Gaical

Starting a blog and earning from it

Okay, we're officially blogging about blogging. Well, we do hope this blog tutorial for beginners about how to start a blog and make money in 2021 will help as many of you as possible. Those who are back and forth on whether to start a blog, those who’ve already started their blog, but don’t know what the next step is and the ones who struggle to grow and monetize their blogs. Here we share 10 things you definitely need to do if you’re starting a blog in 2021 and want to make money blogging.

This quote was actually about an app, but, isn’t it the truth?

Who hasn’t had the thought: “This year we will start a blog and make money with it. It seems simple enough.”

And then you procrastinate the crap out of it.

The Blogging Lifestyle & Struggles

The late bloomer that we are, the idea of starting a blog came to us in 2012. And it took us “ONLY” 3 more years to actually start that blog. Then another 1.5 years to decide it’s time to show the monster we created to the world. You can say we actually started this blog in July 2016.

Contrary to what we believed for the longest time, blogging was nowhere near simple or fast. But it is the most rewarding thing we've done so far.

Blogging comes with long hours on the computer and a lot of work that isn’t just writing 1000 words into WordPress. In fact, writing takes about 10-20% of the effort. Then you’ve got to find pictures, edit, promote that content, promote yourself, find new strategies to grow, find ways to monetize, the list goes on and on. With blogging you’re your own little “business”.

Is it all worth it?

To us, without a doubt: Yes. Because blogging gives you the freedom to design your days and to (pretty much) earn as much as you decide.

With blogging, even if you don’t make millions you can earn an income from anywhere in the world. You don’t need to look for a job or to take unpaid time off when you want to travel or when your family moves. That means, oh yes, more freedom and less worries about money.

We grew this blog on our own from just an idea into a site with hundreds of thousands of page views/month where we reach people from all over the world. That gave us the confidence that we can do anything we want, as long as we work hard and stay true to myself.

Blogging, seriously, can change your life, but to speed things up, you need to start right, go self-hosted and put in the work consistently in the beginning. And that’s why we’re here. We’ll talk about how to start your blog right for as little as $3.95/month and then grow it to hundreds of thousands of monthly visitors, so you can make money. Because without traffic, nobody is getting paid for blogging.

Blogging For Beginners:

How To Start A Blog And Make Money


We decided to grow our blog 3 years ago, and during that time we learned A LOT about blogging and making an income doing it. If we had to start a blog all over again these are thesteps we would take this time around to speed things up.

Even if you’ve already started your blog, but don’t know how to grow it and what to do next – we're sure this tutorial will give you some new ideas and help you. You won’t just learn how to start a blog in 20 minutes, we promise.

Overview:

1.Decide what to blog about (aka simple way to find your “niche”)

2. Find the solid name for your blog

3. Investing in the right things for better SEO

4. Choose the right hosting for your needs

5. Start your WordPress blog for only $3.95/month

6. Design your WordPress Blog

7. Write your first blog posts

8. Promote your blog posts on social media to get initial traffic

9. Keep Going (aka the power of persistence)

10. Make Money (aka how bloggers get paid)

Step 1: Blogging Topics

Decide what you’re going to blog about

This is so important. Let us tell you, if you don’t absolutely love what you’re going to write about, you’ll hate every minute of blogging. And it will feel like a second job that you just HATE.

You can always decide to write about more topics than the one you originally started with (this blog was originally about what we ate), but make sure you love what you start with.

Blogging is a lot of work and since you don’t have a horrible boss to abuse you verbally when you don’t finish your tasks, you’ll need something else to motivate you. We don’t know what that is, but finding a topic you love will definitely make you want to put in the work more often than not.

And that’s the goal. Doing the work more often than not.

If there’s one thing that will make you a successful blogger it’s being consistent. So make sure you love what you’ll be writing about.

If there’s one thing that will make you successful as a blogger it’s staying consistent. So make sure you love what you’ll write about.

For us it’s healthy lifestyle and it’s something we've always been as passionate about as we are about Channing Tatum.

Step 2: Blog Name Ideas

How To Find The Solid Name

The next step is to choose a name for your blog. Don’t get overwhelmed with this step.

