

Top 20 Best WordPress Plugins List You Must Have

Detailed Grasshopper Discount Coupon Code

Detailed StableHost Review

Things to do AFTER your blog is ready

Once you have set up your blog and have learned the basics, let’s take a look into some important things to do post set up. These points will be crucial, if you want to make your blog a success.

Create an “About me” page

About me page

This page simply tells your readers about the creator or author of the website or blog. It is usually the most visited page in a blog, so you better put some brains and efforts in making this perfect.

  • Your “About me” page should be attractive to grab the attention of your readers. Try opening the page with an interesting header instead of the typical and boring “About me/About us” headline.
  • Highlight important and relevant points, terms or sentences in the content to keep your readers interested and engrossed.
  • Add relevant and interesting photos, videos, snapshots, etc. from behind the scenes to make it look more personable and presentable. People should be able to connect, relate and be inspired by this content.
  • Add some snapshots from social media platforms showing people sharing and commenting about you, your blog and your work. This will add leverage to your credibility and buy the trust of your readers.
  • Add a simple and short bio/description about you, your life along with a nice photograph of yours.
  • Focus on telling your readers WHY YOU DO IT.
  • Don’t try to be over creative with your language and grammar. Just write the way you talk.
  • Keep the content DIRECT AND RELEVANT.

Create a “Contact me” page

Contact Page

Once you are done with the ‘About me” page, it’s time to set up your “Contact me” page, so that people can contact you.

For this, you will need to install a plugin called “Contact form 7”. This plugin allows your visitors to contact you with their doubts, queries or collaborative projects. They can fill in the form and send you an email without logging into their own email provider.

If you don’t want to use Contact Form 7, there are lots of other form plugins out there, including HubSpot All-in-One Marketing. It comes with pre-built templates, including a “contact us” form template that you can easily work off.

Hubspot

I have described how you can install and add new plugins in the “How do I add and install plugins?” section above.

  • Once you have installed and activated the plugin, you will find a new “Contact” area in the WordPress side menu.
  • Click on it and choose “Add New.”
  • It will open up a coded form in the “Text format”.

add and install plugins

  • Your default contact form will include these fields:
  • Your Name (Required)
  • Your Email (Required)
  • Subject
  • Your Message

Contact form setup

  • Fill up this form and click on “Send” to get it approved.
  • Once this is done, you need to add this contact form to your blog.
  • After you have saved your contact form, you’ll notice a short code show up directly below your contact form’s title. Copy this code.

Contact form

  • Now navigate to the page you want to display your contact form on.
  • Place your form where you want it to show up. Just right-click, and click on “Paste.”
  • You can even choose to add your contact form as a widget. Just head to the widgets section in your WordPress side menu.
  • Go to Appearance”, then “Widgets”.
  • Now from the list of available widgets, choose “Text,” and then add the widget according to your preference.
  • You can add your contact form as a widget in your sidebar or footer.
  • Regular redesigning and optimizations

If you want to keep your blog up to date and running, then you yourself as a blogger need to remain updated with the latest in trends and technology.

Audiences are always eager and curious to see something new and attractive. You should enhance your blog in such a way that it creates a positive visual impact on the viewers. Blog optimisation is not just limited to beautification of your site, it also focuses heavily on speed, performance and functionality.

If readers find your blog outdated, then it may lead to high bounce rates and decline in traffic.

Useful Guides:

Top 24 Best Rated Web Hosting Services

[Updated] Top Best Hosting Providers in Australia 

Best CHEAP PBN Hosting Reviews  How To Host Your PBN

WordPress Vs Kajabi

What is Search Engine Optimization (SEO) For Blog 

Here’s a word of truth. Whether you are creating a blog, a social media site, an online store or any other type of website, SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION (SEO) is a must have feature for your website. It is the process of getting traffic to your web site from the search results on search engines.

If you have a blog or are planning to build one, then SEO can help your business grow and meet the business objectives. As a traditional pattern, users always trust the web sites that show up in the top 5 positions of the search results for the keywords they search for. SEO will help your web pages and media contents such as images, videos, etc. get shown and ranked on the basis of what the search engine considers most relevant for its users.

SEO can put your blog right ahead of your rivals when it comes to competition. For example, If two blogs of similar contents are representing the same product/service/topic, the search engine optimized (SEO) blog is likely to attract more customers and earn better revenue as a result of increased website traffic.

SEO Management

Management of SEO is rather a framework with various rules and processes to be followed and executed carefully than a static process. To make this quick understandable, let us break down the SEO management process into 2 prime stages:

It is a framework of what rules and regulations are to be applied on your blog to make it search engine friendly. These include basic tweaks that you can apply to your blog and increase its visibility on search engines. It can also improve the credibility of your blog, if followed correctly. All search engines trust your blog on the basis of your web site structure and the SEO.

