It should be no surprise that the people running a blog love the fact that you’re thinking about starting a blog. In fact, we think having a blog is one of the best online businesses that you can start.
Why is that? Because a blog can really open up the doors to how much money you can potentially make. That might sound a bit wild if you don’t know much about blogs, but once you start a blog you begin to see how much opportunity is out there.
Before we get into that though it’s important to understand what a blog is and what it shouldn’t be if you truly want to make money online.
A Resource, Not a Journal
Back in the days, a blog was associated with someone writing whatever they want about anything. It’s why many people associated blogging with people who liked to post cat pictures.
We aren’t saying there is anything wrong with cat pics, but if the goal is to make money, posting cat pics probably isn’t the best route to go.
Nowadays, a blog is like any other website that you can find content on.
The blog you create is no different than The New York Times for example. Both sites post content for people to consume. So when you think about a blog, simply think about the term blog as the technology used to display content on a website.
Your site isn’t a blog, but it will use blog software.
So what is your site then?
It’s a resource. A place where people can go to get help about something.
And that’s what makes blogging so special and to understand why you need to understand what a business is.
The Simple Formula to a Successful Business
It’s easy to think that an online business should be something that is extremely complicated. But if you take a step back and really break a business down you can find that it’s nothing more than a simple formula.
Audience x Offer = $$$$$$Every single business in the world follows this formula for better or worse.
To run a successful business, the only things you need are an audience and an offer that they will buy.
If you can put those two things together then you’ll have a great business.
But what does blogging have to do with this?
The Currency of Attention
In today’s online world, the only currency that matters is attention. Without attention, you do not have an audience and as we see with the formula above, without an audience you do not have a business.
A blog is a perfect way to grab the attention of an audience so that they can become aware of your offer.
This is why it’s important to view your blog as a resource. We like to think of it as a library that you build.
Every single day millions (or maybe billions) of people are hopping online to find the solution to a problem. Often they are sent to blogs (thanks Google!) that hav the answers for them.
If you can create a blog that becomes a resource for a group of people then every single day you’ll have hundreds, thousands, or millions of people coming to you for help.
And once you provide them with that help they’ll see what else you can help them with. This gives you an opportunity to show them your offer and that’s when some of them will buy.
This doesn’t happen every once in a while. This will happen 24/7 for you.
As long you take the right steps in how you start your blog.
So what are those steps?
How to Start a Blog the Right Way
What do we mean by the right way? We’ve been building blogs for over a decade and have helped thousands of others build blogs as well.
And things are constantly changing when it comes to building a blog because how people move around the web has changed.
Before you could start a blog, throw up some pins on Pinterest, and be on your merry way. You’d wake up a week later (pretty long sleep) and have over 100,000 page views.
But unfortunately, it doesn’t work like that anymore.
Google has changed. Content creation has changed. The game has changed.
And because you don’t want to waste months doing all of the wrong things it’s important to understand how you start a blog the right way.
Step 1. Choose Your Audience
You might think that the first thing you need to do is figure out what to write about for your blog and that makes sense.
But that’s not the best route to go.
Why?
Because with a blog, you want to ensure that you’re creating content for an audience that wants it so that’s why you need to figure out who you want to help first.
Once you figure that out, then everything else becomes a lot easier.
So ask yourself who do you want to read your blog? What do you want to help them with? What do they want to achieve?
By answering these questions you’ll be ready for the next steps.
Step 2. Choose a Domain Name
Some people take weeks to find a domain name and that’s pretty silly. Choosing a domain name shouldn’t be something that takes you forever.
Yes, it’s the name that you’ll have to live with for a while, but don’t think that it has to match what you’re talking about.
Look at the domain for this site, Struggle.co. You wouldn’t know what this site talks about unless you came to it and that’s okay.
We wanted this domain because we thought about the people that we wanted to help: those who struggle with money. Because of that the name makes perfect sense to us.
Here are some of our other brands that have unique names:
Just by looking at the names do you have any idea what they talk about? Probably not and guess what? They all do pretty well.
Our rule of thumb for coming up with domain names for our blogs is to use names that we enjoy.
Step 3. Choose a Web Host
You can go with cheap or you can go with not so cheap.
If you’re just getting started then something like SiteGround works just fine. As you grow your blog you might want to look into more specialized hosting services such as WPX.
Either way, choose a host and walk through the steps to get WordPress set up.
Choosing a Theme
This isn’t a mandatory step. The default theme that comes with WordPress can serve you just fine until you’re ready to make some design changes to things.
If you want to work with a theme that’s easy to customize and great for SEO then we suggest GeneratePress. It’s what we use for all of our sites and has served us well over the years.
Plus, it’s a great price for the Pro version and can be used for more sites than you can handle.
Step 4. Create a Topic Cluster
What content do you create for your blog?
The first thing you’re going to do is figure out what topic you want to build a resource around and then create a topic cluster. If you want your blog to do well with Google then you need your blog to be a topical authority on whatever it covers.
What does that mean?
Let’s say you’re doing a blog on interior design. Writing 3 blog posts on how to decorate the different rooms in the house isn’t going to be enough.
You need to cover every single angle of home decor to ensure that you have a resource that will help your audience.
And this is where blogging has greatly changed from what it was in the past. In the past, creating a topic cluster would take you months or years but with the help of AI it can be done in minutes.
This is a deeper topic than we can cover in this blog post but if you’re interested in learning more about how to use AI to help with blogging then check out our book, The Blog Simple Framework.
It walks you through what you need to do to create a successful blog (think this post but way more in-depth) and covers how to use AI to aid in growing your blog.
Step 5. Get People to Your Site
This step is probably closer to a dozen mini-steps, but it will vary depending on what you want to do. We suggest you hop onto social media and start to build up your brand.
Almost every social media network gives you the option of including a link in your bio. Use this opportunity to send people back to your site where they can see what a valuable resource it is.
This also helps Google see that people are going to your site and will consider it branded traffic. This helps to build up the authority of your site and in turn helps you to climb the rankings.
Another option is to use Pinterest. While it won’t send you as much traffic as it did in the past, it’s still a good way to start making people aware of your blog.
Step 6. Repeat Steps 4 & 5 Forever
One of the great things about blogging is that once you have your foundation set up, there aren’t many things that you need to do daily.
And with the help of AI things have become a lot easier. It can get to a point where the only thing that you’re doing on a daily basis is posting to social media. It can be a pretty easy lifestyle once everything is humming along.
But you don’t want to just start a blog, you want to make money with it.
How to Make Money Blogging
This is where things get interesting because as we mentioned before, a blog opens up many opportunities in how you can make money online.
You could simply focus on building up your blog’s traffic and slap some ads on it. You could focus on affiliate marketing.
Or you can do what we teach people to do and that is build a digital product business.
Don’t worry, it’s not as scary as it sounds and in fact, blogging makes it a lot easier.
We like to start by creating an ebook. We can usually do this in less than a week (check out The 12-Hour eBook Method).
Once the book is created we then put looks to it in the different blog posts. That’s passive selling. You’ve seen some of these links in this post.
We’ll also include links to our products in the emails that we send. Most of them aren’t even sales emails. Just emails helping our audience solve a problem.
Sure, there are times where we’ll want to do some hard-selling but that is very rare. We prefer to focus on serving our audience and know that they’ll find our offers in their own way.
This has led us to create brands that always make at least $100,000 a year. But here’s the best part.
Do you know how we mentioned ads and affiliate marketing above? With a blog, you can still do those things, but when you throw in digital products then you’ve created multiple revenue streams for yourself.
This is why we love blogging. Once everything is established you can take breaks away from your new business and money will still continue to be made 24/7.
Is it easy? Not really but it’s not particularly difficult either.
Is it worth it? Every single time.
Start a Blog Today
We encourage you to start a blog today. There is no point in waiting and thinking. You can change whatever you want in the future so if you don’t like some of the posts that you’re creating then change them.
If you don’t like the topics that you’re discussing on your blog then choose other ones.
A blog is flexible but it only works if it exists. You can’t make money with a blog that only lives in your head.
So if you’re going to start one, now is the time.
To learn more about building a successful blog that can make you over $100,000 a year then check out our book The Blog Simple Framework.