Here’s something to keep in mind when choosing a blog name: Your blog name and domain name don’t need to be something original, smart or creative. All your blog name/ domain name needs to be is memorable:

  • Something short and sweet
  • something people can pronounce
  • and have the patience to type into a search bar

That’s all. Don’t overthink, just keep in mind that people need to remember it.

Step 3: Invest To Rank Higher

Invest In The Right Things

To start a blog you need only(!) 3 things:

  • hosting – where your site and all its data is stored (around
  • blogging platform – what you use to write your content and manage your blog
  • blogging theme – this is is for designing your blog (it’s pretty much like a pre-design of your website)

You don’t need anything else in the beginning.

But it’s important that you get all those three right from the start if you want to grow quickly. They help you rank higher in Google search and they’re also important for user experience. Nobody has the time for a slow site to load. So don’t skip on these basics.

Site speed and the technical component to SEO that comes with reliable hosting and a good WordPress theme can’t be beaten by adding keywords to your blog posts.

For that reason, we can only recommend Siteground (you can get hosting with them 60% off here) and Genesis (you can get it here) if you’re serious about making money with a blog. That’s the only 2 investments to make in the beginning.

What should you look for?

With all three you’re looking for as much freedom and space to grow as possible. Remember you do want your blog to be profitable and not just a hobby.

As stated above, we cannot recommend starting a blog for free on something like Blogger. We did that 4 years ago. The site was slow and the whole process was time-consuming. Our blog never looked the way we wanted it even though we spent hours trying to “fix” it and we had 0 traffic.

Now with this blog, we did things a little differently and we're so grateful for our decision to go self-hosted. You’ll need to spend some money, but it’s a one-time investment of $100-200.

Once you make that investment, you have the freedom to do everything you want with your blog, it’s fully yours (unlike the free blogging platforms). You can display ads, sell your own products, do affiliate marketing or sponsored content (you’re limited in this with a free platform).

When you stay consistent and follow the steps here, you can make that investment of $100-200 back within the first few months.

Step 4: Blog Hosting

Choose The Right Hosting For Your Blog

We went through a small crisis when we had to change our hosting about a year ago. It was so OVERWHELMING and we kinda wished we could just skip that step and ignore it.

Yet, we wasn’t happy with our old hosting as our site was slow and down every night (sorry we screamed) for a couple of minutes, more specifically – 8 minutes. This means, nobody could access our site for 8 minutes on a daily basis. That’s A LOT.

After researching for 12 straight hours we one day decided to go with Siteground. And until this day, 2 years after, we're so happy we did. For a few reasons.

  • their uptime is 99.99% (ours is actually 100% for the entire year, and this is something our old hosting provider didn’t care about).
  • they migrated our site for free and helped for free with all of our questions & needs (btw. if you want a free site transfer – use this link).
  • they were the only hosting company that actually told us how many sessions the hosting plan can handle
  • and their support was a reliable, 24/7 and always helpful.
  • let’s not forget 30-Day Money Back Guarantee

You can get 60% off Siteground Hosting here.


4 things to look for in a hosting provider:
  • UPTIME. You might have noticed that many hosting providers have some uptime guarantee like 99.9% or 99.99%. Like why don’t you just round that up to 100%? Well, you understand when you get a hosting that makes your site go down for a couple of minutes every day. (that’s what happened to our site!) Then you find out, there’s a BIG difference whether your site is up 99.99% or 99.9% of the time.
  • Site speed. You want a fast site, that’s it. Nobody’s got time to wait around for your blog to load. The other reason you want a faster site is that it helps you rank higher in Google. And we can testify this, because within a month after changing to Siteground Google miraculously found our site (which never happened in 2 years of blogging).
  • Do we have to pay for everything extra? Our thing was the site migration. We wanted to switch from a hosting that was a little bit cheaper to Siteground (for the 2 reasons above), but the biggest issue we had was migrating our site. We had no idea how to do it and we didn’t want to spend time doing it. But we also didn’t want to spend money on it. Every other hosting company would charge around $100 for it. We didn’t want to pay an extra $100 for website transfer. Thankfully, we found out that Siteground will do it all for us (without downtime) FOR FREE!!!! Sorry, we screamed. So if you already have a blog and want to switch hosting, but don’t feel like doing everything yourself or paying 100 bucks for site migration, get your site migrated to Siteground for free here.
  • How’s the support? What we loved about Siteground is that they’re available 24/7 and offer to do things for you if you can’t figure it out yourself. We loved that about them.