This is a framework that primarily focuses on how to promote your blog so that it can rank better in search results. You may also think of Off-site SEO as “link building” or “web site promotion”. This is because a proper way to promote your blog involves much more methods along with building links.

NOTE:

When a user enters a search query, search engines will always try to find the most important pages of your blog and show those first instead of the direct home page.

What are incoming links?

A “Backlink”, “Inbound link” or simply an “Incoming link” is a link from some other website (the referrer) to that web resource (the referent) Websites often employ SEO techniques to increase the number of incoming links pointing to your website. This helps directly in promotion and publicity of your website. The ranking and position of your website also depends greatly on where the links are coming from. Some methods to get incoming links are free for use by everyone whereas some methods, like link baiting” are paid techniques to increase the number of incoming links to a target website.

Many private blog networks have often been seen to purchase incoming links. But I would strongly recommend you NOT TO TRY to buy links or get them the easy way. Doing so may have some temporary positive impact or short lived success of your blog, but you may then experience high bounce rates and see your web site disappearing from the top pages.

I would really suggest you to forget about building links and rather concentrate more on creating good quality contents for your blog. A good and relevant content always has more chances to get you genuine and natural links, which in turn will give your blog a good ranking and an overall and gradual increase in website traffic.

FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS (FAQs) AND RELATED DOUBTS FOR BLOGGING

DOUBTS FOR BLOGGING

Why should I choose WordPress to create a blog?

It would be wrong on my part to say that WordPress is THE ONLY option to build a website. There are definitely other established and reliable website building platforms as well that you can try out. But if you are a beginner, I would strongly recommend you to stick to WordPress. It is the easiest platform I’ve ever worked with and is flexible enough to suit everyone’s purpose. It’s free, easily customizable and you don’t need any technical coding to create a website here.

On the customisation front, WordPress has a huge community who have designed attractive themes, layouts and templates to choose from, making it easy to get going fast.

WordPress is the best choice for startups and small scale businesses all over the globe. In fact, it is even used by large scale sites like eBay, Mozilla, CNN and even NASA.

Do I need to have coding skills to build a well functioning blog?

Not at all! Technology has eased up to such an extent now that, you can build a website with only a little bit coding or ABSOLUTELY NO CODING! Today you don’t need to be an IT engineer or some tech junky to build a website. You don’t even need to hire a web developer to the same. WordPress enables you to build your own web site without any coding involved.

Do I need to hire a website developer?

Website developers are hired to make your website work on mobile devices as well. A website built through WordPress will be responsive to working on smartphones, tablets and laptops. So hiring a web developer won’t be necessary anymore.

Where do you recommend me to get my domain name and hosting?

You will find there are countless of authorised and reliable sites on the internet from where you can get your Domain name and hosting. But if you ask me to pick one out of the lot, my personal preference would be www.Bluehost.com

Bluehost offers hosting at reasonable and pocket friendly costs just around $2.95 – $3.49 per month and they even offer you a FREE domain name. Their hosting management is seemingly one of the best I have come across. On the technical front, Bluehost provides and offers unlimited storage & bandwidth. You will also be provided with a personal email account specifically for your website or blog. I always prefer buying my hosting and domain from Bluehost for my various projects.

How much would it cost me to build a blog?

It hardly costs anything to build a properly functioning blog. Costs depend on hosting and domain services that you will use. WordPress and other website building platforms are free, but a domain name and hosting will cost you around $2 – $5 a month. Thus, domain and hosting on yearly basis may be usually around $50 – $60 per year.

Bluehost.com just around $2.95 – $3.49 per month and they even offer you a FREE domain name.

What should I do to optimise my blog?

If readers find your blog outdated, then it may lead to high bounce rates and decline in traffic. Thus, optimising your website on a regular basis is necessary and will help attract more visitors and yield more revenue. Redesigning a blog does not necessarily mean rebuilding it from scratch. It simply means you should make useful changes and facelifts on a regular basis. This includes minor changes like color, themes, and templates to major changes like custom logo design, user interface, website plugins, SEO, and regular up-gradation of your blog contents.

Audiences are always eager and curious to see something new and attractive. You should enhance your blog in such a way that it creates a positive visual impact on the viewers. Blog optimisation is not just limited to beautification of your site, it also focuses heavily on speed, performance and functionality. If you want to keep your blog up to date and running, then you yourself as a blogger need to remain updated with the latest in trends and technology.

Can I add videos in my blog posts? What are the supported formats?

Yes! You can upload videos in your posts. Here is a list of video formats that are supported by the WordPress server:

  • .mp4, .m4v (MPEG-4)
  • .mov (QuickTime)
  • .wmv (Windows Media Video)
  • .avi
  • .mpg
  • .ogv (Ogg)
  • .3gp (3GPP)
  • .3g2 (3GPP2)

Why should I add advertisements to my website and posts?

The world of advertising has become so much advanced that advertisements have become the primary source or method of generating revenue from any kind of business, be it online or offline. When it comes to blogging, there are numerous ways in which advertisements and promotions can be done through your blog to fetch revenue.

Once your blog is ready, you must be very much excited to know how your blog will fetch you some revenue. Generating money from a website is definitely some hard work. You can wisely choose to invest the money you earn from your blog into future modifications of your blog or into your other projects as well.

Which plugins would you recommend me to install for my niche website?

Plugins help expand your site’s features and give you new and enhanced capabilities for a better and smoother growth of your blog. There will be hundreds of different plugins that can perform the same function. To help you save some time in choosing and installing the ideal plugins, here is a list of the most popularly used plugins that bloggers use today.

  • Yoast SEO (WordPress specific)

This plugin allows you to edit your title tags, meta descriptions and a lot more before publishing the post. All this can be done from within the page itself.

This is a very important tool if you are interested in tracking the visitors/traffic to your website or blog. All you need to do is install the plugin and link it to your Google account.

This plugin lets you create forms and syncs your lead’s information with a CRM.

Helps you create an automatic backup for your website or blog. It offers you 1 GB of free cloud storage to store your backups.

Helps optimise the speed, performance and functionality and also provides advanced control options to your website.

This plugin will let you add share buttons for social media like Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, etc. FCB will be very crucial for publicity of your blog or posts to various social media platforms by your visitors.

If you are blogging, then you are bound to have a number of comments and opinions posted by your readers on your posts. Disqus helps manage your posts when a large amount of comments drop in. It also provides a voting system for displaying the top comments.

This plugin simply helps redirect broken pages back to your homepage.

What is an SEO? How is it important?

Whether you are creating a blog, a social media site, an online store or any other type of website, SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION (SEO) is a must have feature for your website. It is the process of getting traffic to your web site from the search results on search engines.

If you have a blog or are planning to build one, then SEO can help your business grow and meet the business objectives. As a traditional pattern, Users always trust the web sites that show up in the top 5 positions of the search results for the keywords they search for. SEO will help your web pages and media contents such as images, videos, etc. get shown and ranked on the basis of what the search engine considers most relevant for its users.

SEO can put your blog right ahead of your rivals when it comes to competition. For example, If two blogs or similar contents are representing the same product/service/topic, the search engine optimized (SEO) blog is likely to attract more customers and earn better revenue as a result of increased website traffic.

How to find keywords for my blog or niche  ? 

I have made this tutorial for Keyword research tool SEMRush and you can see detail video here to find keywords for your niches.

In which category does your blog fall into? Can you please explain?

What you are reading RIGHT NOW is a Homer blog. The Homer is any kind of blog that takes its readers on a journey of over 2,500+ words in content. A Homer blog can be about anything starting from health & fitness, Fashion & lifestyle, Educational coaching, Spirituality, Step by step guides and so on. Work on such blogs often requires an excessive brain storming and research to yield effective and observable results and conclusions.

Posts for Homer blogs require a major share of time investment and a hell lot more research. It is very important and rather hard to hold your reader’s attention through such a large word count. Research and surveys reveal that long form contents that cross over 2,500+ words tend to get shared more than short form contents. Greater word count and research gives you better chances at attracting organic search traffic.

If you are writing a Homer blog post, what must be your prime concern is getting the length right. You will need to master the art of creating a balance between your research content and the word count. Craft your post in such a way, that you plot in key points of your research without pushing in too many words into the post.

What all should I keep in mind to build a good personal brand blog?

A personal brand blog portrays you as the person who writes the blog. It tends to have your name and face all over the home page. It is the right kind of blog if you are seeking to position themselves as experts or masters in a particular field. Make sure your Personal Brand blog showcases a name that has a personality. This does not at all mean that the posts have to be all about you. Your posts should be framed and aided by your own personal views and experiences.

Try writing posts that showcase things like:

  • The struggles and failures you have experienced within your field. Tell your readers what you learned from them.
  • Self made strategies and techniques you have personally created and tested.
  • The tools you have used to achieve results your audiences desire.
  • Your personal views and opinions on divisive and valuable issues within your field.

Please explain me the concept of a guest host blog?

This is the type of blog where you act as a host for publishing posts that mainly come from guest authors. Although your blog will regularly feature content from other guest authors, you as the person behind the blog, can also regularly step back in and write posts of your own. The biggest plus about creating a guest host blog is that you don’t have to spend any time creating contents. In fact you can also get help for promoting every post. You can rely on the brand awareness and knowledge of the guest writers you host.

The key to having a great guest hosting blog is not in the creation of the post, but the selection of the post. You need to brain storm pick the right topics to write posts on. You will have to do a lot of research and know how to recognise great content. Since you are not the only person who will be posting on your blog, your guest writers will also need to keep in mind the above mentioned points.

Place guest posting guidelines in a prominent place on your blog so that it reaches the eyes of your visitors and writers. Add a submission form or contact email address so that the writers can submit their ideas to you.

Why is it so important to add a “Contact me” page to my blog? How should I do it?

Once you are done with the “About me” page, you need to set up your “Contact me” page, so that people can contact you. Visitors and readers may contact you with their doubts, queries, experiences, opinions or even collaboration and other business ventures. For this, you will need to install a plugin called “Contact form 7”. This plugin allows your visitors to contact you with their doubts, queries or collaborative projects. They can fill in the form and send you an email without logging into their own email providers. You can scroll up to check how you can install and add new plugins to your blog. Also you can see how to set up the “Contact form 7” plugin to create your “Contact me” page.

How do I select an ideal background for my blog?

An attractive website background always attracts more visitors to your site. If you want your website to create a nice visual impact, then you can use an attractive background image. But if you want to emphasise the readability of your website, then you should simply opt for a plain colour which is appropriate for any blog.

What is the difference between a blogger and a content writer?

There are considerable amount of differences between being a blogger and a content writer. A content writer is someone who simply writes posts for a website or a blog. The only thing they need to focus on is content research and the write up. While a blogger needs to focus on a whole lot more apart from just writing posts.

As a blogger, you need to focus on things like website design, themes, SEO, optimizations, marketing and so on.

A content writer just writes, while a blogger manages the entire blog.

How can I manage affiliates through my website?

Managing functions and activities on your website depends on the plugins you have installed. There are various plugins that help in managing all your affiliate program needs. WP Affiliate is a great plugin for doing so. It allows automatic affiliate registration, management and payments. It also enables stable integration with WooCommerce, WP Shopping Cart, eShop and a number of other e-commerce platforms.

E-junkie is also another popular alternative. This plugin provides several payment options, autoresponder, newsletter and updates, customised emails and a lot of other useful options. Some other popular advertisement management tools are iDevDirect, JROX and Clickbank.

Do I need to pay or create some paid account for signing up for an affiliate program?

There is no cost for signing up to promote a brand through an affiliate program. You can choose to sign up for as many programs as you want across any affiliate network at absolutely no cost.

How good is GoDaddy to get my domain name and hosting? What do you suggest?

GoDaddy is well regarded as a domain name registrar but not a hosting provider. Their domain management is good, but for hosting my  personal preference would be Bluehost.com for both, domain management and hosting services.

How to Earn Money From Your Blog? How To Make Money Blogging 2022

how-to-make-product-review-site-with-wordpress-to-make-money-1

Once your blog is ready, you must be very much excited to know how your blog will fetch you some revenue. Generating money from a website is definitely some hard work. You should never expect your blog to start earning as soon as it is set up. It may even take a month or two for your earnings to start and stabilise.

But if you work on your blog the right way, optimise and update it on a regular basis, then the earning process would definitely become easier in the long run. You can wisely choose to invest the money you earn from your blog into future modifications of your blog or into your other projects as well.

It is very much necessary that the monetization methods of your blog keep evolving with the latest technologies and trends. You need to stay up-to-date with the current web and social trends. With the advent of technology and a revolution in the world of advertisements, monetization methods are also evolving along with it.

Some helpful guides

Make Money With Best High Paying Hosting Affiliate Programs

Best High Paying Affiliate Marketing Programs/Networks

Shopify Affiliate Review: Make Up To $2,400 Per Sale? LEGIT ?

How I Made $ 450 with Template Monster Affiliate Program

Let us discuss in brief, about the various methods through which your website or blog can earn you revenue. Please note that this list of methods is subject to changes due to new and unpredictable future advances in technology.

The world of advertising has become so much advanced that advertisements have become the primary source or method of generating revenue from any kind of business, be it online or offline. When it comes to blogging, there are numerous ways in which advertisements and promotions can be done through your blog to fetch revenue.

This is the most popular type of advertising. These ads are usually banners that you place in your content or sidebar. You are paid when visitors click on an ad. Each advertiser pays differently.

For every thousand times the ad is displayed, you get paid. This works according to the amount of times the ad is displayed on your website. These ads pay you a fixed amount of money based on how many people view your ad.

Google AdSense is one of the largest advertising networks, and perhaps one of the best networks for placing these types of ads. It is preferred by the largest percentage of website owners. AdSense allows users to set up advertisement banners on their website. These ads are generated on the content of each page. This is technically called targeted advertising, which helps in placing content relevant advertisements on your website.

You will find numerous similar programs available on the internet like Chitika, Infolinks, and Media.net that will serve you the same purpose if AdSense doesn’t work for you.

Benefits:

Major benefits of these two types of advertising methods include points like, be it a small amount or big, income is often guaranteed. Thus very little effort is to be done to monetise your blog or website. These advertising strategies save you a lot of valuable time. It is also a great way to connect and build a network with others in your industry.

Drawbacks:

Important and considerable drawbacks include points such as it tends to take away from the user experience. Ads, banners and links in between important points in a post often tends to break the continuity and flow of your content and distracts the readers.

The price of such advertisements are fixed. If you set a set price per month, you can’t make any more even if your website traffic doubles over time. Advertising is a dynamic business, hence advertisers come and go once their desired promotion is done. You will have to spend time editing, adding, deleting and finding more advertisers for your blog.

Sell private ads

If your blog has grown substantially and attracts heavy traffic, advertisers may come directly to you with various offers and ask you to place their ad on your site to promote their products and services. You may also choose to contact potential advertisers yourself. The biggest advantage here is that there is no middle man involved and you can set your own ad rates.

These private ads can be in the form of banners, buttons, or links. You may charge a one-time fee for a link within a post or you might even charge your partner monthly, if you are hosting banner ads.

Sponsored posts

Now You Can Quit Your Job & Make Even More Money From Blogging

You can even make money writing sponsored contents and posts. Such contents may include write ups or reviews about an advertiser’s product or service. These often deliver relevant, useful, high-quality content, and these relevant contents result in higher engagement. Higher engagement equals more value and more value equals more revenue.

Affiliate marketing

Affiliate marketing

Affiliate programs are networks in which you have the option to select from various advertisers. A few of the major search engines offer programs for advertising and promoting an affiliate product on your site. Here is a brief explanation on how this works:

  • If an advertiser has a product he wants to sell, he will agree to give you a commission from each sale of his product, if the buyer is coming from your site.
  • He will give you a unique link (Affiliate link) that will track your affiliate code. This will enable him to know when a buyer uses your link to make a purchase.
  • You include your affiliate link on your site. You can do this in two ways. Either directly through the content of your post or through banner ads.
  • If a reader clicks on this unique link and buys the product you have recommended, you earn a percentage or commission of what the buyer has purchased.
  • This way, the ads are relating to your content and mostly are of interest to your readers.
  • Over 70% brands worldwide utilise affiliate marketing to drive sales and promote their products and services.

Benefits:

The major benefits of advertising through Affiliate marketing are that this method can earn you big bucks and lots of passive income. Income through affiliate marketing is guaranteed. The affiliate networking process and advertising is quite easy to setup and doesn’t require much support.

Drawbacks:

Certain important drawbacks of affiliate marketing include points like irregular earning structure. Earnings are not guaranteed. You can earn as much as $1000 one month and it may even drop to as low as $100 the next.

Good products can even end up having low converting sales pages while high converting sales pages can have rubbish products.

Email advertising

Email Marketing Tips for the Medicore Blogger

Email advertising doesn’t eat up any unnecessary screen space on your website and in fact engagement rates tend to be higher. It helps in a big way as a considerable percentage of readers know what areas of a website to avoid if they don’t want to see ads. You can also choose to make direct email promotions, to deliver free reports that are monetized.

Benefits:

The most major benefit of email advertising is that it is a very direct way to market. One email can make you thousands and anyone can do it. It is widely considered by most to be the no.1 way to make money online and that too consistently.

Drawbacks:

The only thing you need to keep in mind before going forward with email advertising is that your approach needs to be very clean and professional. If subscribers don’t like your emails, they will unsubscribe.

Sign up with advertiser-publisher connection programs

Another way to make money through your blog is that you can sign up with an advertiser-publisher connection program like BlogAds or AdBrite. Doing so gets you listed in their publishers’ directory.

Benefits:

This method of advertising is considered to be highly profitable. It has proven to be very useful to readers. It earns you recognition and makes you stand out as you are doing something different. Advertising through such network programs nearly guarantee you income.

Drawback:

One major drawback about such type of advertisements are that it is not free. It costs to setup. Also, research and surveys have revealed that smaller sites may not work so well for these advertisements.

Approach companies directly

If your site is already getting lots of traffic, you can also directly approach companies to ask if you can advertise for them. In such a situation, you may try looking for sites that offer complementary products and target the same sections of audience or market that you do.

So you will need to research and brain storm a bit and contact potential internet advertising partners with good reputation. When you do so, you should be prepared to supply them with information about your business and your site traffic.

The more details and information you can provide regarding your blog, the more likely they will be to consider your offer. This method really comes in handy once your blog has grown substantially over time and have garnered much reputation and visitors alike.

Attract advertisers through links

You can even get advertisers interested in your blog with a link they can use to contact you for promotional rates and requirements. This method also works best when your blog has garnered a lot of visitors and traffic. Links like these often can be messages like “Click here to find out how to advertise on this blog!” in between your posts or on the sides of your home page, etc. This would allow anyone visiting your site to contact you and discuss advertising opportunities with you.

Miscellaneous methods

The more traffic your blog attracts, the more likely it is to earn more revenue. You can also conduct web seminars (Webinars) and online workshops relating to your business, apart from promotions and placing advertisements on your blog. This will help establishing the credibility of your website and help companies and ad programs build trust with your business.

NOTE:

Once you’ve chosen the right type of advertisement you need for your website audience, you will need to place the ads on your website. Just choose a banner style or text style ad. Banner ads are permanent ads that stay in a fixed position on your website, while text ads are temporary.

TYPES OF BLOGS

Now that you have more or less learnt and understood how to create your own blog, you will need to know about the different types of blogs you can set up and understand the difference between them. Let me guide you through the most common and popular types of blogs that exist these days.

Rogue blogs are those which post contents that are sharp, honest and to the face, whether in favour of the issue or against it. Rogues very easily attract attention of readers both good and bad. These bloggers are not afraid to bend the rules and go against the facts. They take bold stances and put forward sharp views and opinions on divisive issues. This quite sensibly wins them both admirers and haters.

Advantages:

There are bunch of advantages if you choose to become a rogue blogger. You get to tell everyone what you really think. You polarise with your honest and decisive point of views, which attracts attention. Readers will appreciate your confidence and stance, plus they will find your work very promising. You may feel apprehensive and hesitate initially, but realise that there are enough people out there who can benefit from reading it.

Disadvantages:

Honesty doesn’t always pay you off in a positive way. You should be well prepared and expect to attract an above-average amount of haters. It’s actually pretty tough to pull off without feeling forced. You will be subjected to a considerable amount of negative attention, controversies and debates, and it will be hard for you to physically fight your way out of tricky and debatable situations.

Ingredients for a good Rogue blog:

  • You must be passionate about taking it forward. Avoid feeling apprehensive. This will prevent your post from sounding forced.
  • Brain storm and research down to the core to gain the best knowledge regarding the topic or issue. This will give you the ability to hold an intelligent argument.
  • You must be confident and experienced enough to take a stand and stick to it without dwindling away from your point. This will help you reinforce your argument.

Guest host blogs

This is the type of blog, where you yourself don’t write and upload too many posts for your blog. You basically act as a host for publishing posts that mainly come from guest authors. Although your blog will regularly feature content from other guest authors, you as the person behind the blog, can also regularly step back in and write posts of your own.

Advantages:

The biggest plus about creating a guest host blog is that you don’t have to spend any time in creating contents. In fact you can also get help for promoting every post. You can rely on the brand awareness and knowledge of the guest writers you host.

Disadvantages:

Attracting guest writers will require a significant amount of time investment. You will need to build a relation with your guest writers so that they trust the credibility of your blog. Your blog will already need to have some considerable following to assure guest writers that their content will be exposed to a new audience.

Ingredients for a good “Guest host” blog:

  • The key to having a great guest hosting blog is not in the creation of the post, but in the selection of the post. You need to brain storm and pick the right topics to write posts on. You have to do a lot of research and know how to recognise great content.
  • Your work will need to have standards and you need to know how to promote your post.
  • Since you are not the only person who will be posting on your blog, your guest writers will also need to keep in mind the above mentioned points. Place guest posting guidelines in a prominent place on your blog so that it reaches the eyes of your visitors and writers. Add a submission form or contact email address so that writers can submit their ideas to you.
  • Post an ad for guest writing for your blog in your sidebar or at a place where it easily grabs attention from visitors.
  • “Crash test dummy” blogs

A Crash Test Dummy blog simply tests and reviews different strategies, techniques, and tools. It then shares what works and what doesn’t, so you can know what to implement and what to avoid.

Advantages:

Creating and handling such this type of blog lets you stay focused on consistently testing and monitoring different strategies and techniques in your business. People easily are attracted to detailed how-to style articles and guides. It will enable you to gain new insights into your own work.

Disadvantages:

You will need to consistently achieve significant and observable results in your business that impresses and attracts more visitors and guest writing offers. You will need to keep in mind that sometimes the strategies you reveal through your work could potentially help your competitors and other rival blogs.

Ingredients for a good “Crash test dummy” blog:

  • A good Crash Test Dummy post can be mathematically expressed as:

Good Crash Test Dummy Post = Step-by-Step guidance + Teaching + Results

Good Crash Test Dummy Post = Step-by-Step guidance + Teaching +

  • You should sincerely make sure that your Crash Test Dummy posts try to teach readers by providing actual results that you yourself have achieved. Even after providing all the results, you should systematically guide and teach your readers how to get those same results.
  • Great Crash Test Dummy posts take weeks and months to create after some extensive research and intensive testing. You need to be very patient and give whatever strategy or technique you are testing, enough time to produce observable and desirable results to draw any solid conclusion.
  • You will then need to focus greatly on exhaustive details as you explain the process in your post and teach readers how they can set up something similar. Make sure to add visual media like screenshots, animated GIFs, charts, etc. to keep your readers engrossed into your post.

Let me emphasise a little bit on Niche blogs: What are Niche Blogs

Like I’ve mentioned earlier, Niche blogs are blogs that target a specific section of audiences who have a specific interest. In other words, when writing a niche blog, you need to write about one thing and one thing only. The Contents you write should be having one purpose, one goal and one target.

No reader likes wasting their time in reading through too many words. If you create a Niche blog, then the biggest advantage you will have is that it won’t take up too much time of the reader since your work is targeted on a specific topic. That is one reason why people with targeted interests don’t prefer reading lifestyle blogs as it eats up their time.

While starting a Niche blog, you should be well aware of the fact that you have to manoeuvre your work within the field of your niche. You should be experienced and talented enough to twist and shake up your contents each time to offer your readers something new. Different posts within a niche blog may be connected to each other, but readers should still feel the difference between them.

“As a niche blogger, your challenge is to create variety within boundaries. You should be able to manoeuvre your knowledge in a limited area of play and craft it into something new each time.”

Now here are a few trademark benefits that come from a niche blog:

Since a Niche blog always focuses on a specific topic, it lets you stay on track with your content. This means that you will hardly tend to deviate off the topic that you are focusing on. A niche blog has more concrete ways of finding ideas because the topic is restricted. Boundaries keep you from dwindling away from the topic. Thus, having a firm hold on the topic is a very important necessity for a niche blog to be successful.

  • Ensures growing a reliable audience.

Audiences are always certain of what they are searching for. Which means that if they have a specific area of interest, they will always be more likely to visit the blogs that offer them exactly what they want. Readers with niche interests want nothing more or nothing less of what they are looking for. This way, a niche blog will give you THAT section of the audience whom you understand and who understand you back. They are sure that they will find their desired content on your blog. Thus, this will enable your niche to grow a following that are reliable, valid and appreciative of your work.

  • Easier monetization for your blog.

If you have a niche blog, then posting specific contents is a must. If you post specific contents, they will feature advertisements that are relevant to the contents. Specific contents attract targeted audiences who will find the ads relevant and will be interested in them. They will be more likely to click on the ad links, visit the page and even purchase the promoted products. This will directly result in higher sales, more commission or revenue for your blog. Thus, monetization of your blog becomes much easier.

Here’s a chain to make my point brief and clear,

“Niche blog à Specific content à Relevant ads à Targeted audience à Higher sales à More revenue”

  • Helps expand your knowledge and enhance creativity.

Niche blogs, requires you to do a hell lot of brainstorming and research to craft something reliable that interests your readers. This feature encourages in-depth coverage of topics. Since you are writing about one specific topic, you will naturally have to dig in deeper and cover details as much as you can because there isn’t another topic to bounce on. This will help expand your knowledge regarding that niche and enhance a sense of creativity and expression.

How to start a Niche blog?

There are a few simple but very necessary prerequisites you need to keep in mind if you want to start a niche blog.

  • You should know your passion.

As a niche blogger, you will have to write heavily about a very focused topic. This itself is a tough task to execute. Hence, it’s your job to make it easy on yourself and have a serious, passionate and interest in your niche. Otherwise, your blog is going to be very short-lived.

  • Short term or long term blog?

While choosing the right area to target on, you should also think of a topic that will always have some long term following. I would strongly suggest you refrain yourself from setting a niche on topics that trend for a short period of time and then fade away. They may be profitable while the topic trends, but you’ll experience a fall in traffic once the hype dies off. Pokemon GO was a highly trending and profitable topic for categories like mobile gaming and augmented reality games for a couple of months, but it eventually faded away into disappearance.

  • Decide how to monetize your blog.

Until and unless you are doing it just for fun or killing time, any blogger would want his or her blog to earn some revenue. Apart from setting up your blog, you should think of the methods through which you will monetize your blog. You must brainstorm and research to decide which advertising program to sign up with for achieving the best possible results. Niche blogs are uniquely able to handle advertising and affiliate marketing very well.

If you want to use advertising, your blog should showcase the topics that attract a specific audience that advertisers are eager to market. For this your blog will need to build up a considerable amount of traffic so that advertising programs can trust your credibility, marketability and consider your blog.

If you want to use affiliate marketing, you will need to pick a niche topic where good affiliate marketing programs and products are available. You should research for available and well reputed affiliate programs that offer you a decent commission and fetch you the best results.

If you decide to build a niche blog and want it to bring in money and traffic, then you need to find specific and relevant keywords. If you want to write about an iPhone for your niche blog, then you must realise that the term “iPhone” covers a pretty broad area of topics. You must be sure what you are talking about. Jail breaking an iPhone? Software updates for an iPhone? Screen recording on an iPhone? Recording calls on an iPhone? Gaming compatibility of an iPhone? Or a lot more.

To understand this better, you might want to refer to Google’s keyword planner for better keyword management for your niche blog.

  • Rekindle your current blog.

If you already have a blog and it has gone off track and became a blog about everything, you can still turn it back into a niche blog. Let me tell you how.

  • Figure out the appropriate category.

Take a nice look into the list of categories you have written contents about so far. You will notice which category you seem to write in the most. This will give you a good hint at where your passion and interest in blogging lies.

  • Analyse trending posts and traffic.

Along with observing the appropriate category, you should try to study which of your posts have trended and attracted traffic the most. This will indicate why people come to your blog. It also indicates if a post has done well in search.

  • Remove unnecessary posts.

If you’ve figured out your category, you should consider removing or deleting posts that are irrelevant to your niche and completely off-topic. It won’t leave a nice impression on your readers if you are claiming your blog to be a niche, but it features posts that are completely off your area of interest. Try to build on the existing traffic and following while you regain focus as a niche.

Ingredients for a good “Tell-All” blog:

how to tell blogs

  • A Tell-All blog have many similarities with a Rogue blog. They both tend to reveal shocking details and experiences with observable conclusions. The major distinguishing point between the two is that a Rogue blog is concerned with revealing external details, while the Tell-All blogs focuses more into revealing internal details.
  • Always make sure that your Tell-All posts has compelling narrative that reveals a valuable lesson that’s relevant to your readers. Crazy experiences are a prerequisite for Tell-All posts.
  • Personal brand blogs

Personal Brand blogs are the blogs which those people use who are seeking to position themselves as experts or masters in a particular field. It comes in very handy when you are building a brand. Such a blog helps in making your personality a cornerstone of the blog you are building. A personal brand blog portrays you as the person who writes the blog. It tends to have your name and face all over the home page.

Advantages:

When you are seen and branded as an expert, people will want to hire you as a consultant, or offer you a job. They might also want to book you as a speaker or even invite you to write on their blog or be interviewed on their podcast. A personal brand blog can increase your name, credibility and recognition within your industry.

Disadvantages:

The term “Personal brand” itself, means that you need to be comfortable putting yourself in the spotlight. You have to be well prepared to treat yourself like a product, which is a challenge that requires brutal self honesty.

Ingredients for a good “Personal brand” blog:

  • Make sure your Personal Brand blog showcases a name that has a personality. This does not at all mean that the posts have to be all about you. Your posts should be framed and aided by your own personal views and experiences.

Try writing posts that showcase things like:

  • The struggles and failures you have experienced within your field. Tell your readers what you learned from them.
  • Self made strategies and techniques you have personally created and tested.
  • The tools you use to achieve results your audiences desire.
  • Your personal views and opinions on divisive and valuable issues within your field.

Enterprise blogs

As the name itself suggests, an enterprise blog is a blog built for a company rather than an individual. Typically, a team of writers create content that is relevant and valuable to the section of audiences that the particular company is targeting to dish out their sales. That content, then attracts those potential customers to the website, where they can learn more about the company’s products and services.

Advantages:

Such blogs are prime ingredients for effective content marketing strategy for your company. A great Enterprise blog can dramatically impact and boost your company’s sales and revenue. You can even choose to feature a variety of writers and voices.

Disadvantages:

You will need to invest a lot of time in finding great writers you can trust with the brand you’ve worked so hard to build.

Ingredients for a good enterprise blog:

  • A good Enterprise post not only attracts prospects with high value content, but it also converts them into potential customers. If you have a product that is relevant to the needs of your readers, you wouldn’t have to bother to hit them over with a sales pitch.
  • Your content can generate more sales if you mention your product details along with interesting results your other customers have achieved with your product.

Over To You: How To Start A Blog and Make Money 2022

So I hope this detailed guide on how to start a blog under 15 minutes will help you get started in blogging and it will help you to achieve lots of success through blogging.

“Feel free to comment down below if you have any kind of doubts or queries regarding how to start a blog. You can even contact me through email([email protected]bloggersideas.com) . I will be really glad to guide you through your problems.”

 



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