Step 5: Getting Started With WordPress

Starting Your Blog


We don’t know about other hosting providers, but here’s how to set up your blog with Siteground. It’s simple.

1. Choose a plan that will work for you.

If you’re brand new, you want to start with the StartUp plan. You can always change to a different plan once you start getting enough traffic. In this case you will then just need to pay the difference and not the full amount.

If you already have a blog & some traffic, but like us a few years ago, need better uptime and faster loading times – go with the other two options. You can even get free site transfer here.

We first chose the GrowBig plan and it was enough for around 50.000 monthly page views on our site (even though it says 25.000 visits). If you have more traffic, choose the GoGeek plan.

2. Pick a domain name.


Then, if you haven’t done it, it’s time to pick a domain name. If you don’t already own one, you can choose and purchase a domain name with Siteground, it’s convenient.

Then click next.

3. Fill out your details and preferences.


After you fill out your data, you can choose between different data centres. Go with where your audience is or will be. If it’s in the US – choose Chicago, if it’s in the UK – choose London and so on.

Then you hit pay now and you’re ready with the sign up.


Domain Privacy Protection:

After you sign up, the other thing we would recommend getting is domain privacy protection, so your personal data is not listed online (you can order this in Siteground from your User Area -> Add Services -> Domain Privacy).

Installing WordPress

Now wordpress.org is where you’ll operate most of your site, not at Siteground.

The question is how do you get there? Well it’s simple.

Once you’ve registered, log into your Siteground account. Then go to Our Accounts and click on the red Go To cPanel Button.


Then you’ll see a little Pop Up, click Proceed. In the next step click on WordPress Installer, you’ll find it under WordPress tools.


Then click on the link that says “Install Now”

Alright, and from here you only need to fill out the form below.

domain to install: the domain you registered for your blog

Site Name: Your Blog’s Name

Site Description: A few keywords that describe your blog (we think ours is Recipes, Health & Fitness – could be mistaking though)

Be sure to choose a strong password AND username! Remember this is to protect your blog, don’t make your username obvious and think about a good password. Write them both down, somewhere where you’ll find them.

You can leave the rest like this. Then click install!

Congrats! Now you’ve installed WordPress and you can officially start working on your blog!

For more options, you can also use this tutorial to install WordPress.

Logging Into WordPress

  • Log in to WordPress using www.yourdomainname.com/wp-admin
  • Fill out the user name and the password for WordPress you just wrote down.
  • Welcome to your WordPress Dashboard. Here you can write your blog posts and design your website.

Step 6: Blog Design

Making Your Blog Pretty

Once you’re in WordPress you can start designing your blog. To do it, you’ll need to install a WordPress theme.

With a WordPress theme you’re looking for one that will show your content in a reliable way possible and that you’re able to customize. Your theme also needs to look good on mobile – that’s called responsive theme and it’s a important point!

In the beginning, there’s no harm in starting with a free WordPress theme for the design of your blog. You don’t have that many (or any) followers and you can experiment all day long! Use this time!

In the WordPress Dashboard, left menu, go to Appearance -> Themes -> Add new and go crazy! You can search through thousands of free themes!

The free themes we used were Optimizer and Hueman and they’re both awesome, but need some CSS knowledge if you want to customize the majority of things.

Otherwise to change fonts and backgrounds you need to install and activate the theme you choose, then hit customize and go!

SEO-Friendly Themes

After using a free theme for the first 1.5 years, when we decided to start growing our blog and to speed up our website, we bought Genesis and the Divine Theme. We chose that theme, because it’s unbelievably customizable and looks great – it’s everything we ever wanted in a theme.

One important reason why we actually switched to a paid theme was SEO. With the free theme we never, ever, ever came up on page 1 in Google search results. Even when we'd google Gaical – page 6 haha – that’s a slap in the face. After getting Genesis we think it took about 2 weeks and we were 1st result.

Together Divine and Genesis cost us, we believe $129, which isn’t a small amount, but you can use the Genesis framework and the child theme on multiple sites and you get lifetime support & updates (important! and unfortunately not something you get with most themes). It’s a one-time investment and we've been using this theme for over 3 years now – to us definitely worth it. You can get Genesis hereand the Divine theme here.

Step 7: Prepare


Now that you already set up your WordPress blog, it’s time to do some prep work. What do we mean by that?

Before you actually start promoting your blog, create 10-15 blog posts and schedule them in WordPress. Some back dated, and 3-4 for the coming 2 weeks.

Seriously, we're not a big fan of preparation, because with us it easily turns into procrastination and overthinking, but having some content ready before you start will help you stay on track. And will keep visitors longer on your blog.

Writing Your First Blog Posts

Here are some tips for when you’re writing your content:

  • Figure out who you’re writing to. As long as you know who you’re writing to – what their interest, dreams and needs are – you don’t have to go crazy with niching down your blog. Make sure you meet the needs of your ideal reader.
  • Write as if that person is your best friend. We’re not doing dissertations here. Don’t pretend to be something or someone you’re not.
  • Create helpful content. Content that not only inspires, but helps your reader take action. Ask a question: What action do we want the reader to take after she/he reads our post? And create your post around it. With recipes it’s simple – you obviously want them to make the recipe, workouts – again, DIY – same thing! Therefore these happen to be the most popular posts overall! If you need more help with writing your first blog posts, this post can help.
  • Wrap up, before you go crazy! Don’t try to be solid with your content – some people will like it, some won’t, others won’t even read it! What matters is to do your best in a reasonable amount of time. It’s never going to be solid, don’t try to fix it too long. Here’s a helpful article on how to write good content fast.
  • Make your blog post titles CLEAR. If you confuse people with your titles it’s less likely to make them want to read your blog.

Don’t take too long with that blog post writing part. A week is enough – write 1-2 blog posts a day to get into the habit of writing every day.

How to publish a blog post in WordPress?

In your WordPress Dashboard select Post -> Add New in the menu on the left. Once you’ve written and edited your post, you can choose to publish it now (or before – select a date, in the small area (Publish) to the top right) or schedule it for a day in the future.

*You can add images using the Add Media button and you can format your text using the menu above

Step 8: Promote

Using Social Media To Get Traffic

Whew. Your blog is now up and your blog posts scheduled, but unfortunately all your awesome content doesn’t promote itself. TRUST us. This blog was dead the first 1.5 years, because we didn’t promote it ANYWHERE.

But once we started, We got 19.000 page views within a month.

So how do you make your blog popular and get people to your brand new site?

Create Pins

As for the title – make it something that people actually want and need. Not something that’s nice to have. A burning desire…not just interesting. For example people would need a one week workout plan to get fit, not 10 reasons to work out.

Pin!

That said, we used to pin manually in the beginning. Eday to every group board We were a part of and then repinned content from each group board to our own boards. It got overwhelming, but it also worked for a little bit. Whichever option you choose, remember that persistence is key. Speaking of…

Asking Group Boards For Invites?

Step 9: Persistence

Do it again.

Now, keep writing content and promoting it.

Persistence is key with growing anything and a blog is no different. Once you have everything up and running you need to put out more content on a regular basis and to keep promoting it to your readers + potential readers.

Step 10: Make Money Blogging

Ads, Affiliate Marketing, Sponsored Content, Products

Once you have enough traffic you can:

  • display ads,
  • do sponsored content,
  • promote affiliate products
  • create and sell your own products & services through your blog.

For this, you’ll need to choose a good ad management company (we're with Mediavine), join affiliate networks and programs for products you love and use or create your own products.

There are many ways, you can monetize a blog these days – it’s insane! A reliable way to do it is to do a mixture of all or some. For example, we don’t do sponsored content and don’t have our own products yet.

When you get into the groove and get most of your stuff automated, that income can grow quickly even if you don’t do much.

Here’s a helpful post on how to make money blogging.

We hope you found this beginner blogging guide helpful to get started, it’s a lot at once, yet definitely not everything you will need to learn about blogging. But it’s important to start. Trust us, you’ll have time to figure out the rest as you go.

It’s been therapeutic for us to put it together as blogging has become such a huge part of our life and we don’t talk about it much.

To us, this blog is a place where we can come and share a part of us. It’s the one thing that’s ours – we created it from scratch. And we don’t know if something like this means a lot to you, but it means EVERYTHING to us.

More Helpful Resources: