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However, is that really true?

Having experience using both types of website building, we think everyone is wrong about WordPress.com and gives it a rather bad reputation.

In this post, we’re going to explain why we say self-hosted WordPress.org is NOT better than WordPress.com. In fact, we think WordPress.com can be a more suitable choice for beginners when starting a blog or a website compared to using self-hosted WordPress.org.

Self-hosted WordPress.org and WordPress.com: A brief introduction

Before diving deep into this post’s main topic, it’s best to understand a little bit more about WordPress.org and WordPress.com.

WordPress.org is the home for the WordPress software – a free content management system (CMS) that helps you quickly create and manage sites’ content. Because it’s only a tool to assist you in building websites and blogs, you still need web hosting services to host the content. In that way, people can find and access it. Hence, the term self-hosted WordPress.org is coined.

On the contrary, WordPress.com is a hosting service and website creator built on the WordPress core. It means if you register for WordPress.com, you don’t have to find web hosting services yourself. Therefore, sometimes, people call it hosted WordPress.org.

Using self-hosted WordPress.org and WordPress.com introduces slightly different levels of controls, advantages, and disadvantages over the management and customization of a website.

However, we won’t go into details about that here. They’re for a different post.

Now, let’s go through the benefits of using WordPress.com over WordPress.org and why we think it might be better for beginners to go with WordPress.com.

The benefits of using WordPress.com over self-hosted WordPress.org

There are a bunch of built-in features and benefits WordPress.com provides that a self-hosted WordPress.org site doesn’t have out of the box.

Let’s see what they are!

Easy setup

With WordPress.com, you don’t have to find and set up a web hosting service yourself unlike in the case of self-hosted WordPress.org.

WordPress.com takes care of all the heavy lifting to help you start building your blog and website in the fastest and easiest way.

Free to use forever

You can start a completely free blog or website on WordPress.com with its custom domain name extension.

This allows you to test out the power of WordPress freely without having to pay in advance for a web hosting service.

Alternative To Google Ads: WordAds

In case you didn’t know, to be able to display Google ads to make money from your blog or website, it has to go through a strict review process to determine if it has enough content and doesn’t violate any advertising rules.

For example, we got rejected by the Google Ads program once because we only had 10 blog posts at the time of applying.

Using WordPress.com Premium, you automatically got accepted to the WordAds program, a high-quality advertising optimization platform for WordPress sites. It means you can instantly display ads right from the get-go.

Additionally, WordPress.com makes it super easy to show WordAds advertisements on your site with just a few clicks – no coding or third-party plugin required!

Unlimited Premium Themes

If you upgrade to a WordPress.com premium plan or higher, you get access to an unlimited number of powerful, flexible, highly-customizable premium themes at no extra cost.

Google My Business

Google My Business is a service for businesses to manage their online presence across Google, including Search and Maps. It helps people find and understand your business and improve your exposure on the internet.

Using WordPress.com, you can quickly connect it to the service to view stats and other useful information right from your site dashboard.

Collect Stripe And Paypal Payments

Upgrading to the WordPress.com personal plan gives you the ability to accept one-time or recurring payments through Stripe or Paypal for products, services, memberships, subscriptions, donations, etc.

This feature is usually not available by default for self-hosted WordPress.org sites unless they install third-party plugins like WooCommerce.

Accept donations and tips

You can easily set up a Donations Block on your WordPress.com site to accept donations, contributions, and tips for your hard work.

Subscriber Only Content

WordPress.com allows you to lock specific content on your site, so only people who subscribe to your monthly or yearly membership program can access it.

You might have to spend quite a bit of money if you use a plugin like Memberpress or RestrictContentPro to have this feature, which costs at least somewhere around $99/year to $149/year.

Paid Newsletters

With Paid Newsletters, you can automatically share premium content you publish on your blog with paying subscribers through email.

Automated Backup And One-Click Rewind

Backup & Rewind is a WordPress.com Business feature that keeps a record of your site’s content automatically (pictures, texts, videos, plugins, etc.), allowing you to restore your website or blog to a specific point in time.

This is useful in case you make an editing mistake, or your site crashes for some reason.

You can get this feature for self-hosted WordPress.org websites at an additional cost. For example, BlueHost offers the CodeGuard-powered Automated Backup feature at $1,99/month.

SEO Tools

Another feature that is available in the WordPress.com business plan is SEO Tools. It allows you to optimize your site for SEO with custom meta descriptions, custom title formats, social previews, etc.

Again, this feature can cost you somewhere around $1,99/month if you start a blog or website with self-hosted WordPress.org.

Built-in Site Stats

WordPress.com provides you with a powerful built-in stat page, showing you how many views and visitors your site gets, what posts and pages are the most popular, which links are clicked, which videos are played, which countries your audience comes from, and more.

Google Analytics And Site Verification

Google Analytics is an advanced web analytics platform developed by Google, complementing WordPress.com stats, and giving you in-depth insights into your visitors.

Adding Google Analytics to a WordPress.com site is simple and straightforward with a built-in tool and no coding skills required.

WordPress.com also has its own site verification and sitemap tools that allow you to automatically send your site to all major search engines for indexing.

These are features that are often not supported by self-hosted WordPress.org by default.

Advanced Social Media

WordPress.com’s Advanced Social Media features give you the ability to connect, schedule, and share your posts to many big social media platforms, including Facebook, Twitter, Linkedln, and Tumblr.

There are also many other great advanced social tools WordPress.com offers out of the box, such as Instagram and Pinterest Embeds, Reblogs, Geotagging, Survey, Poll, Quiz, and more.

Although you can install third-party plugins to get similar features for your self-hosted WordPress.org site, they can be hard to manage, and you might have to pay additional fees to use them.

VideoPress Support

VideoPress is a lightweight, responsive, and highly-customizable video player included in WordPress.com and Jetpack paid plans. It allows you to host and embed fast, ad-free, unbranded videos on your blog and website with no additional charges for bandwidth usage and no caps on the number of video plays.

Free Email Forwarding

Upgrading to a WordPress.com paid plan allows you to access the Email Forwarding feature. It lets you use your custom domain in your email address, such as newsletter@thecleverbusiness.com, so your email address looks more professional. All mails sent to this custom email will be forwarded to another email address.

With a business plan, you can have up to 100 email forwards.

Many self-hosted WordPress.org hosting services also offer free custom email accounts using cPanel Webmail. However, they are sometimes buggy and take a little bit of time to set up correctly.

Free Photo Library

WordPress.com automatically integrates your site with a Pexels free photo library with over 40,000 copyright-free images.

This feature allows you to quickly find and add beautiful images to your blog posts and pages without ever leaving the editor and digging photos from other websites.

WordPress.com Reader

The biggest advantage of using WordPress.com is that you have access to its Reader, a very active feed aggregator that automatically brings every WordPress.com blog together in one place.

The Reader allows everyone to search, visit, like, share, and comment on a blog post directly from it.

Additionally, people can follow a site and start seeing its posts as well as getting notifications when a new one is published. It means your site automatically gets extra exposure if you use WordPress.com.

It’s worth noting that a self-hosted WordPress.org site can appear on the WordPress.com Reader. However, to achieve that, you must have a paid Jetpack plan.

Self-hosted WordPress.org and WordPress.com: The real price comparision

We have gone through all the benefits of using WordPress.com over self-hosted WordPress.org.

But, to access many above features, you have to subscribe to a WordPress.com paid plan, which starts from $4/month (billed annually). And if you want to access all, you might have to choose the Business one, which costs $25/month.

How about self-hosted WordPress.org?

For example, BlueHost is one of the most affordable hosting services out there, costing you a minimum of $5.95/month (billed annually). Then, most features we have mentioned can be obtained with a $19.95/month Security Daily JetPack plan. If you choose to pay for other individual third-party plugins, the cost can go up a whole lot more.

Therefore, in total, you might have to spend at least $25.9/month for your self-hosted WordPress.org site to have similar advanced features as a WordPress.com one.

As you can see, the costs between the two are more or less the same.

Conclusion

So, in the end, should you use WordPress.com or self-hosted WordPress.org?

The answer is it depends. If you are looking for a low-upfront-cost solution and extend the site functionality yourself later, you should go with self-hosted WordPress.org.

And if you want to start a blog or a website with full-fledged features in the quickest and easiest way, WordPress.com should be your go-to destination.

Userful Resources

• 18 best platforms to start a blog or website: Besides WordPress, there are many other powerful platforms to start a blog or website on. What are they?

In this blog post, we will guide you through every step to quickly get a free blog up and running. you will also learn various methods to make money from it.

Let’s dive right in!

Why you should start a free blog

Blogging is becoming increasingly popular nowadays, and it seems that nearly all business websites equip a blog in one form or another.

It has become one of the primary ways to inform people about the latest news and updates about products and services. Furthermore, compared to other marketing forms like advertising, blogs can help companies and brands appear more trustworthy and build a strong relationship with potential customers.

As an individual, besides being a place to share your thoughts and opinions about everything, a blog can become a good portfolio where you can show off your work and expertise.

Numerous bloggers are also able to turn blogging into a full-time job and generate a reliable income source from it. For example, Pinch Of Yum makes thousands of dollars in revenue per month consistently by blogging about food.

As you can see, there are many benefits of owning a blog, and you should absolutely start a free one right now!

How to start a blog for free

Here are the 9 steps to start a completely free blog (and make money from it if you want to).

1. Choose a free blogging platform
2. Pick a blog niche
3. Come up with a blog domain name
4. Create your free blog
5. Set up and launch your free blog
6. Design your blog with free themes
7. Create blog content
8. Promote your blog and get free traffic
9. Monetize your free blog

1. Choose a free blogging platform

There are numerous free blogging platforms on the interest, and one of the best and most beginner-friendly ones is WordPress.com.

WordPress.com is an advanced site creator platform that allows you to easily create a beautiful website using many built-in themes and tools.

Additionally, The platform offers various plugins that help you quickly extend your website’s functionality.

Founded in 2005, WordPress.com has powered millions of websites and blogs on the entire internet.

Compared to many of its rivals like Wix or Blogger, WordPress.com prevails in terms of extensibility and the ability to build a large-scale blog.

Therefore, we think the best choice to start a free blog is WordPress.com.

2. Pick a blog niche

Picking the right blog niche is very important if you intend to start a free blog to make money. Otherwise, you can just ignore this step.

A blog niche is a topic that your content will focus the most around.

Some of the most popular blog niches are food, fashion, personal finance, online business, fitness, healthcare, travel, lifestyle, technology, and blogging.

Before deciding on a blog niche to make money, there are some factors you should keep in mind:

• Pick a niche that you’re familiar with. Otherwise, you would have a hard time writing about it. For example, a fitness blog is the right choice for people who love working out.
• Consider choosing a broad enough niche, so it’s easier for you to find your audience. A quick way to check for the popularity of a niche is by doing a google search. If it has around 500 million search results, you are good to go. For example, the word “food” has over 25 billion search results.
• A narrow niche is fine. You might have a hard time promoting your blog to the right people, but it also means that you have less competition.

3. Come up with a blog domain name

People usually look at your blog domain name to have a general idea of what your content is all about. Therefore, you should choose a name that is somewhat related to your blog niche.

Below are some tips to help you come up with a blog domain name.

• It should be short and memorable. When people want to find your blog, they can do it with ease.
• Avoid using digits or hyphens, if possible. They make your blog name look unprofessional. However, using numbers in text form is OK.
• If you want to use a paid domain name, go with the “.com” version since it’s the most popular and recognizable domain name extension.
• Use the correct spells of words to avoid people from mistyping your blog name.

4. Create your free blog

Now, you have an amazing blog name and know which niche to write about. It’s time to create your free blog.

First, Go to WordPress.com and create an account.

Click “Get started” on the top right corner to start creating a WordPress.com account.

You can choose to create your account using an email address, your Google account, or an Apple account.

The next step is to create your blog domain name.

Enter the domain name you have just come up with to the blank field.

If your domain name is available, a “.wordpress.com” version should appear. It’s the free domain name extension provided by WordPress.com.

To be able to name your blog under other extensions like “.com” or “.net,” the platform requires you to subscribe to one of its plans, starting from $4/month. However, it’s out of this guide’s scope, which is to start a free blog.

Click the “Select” button next to the “.wordpress.com” domain name version to claim it.

A new page will appear, prompting you to pick a plan. Just click “Start with a free site” near the top of the page to ignore this step.

If everything works correctly, you should be directed to your main dashboard. This is where you will manage, design, and configure your blog.

5. Set up and launch your free blog

After your free blog has been created, you should go through some additional steps to set it up and running smoothly.

Click the “Get Started” button in the middle of the page to start the setup process.

Name your blog

The first step is naming your blog. This is the title that people will see when entering the site, and it’s usually situated at the top left corner and on the web tab.

You should name your blog similar to your domain name to for consistency purpose.

Click “All done, continue” to move on to the next step.

Edit homepage and launch your blog

Now, it’s time to edit your blog homepage. Click on the “Edit homepage” button to get started.

A new window will appear, allowing you to customize your blog’s design.

WordPress.com uses block editor (also known as Gutenberg editor) that lets you add, arrange, and remove various types of blocks to design your blog however you want.

To add a new block, click on the plus sign button on the top left corner and choose the one you like.

Clicking on an element will let you customize, arrange, or remove it.

After customizing the page, remember to click on the “Update” button on the top right corner to update your design. You can also click on “Preview” to see how it actually looks in your web browser.

If you’re satisfied with your design, click the “Launch” button to publish your blog, and everyone will be able to access it under “yourdomainname.wordpress.com.”

For a more comprehensive guide on using the block editor, you can watch this video.

Confirm email address

If you haven’t confirmed your email address, you should do so to ensure you have access to all of WordPress.com’s free features.

Create your blog menu

Creating an effective menu will help people navigate your blog easily and find what they’re looking for.

To start, click “Add a menu.”

A menu editor should appear.

There are 2 main types of menu: primary and social.

The primary menu appears on the top right side of your blog, including Home, Blog, About, and Contact. You can click on it to add or remove items.

The social menu contains items that link to your social profiles like Facebook or Twitter.

If you don’t see the social menu anywhere on your blog, you have to add it to a location first. Click “View All Locations” and assign your social menu to either the footer location or social links location.

Remember to click “Save changes” to save all of your changes.

That’s basically every step to start getting your free blog up and running smoothly.

6. Design your blog with free themes

Themes are predesigned templates that let you quickly change your blog’s look and feel without affecting its content.

To access WordPress.com free themes, go to your main dashboard and click on the “Change Theme” button on the right side. You can also click on the “Design” tab on the left side, then click on the “Themes” subtab to achieve the same thing.

There are hundreds of free themes to choose from.

You can click on each theme to see how it looks and various additional information about it.

If you love a theme, click on the “Activate this design” button to swap out your old theme with the new one.

A popup will appear with two options: keep your current homepage content or use the theme homepage and make your existing one a draft.

To keep the homepage’s design you have changed, select the first option, then activate your theme.

Selecting the second option will change your homepage’s design to the theme homepage. If you want to retrieve your old design, go to your main dashboard, click on the “Site” tab on the right side, and select “Pages.” This is where houses all of your blog pages.

Next, select the “Drafts” tab from the horizontal menu. You should see your old homepage.

Click on the three-dot icon and select “Publish” to republish your old homepage. It will now appear in the “Published” tab.

Finally, make it your main homepage by clicking on the three-dot icon again and clicking on the “Set as Homepage” button.

Each theme comes with its own settings that let you customize your blog’s design further.

To start customizing your current theme, click on the “Customize theme” button in your main dashboard. A theme editor should appear.

You can change your blog identity, colors, background image, fonts, widgets, and more.

WordPress.com allows you to preview your blog design across many devices. Simply click on a device at the bottom of the editor.

7. Create blog content

Your content is the most important element of your blog. Even if your design looks wonderful, no one will bother visiting your blog unless it has something people care about.

Start writing a blog post by clicking on the “Write blog post” button in your main dashboard or click on the “Site” tab, select “Posts,” then click “Add new post.”

WordPress.com also uses the block editor for editing blog posts. Therefore, you can freely write and style them however you want to.

The right sidebar contains settings that allow you to customize your blog post visibility, permalink, categories, tags, featured image, excerpt, etc.

After writing your blog post content, click the “Publish” button on the top right corner to publish it.

8. Promote your blog and get free traffic

Promotion plays a key role in the success of your blog, especially if you want to make money from it.

There are many methods to get free traffic to your blog, including optimizing content for SEO, publishing content to social media like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, or being active in community forums like Reddit and Quora.

Optimizing content for SEO

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization, referring to a set of techniques to optimize your blog content with the aim to make it rank higher on search engines.

If your content gets to the top of search results for a specific term, it can help you attract tons of visitors to your blog regularly.

SEO is a complicated topic and impossible to master since search engines like Google generally don’t want anyone to know details about their algorithm. Otherwise, people will exploit it.

However, at its core, SEO means delivering good and unique content to people who need it. So, as long as your content is fresh, helpful, and easy to follow, you’re good to go.

Here are some basic tips to help you get started writing SEO content for your free blog.

• Search engines prefer in-depth articles. Therefore, the longer and more comprehensive a blog post is, the better it usually is (Around 1000 words or more).
• Write a descriptive and accurate post title. Don’t try to clickbait or stuff in many keywords to trick search engines into ranking your content. They are smart enough to detect all of this. The key here is to sound as natural and honest as possible.
• Use headings to break down your content, so it’s easier to follow. Search Engines are trained to look at content like the way humans do. Therefore, the easier it is to read and navigate your blog posts, the better they are.
• Focus on one or two keywords or phrases and use them sparingly and appropriately. In that way, search engines have a better understanding of the blog content and rank it accordingly.
• Use descriptive link text when linking to other blog posts, so readers know what you are linking to. Don’t just past the entire link into your posts or use generic words like “here,” “click here,” “this,” etc.

For a more comprehensive guide on this topic, check out the Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Starter Guide.

Publishing content to social media

Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, or Pinterest are great places to publish your new content and find relevant audiences. They have billions of active users and are totally free to use.

Before choosing a social networking platform to put your effort into, we recommend looking at popular blogs in your niche to see which one they focus the most on.

Suppose you start a free food blog. In this case, PinchOfYum would be a good model.

They seem to use pretty much all popular social networking platforms. However, the two that have the highest engagement rates are Instagram and Pinterest.

PinchOfYum’s Instagram has over 1 million followers.

Their Pinterest account has 996k followers and 10 million monthly viewers.

Knowing this, you can create promotional materials that suit these two platforms. For others, reusing the same images or videos is enough.

If you are interested in growing your social profiles quickly, have a look at Proven Tactics To Grow Followers and Engagement.

Being active in community forums

One of the best methods to grow your blog and build a strong connection with people is to be active in relevant community forums. It means contributing to those communities by sharing great content and answering any question others might have.

The two most popular community forums you should focus on are Reddit and Quora. They both have hundreds of millions of users, and you can pretty much find any topic to join and start contributing.

For example, there is a food community on Reddit that has over 20 million members. You can post your food recipes on here and start getting traffic to your free blog.

Remember to read the community guidelines carefully to avoid becoming a spammer and getting banned.

Additionally, some forums don’t allow you to include links to other websites in your posts. Therefore, it would be best to create an account under your blog name to get some good exposure.

9. Monetize your free blog

Monetization refers to the process of making money from your blog by selling or promoting something.

For a free blog, there are a couple of ways you can choose to start monetizing.

Doing affiliate marketing

Affiliate marketing is one of the most popular and lucrative methods to make money blogging. It is the activity of promoting products or services to earn commissions. For example, you can earn up to $65/sale by promoting hosting services like BlueHost.

Affiliate marketing usually works like this: When someone clicks on an affiliate link that contains a special tracking code and buy something, the person who promotes the link (also called the affiliate) takes a cut of the total sales.

It sounds complicated. However, in fact, it’s actually super easy. All you need to do is signing up for an affiliate program, finding a product or service to promote, getting an auto-generated tracking link, and finally putting it into your blog posts like a normal link – nothing technical or fancy here.

Some of the most popular affiliate programs are Amazon Associates, ClickBank, and ShareASale.

Writing sponsored posts

Another lucrative method to make money from your free blog is to write sponsored posts. They appear as normal blog posts. However, their primary purpose is to promote a product or service of a brand.

Depending on your blog traffic, you can earn up to several hundred or even thousand dollars per post.

Check out 7 top sponsored post networks to join for paid blogging opportunities.

Drive traffic to other channels to make money

When your free blog starts getting traction, you can direct your readers to many other channels that allow you to make good money.

Selling online courses

If you are an expert in your niche, consider signing up for online learning platforms like Udemy or Skillshare to become a teacher, and start sharing your knowledge. Generally, you can charge at least $9,99 for a course.

It’s important to note that when we talk about being an expert, we actually mean that you only need to be familiar with your niche and have things to share with others.

Selling physical products

You can also create an online store and start selling physical products.

Don’t worry! You don’t have to create them or handle the shipping process yourself.

Nowadays, many print-on-demand services like Printful or Printify allow you to create customized designs for specific products like shirts or bags. Then, when someone places an order, those companies will print your design onto the item and handle the rest, from fulfilling, shipping to customer services.

Another method is to start a dropshipping store. It’s pretty similar to the print-on-demand model, except you usually cannot customize designs, but you have more products to choose from.

Selling other digital products

Besides online courses, you can create other digital products like eBooks, designs, templates, or software to sell.

Donations

If people love your free content, they can donate to support your blog via Patreon or BuyMeACoffee.

Offering services

If you can show that you are an expert in your field, you can become a freelancer on Fiverr or Upwork and offer meaningful services to others.

For example, if you’re good at writing, you can provide copywriting or blog writing services.

There are many other methods to make money from your blog, like displaying ads or offering membership exclusive content. However, to show ads on your blog or create membership zones, WordPress.com requires you to upgrade your free plan to a premium one. Therefore, we don’t mention them here.

Conclusion

Starting a free blog gives you many benefits, and you can even make good money out of it.

Following this guide, you should be able to create a free blog in a few minutes and become sharing your knowledge with the whole world.

Useful Resources

• How to come up with unlimited blog ideas: Get stuck finding the next viral blog post idea? Check out our guide.
• Set up a paid blog: Want to have complete control over every part of your blog and extend its functionality easily? It’s best to set up a paid blog with a powerful hosting service.

The result was quite mesmerizing. We spent $150 and ended up collecting more than 800 new email leads.

In this post, we go through every step we have taken to achieve such impressive results.

Introduction to Facebook and Facebook Ads

Facebook is a social networking platform that lets users connect with other people worldwide and share images, videos, and information on almost any topic.

Being the biggest social networking website with over 2.7 billion monthly active users, Facebook is the perfect place for marketers to find their audience and promote their products or services.

Facebook Ads are advertisements that can appear in the Facebook news feed on desktop, mobile, and in the right column of Facebook on desktop.

According to DialogTech, 93% of social media marketers use paid Facebook ads and spend a total of $25.56 billion on the platform. Besides, 26% of Facebook users who clicked on ads went on to make purchases.

Therefore, if you don’t use Facebook Ads, you miss out on a big opportunity to drive your business more profits.

Facebook Lead Ads: What are they?

Facebook Lead Ads are a type of Facebook Ads that allows you to collect information from people who may be interested in your products or services.

Types of information may include name, email address, phone number, and more. You can also create custom questions to help you better understand your potential customers.

Compared to other lead generation methods like landing pages, you can expect a 50% reduction in Cost Per Lead. The reason is that Facebook Lead Ads allows you to streamline the user experience without forcing them to ever leaving the Facebook platform.

How we get 16 cents per lead with Facebook Lead Ads

Below, we go through every step we have taken to achieve 16 cents per lead, as well as the ideas and hypotheses behind all of our decisions.

Set up the basic campaign details

Before diving deep into our strategies and thought process, let’s look at the basic details of our Facebook lead ads campaign that we didn’t change throughout this experiment.

The lead magnet

At the moment of creating the campaign, we didn’t really have any great materials to promote except our blog content.

Because of the situation, coupling with the urge to test out Facebook Lead Ads, we decided to take one of our best blog posts as the lead magnet.

We ended up choosing 45+ Best Winning Dropshipping Product Research Tools for two main reasons.

First, our other blog posts, like How to start a successful blog or The definitive guide to creating a profitable dropshipping business, are great content. However, they are ubiquitous on the internet and not as unique as the one we have chosen.

Second, it has the potential to capture people’s attention much better than others because of strong words like “Winning” and the number “45.”

At least that’s what we thought. If we have time, we’ll definitely test out other blog posts to see how things would turn out. Therefore, be sure to check back our blog sometimes!

So, that was our lead magnet.

The ad copy

Our ad copy is pretty simple and straight to the point.

The title of the blog post pretty much speaks for itself. Therefore, we just had to put it with some emojis and a CTA (Call to action) “Check them out now.”

There are some interesting insights about the effect of emojis and the CTA you might want to know.

According to WordStream’s research, having emojis in Tweets can increase the engagement rate by 25.4% over posts that don’t have them. Furthermore, they have a 22.2% lower cost per engagement.

ZazzleMedia also points out that Facebook posts with emojis have a 57% higher like rate, a 33% higher comment rate, and a 33% higher share rate.

Regarding CTAs, HubSpot found that anchor text CTAs increase conversion rates by 121%.

With all of the statistics, we think that including emojis and a CTA in our ad copy is the right move.

The ad set

There is nothing special about our ad audience. It’s straightforward to target people who are interested in dropshipping.

We also didn’t target any specific country, age, or gender.

One of the reasons for this is that the Facebook algorithm is already really good at finding the right audience for your ads.

Another reason is that our potential reach was 62 million, and we thought it’s the right fit for our experiment.

Regarding ad placement, because our ad creatives look good in all locations since they are square in dimensions, we let Facebook allocate them automatically.

The lead form

We only collect 2 types of information, including names and email addresses.

We could have been able to increase our conversion rate a little bit more by leaving out the name field. It’s because it would allow people to fill in the form faster. However, for the sake of email personalization, we decided to include it.

Try different ad creatives

We strategically created 5 different ad creatives for Facebook Lead Ads to test many different ideas and hypotheses.

• First, we want to see if 3d animated ads are good.
• Second, how important are ad thumbnails?
• Third, how important are ad playtime and initial impressions?
• Finally, do video creatives perform better than image creatives?

With all of that in mind, here are our ad creatives.

Ad 1: The 3d animated ad

With an interesting concept, our hypothesis was that this ad would perform well and would be a close match compared to most of the other ads on our list.

Ad 2: The attractive girl video ad

We expected this would be our best performing ad since it seemed to capture our attention the most.

Ad 3: The curious girl ad

We hypothesized this third ad would be somewhat outperformed by Ad 2 but not much.

Ad 4: The confused man ad

This 4th ad captured our attention pretty well. However, not as much as Ad 2 or 3. We thought its performance would be equal to Ad 1.

Ad 5: The attractive girl image ad

Many marketers said that video ads tend to outperform image ads. With that thought in mind, we assumed that this ad would perform pretty well but could not outperform any other ads on the list.

Exit the learning phase as quickly as possible

When creating a new ad set or make a significant edit to an existing one, the Facebook ad system tries to explore the best way to deliver your ads. This period is called the learning phase.

During the learning phase, your ad’s performance is usually unstable, and CPA (Cost-Per-Action) tends to worsen.

Therefore, the sooner you can exit the learning phase, the better it is.

Whether your ad set can exit the learning phase is decided by the number of optimization events – the number of times your ads achieved the outcomes your ad set is currently optimized for. In the case of Facebook lead ads, it’s the number of new email leads generated.

An ad usually has to have around 50 optimization events in a specific amount of time to exit this phase. For example, if you chose a conversion window of 1-day click and 7-day view when creating your ad set, this metric will use that to count the number of outcomes.

In the beginning, we set our daily campaign budget to $5 and got around 20 to 30 optimization events each day. After 2-3 days, the Facebook ad marked our ad set as Learning Limited. It’s the situation when an ad set isn’t getting enough optimization events to exit the learning phase. As a result, its performance will be unstabilized, resulting in high CPA.

There are multiple ways to fix this problem. However, we chose to raise our daily ad budget to $8 as it’s the quickest and easiest method that can help Facebook deliver the ads to more people quicker.

The result was mesmerizing. After exiting the learning phase, we constantly got around 60 leads per day, resulting in an average of 16 cents per lead.

It’s important to note that we could have lowered our average cost per results to around 13 cents by turning off all poorly performing ads. However, for the sake of an experiment, we decided to keep all the ads running.

Increase the Facebook Ad Relevance

Facebook Ad Relevance is a combination of metrics that rank ads’ quality, engagement, and conversion rate.

When we ran our ads, we paid close attention to our ad relevance, especially the engagement rate rankings, and tried to optimize them. The reason is that high relevance is often correlated with high performance.

At first, all of our ads didn’t perform this well. Only after we improved the engagement rate rankings by changing the ad thumbnails to more attractive ones, the ads performed much better. Naturally, the other two metrics increased as well.

You can look at the ad relevance diagnostics chart to diagnose your ads and improve them accordingly.

However, note that ad relevance is not always the reason for high performance. Sometimes high performing ads have low ad relevance diagnostics rankings, and that’s totally fine.

Results from Facebook Lead Ads

After running the ads for a few weeks, we broke down the results and checked if our hypotheses were right.

Are 3d animated ads good?

Our results with the 3d animated ad weren’t too great. The average cost per result was $0.72. In fact, it was heavily outperformed by all other ads on our list (the closest one was Ad 4, with a $0.27 Cost Per Lead).

Although the conversion rate ranking was still above average, the quality ranking and engagement rate ranking were below average despite we had tried changing different thumbnails for the ad.

One of the reasons for the situation is that there wasn’t any good cut in the video that could make an eye-catching thumbnail. Furthermore, the setting was at night, and it might not be as appealing and engaging as a brighter one. Finally, it seemed that Facebook compressed the video, making it not as crispy as the original one (although other videos were also compressed, the 3d animated one seemed to be the most noticeable downgraded video).

For good measure, an article from AdEspresso shows that they generate a new lead at $0.91. The data also shows the relationship between the number of questions asked (email, name, phone, etc.) and Facebook lead ad performance if you’re interested.

We also found an article from OverThinkGroup that says to achieve $0.24 per lead.

Overall, we think the $0.72 result generated by the 3d animated ad was OK, not too great but not too low or too high neither.

How important are ad thumbnails?

Ad thumbnails play a significant role in ad performance.

According to AdEspresso, the thumbnail image can have a 2X difference on the CPA.

Our experiment shows a similar result. For example, with Ad 2, we tried switching 2 different thumbnails.

Below is the first thumbnail.

The average cost per lead for the first thumbnail was $0.19.

And below is the second thumbnail.

The average cost per lead for the second thumbnail was $0.14, resulting in a decrease of nearly 30% from the first one.

It seems that providing a thumbnail with a little bit of context about the ad makes it perform a little better.

We made a mistake not creating two separate ads but changing the thumbnail of the same ad. However, the result should be the same either way.

How important are ad playtime and initial impressions?

Ad playtime is the biggest factor that affects ad performance.

Looking at the results, people who watch an ad for a longer time are much more likely to click on the ad link. For example, Ad 2 had an average playtime of 4 seconds and a CTR (Click-Through-Rate) of 3.61%. On the contrary, People only watched Ad 4 for an average of 1 second, causing a 77% (to 0.83%) drop for CTR.

We also intentionally made the same video content for Ad 2 and Ad 3 except for the first few seconds to actually see the impact of initial impressions.

At the first look, it seemed that the two ads had the same Cost Per Result at $0.16. However, Ad 2 had way better CTR and CPC. If we ran the ad for a little longer, we believe that Ad 2 would definitely outperform Ad 3. To prove this, below are the results from the last few days before we turned off the ad campaign.

As you can see, Ad 2 started to outperform Ad 1 in Cost Per Result.

In conclusion, it’s crucial to create good initial impressions for Facebook ads (especially for the first 3 seconds).

Do video creatives perform better than image creatives?

According to research from DataBox, 60% of marketers said videos tend to drive more engagement than images.

However, our experiment showed a different result.

Our image ad (Ad 5) generated a new lead at $0.12, which outperformed all of our ads in terms of Cost Per Lead.

Additionally, It had a CTR of 2.21% and a CPC of $0.04, making it the second most engaging ad (behind Ad 2) compared to all others.

We think that it really comes down to first impressions. As long as your ad can quickly grab people’s attention, it will convert well no matter videos or images.

In the article from DataBox, it also mentions that “the line between image and video-based Facebook ads can get pretty blurry” and “between video vs. image ads, it definitely depends on the product/service you are promoting.”

Therefore, the only way to really know which one is better for your use is to test them yourself.

How about email delivery performance?

We sent 2 different emails to the email list generated from Facebook, and below are the results.

The first email was sent to 310 recipients with a 13.9% open rate and a 5.2% click rate.

We sent the second one to 648 recipients with an open rate of 10.8% and a click rate of 4.5%. There was a difference between the number of receivers because we sent this email one week later after we had collected more leads from Facebook.

According to CampaignMonitor, The average email open rate should be between 15-25%, and the average click-through rate should be about 2.5%.

Compared to the data from CampaignMonitor, our email open rate seems to be out of the recommended range. However, the click rate is almost double the average click-through rate across all industries.

Overall, for a list generated from Facebook Lead Ads, which anyone can fill whatever in, the lead quality is pretty decent.

Currently, we have nothing to sell to our list. However, as soon as we find or create a good fit, we will try promoting it and update the results. Hence, stay tuned with us!

Things we could have improved

There are many things we could have changed and done better to improve our results.

Use a better lead magnet

The article we promoted was fine. However, it would be much better if we used a more unique and useful lead magnet like 10 dropshipping products that guarantee to make sales in 2020 or something like that. That’s just a theory, though.

After all, it all comes down to trial and error. Don’t be afraid to test everything for a few days and see how things turn out.

Write a better ad copy

If you notice, all of our ads didn’t have above-average quality rankings. Some even were below-average.

According to Facebook’s Advertising Attributes, some factors that contribute to low-quality ads are withholding information like “your life will be better if you do this every day,” or using sensationalized language or engagement bait like “10 MIND-BLOWING facts about rich people that no one told you.”

Our ad copy didn’t fall deep into those categories. However, we might be able to improve our quality rankings if we write a longer ad copy explaining why people should get the content rather than just simply putting the blog title with some emojis and a call to action.

Confirm email addresses

A confirmation email is an email that a person receives after filling your lead form.

People who confirm interest are much more likely to open your emails in the future, which improves your delivery performance.

Another advantage of email confirmation is that it protects against fake subscribers, spammers, or bots that add no value to your email list.

Regarding our Facebook Lead Ad campaign, we didn’t set up a responder to automatically send confirmation emails to subscribers. It basically means that we didn’t do anything to filter out unengaged or fake recipients.

If we could have done that, we might be able to improve our email delivery performance significantly.

Use personalized subject lines

According to CampaignMonitor, emails with personalized subject lines are 26% more likely to be opened.

We collected subscribers’ full names but haven’t utilized them yet. Again, doing this might improve our delivery performance.

Conclusion

If there is one thing we need to say about Facebook Lead Ads, we think it’s being underutilized by many marketers.

With the ability to generate decent-quality leads at a very low price, we think you should give Facebook Lead Ads a try. The results might blow your mind away.

However, it’s not always easy to pick one. Countless great domain names have been taken, and you’re left with dull ones.

Therefore, in this blog post, we provide you with various tips to help you come up with a name for your blog within minutes.

Why do you have to pick a good name for your blog?

There are many advantages of having a good name for your blog, and the most obvious one is that it adds a layer of credibility to your blog.

By owning a great name, you establish a high level of authority and professionalism for people who visit your blog.

For example, look at these two blog names “foodblog123” and “foodblog.” Which one do you think it’s more professional and trustworthy? For us, it’s the second one.

Another benefit of having a great name is that it can immediately communicate your blog’s value to your visitors even if they don’t know anything about it beforehand.

Suppose you don’t know what Good Financial Cents is about, you can still guess that it’s a blog about managing finances.

How to choose a perfect blog name

Below are various tips that can help you choose a perfect name for your blog.

1. Make sure the domain name is available

Your blog name should be the same as your domain name (The name that appears in the address bar of your web browser). So, make sure it’s available.

You can use the Domain Name Search Tool to check for the availability of a domain name.

2. Resonate with your niche

Your blog name is the very first thing that many people will look at. Therefore, it would be best to pick a blog name related to what you will be writing about. Your visitors look at it and expect that they land on the right site with the right content.

Example: PinchOfYum is a food blog.

3. Including a keyword in your blog name is a good idea, but not required

There was a time that many people created websites with exact match domains to easily rank high in search results. This is because an exact domain name contains one or many keywords that match a search query. Google used to look at it as one of the significant factors in ranking a website in search results.

However, Google updated its algorithm a long time ago, and that time has passed. According to John Mueller’s statement from Google, a keyword in a domain name nowadays would not make a site rank better for that keyword.

So, why should you consider including a keyword in your blog name?

Even though having a keyword in the domain name doesn’t directly have SEO (Search Engine Optimization) benefits, it does play a role in the anchor text of the reference links to a website.

For example, when people link to the website “fitness.com,” the anchor text usually contains the keyword “fitness.” This tells search engines what the site is about and gradually rank it for that keyword.

In that regard, keywords in domain names can provide some sorts of SEO advantages.

Therefore, although it’s not required and doesn’t really have an obvious benefit to include a keyword in your blog name, it might still be a good idea to have one. However, don’t force it if you don’t want to.

Example: IAmAFoodBlog is the first search result for the query “food blog.”

4. Go with the extension “.com” if possible

According to Statista, the most popular domain name extension on the entire internet is “.com.”

Since “.com” is the most recognizable domain extension, go for it if you can. It will make your blog look more trustworthy.

If the “.com” version of your blog name has been taken, “.net” or “.org” are good alternatives. They are not as familiar, though.

Although “.ru” is the second most popular extensions, it’s Russia’s official domain and only ideal for Russian businesses. So, avoid using it.

5. Choose a short and memorable blog name

The name of your blog should be short and easy to remember. If your readers want to find your blog again, they can do it with ease.

So, how short should it be?

The answer is your blog name shouldn’t be longer than 15 characters. The reason is that many social networking sites like Twitter limit your username to a maximum of 15 characters. If you want to have the same name across platforms, pick a short one.

We didn’t pay attention to this at first and ended up naming our blog “TheCleverBusiness,” which contains 17 characters.

Don’t be like us!

Example: Amazon has 6 characters.

6. Avoid hyphens

Hyphen “-” is the only special character that you can put in your blog domain name.

However, the symbol not only adds an extra layer of complexity for people to enter your domain name, but it also makes your blog look less professional.

Therefore, we recommend avoiding hyphens at all costs.

7. Avoid numerical digits

For a similar reason, avoid using numerical digits in your blog name.

However, it’s fine to use numbers in text form like “one,” “two,” etc.

8. Use the correct spells of words

Misspelled words make your blog name harder to remember. What’s worse is that it can direct people to the wrong site.

For example, many people mistype gogle.com instead of google.com. Google decided to buy the gogle.com domain and redirect it to the main one to avoid users from landing on the wrong site. Although this is not a precise example of using wrong spells of words, you get the point.

9. Your personal name is fine

Before going into this, we have to admit that we don’t like the idea of using a personal name for a blog. It doesn’t give people any clue about what the blog’s content is. In addition, it’s harder to remember than a general name like PinchOfYum or IAmAFoodBlog.

However, a personal blog name does give you some significant advantages.

Firstly, you can establish yourself as a brand. Really, who doesn’t want the world to know their name? Using a personal blog name helps people remember who you are and what you’re good at.

Secondly, it gives your blog strong credibility. People will be more likely to look at your blog as a destination to learn new things from an expert or a friend rather than a soulless company trying to make money from them.

Therefore, using a personal name for your blog is absolutely fine.

Example: NomadicMatt is a popular travel blog owned by Nomadic Matt.

10. A niche name is good, but think it twice

A niche name creates a good impression on your visitors since it immediately tells them what your blog is about.

However, think twice before doing it. The reason is that as your blog grows and you want to write about another topic that isn’t directly related to your current one, people will find it weird. For example, it’s not suitable for a blog named “YummyFood” to have content about investing and savings.

Therefore, before using a niche name for your blog, ask yourself a question: will my blog extend to another topic in the future?

Example: Investopedia is a blog about investing.

11. Auto-generate a blog name

If you get stuck, try using a domain name generator tool like the one below. Just insert one or two keywords that relate to your niche into the blank field and let the tool suggest a wide variety of name ideas.

You might find some interesting names for your blog.

To quickly find related keywords to your niche, use RelatedWords.

12. Synonymize it!

A technique to come up with an interesting blog name is to use synonyms for your keywords. You can use Thesaurus or Merriam-Webster to do this.

For example, if you love the name “travelblog.com,” but it has been taken, try a synonym for the word “travel” or “blog” is a good way to go. It could be something like “trekkingblog.com” or “traveljournal.com.”

13. Rhyme it!

Rhyming is another technique to create an easy-to-remember and fun name for your blog.

Take the word “money” as an example and put it into a tool like RhymeZone. You can get back some cool ideas like “Money Honey” or “Money Buddy.”

14. Try acronyms

Many big companies abbreviate their full name, so it’s easier for people to remember. We also often call ourselves TCB instead of The Clever Business.

Example: NASA stands for The National Aeronautics and Space Administration.

15. Combine multiple words

Mixing words together can yield back some creative and catchy results.

Example: Facebook is a compound of the 2 words face and book.

16. Cut out parts of words

Another clever method to find ideas for your blog name is cutting out parts of words.

Take Lego as an example. The name ‘LEGO’ is created from the two Danish words “leg godt,” meaning “play well.”

Another creative example comes from Passio Coffee. The name is created by cutting the “n” character from the word “passion,” and its motto is “passion without end (n).”

17. Add a prefix or suffix

Prefixes like “a,” “the,” or “best,” and suffixes like “-ify,” “-er,” or “-ize” can create a unique name for your blog and make the name flow better when reading out loud.

Example: Spotify and Shopify are two big companies that use the suffix “-ify” in their name.

18. Everything is possible

Sometimes, it’s best to go all out and come up with a name that you love, even if it has nothing to do with your niche.

There are countless successful companies with names that are completely irrelevant to their expertise like Apple, Google, Amazon, etc.

19. Don’t worry about your blog name too much!

Your blog’s content is always the primary factor that defines your blog.

It’s true that your blog name is important. However, people don’t really care about the name of your blog that much. The most important thing for them is what they can learn from your blog.

So, don’t get too hung up on it.

Conclusion

It’s not always easy to come up with a perfect name for your blog.

There are many factors that you might have to look into before deciding on your blog name. Additionally, countless interesting and catchy domain names have been taken.

Hopefully, with various methods and techniques we have provided you in this post, you can come up with a blog name that you will never regret.

Useful Resources

• How to come up with infinite blog post ideas in minutes: If you get stuck coming up with new and popular blog post ideas consistently for your blog, check out our guide.
• Best blogging platforms to make money: Looking for the best blogging platform to start a blog and make money? Have a look at our detailed review.
• The definitive guide to making money blogging: Having a great blog with a perfect name and amazing content but don’t know how to monetize it effectively? We’ve got you covered!

Many beginners struggle to find the next best things to write about, whereas veteran bloggers seem to have unlimited ideas in their minds.

How do they do that?

Below, we provide you with numerous methods to help anyone come up with infinite viral blog post ideas in a matter of minutes. Hopefully, after reading this, you don’t have to waste countless hours wondering what to write about ever again.

1. Google Autofill

Google Autofill is a feature of Google Search Engine that helps users quickly perform a search query. Since the autofill results come from the most common questions people ask for, you can use it as a keyword research tool to find popular blog post ideas.

Looking at the autofill results for the term “food recipes” above, some blog post ideas for a food blog can be “10 best food recipes for dinner” or “10 food recipes with chicken.”

A little technique you can use to come up with more blog post ideas is playing with the alphabet. For example, adding a letter “c” at the end of “food recipes” can yield back some interesting results like “food recipes crock pot” or “food recipes chicken wings.”

More often than not, you would like to check the popularity of these search terms. To do that, you can install a keyword research Chrome extension like Keyword Surfer. It allows you to see the estimated monthly search volumes of search terms directly in Google search results.

It’s important to note that because the tool shows you the search volumes of exact match search queries for search terms like “food recipes with chicken,” and it’s rare for a user to perform a search query like that, you should check the data on the right side of your search result page to see how popular a topic idea truly is.

2. QuestionDB

A powerful alternative for Google AutoFill is QuestionDB. You can enter a broad term on the platform to find many related keywords and topics that contains it.

Similarly, you can use these results as your blog post ideas.

3. Google Trends

Google Trends is an official Google tool that shows you the graph trends of search terms.

Besides helping you analyze how a term is performing, the tool shows you popular related search topics and search queries to that term. For example, “kimchi recipe” and “hummingbird feeder food recipe” are some trendy terms related to “food recipe.”

4. Pinterest Suggestions

Pinterest is an online visual social network, allowing users to share images on almost any given topic.

With over 335 million monthly active users and more than 200 billion images, Pinterest is a perfect destination to find ideas for your blog.

Quite similar to Google, Pinterest offers a powerful search engine that helps users quickly find anything on the platform. As a blogger, you can use it to your advantage to discover what is trending and write blog posts around it.

For example, when typing the word “food” into Pinterest’s search bar and hit enter, you can see a bunch of suggestions related to your keyword at the top of the page.

Some popular keywords that come with the word “food” at the time of writing this post are “Recipes,” “Party,” “Cravings,” “Photography,” “Finger,” etc.

Extending on these keywords, you can write blog posts about “10 best breakfast recipes” or “15 food photography tips.”

You can also click on each of the keyword suggestions and look at other people’s images to have a general idea of what you should be writing about.

Going deeper into a keyword is a good idea to figure out more specific and less competitive terms. For instance, clicking on the word “Photography” shows you another whole range of suggestions, such as “Styling,” “Indian,” “Dark,” “Tips,” “Aesthetic,” etc.

It’s important to note that the popularity of keyword suggestions on Pinterest decreases from left to right. Therefore, if you think that a keyword is too competitive, try using a suggested term on the far right side like “Food photography lighting” or “minimalist food photography.”

Pinterest also offers a nice little research tool that shows you the estimated monthly search volume of a keyword. To use this tool, you have to switch your personal Pinterest account to a business one in the “Account Settings” section of your Pinterest settings.

Then, click on “Ads” and “Create Ad.”

Quickly create an ad campaign and hit “Continue.” Don’t worry because you don’t have to run the ad.

Scrolling down a little bit, and you will see a keyword research tool. Now, type in a keyword to check for its monthly searches. Although Pinterest doesn’t show the exact number, you can use it to see how popular a keyword is.

5. Quora

Quora is an online community where people ask and answer questions with over 300 million monthly active users. With so many members on the platform, coupled with thousands of topics and billions of questions, you should definitely check out Quora to see what problems people are facing the most.

For example, by entering the word “food” into Quora’s search field, you can get back some popular results like “What is the healthiest food we can eat?” or “What is the best food for the brain?”

You can write content around those questions. Better yet, clicking on a question helps you see all its answers, so you get some interesting ideas for your own blog posts.

6. Reddit

Reddit is one of the biggest online community networks where people find, share, and discuss almost anything.

Like Quora, you can search for a specific topic and see what people are talking about.

Take “fitness” as an example. After entering the keyword into Reddit’s search field, click on a related community to see its content.

You can set the filter at the top of the community page to “Top” and “All Time” to discover what people are interested in the most. Otherwise, set it to “Hot” to figure out what is trending.

Some interesting blog post ideas are “How to do pull-ups properly” and “Facts about smoking.”

7. AnswerThePublic

If you want to quickly find out what people are asking for, you should take a look at AnswerThePublic. It shows you all of the related questions to a specific topic in a visualization way.

Again, use them as content ideas for your blog.

8. Blog Post Ideas Generator Tools

Some blog post idea generator tools like TCB Ideas Generator or Portent Ideas Generator let you quickly generate hundreds of ideas for your blog.

The results are sometimes nonsensical. So, consider tweaking them to suit your needs.

9. Analyze your competitors

One of the fastest and most effective ways to come up with viral blog post ideas is to check your competitors and replicate their success. There are many tools that help you do it easily, like UberSuggest, SEMrush, or Ahrefs.

For example, enter your competitor’s domain into UberSuggest’s search field. Here, we type “pinchofyum.com.”

The tool gives you useful insights into the domain you have entered, such as organic keywords and organic monthly traffic.

Scrolling down to the “Top SEO pages” section, you get to see the domain’s most popular pages like “15 Minute Lo Mein Recipe” or “Spicy Shrimp Tacos With Garlic Cilantro Lime Slaw.”

The “SEO keywords” section gives you the top keywords that the domain ranks for, such as “lo mein” or “peanut butter.”

Although it might be hard to compete with your competitors on these topics and keywords since search engines already rank their content, it’s still worth a try.

10. Keyword Ideas Explorer

A powerful way to find viral but less competitive content ideas for your blog is to use keyword ideas explorer offered by many tools mentioned above.

Again, we will demonstrate this method with UberSuggest. You can also use a more versatile tool like SEMrush or Ahrefs.

In the “Keyword Ideas” tab, enter a keyword to find relevant suggestions.

With “food recipe,” you get back some popular terms like “angel food cake recipe” and “food recipes Mexican.” The tool also provides you with insightful information, including monthly search volume (VOL), Cost Per Click (CPC), Paid Difficulty (PD), and SEO Difficulty (SD).

It would be best to choose ideas with high search volume but low SEO difficulty. In that way, your content is easier to be ranked on the first page by search engines. If you want to run advertising for a specific term, choose one with low paid difficulty. You can also rely on the Cost Per Click metric to determine the value of an idea: the higher CPC, the more people are willing to purchase something or take a specific action.

You can also open up UberSuggest’s filters to quickly sort out ideas that suit your needs. For example, we enter “30” as the max value for SEO Difficulty and “1000” as the min value for Search Volume to filter out terms that have low competition but still have high search volume.

The results contain “food recipe for dogs,” “food recipe for baby,” and “food recipe Filipino.”

You should also check out the “Related,” “Questions,” “Prepositions,” and “Comparisons” tabs to get more blog post ideas.

11. Content Ideas Explorer

Using content ideas explorer is another method to find hidden viral blog posts.

Typing “food recipe” into UberSuggest’s content ideas explorer tab, you will find many viral articles that don’t have a lot of search traffic but have tons of social traffic from Facebook and Pinterest. For instance, “Best Ever Strawberry Jello Angel Food Cake Dessert Recipe” has over 530 Facebook shares and 257,004 Pinterest shares.

12. Follow The Trend

It’s a good idea to write blog posts around holidays and observances like New Year’s Eve, Christmas, Halloween, or Valentine. These kinds of content have a huge potential to go viral since people are more active in these special events and more likely to read and share content about them.

For example, if you have a food blog, you could write content about “10 Halloween appetizer ideas” or “10 tips to decorate your Halloween food.”

You can also use Pinterest or Google to get some interesting blog post ideas.

Conclusion

Not knowing what to write about is one of the scariest things when starting a blog. Even if you are familiar with your niche, it’s not always easy to come up with new and popular ideas.

Understanding the problem, we have provided you with many methods like using Google Autofill, Pinterest, Reddit, or Keyword Tools to help you overcome the fear.

Hopefully, after going through this blog post, you never run out of content ideas ever again.

Useful Resources

• The definitive guide to making money blogging: Writing blog posts is one thing, making money from it is another thing. If you have a great blog but struggle to monetize it effectively, take a look at our guide.

There are so many blogging platforms out there with their own strengths and weaknesses. Additionally, the monetization potential of one can be vastly different from another.

Therefore, in this guide, we’ll honestly review the most powerful blogging platforms on the internet and help you choose the best one to start a money-making blog successfully.

In a rush? Jump straight to our final verdict.

What to look for when choosing the best money-making blogging platforms

It’s imperative to know all the key factors of a money-making blogging platform, so you can better decide which one is right for your business.

Easy to set up

An easy-to-set-up blogging platform is the first factor you need to consider. Even if you are a tech-savvy individual, creating and installing all the necessary features for a blog all by yourself can be exhausting.

Additionally, having to do all the maintenance and upgrade work can distract you from your main purpose of starting a blog in the first place, which is to make money.

Therefore, It’s wise to choose a user-friendly blogging platform to help you quickly set up a blog and extend on it later if you wish to.

Easy to customize

A flexible blogging platform helps you easily and quickly adapt to the new trend.

For example, you might want to change your blog’s look and feel for a holiday to better fit in with the atmosphere. Then, after the holiday, you want to change the design to the old one. Achieving that is a piece of cake with a flexible blogging platform.

Easy to scale

You want to choose a blogging platform that can scale effortlessly with the growth of your blog. If, for some reason, a platform breaks down when handling too many people at once, you risk losing your new visitors as well as your current ones.

Easy to monetize

There are many elements involving making money blogging, including creating content, building email leads, growing traffic, setting up monetization models, and tracking results. Without a powerful blogging platform, it’s hard for you to do all of that effectively.

Easy to protect

Spamming, hacking, and DDoS are just some of the problems that bloggers have to deal with on a daily basis. If your blogging platform cannot help you handle these troubles, you risk losing all of your hard work.

18 best blogging platforms to make money

Now, let’s review the best blogging platforms to make money and why you should choose them.

1. Self-hosted WordPress

WordPress is a free content management system (CMS) that helps make the process of creating a website easier. It powers more than 38% of the websites and blogs on the entire internet.

Although being completely free, to make a WordPress blog come online, you still need to find a hosting service to run it on. This is why the term “self-hosted WordPress” is coined.

Key features

WordPress is a full-fledged software that allows you to do just about anything. You can freely customize the look and feel of your blog or even change the internal core of it as you wish.

Additionally, WordPress has great SEO (Search Engine Optimization), responsive design, high performance, and high security out of the box.

Ease of use

Generally speaking, self-hosted WordPress is relatively beginner-friendly.

Although it can get a little bit technical if you really want to customize every little part of your blog, WordPress still provides the ability to change your blog’s design or extend its functionality in just a few steps. This is achieved with the help of themes and plugins.

A theme is a ready-made template or design that can quickly change your blog’s look and feel but still keep the content like blog posts intact.

A plugin is a ready-made tool that you can install to extend WordPress functionality, ranging from analytics, managing emails, creating forums to building an online store within your blog.

With the help of those features, WordPress is suitable for both technical and non-technical users.

Custom domain name

It’s easy to have a custom domain name for your self-hosted blog since every WordPress hosting service allows you to create and connect one with just a few clicks.

Monetization potential

Almost every monetization model, such as displaying ads, managing affiliate links, or member subscriptions, can be done effortlessly with the help of various WordPress plugins or custom codes. Therefore, you can be sure that your self-hosted blog is always ready to make money.

Pricing

Like we have mentioned, WordPress CMS is completely free. However, you need to purchase a web hosting service to get your blog online. We recommend BlueHost as it’s one of the most powerful and affordable hosting services, which costs 3.95$/month.

2. WordPress.com

Many people get confused between WordPress and WordPress.com, and it’s for a good reason.

The term “WordPress” is a registered trademark name of the WordPress Foundation founded by Matt Mullenweg, who founded (and co-founded) both WordPress CMS and WordPress.com. WordPress.com’s purpose is to help you build a website like WordPress CMS, along with the same founder and same trademark, the confusion arose.

So, what is the difference between WordPress and WordPress.com?

Although WordPress.com runs on the core of WordPress CMS, it has been modified and customized to become more friendly to use. Using WordPress.com, you don’t need to worry too much about finding a hosting service, maintaining your server, or backing up your data. All of those things are taken care of by WordPress.com pretty well.

Key features

WordPress.com is essentially a WordPress CMS blogging platform, so there is nothing else much to say about it.

However, it’s important to know that since the platform is tailored to make things more beginner-friendly, some plugins cannot be installed for compatibility reasons.

Ease of use

Although it’s definitely easier to use WordPress.com than self-hosted WordPress, there might still be some parts that require a little bit of work to suit your needs.

Custom domain name

WordPress.com provides an out-of-the-box hosting solution with a custom domain name.

Monetization potential

Similar to self-hosted WordPress, you can easily monetize your blog to make money with the help of various ready-made tools and plugins.

Pricing

You can use WordPress.com for completely free with limited features.

To use your own domain name, you have to subscribe to the Personal plan, which costs $4/month.

Only when upgrading to the $25/month Business plan, you will be able to have access to advanced themes and install plugins.

3. Wix

If you love an intuitive blog building experience, Wix is your go-to choice. It’s a drag-and-drop website builder that is simple to use and super beginner-friendly. On top of that, Wix is famous for its ADI, the Artificial Design Intelligence that helps you automate the website building process just by answering a few questions.

With Wix, you can truly create your own stunning blog within minutes without any bit of technical coding.

Key features

Wix provides dozens of ready-made templates and free stock images to help you quickly get started and design on.

If you want to extend Wix’s functionality, you can install hundreds of third-party apps offered on the platform.

Ease of use

Wix is one of the most beginner-friendly platforms to get started blogging and make money.

However, compared to WordPress, Wix might lack some out-of-the-box advanced blogging features as a trade-off for the ease of use. You can install third-party apps to make up for this drawback though.

Custom domain name

Wix allows you to connect a custom domain name with a paid plan.

Monetization potential

You can monetize your Wix blog with ease like WordPress.

Pricing

Wix offers a free plan so you can have a taste of how powerful it is. Starting from $4.50/month and going up to $24.50/month, you have access to more storage, more bandwidth, advanced apps, and priority support.

4. Constant Contact Web Builder

Constant Contact Web Builder is another platform that uses ADI to make the process of creating a website hassle-free. Although not as flexible as Wix, the platform is extremely suitable for people who want to start a professional blog with minimal fuss.

Key features

The main strength of the platform lies in its powerful eCommerce system and email marketing service. You can easily integrate a full-fledged online store into your website, manage your email list, and analyze many key statistics on the fly.

Regarding blogging, Constant Contact only offers basic functionalities. If you really want to make your blog posts visually appealing and stand out, WordPress or Wix might be a better option.

Ease of use

Constant Contact Web Builder is super beginner-friendly. You will never be overwhelmed by many options or features.

Custom domain name

The platform allows you to connect a custom domain name with a paid plan.

Monetization potential

If you intend to make money by opening an online store and using your blog content to promote your products, you should definitely try out Constant Contact. Other than that, the platform doesn’t really have an option to help you display ads or manage affiliate links.

Pricing

In terms of pricing, Constant Contact is really generous. You can use many of its features for totally free with no credit card required.

Subscribing to the $10/month plan lets you connect your own custom domain name and access to advanced Ecommerce and Marketing features.

5. Ghost

Ghost is a purely blogging platform geared towards more technical individuals. It offers a simple, clean, and modern blogging interface that makes the writing process fun and fast.

Key features

The platform is specially designed for blogging and made for blogging. It means that you have every tool you need to create a stunning, rich media blog posts and build a strong community around your blog right from the get-go.

Ease of use

Installing third-party apps into a Ghost blog requires a little bit of work. However, following Ghost’s step-by-step tutorials, you won’t have any trouble in the process what-so-ever.

Custom domain name

You can connect your own custom domain name either through a third-party hosting service or Ghost’s hosting service.

Monetization potential

Because Ghost’s sole purpose is blogging, you won’t be able to create something like a full-fledged online store. Apart from that, the platform allows you to make money by almost every other monetization models, such as displaying ads or member subscriptions.

Pricing

Ghost is a completely free blogging CMS. However, like self-hosted WordPress, you need a hosting service to bring your blog online.

There are 2 options for this. The first one is to use Ghost’s official hosting service, which starts at $29/month. It saves you a lot of time choosing, installing, and managing a hosting server yourself.

The second option is to host Ghost on a third-party hosting service. BlueHost is our recommendation.

6. Squarespace

Squarespace is another popular drag-and-drop blogging platform that packs with many robust built-in tools and award-winning templates. It’s suitable for people who want to have an optimized and elegant blog.

Key features

Besides many advanced Sparespace’s built-in tools like website analytics, eCommerce system, email marketing, or SEO tools, you can install a limited number of extensions to extend your blog’s functionality.

Ease of use

Squarespace is straightforward and easy to use. However, since the platform focuses on developing its in-house tools, it might lack some features that many other platforms have already offered with their third-party plugins. In this case, you might need to do some technical stuff to customize Squarespace further.

Custom domain name

Connecting your own custom domain name to the platform is possible by subscribing to one of its paid plans.

Monetization potential

You can monetize your blog by building an eCommerce store.

Regarding other monetization models, they require you to do a little bit of coding to have them up and running on your blog.

Pricing

Squarespace starts at $12/month. Going up each plan lets you access to more advanced features and added benefits.

7. Blogger

Blogger is a blogging platform owned by Google. It’s a simple, free blogging solution for hobbyists who want to start a blog and make money on the fly.

Key features

The platform offers limited options for customization since it’s geared towards beginners and hobbyists. However, it syncs effortlessly with other Google products like Google Drive or Google Photos.

Ease of use

Blogger is one of the easiest platforms to start a blog on. You can literally create your online presence with it in a matter of minutes.

Custom domain name

You can buy a custom domain name through a third-party provider or Google domains and connect it to your blog.

Monetization potential

Since the platform is owned by Google, you can start displaying Google ads on your blog at any time to make money.

To implement other advanced monetization models like member subscriptions, you might need to do some coding.

Pricing

Unless you want to buy a custom domain name for your blog, Blogger is totally free.

8. Medium

Medium is a place for hobbyists, bloggers, writers, or even experts from big companies to share their opinions and ideas to a strong and healthy community.

Key features

With over 100 million monthly active readers and thousands of articles published each day, Medium is an ideal destination to both learn new things and start a blog.

However, since Medium is more of a publishing platform, you don’t really have options to customize your blog besides your name or your cover image.

Ease of use

It requires no setup what-so-ever to start a blog on Medium. You just have to create an account and start writing.

Custom domain name

You cannot connect your own domain name.

Monetization potential

There are a limited number of options to make money from a Medium blog, such as Medium partner program or affiliate marketing.

You can visit 5 Ways To Monetize Medium As a Writer to learn more.

Pricing

Medium is completely free.

9. Weebly

Similar to Constant Contact Website Builder and Squarespace, Weebly aims at providing the necessary tools for businesses to build a blog, along with managing an online store. It’s also relatively similar to Wix in terms of ease of use, freedom, customization, and extensibility.

Key features

Weebly offers beautiful and polished themes that are fully customizable through a drag-and-drop site builder. The process of creating an online is also made simple with the help of many advanced tools.

Another strength of the platform is its app center, which offers a wide variety of third-party tools that you can integrate into your blog.

Ease of use

The platform is beginner-friendly and easy to use.

Custom domain name

You can connect your custom domain name like other popular blogging platforms.

Monetization potential

You can easily monetize your blog through Weebly in-house tools or third-party apps.

Pricing

Weebly is free to use with limited features and limited storage. Starting from $5/month, you can connect your custom domain name. However, if you want to enjoy the power of Weebly, the $12/month plan is a better choice.

10. Write.as

Write.as is a minimalist blogging platform that is ideal for writers who want a distraction-free writing experience.

Key features

Write.as offers a limited number of themes to choose from. You can also use custom CSS and Javascript to personalize your blog further.

Ease of use

It requires little to no setup to start a Write.as blog. However, you need to learn Markdown to format your posts.

Custom domain name

You can connect your custom domain name by subscribing to a paid plan.

Monetization potential

Besides doing affiliate marketing, the platform doesn’t provide you with an easy setup for other money-making models.

Pricing

Write.as offers 3 pricing plans.

The Free plan gives you access to basic features like publishing unlimited posts or RSS feed.

The key difference between the $6/month Pro plan and $35/month Team plan is how many team members your blog can have and the ability to manage them.

11. Tumblr

Tumblr is a combination of blogging and social media – a platform that lets hobbyists share eye-catching photos, videos, blog posts, and follow your favorite Tumblr sites.

Key features

Tumblr offers quite a few design options, including title, description, background color, font, buttons, header, and footer. You can also select from hundreds of beautiful themes to quickly change the look and feel of your blog.

Ease of use

It’s relatively easy to get started with Tumblr. However, to have complete control over your blog, you might need to do some coding stuff.

Custom domain name

It is possible to associate a custom domain name to your Tumblr blog.

Monetization potential

You can display ads or use affiliate links on your blog to make money.

Pricing

Like Blogger, Tumblr is completely free to use unless you want to have your own custom domain name.

12. Site123

Site123 is a simple and clean blogging platform, offering a 24/7 live chat feature that will answer any questions you have in mind.

Key features

Compared to other platforms, Site123 lacks many advanced features that can truly make your blog stand out.

However, if you are just getting started, the platform should be able to fill your needs and set you in a good position in the blogging competition.

Ease of use

With a clean interface and the help of the live chat feature, the platform is perfect for beginners.

Custom domain name

Connecting a custom domain name is possible with a paid plan.

Monetization potential

Built-in tools and third-party apps can help you set up various money-making methods for your blog pretty effortlessly.

Pricing

There are only 2 pricing plans. The Free one gives you 500MB storage and 10GB bandwidth. You have a free domain, more storage, bandwidth, and access to eCommerce features by upgrading to the $7.80/month Premium plan.

13. Strikingly

As the name suggests, Strikingly helps you build a striking blog in minutes. The platform is suitable for small businesses and entrepreneurs looking for a simple solution to showcase their work.

Key features

Strikingly offers various professional-looking templates to choose from. It also has built-in eCommerce, social feed, and analytics systems.

Additionally, the platform has an active app marketplace to help you extend the functionality of your blog. However, the lack of a wide variety of applications is one of the Strikingly’s weaknesses.

Ease of use

Strikingly editor is clean, well-organized, and easy to get familiar.

Custom domain name

With a paid plan, you can connect a custom domain name.

Monetization potential

Displaying ads, member subscriptions, or selling products are all well-supported by Strikingly.

Pricing

The Free plan is extremely limited, with the ability to add only 1 product to your site. It’s best to subscribe to the $20/month to access all of the features Strikingly has to offer.

14. Hubpages

Hubpages establish itself as a “network of sites where people write about their passions.” It is a user-generated-content, revenue-sharing blogging platform, which basically allows you to publish articles in any given topic and share revenue through ads or affiliate links displayed on the website.

Key features

Hubpages has a monthly impression of over 24.7 million, so you can be sure to earn some cash writing blog on the website (not much, though).

Since you are tied to the Hubpages system, you have little to no control over your blog’s appearance.

Ease of use

Once you create an account, and all that’s left is writing.

Custom domain name

Using a custom domain name is not supported by Hubpages.

Monetization potential

Displaying ads and adding affiliate links are two common ways to make money through a Hubpages blog.

Pricing

It’s completely free to start a blog on Hubpages.

15. Joomla

One of the best alternative CMSs to WordPress is Joomla, a flexible, search-engine-friendly, and fully extensible blogging system that has powered over 2 million websites.

Key features

Joomla offers more than 10 thousand extensions and templates to help you get started fast. Furthermore, the platform supports over 76 languages.

Compared to WordPress, Joomla is more well-suited for large and complex blogs and websites whose owners seek a reliable, flexible, and secure system.

Ease of use

Joomla requires you a fair bit of time to learn and install the CMS on a hosting service. It is also a bit harder to navigate than WordPress.

Custom domain name

Like WordPress, Joomla serves as an underlying system for your blog, so it has nothing to do with custom domain names. It means that you can freely connect one with whichever hosting service that supports Joomla.

Monetization potential

You can monetize your Joomla blog with any monetization models to make money.

Pricing

Joomla CMS is free. However, you need to host it on a web hosting service like BlueHost.

16. Drupal

Another well-known free CMS is Drupal that provides reliable performance, excellent security, and great flexibility.

Key features

The platform is not only suitable for individual developers, marketers, and entrepreneurs, but also large agencies and organizations because of its extensibility, flexibility, and automatic scalability.

The Drupal community is one of the largest open source communities globally, with more than 1 million developers, designers, editors, and sponsors.

Ease of use

Drupal takes a fair bit of time to learn and familiarize yourself with various features it offers.

Custom domain name

You can connect a custom domain name with your blog using a Drupal supported hosting service.

Monetization potential

You can monetize your Drupal blog with any monetization methods.

Pricing

Like any other free CMS, you need to purchase a hosting service for Drupal. Again, we recommend BlueHost.

17. Webflow

Webflow is one of the most highly customizable and full-featured blogging platforms on the market. It positions itself as a destination for designers and creatives to build a beautiful and flexible blog at the same time.

Key features

Webflow offers a robust drag-and-drop page builder with clean, semantic HTML5, CSS, and JavaScript.

The platform also has a powerful built-in CMS and animation system that helps you efficiently create and manage visually engaging, dynamic, and interactive content.

Ease of use

When it comes to using Webflow, there is quite a bit of a learning curve. However, after familiarizing yourself with the platform, you can start seeing how powerful it is.

Custom domain name

You have a custom domain name for your blog by purchasing a paid plan.

Monetization potential

With various integrations, you can comfortably enable numerous monetization models on your blog.

Pricing

The Free plan helps you get started with the platform. Once upgrading to at least the $16/month plan, you have access to numerous additional advanced features.

18. Jekyll

Jekyll is an advanced blogging platform used primarily by tech-savvy users and developers. It’s simple, reliable, and suitable for building static websites and blogs.

Key features

Since Jekyll is an open-source platform, you can pretty much design, customize, and extend your blog however you want.

The best part about Jekyll is that you can deploy your blog using GitHub with a completely free custom domain name.

Ease of use

Jekyll is for advanced users only.

Custom domain name

Associating a custom domain name is possible with Jekyll.

Monetization potential

You can monetize your blog with any methods you like as long as you know how to implement them.

Pricing

Jekyll is completely free to use.

Final Verdict: The best blogging platforms to make money

It’s hard to decide which blogging platforms to choose when there are just so many out there.

For that reason, let’s go through all the best of the best that can help you quickly set a money-making blog up and running.

The most versatile blogging platform to make money

Self-hosted WordPress is our pick for the most versatile blogging platform.

Despite being a little bit technical sometimes, the freedom, the capabilities, and the potential it possesses are worth investing your time and effort.

The most beginner-friendly blogging platform to make money

If you are not very fond of doing technical stuff, Wix is your perfect choice to build a blog.

Offering a powerful drag-and-drop page builder and many out-of-the-box tools, Wix helps you quickly create a beautiful blog and set it up properly to start making money.

The best free blogging platform to make money

Straightforward and simple to use, Blogger is the best free blogging platform that anyone can use to build a blog within minutes.

The honorable mention

Our honorable mention in this blog post is WordPress.com. Running with the core of WordPress, WordPress.com is for people who want to enjoy the power of the most popular CMS without having to worry too much about the installation, maintenance, and up-gradation of their blog.

Conclusion

It entirely depends on you to choose a platform to start a blog.

However, if you are serious about making money, an easy-to-set-up, easy-to-scale, and easy-to-monetize blogging platform is your go-to choice.

If you’re still unsure whether blogging is right for you, you can start a free blog on Blogger.com or WordPress.com. Then, as your blog grows, you can always switch to a paid platform like a self-hosted WordPress blog. Nowadays, most blogging sites provide the functionality to export your old content and import it to the new platform in just a few clicks.

Useful Resources

• Blog, Blogging, Bloggers, and Blog Posts: Have a look at the comprehensive definitions of blogs, blogging, bloggers, and blog posts.
• The definitive guide to making money blogging: Wonder how exactly you can make money blogging? Click the link to check out our definitive guide.

FAQs

In this blog post, we will try to thoroughly answer all those questions and give you a detailed step-by-step framework you can take to start making money from your blog, even if you are a complete beginner blogger.

How much money exactly can bloggers make?

Before diving deep into the answer, let’s look at some successful bloggers as a reference.

Fire Nation

Fire Nation is a blog for entrepreneurs who want to achieve financial and lifestyle freedom.

In their August 2020 income report, they claimed to make $156,959 in gross profit. Their revenue mainly comes from 4 different sources, including sponsorships, online courses, affiliate marketing, and journals.

If you want to start a podcasting business, they have some great articles on starting a podcast and how you can make money from it.

Pinch Of Yum

In terms of food blogs, Pinch Of Yum is a role model that has been around for nearly 10 years.

Their food blog content is not only informative but also extremely elegant.

In June 2015, they made a revenue of nearly $40,000 from various sources like displaying ads, Amazon affiliate programs, ebooks, sponsored posts, etc.

They have stopped doing blog income reports for a while now. However, looking at their social media activity and their website statistics, we can confidently say that they are constantly growing at a rapid rate.

Nerd Fitness

Nerd Fitness is one of the most well-known and successful fitness blogs. They focus on helping people keep fit and stay healthy.

They don’t publicly share how much money they make from their business. However, according to an interview with Kamb, the founder of Nerd Fitness, the business generates seven-figure per year.

Make Money Your Way

Make Money Your Way is a financial blog aiming to provide information about career improvement, investing, real estate, and online business.

In May 2016, they made $8,760 in net profit. Aside from advertising and affiliate income, they also used their blog to advertise their freelance service to make more money.

As you can see, making thousands of dollars from a blog is a common thing nowadays.

However, don’t let those numbers make you think it would be easy to earn money blogging, especially if you are a beginner.

Like any business, blogging takes a lot of time and effort to build and make a living out of it.

Many bloggers don’t put enough effort into creating content, promoting their blog, or building a healthy email list. Thus, they fail to make blogging into a stable business.

On average, it requires a blogger at least 4 months to start making money from their blog and at least 6 months to start seeing a consistent stream of income to their pocket. So, if you want to become a successful blogger, be patient and hard-working.

7 proven methods you can make money from your blog

Diversifying your monetization methods is a good practice to make money from your blog. If a method suddenly decides to stop generating income, you always have others to rely on.

There are probably hundreds of methods to make money blogging. However, below are the most common ones that have proven to work for both beginner and veteran bloggers.

Displaying ads

Many people hate ads. However, it still remains the most popular form of monetization for any blog.

The reason for this popularity is that ads take little time to set up. Furthermore, when they’re already up and running on a blog, there is no need to touch them anymore as ad networks do all the remaining behind-the-scenes work.

Usually, you get paid by ad networks every time a person clicks on an ad displayed on your blog (also known as Cost Per Click or CPC).

Google Adsense is the most well-known ad network for bloggers to start making money. Developing by Google, you can be guaranteed that ads displayed by this network are relevant and family-friendly.

When your blog starts seeing a consistent number of visitors, you can decide to switch from Google Adsense to a more high-paid advertising network like Mediavine or AdThrive.

In the case of Mediavine, they require your blog to have around 50,000 sessions a month (or 60,000 pageviews) before applying for the ad network. Although it’s tough to grow your blog to that number, the amount of money they pay is usually worth the effort.

Affiliate marketing

Affiliate marketing is the process of promoting a product or a service of other people to earn commissions.

Normally, affiliate marketing appears under the form of a tracking link. Whenever a person clicks on the link (also called the affiliate link) and buys stuff from it, the affiliate of that link gets a commission.

The biggest and most well-known affiliate program is Amazon Associates. You can earn up to 10% in associate commissions for every qualifying purchase. There are also millions of products on the platform for you to choose from. Therefore, it’s a go-to destination for finding and monetizing your blog traffic.

Commission Junction, ShareASale, and ClickBank are also huge affiliate networks that you can use to find suitable products to promote on your blog and make money.

Sponsored posts

Similar to affiliate marketing, sponsored posts are content written to promote a product or a service. The difference between the two is that you get a one-time payment for each sponsored post you create.

Many bloggers choose to write sponsored posts for two main reasons. First, they are less distracting than displaying ads that can drive many visitors away from your blog. Second, they earn a fixed amount of money they have negotiated beforehand, no matter if the sponsored post attracts readers or not.

If you are a beginner blogger, there will hardly be any company willing to pay you to write sponsored content. The best thing to do is to grow your blog to a few thousand regular visitors a month before reaching out to relevant brands to ask for sponsorship opportunities.

So, how much should you charge for a sponsored blog post?

The rate is different depends on how much traffic your blog generates, how engaging your audience is, or how relevant your content is to your readers. However, you can have a look at the image provided by Hobo with a Laptop below as a reference.

DA stands for Domain Authority, a metric that predicts how well a website can rank on search result pages. You can check your blog DA by an authority checker tool.

Membership content

Another method to make money from your blog is to create member-only content for your readers. Only when they sign up for your membership program, they have full access to more in-depth posts or special offers.

Membership is considered one of the hardest monetization models for a blog. Not only do you have to invest a lot of time and effort into making good and unique content, but you also have to create and update it regularly. Otherwise, no one will bother signing up for the program.

Medium is one of the few businesses that successfully implement this model. You can only read a limited number of the site’s posts each month unless you join its membership program, which costs $5/month.

Digital products

EBooks or online courses are digital products that you could promote and sell to your readers. They are not complex to make but can be a significant income source for your blog.

To speed up the process of creating your digital goods, you can use your already published blog posts as a foundation. Then, modify and expand on them to have your own eBooks or online courses.

Using PLR content is another method to produce digital products, especially if you are a beginner blogger. PLR stands for Private Label Rights, a license for other people’s intellectual property that you can freely modify and even claim ownership of them.

ThePLRStore or InDigitalWorks are some places that offer a wide variety of PLR products. Be careful that the content of those products can be outdated. We recommend that you thoroughly review them and make any changes if necessary.

Physical products

Selling your own physical products is also a great way to make money from your blog.

The idea of producing physical items and managing the shipping process might sound a little bit intimidating. However, you don’t actually need to do all of that.

Using print-on-demand services like Printful, Teespring, or Spreadshirt, all you need to do is create custom designs for products and display them on your online store or blog. Those services will take care of the rest of the work for you.

Online services

If you are confident that you can deliver good stuff for other people, offering online services like freelance writing, consulting, or coaching can be a very stable monetization model for your blog.

Although it can take a lot of time and work, the reward this model can bring to you is immeasurable. Not only can you make a lot of money from offering those online services, but you can also use them as an opportunity to spread your blog to a bigger community.

It’s important to note that the services you offer should closely relate to your blog’s content. Otherwise, it would be tough for you to find customers.

How to make money blogging the successful way

Now you know various methods to monetize a blog. However, not every model is suitable for every blog and everyone. Additionally, if you are a beginner blogger, doing good monetization to maximize your earning potential may not be easy.

Below are the 7 steps you need to take to make money blogging in the right and successful way.

1. Start your own blog

If you’ve already owned a blog, you can immediately move on to the next step. Note that some pieces of content going forward might only be suitable for a WordPress blog. The reason we use WordPress is that it offers many versatile tools that can help you write amazing blog posts and quickly set up your monetization strategies.

To start a WordPress blog for beginners, first, you need to pick a niche.

A niche is a topic that your blog will focus on. There are a wide variety of blog niches, ranging from food, fitness, traveling, finance, and marketing to lifestyle. You should choose a niche that you understand and love. Otherwise, you will have a hard time writing about it.

The next thing you need to do is to pick a name for your blog. It should be short and closely related to your niche. People usually pay attention to the blog name and expect that they land on the right site that offers the content they are looking for.

Finally, choose a web hosting service. It will be the ticket to bring your WordPress blog online so people can find and read your content. Bluehost is one of the best hosting services recommended by many bloggers and WordPress themselves to host your blog.

If you want an in-depth tutorial on this topic, check out the step-by-step guide to starting a blog successfully.

2. Research suitable monetization models for your blog

The Pareto Principle states that 80% of the outcomes result from 20% of the causes. Applying this rule, in any business, the goal is to find the sources that are the most profitable and focus primarily on them.

Before deciding on a monetization model for your blog, researching other bloggers within the same niche as yours is recommended to figure out which methods generate the best results and which don’t.

Suppose you own a food blog. You can type in Google search “most popular food blogs” to have a list of all the popular blogs within this niche.

Examine a couple of them and see what they are doing. It would be best if you could find a blog with an income report since it usually includes details on how the blog makes money.

Take Pinch of Yum as an example again. The most obvious monetization method is displaying ads.

You can see that they display an ad at the bottom of their blog and on the right side of each post.

The second monetization method of the blog is affiliate marketing. They include links to Amazon that you can click on and buy the equipment mentioned in their posts.

Looking at their income report, besides Amazon Associates, they also join other affiliate programs from Bluehost, Genesis Theme, Elegant Themes, ActiveCampaign, and AWeber.

Another significant source of income comes from sponsored content. The tasty food photography course also generates nearly $3,000.

They don’t seem to sell any eCookBook. However, it is another method that you can make a decent amount of money from if you own a food blog.

Go through a couple more blogs with the same process, and you should have a general idea of which method you should invest your time and effort into the most.

3. Create great blogging content

If you want to make money from your blog, producing great content should be the number one priority.

Many bloggers tend to focus too much on designing or promoting their blogs. They don’t put enough time and effort into creating great content and deliver value to their readers. As a result, people quickly come and leave without taking any action.

It’s important to always remember that the most valuable thing for your readers is what they can get out of your blog. So, focus on it.

Now, let’s go through some actions you need to take in order to create blogging content.

Research blog post ideas

Even if you are an expert in your niche, there is no guarantee that the content you write will attract tons of readers. It might already be outdated or too specific.

Great blogging content is not a combination of fancy pieces of text without an obvious purpose. It has to be something that people want to know and read about.

Because of that, researching blog post ideas is a must when it comes to creating a blog that can make money.

There are 2 main techniques that can help you with the process, including keyword research and competitive analysis.

Keyword research

Researching keywords provide you the benefit of understanding the current trend in your niche. It will also help you make your blogging content more SEO-friendly.

Google Autofill is a feature of Google Search Engine that makes it easier and quicker for users to perform a search query. However, as a blogger, you can use it as a keyword research tool since the autofill results come from the most common questions people are asking for.

Looking at the autofill results for the term “fitness” above, some blog post ideas for a fitness blog can be “the best fitness equipment” or “the best fitness trackers.”

A more powerful tool you can use for researching keywords is Ubersuggest.

The tool offers a wide variety of metrics, including monthly search volume (VOL), Cost Per Click (CPC), Paid Difficulty (PD), and SEO Difficulty (SD).

A general rule of thumb is to pick ideas that have high search volume and low SEO difficulty. It makes your content easier to be found, especially if you are a beginner. Choosing an idea with a high CPC is also recommended since the metric indirectly indicates a high demand for a specific product related to the keyword.

SEMRush is another more comprehensive and advanced tool that can replace Ubersuggest. It’s a little bit pricey but still worth a try.

Competitive analysis

Analyzing competitors in your niche is another method to find content ideas for your blog. Also, knowing what works for others and replicating their success is a faster way to reach your own success.

Using Ubersuggest and entering a competitor domain name in the search field, you can have a look at their monthly traffic and the number of organic keywords they have.

You can find the most popular pages of your competitor by scrolling down to the middle section.

Using this approach for a couple of different blogs will give you which content ideas you should write about and which money-making methods you should use for each of your posts.

Make your content Grammarly

Grammarly is a popular free online assistant that helps you check for mistakes in your writing, including correctness, clarity, engagement, delivery, and plagiarism checking. It can also help you adjust your writing style to fit a certain group of audience.

We use the term “Grammarly” for a piece of content to indicate how clear and unique it is. The more you can make your writing Grammarly, the better the content it is to your readers.

Note that we only use the term as an indication of good content. Grammarly is an amazing tool, but it’s not perfect. So, use it as your assistant, not your boss.

Make your content SEO-friendly

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization, a set of best practices that aims to increase organic traffic quality and quantity to a website. Organic traffic occurs when someone performs a search query on a search engine like Google and ends up landing on a specific website.

Search engines actively go through billions of websites on the entire internet to figure out the best content for their users. It looks at various SEO factors on a website like how relevant the content is, how well it structures, or how authoritative the site is.

Making your content SEO-friendly not only means that your content is what your visitors are looking for, but it also ensures that the content is easy to understand and doesn’t stray away from its main idea.

If your blog runs on WordPress, you can install the Yoast SEO plugin to start SEO-ing your content. It’s a beginner-friendly tool that checks for various SEO problems on your blog and provides you with guidance on how to fix them.

4. Set up your blog for each money-making model

As mentioned earlier, depending on your niche and your content ideas, you might want to set up different monetization methods for your blog.

The section below introduces you to the general installation process of the most common monetization models (mainly for WordPress blog).

Set up advertising

To start displaying ads for your blog, first, you need to sign up for an ad network. Google AdSense is the number one choice if you are a beginner blogger.

Go to Google AdSense and click on the “Get Started” button in the top right corner to sign up for the ad network.

The first time you enter the Google AdSense dashboard, you will have to submit an application asking for some basic information. It usually takes Google a few days to review it before you can start placing ads on your blog. So, please be patient.

Next, install the Google Site Kit plugin for your WordPress blog. It’s an official tool developed by Google that can help you manage not only Google AdSense but also various other Google services, such as Search Console and Google Analytics.

Once the plugin is installed, select it from the left sidebar of your WordPress dashboard and click on “Start Setup” to the connecting process.

Follow the Site Kit guide and you should have no problem setting up your blog with the service.

Note that Google Site Kit might require you to verify the ownership of your blog. You can do it through Google Search Console.

The final step is to connect your Google AdSense account. Select “Settings” from the “Site Kit” tab, click on “Connect more services,” and choose “AdSense.”

Site Kit will automatically place special code across every page of your blog.

You are all set! Your blog will start displaying ads once your AdSense account is approved.

Manage affiliate links

After signing up for affiliate programs, you will have your own affiliate links. You can begin putting these links directly inside your blog posts to start making money.

However, it’s better to manage all of your affiliate links in one place, so you know which link is popular on your blog and how many times people have clicked on it.

ThirstyAffiliates provides many features for WordPress bloggers to manage and monitor affiliate links easily. You can check out the complete guide on setting up this plugin here: How to use ThirstyAffiliates to add affiliate links in WordPress.

Create business pages

A business page gives your visitors information on various services that you offer. It can be anything from freelance writing, logo design, illustration to social media marketing.

Setting up a business page for your blog should be the same as creating any other page. However, there are some factors that you need to pay close attention to build the page successfully.

Expertise

Your business page should show that you are an expert in your field. It should also clearly communicate the value you can bring to your customers.

This section can include information like who you are, how long you have been in the business or the skills you have.

Service features

A section for all of your service features can help your customers understand more about what benefits they can have when working with you over others.

Pricing table

A pricing table gives your customers a detailed look at various plans of your service as well as how much each of them costs.

If you are using Elementor as your WordPress page builder, you can install the Premium Addons for Elementor plugin or purchasing Elementor Pro to quickly create a pricing table for your business page. Otherwise, Pricing Table by Supsystic is a good alternative for non-Elementor users.

Customer testimonials

Customer testimonials add an additional layer of trust for your service. It also acts as a catalyst that positively influences the purchasing behavior of your customers.

FAQs

The FAQs section answers your customers’ most frequently asked questions and clarifies any doubts they might have.

Contact form

Finally, you should include a contact form for your business page. If people have any other questions about your service, they can do it immediately.

WPForms, Ninja Forms, or Contact Form 7 are some popular WordPress plugins that can help you set up a beautiful contact form in a matter of minutes. You can also achieve the same thing using Elementor Pro.

Create a membership site

If you decide to earn money by offering member-only content, you need to make your blog into a membership site. It includes many factors, such as member signup, membership level, and content restriction.

MemberPress is an all-in-one membership plugin for WordPress. It provides many advanced features that allow you to build and manage a membership site as you wish instantly. On top of that, the tool integrates seamlessly with many other forum plugins such as BBPress that you can use to create premium community forums for your members and strengthen their relationships.

For a complete guide on building a membership site, visit The ultimate guide to creating a WordPress membership site.

Build a store

A store helps you display and sells digital or physical products.

There are 3 options you can choose when it comes to building a store: Becoming a seller on an established e-commerce website, creating a separate store, and integrating a store page into your blog.

It is relatively simple to become a seller on a popular e-commerce website. You just need to sign up for their seller program, pay a monthly fee (if applicable), and start displaying your products. We recommend Amazon, eBay, or Esty.

The second option is to create your own separate store using an e-commerce platform, such as Shopify, BigCommerce, or Magento. The advantage of this approach is that you have full control over every part of the store.

The final option is to integrate a store page into your blog. Although it might be less flexible and harder to scale than building a separate site, it takes little time and money to create. For this approach, we recommend using WooCommerce for your WordPress blog.

Check out An Introduction to eCommerce for WordPress for more information.

5. Promote your blog to start making money

It’s obvious that a blog with no traffic cannot make money. However, there is no magic that can suddenly get people into your blog unless you tell them to.

Like any business, promotion plays an imperative role in deciding the success of your blog.

Social traffic

Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Youtube, and Pinterest are popular social networking platforms that have billions of active users. They are great places to start putting out great content, drive traffic to your blog, and build a strong community around it.

Depending on your niche, you might want to invest most of your effort into one or two networking sites only. It helps you create better posts that fit your chosen social platforms and avoid burning yourselves out.

As a beginner, consider researching your competitors to figure out which social media websites they use and pick the ones that have the highest engagement rates.

For example, PinchOfYum has 4 social media profiles on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and Pinterest. However, Instagram and Pinterest seem to be the two most engaging ones.

Creating social posts that perfectly fit these two platforms should be the priority. For other sites, you can re-publish those posts or create slightly different versions.

Paid traffic

Paying for advertising campaigns is the quickest way to drive traffic to your blog and gain exposure.

The two most popular advertising services you can use to get your blog in front of people are Facebook Ads and Google Ads. Both are really powerful and not too costly to run. However, since users’ behaviors on Facebook and Google are largely dissimilar, advertising on each of the platforms is vastly different as well.

Organic traffic

As previously mentioned, organic traffic occurs when someone lands on a website through search results.

According to Backlinko, only 0.78% of Google searchers clicked on a result from the second page. It means that if your blog post doesn’t appear on the first page for a search query, it virtually gets no traffic.

Besides SEO-friendly content, there are probably hundreds or even thousands of factors that search engines use in ranking your blog. No one really knows exactly what they are except Google engineers themselves. That’s why driving organic traffic to your blog is very difficult.

Having said that, increasing organic traffic can be extremely rewarding. You won’t have to pay a single dollar on advertising campaigns and can still attract thousands of visitors to your blog.

If you are interested in this topic, have a look at 10 Google Ranking Factors You Shouldn’t Ignore.

Referral traffic

People that visit your blog by clicking a link on another website are considered referral traffic.

Increasing referral traffic to your site is important for 2 main reasons.

First, similar to organic traffic, referral traffic has the potential to drive a large number of readers to your blog without you having to spend money.

Second, referral traffic has a huge impact on your search rankings. When someone backlinks to one of your blog posts, search engines see that as a positive signal, which indicates your content is trustworthy and useful to others. So, it should be ranked higher.

You can use many techniques to increase your referral traffic, including Guest Blogging, Press Releases, or Answering Community Questions. All of them take a lot of time to do, but the result is worth the effort.

Email traffic

Email traffic refers to when people land on your blog through an email you send to them. This is done by collecting your visitors’ emails, then run an email marketing campaign.

It’s arguably the most valuable traffic source to make money since people on your email list are already interested in your blog content. They are much more likely to take action on your blog than others, such as buying an affiliate product.

To start getting email traffic, you have to sign up for an email marketing service like ConvertKit. It helps you manage your email list and send emails automatically to your subscribers.

Then, place signup forms in various places on your blog to collect emails. They can be your site header, footer, or sidebars.

You can also put signup forms sparingly in your blog posts. However, be careful not to distract the reading experience of your readers.

An effective technique many bloggers use to improve their signup forms’ conversion rate is to use lead magnets. They are incentive factors that improve the likelihood of a person giving out their email in exchange for a benefit.

Popup forms and flyout forms are also widely used by bloggers because they can quickly grab visitors’ attention. Still, make sure to avoid interfering with the user experience.

After collecting emails, you can start sending updates about your blog or marketing materials to your list.

6. Use email marketing to the full potential to earn more money

Email marketing is one of the most profitable forms of marketing. It can generate a whopping 4000% ROI (Return On Investment) compared to others.

However, if you are a beginner blogger, you might not be using it effectively. There are 4 key elements you need to keep in mind in order to do email marketing successfully.

Email Automation

Email automation is the process of automatically send a sequence of emails (or an email) to your subscribers when an event is triggered. It allows you to keep in touch with people in your email list at the right time, with little to no intervention.

Using email automation helps you manage a large number of subscribers without having to hire a specialist to do so.

Take the subscribing event as an example. When a new person joins your email list, you might want to send them a sequence of emails to introduce yourself and welcome them to your community.

Doing this manually for all new subscribers is nearly impossible. With email automation, you can set up an email sequence beforehand and have them send out automatically.

Segmentation

Segmentation is the process of separating your email list based on personalized interests.

For example, suppose your financial blog has two categories: investing and saving. People interested in the second category might find it weird when you send emails telling them to invest in stocks or real estate and vice versa.

According to Evergage, 88% of marketers state that their email subscribers want a personalized experience. Additionally, 98% of them accept that personalization significantly strengthens customer relationships.

That’s why you need to start segmenting your email list to maximize the potential of email marketing.

Sales letters

Besides sending regular emails to keep your subscribers informed about your latest blog content, you periodically need to send out a sale letter to promote your (or other’s) product or service. It is a piece of content that aims at persuading your subscribers to purchase something.

Without a professional and persuasive sale letter, you leave a lot of money on the table.

If you are unsure how to write effective sale letters, check out How To Write A Sales Email People Want To Respond To. You can also hire a copywriter on Fiverr to help you with the process.

Another method to quickly write your sale letter is to use Automatic Script – a copywriting software that automates the process of creating your sales messages.

Data analysis

Most email marketing services nowadays allow you to track various metrics for your campaigns, including received rates, open rates, link click rates, or unsubscribed rates.

Paying attention to these metrics and comparing them with industry-standard numbers help you determine which parts of the email marketing campaign you’ve done right and which parts need improvement.

For example, the average email open rate is between 15% and 25%. If your number is outside that range, consider writing a more catchy email subject line next time.

7. Treat your blog like a real business

Blogging has the potential to change your life. But, the statement is only true for people who are serious about it.

Besides building a beautiful blog, and creating great content, treating your blog like a business is the key to your success.

Have a clear goal

A goal helps you stay motivated and focus on delivering the best content for your readers. It could be earning $5000/month at the end of the year or driving 5000 more regular visitors next month for your blog.

Having a goal also comes naturally with building a plan. It means you know how many blog posts you need to write each month, how much money you should invest in running ads to acquire new subscribers, and the list goes on.

With a clear goal and an actionable plan, your success should be around the corner.

Build a brand

We recognize a brand not because of its memorable name or its elegant logo, but because of the value it can bring to us.

Take Google as an example. No one really cares about how many colors there are in its logo. People talk about Google because it’s the number one destination for anyone to find information just about anything in the world.

By focusing on delivering the best and useful stuff to your readers, you create a brand that people remember.

Build a strong community

The success of your blog is decided by your community. If your readers don’t love you, even with amazing content, you will have a very hard time creating a successful blog.

To build a strong community, the easiest thing you can do is to answer your readers’ questions as soon as possible. In this way, they feel like they are a part of your community and much more likely to respond to your posts and promotions.

You can also create small contests or doing giveaways regularly to grow your community quicker.

Network with other bloggers

Your competitors aren’t necessarily your enemies. Rather, they are your friends that can help you broaden your audience.

Start networking with other bloggers by commenting on their blogs, saying that their content is amazing. Remember not to promote yourself. Otherwise, they will feel like you are using them for your own benefits, rather than trying to be their friends.

Conclusion

There is no magical method that can instantly turn your blog into a money-making machine. It’s all about diligence and hard work.

Displaying ads, affiliate marketing, sponsored posts, membership content, and selling products or services are some of the common methods to make money from your blog. However, it’s best to research other bloggers to figure out what they are using the most and focus on that.

Remember to treat your blog like a real business. It’s the only way that can help you become a successful blogger.

Useful Resources

• Blog, Blogging, Bloggers, and Blog Posts: Still curious about blogging? Click on the link to learn more.

FAQs

No need to worry! This blog post will guide you through the detailed step-by-step process to help you get your blog up and running without you having to do any complicated coding or fancy technical stuff. It also shows you various methods to make money from blogging. All you need to do is to sit back, relax, follow the tutorial, and with a few clicks, you can start your blogging journey and become wonderful!

Why you should start blogging

Whether you are an entrepreneur finding a way to market your product or a person who wants to start an online business and make money, blogging is probably precisely what you are seeking.

Blogging is becoming more and more popular, and it is an easy and inexpensive way to communicate and express yourself with the world. Many entrepreneurs and even big companies use blogs to keep their customers informed with their latest products or services and build a loyal community.

Besides, blogging can become a full-time job and generate a reliable income source if done correctly. Numerous bloggers, for example, Pinch Of Yum and Melyssa Griffin, were able to turn blogging into a stable online business, work on it entirely, and make thousands of dollars in revenue per month consistently by blogging.

Even if you are not interested in starting a blog to make money and just want to do it for fun, blogging can help you gain confidence in your writing and communication skills. Just write a post about anything, hit the publish button, ask others for their opinions, and with their feedback, you will gradually become much much better at those.

What is the requirement to start a successful blog?

“Content is king.”

Bill Gates

As Bill Gates once said, “Content is king,” and it holds very true for blogging. Blogging, at its core, is all about sharing your knowledge and experience with others.

Although being a great writer or an expert in a specific field might be beneficial when starting a blog, you do not need to be either one of those to be successful. All you need to have is a passion (or an interest) for your topic, commitment, and your own way of telling about it.

People want to read stuff that they find genuine and exciting, not superior knowledge in an essay. No need to worry if you are just a beginner. Your experience is unique, so just be yourself and write in your own way. You will be fine.

Besides passion, a clear goal is another important factor that significantly affects how successful your blog is.

Everyone has their reason when creating a blog, for instance, improving public images, sharing knowledge, building a community, or making money. Thus, they have their own definition of a successful blog. So before starting a blog, ask yourself a question: what is the objective of your blog?

With the help of various platforms and services, starting a blog is no longer an intimidating experience. With a little bit of guidance, everyone can start creating their own blog and writing anytime and anywhere.

The rest of this blog post will guide you through the detailed step-by-step process it takes to help you start your first blog as quickly and successfully as possible.

Note that this guide might not be suitable for you if you are looking to create a completely free blog. There are millions of bloggers these days, and they are also trying their best to be successful. Of course, if you are a talented writer, you can be successful with a free blog just fine. Even so, investing a little bit of money upfront can go a long way since you will have full control over your blog. Furthermore, you have full access to versatile tools, services, and supports to help you stand out.

How to start a successful blog

Here are the 11 steps you need to do to start a successful blog and make money from it.

1. Research blog topics (or niches) and choose a profitable one

A topic or niche is an area that your blog content will focus around. Some of the most popular niches are food, fashion, personal finance, online business, and blogging.

Because your niche decides the entire content of your blog, it should be the first thing you care about. You should choose one that you’re familiar with and enjoy writing. For example, a fitness blog can be the right choice for people who love working out.

However, not every niche is the same. Some are popular than others. If you pick one that is too narrow, you can have a hard time finding the right audience for your blog and make money from it.

One of the best ways to come up with the best blog niche that suits you is to brainstorm any idea you have in mind and list it out. Just think about anything you like, working out, learning, traveling, food, cooking, home decoration, cat, dog, shopping, photographer, anything. Then, check the popularity for each of them by doing a quick google search.

A high number of search results is a good indicator of a popular niche.

Also, don’t be too afraid if there are many competitors. The internet is a big place, and there will always be people that resonate with your experience. Furthermore, in blogging space, competitors aren’t necessarily your enemy. Rather, they are your friend. If you have good content and your competitors find it useful to their own audience, they might backlink to your blog. Ultimately, it is a win-win situation.

Another crucial factor in finding your profitable blog niche is to check for possible monetization models.

A monetization model is a method that a business uses to make money. Some of the most popular monetization models for blogs are displaying ads, affiliate marketing, writing sponsored posts, or offering online courses.

A niche with various monetization models means that you have the opportunity to diversify your sources of income and make more money from your blog.

So, should you choose a blog topic that you are not interested in but can make a lot of money?

Well, at the end of the day, nothing is right for everyone. The recommendation in this blog post is merely general guidance to increase your chance of success. If you are confident that you can write about an unfamiliar topic, go ahead. Just remind yourself that you might struggle to keep up the good work in the future.

In conclusion, before starting a blog, make sure your niche is broad enough, the monetization potential is good, and most importantly, the more you love a topic, the better it is.

2. Pick a great name for your blog

The name of your blog should be the same as what appears in the website bar. So when refers to a blog’s name, people usually refer to your domain name.

Unless you intend to create a personal brand like Google or Amazon, your blog’s name should be somewhat related to your topic. People see your domain name and expect that your blog content is what they think it is.

The more descriptive and memorable, the better it is. 2-3 words usually are the best. You also don’t need to go all out and find a creative name. It just needs to be memorable so people can easily remember and search for it.

Avoid using numbers or even hyphens for your domain name, if possible. They make your domain name look unprofessional.

The .com is the most popular and recognizable extension, so you should go with it. However, other extensions like .org, .io, .net,.. are also fine. They are not as popular but still look trustworthy enough. Suppose you find a domain name that you really love, for example, coffeelover.com, has already been taken. You can go with coffelover.net or coffeelover.io instead. There are countless successful blogs out there than has the domain name extension .org, .net. Therefore, don’t worry too much about it. For example, google.blog is the official blog of Google.

Similar to choosing your blog niche, write down everything you have in mind for your blog name. Pick one that you find the most appropriate and love the most.

Using Therasus is also a method to come up with a blog name. For example, if you love the name “thecleverbusiness.com,” but it has been taken, try a synonym for the word “clever” or “business” is a good way to go. It could be something like “thesmartbusiness.com” or “thecleverstartup.com.” It’s up to you to decide.

Don’t be afraid if you accidentally make a mistake. You can always change your domain name later.

It’s also important to note that even though having a great name is good, your blog’s content is always what defines your blog. Even if you go with your personal name, but you have great content, search engines will still recommend your blog. Furthermore, people don’t really care about the name of your blog that much. The most important thing for them is what they can learn from your blog. So, don’t get too hung up on your domain name.

3. Choose a good blogging software

One of the best blogging platforms to use is WordPress. It is a CMS (Content Manager System) that has been around for a very long time and powers more than 30% of entire online websites. Many web hosting services also support one-click installed WordPress as part of their hosting plan.

WordPress allows you to customize your blog as you want. You also have full access to various free tools and services to build your blog faster and easier.

It’s important to note that when people refer to WordPress alone, they mostly refer to WordPress.org, not WordPress.com. There are many differences between WordPress.com and WordPress.org that you might have to consider.

Firstly, WordPress.org is the home for WordPress software, whereas WordPress.com is a website builder with WordPress core. WordPress.com was founded by Matt Mullenweg, who is also the co-founder of WordPress.org. Additionally, the name WordPress is a registered trademark of the WordPress Foundation established by Matt Mullenweg. Because of the same name and the same founder, people often confuse between the two.

Secondly, using a web hosting for WordPress.org and using WordPress.com introduces different levels of controls, advantages, and disadvantages over the management and customization of a website.

If you register for a web hosting service like BlueHost and install WordPress.org, you will actually create a self-hosted WordPress blog. Owners of self-hosted blogs have the complete freedom to customize their website and install any tools they want. They also have full access to the website files and make any changes. However, it is entirely up to the owners to maintain the site.

WordPress.com, on the other hand, provides all the necessary tools for a hosted WordPress website. It means that it provides less freedom for people to configure the site, especially those who want to access the underlying structure entirely. The advantage of using WordPress.com is that you don’t have to take care of some management parts for your site or find a web hosting service yourself. WordPress.com will help you with that.

Another thing you might need to consider is the difference in prices. WordPress.com offers a free plan. However, unless you invest money in the business one, which costs $25/month (billed annually), you merely have the freedom to do anything. In this case, starting a self-hosted WordPress blog is a lot cheaper.

Ultimately, it all depends on how much money you are willing to pay and the level of control you want over your blog.

If you are a complete beginner and have no technical background, we still recommend starting a self-hosted WordPress blog for the complete control and the low upfront cost. If you get stuck, you can always search for solutions on the internet or contact the web hosting services for help. You can also contact us, and we will try to help you out as much as possible.

4. Bring your blog online

To get your blog online, first, you need to find a web hosting service. A web hosting service is a platform that helps put a website on the internet and make it available and accessible online.

If you decide to register for WordPress.com, you don’t need to find a web hosting service since WordPress.com will take care of this process for you.

For a self-hosted WordPress blog, BlueHost is one of the best choices in terms of cost, performance, and support. It is also officially recommended by WordPress themselves as one of the best hosting services.

Now, Let’s get your blog online.

Step 1: Go to BlueHost

Click the “Get Started Now” button to start signing up for BlueHost.

Step 2: Pick a plan

BlueHost offers 4 plans, starting from $3.95/month up to $13.95/month, billed triennially. The price would be $5.95/month up to $16.95/month if billed annually. Don’t hesitate and pick the first one. The basic plan offers everything you need to start a professional blog. If you want to upgrade to have more spaces or additional features like marketing offers or SpamExperts, you can always do it later.

Step 3: Enter your domain name

The next step is to enter your domain name. If you already own one, BlueHost provides the ability to transfer that domain to your BlueHost account so you can easily manage it later. Just type in that domain name in the right box, and click “Next.” Otherwise, Enter your domain name that you have come up with in the left box to check for availability.

If the domain name has already been taken, you can go back and type in another name or pick a suggested one by BlueHost.

If you haven’t decided on your domain name yet, click on “I’ll create my domain later.”

Step 4: Fill in the necessary information and register

First, enter all the account information as indicated by BlueHost or sign in with Google.

Next, select your account plan.

It is entirely up to you to select between the 12-month, 24-month, and 36-month package. The 36-month package gives you the lowest monthly fee. Additionally, the different price between paying 12-month and 36-month packages is only around $40 to $60. Still, going with a 12-month package might be the best option as it costs you the least amount of money upfront.

It is also worth mentioning that BlueHost offers a 30-day money-back guarantee. So, you can try it out for 30 days to see whether blogging suits you or not.

For the package extras section, you can uncheck all of them except Domain Privacy + Protection. The feature will mask your personal information from the Whois database and protect you from spammers or unwanted solicitation. You can always add other features like Codeguard Basic or BlueHost SEO Tools Start later if you feel the need to use them.

Finally, fill out your payment information and register for BlueHost.

Step 5: Create your account

This step is pretty straightforward. Click the “Create your account button,” enter your password, and you are all set.

From now on, whenever you want to log in to BlueHost, just use your domain name and the password you just set.

Step 6: Set up WordPress

The first time you log in to your BlueHost account, you will be asked to follow a simple setup process. The purpose of this process is to set up some basic information and pages for your website.

You can click “Skip this step” to head to your main BlueHost dashboard. Whether you choose to follow the process or not, it doesn’t make much of a difference besides some basic initial setup. Again, you can always do this stuff later.

Step 7: Get your blog online

You can immediately make your blog go live by clicking the “Launch My Site” button near the top right corner. You can also change your site’s status back to “Coming Soon” in the WordPress settings at any time.

To access your WordPress dashboard and start customizing your site, click “WordPress” next to the “Launch My Site” button.

5. Design your blog

Before designing your blog, access your WordPress dashboard, click around, and start familiarizing yourself with various tabs on the left side.

• Dashboard: gives you an overview of your site, news, and updates on WordPress and various tools.
• Jetpack: a tool that helps with your site performance, traffic growth, and security.
• Posts: the place you manage all your blog posts, categories, and tags.
• Media: contains images that have been imported into WordPress.
• Pages: manage your site’s pages.
• Comments: contain all comments that have been posted on your site.
• OptinMonster and WPForms: tools that help you build sign-up forms to collect emails for your blog.
• Appearance: customize the look and feel of your blog. Your site’s general layout and style are often controlled by themes that can be found by clicking the Appearance tab. There are many themes in WordPress (including free or paid themes) to choose from. They are suitable for different purposes like blogging, education, food & drink, news, e-commerce, and more. It is important to note that your theme only affects your site’s general appearance, not your content (Posts, Pages, Media, etc.). You can freely try out any themes and swap them out with a different one without worrying about breaking your site.
• Plugins: manage all the tools you have installed. People also use the word “plugin“ to refer to a tool or software that can be installed into WordPress.
• Users: contain information about who has logged into your site.
• Tools: contain some general tools to import, export your site, or your personal data.
• Settings: configure some general information about your site, including Site Title, Tagline, Date Format, Time Format, etc.

To start designing the general layout and style of your blog, simply click on the “Appearance” tab, then click “Themes.”

Click “Add New” on the top left corner to bring up the entire theme library. Just choose the one you love but don’t get too hung up though. You can always go back here and change your theme later.

You can type in your domain name in your web browser to have a look at your blog.

A theme also comes with its own customization options. Click the “Appearance” tab and then click “Customize” to start customizing your selected theme.

A new panel will be brought up. Below is the customization panel for the Twenty Twenty theme.

• Site identity: gives you the ability to upload your site’s logo and icon. You can also change your site title and tagline here.
• Colors: change the background color and the primary color of your theme.
• Theme Options: allow you to show the search icon in your site’s header bar and show the author bio of your posts.
• Cover Template: control the overlay background color, overlay text color, and overlay opacity.
• Background Image: upload a background image for your site.
• Menus: contain the settings for all of your site’s menus and their locations.
• Content Options: control the settings for your post details and the featured images. Featured images usually appear at the top of a post or page.
• Widgets: customize the site’s footer. For example, you can add quick links, recent posts, recent comments to the footer.
• Homepage Settings: choose what to display on the homepage of your site. It can be reverse-chronological-ordered posts or a static page.
• Additional CSS: an advanced option to further customize the appearance and the layout of your site. This tab might be suitable for tech-savvy people only.

One of the fastest and most elegant themes is Astra (totally free). It provides many functionalities to customize your blog that looks good on both mobile and desktop devices. Astra also provides its own gallery of pages like the home page, about-us page, contact page, and product page that you can import to your blog with just a click.

Using themes is a very powerful way to design your blog. However, because their purpose is to give you the quickest and easiest way to customize the general layout and style of the site, they can be limited sometimes.

If you wish to have complete control over every bit of your blog’s appearance, Elementor might be able to help you achieve that.

Elementor is a free WordPress drag-and-drog page builder that lets you create a beautiful WordPress website in a matter of minutes. If you want to get started with Elementor, check it out at building your site with Elementor.

6. Set up your blog for success

Before start writing and publishing your blog content, there are a few key factors that you should go through so you can increase your chance of success.

6.1. Site tittle and tagline

A site title is the name of a site. It usually appears at the top left corner (or middle top) of every site’s pages if no logo is specified. It also appears in web browser tabs.

A tagline is the description of your site. It should be short, memorable, and describe your site’s purpose.

Together, the site title and the tagline serve as the introduction of your blog for readers. They are also important factors that search engines pay close attention to better understand your site.

Make sure that you have set your site title and tagline by clicking on the “Settings” tab, then click “General”.

6.2. Site logo and icon

For a similar purpose to the site title or tagline, your site’s logo and icon are also worth paying attention to.

Canva is one of the few websites that let you create beautiful logos for free. Simply sign up for Canva, go to the home page, click “Create a design” in the top right corner, and then select “logo” to start designing your own logo.

After finishing your site logo and icon, make sure to go to “Appearance,” select “Customize,” and set them in the “Site Identity” tab of your current theme.

6.3. Site visibility

You can change your site’s visibility by clicking on the “Settings” tab. Next, select “General”, scroll down to the bottom of the page and toggle the line that says “Bluehost Coming Soon Page.” Turning this off will allow everyone to access and read your site’s content.

If your blog is ready to be indexed by search engines so everyone can search for, click on the “Settings” tab, and select “Reading.” Make sure that you leave the “Discourage search engines from indexing this site” box unchecked.

6.4. SSL certificate

SSL stands for Secure Sockets Layer, a technology that secures the internet connection and protects user data. An SSL certificate determines that a website is secured and safe for users to visit. If your blog doesn’t have an SSL certificate, visitors might get a warning stating that the connection is not private and vulnerable to attackers.

To check if an SSL certificate is installed on your blog, you can look at the address bar. If your blog is secured, the URL will begin with HTTPS instead of HTTP. You can also click the lock icon to validate this.

The tool below will show you the general SSL certificate information of your site.

By default, if you purchase a hosting plan from BlueHost, an SSL certificate will be automatically installed on your site. Therefore, you don’t need to do anything.

If, by any chance, the SSL certificate is missing, open your BlueHost dashboard, click on the “My Sites” tab, then click “Security.” Make sure that the “Free SSL Certificate” has been turned on. You can also contact BlueHost to address the issue.

6.5. Post links

It is recommended that your post links should be short and easy to understand both by readers and search engines.

By default, your blog’s link structure might not be SEO-friendly (SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. More information on SEO will be addressed later). To change this structure, go to the “Settings” tab of your WordPress dashboard, then access the “Permalinks” section.

Change your permalinks to “Post name: domainname/samplepost” variant.

6.6. Privacy policy

As any standard website, you need to create a Privacy-Policy page and similar legal pages like Terms Of Conditions or Disclaimer for your blog. The purpose of these pages is to inform users which data you collect, ads you display, affiliate links you use, etc. You might also need to create these pages to follow national or international laws. In any case, creating these pages ensures that you don’t run into any law-related troubles later.

Don’t worry! You don’t need to write down this stuff yourself. To save you from the trouble creating these pages, go to Policy Maker, answer a few questions. It will automatically generate the content of these pages for you.

Now, go to the “Settings” tab and click “Privacy.”

If you already have a Privacy-Policy page, just select it from the drop-down menu. Otherwise, click “Create New Page” and paste the content you have generated from Policy Maker into the current page editor.

Then, hit “Publish” on the top right corner. You now have your own Privacy-Policy page.

For other legal pages, you can go to the “Pages” tab and click “Add New” to create them.

For more information about the WordPress page editor, check out section 9: Create your first blog post and publish it.

6.7. Sharing

In the “Sharing” section of the “Settings” tab, you can set the Twitter Site Tag for your blog. This tag will appear when someone shares a post from your blog on Twitter. You can set this to your own name or your domain name.

6.8. SEO

SEO is one of the most important aspects when it comes to building a successful blog. Without good SEO, your blog will not be able to rank high in the search results, bringing in fewer readers.

So, what is SEO anyway?

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization, which is a set of techniques and practices aiming to increase the amount of traffic to your site through organic traffic. Organic traffic happens when people search for something and end up landing on your site (also called unpaid traffic or natural traffic).

You can read the official guide of Google on SEO here: Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Starter Guide.

It must be pointed out that SEO only serves as a method to make your site easier to rank high in the search results. Google and any search engines value your content much higher than, let say, a site with good SEO but poor content. So, focus on writing good content first and do SEO stuff later.

You can start setting up some basic SEO settings for your blog by installing the Yoast SEO plugin – a free and comprehensive SEO tool for WordPress sites.

Click on the “Plugins” tab, and select “Add New.” Enter “Yoast SEO” in the search bar and hit enter.

Yoast SEO should appear as the first result. Click “Install Now” to install the plugin for your blog. Next, click on “Activate” to activate it.

A new “SEO” tab will be added to the left panel of your WordPress dashboard. Click on it to open up the Yoast SEO window. You can start by clicking on “Configuration wizard” to quickly set up basic SEO settings for your blog.

The problem section allows you to identify issues that affect the SEO of your blog.

You can also select the “Tools” tab and click on “Start processing and speed up your site now” to let the plugin create an index of your site’s SEO data. It might take a few minutes for this process, so be patient.

For the complete rundown on Yoast SEO, click the link here: Configuration guide for Yoast SEO.

SEO is a complex topic as search engines change their algorithm almost every day to ensure that they can find the most relevant and the best content for their users. Also, for the purpose of a short and easy-to-understand guide on starting a new blog, we will not try to go into too much detail about the topic here.

6.9. Site speed

Your site speed is another factor you should pay attention to. A website that renders slowly can negatively affect the user experience and drive visitors away. Thus, It might indirectly affect your site ranking on search engines.

Google offers Google PageSpeed Insights, a website that can help you check your site speed. Additionally, it provides you with issues that need to be addressed to speed up your site. Just enter your site URL in the blank field and hit “Analyze” to start the process.

The same thing can be done using GTmetrix.

You should regularly check your site speed to fix your site problems as soon as possible. It helps avoid a bad experience for your visitors.

If you’re just getting started, your blog will most likely score a high point in speed check tools. However, as you install more plugins, import more images, or use a slow theme, you can start to see a decrease in your site speed score. In this case, installing the LiteSpeed Cache plugin might be a solution.

LiteSpeed Cache is a comprehensive acceleration plugin that provides many site speed optimization features such as caching, image optimization, database cleaner, etc.

If you don’t feel the need to use the default installed plugins like Jetpack, OptinMonster, or WPForm, go to the “Plugins” tab, click the “Deactivate” button, then click “Remove” to remove them from your WordPress site. You can always install these plugins again like any other.

You can read more about the topic here: Improve your site speed with LiteSpeed Cache plugin.

6.10. Blog backup

BlueHost and WordPress, like any other services and software, can be vulnerable to server crashes, hacking, theme, or plugin issues, which can cause you to lose your content, or even worse, lose your entire blog. To avoid the worst things ever to happen, using the UpdraftPlus plugin to backup your site is a good option.

UpdraftPlus plugin is the most popular manual and scheduled backup plugin, which provides the ability to backup your entire data into the cloud and restore later with just a click. With this tool, you don’t need to worry about making a mistake or losing your content. You can always rewind to a backup point at any time.

6.11. Email list

Email list refers to a list of emails that accepts to receive marketing materials from your blog. You can think of it as a list of your regular readers. An email is added to your email list when a person enters their email address into one of your signup forms.

Growing your email list is one of the most important factors to consider. People who subscribe to your email list are often the most interested in your content and regularly visit your blog. They are also much more likely to take action on your blog than regular visitors (for example, buy your products or click your affiliate links).

It is recommended that you start building an email list for your blog as soon as possible.

To start, first, you need to sign up for an email marketing service like ConvertKit. It helps you organize email addresses, create newsletters, and automatically send them to your subscribers. Most of the email marketing services offer a free plan if you have less than 1000 subscribers.

Next, install a signup form plugin to collect email addresses (also known as email leads). You can install any signup-form plugins as long as it supports the integration with the email marketing service that you choose. Some of the most popular plugins in this field are OptinMonster, Contact Form 7 (free), Contact Form by WPForms, and Ninja Forms.

For more information on the integration between ConvertKit and WordPress, visit the link: Integrating ConvertKit with WordPress.

6.12. Other plugins

Below are some other extremely helpful plugins that you can install:

• MonsterInsights – a Google Analytics Plugin for WordPress that helps you track, analyze, and optimize your website traffic.
• WooCommerce – create your online store in minutes with Product, Cart, and Checkout pages and secure payments.
• Smush – Compress and optimize images to boost page speed.

It might be tempting to install many plugins so you can manage your blog easier. However, you should consider the trade-off between your blog performance and the value these plugins bring you. Installing many of them can add high overhead costs for your blog, making it load slower. Make sure to check the site performance after installing a plugin and remove unnecessary ones if possible.

7. Decide effective monetization strategies for your blog

Monetization is the process of making money from a product or service. There are numerous ways you can choose to start monetizing your blog.

• Displaying ads – Selling advertising space is one of the easiest ways to start making money from your blog. You can sign up for Google AdSense, an advertising platform created by Google to start displaying ads. You can also consider joining a higher-paid advertising platform like Mediavine or AdThrive if your blog has a large number of visitors (at least several thousands of visitors per month).
• Sponsored posts – You can try contacting a relevant brand with your blog content and ask them if they want to be featured on one of your posts. Sponsored posts are a really good way to make decent money, which you can earn up to several thousand dollars per post depending on your blog traffic.
• Affiliate Marketing – Probably the most popular form to make money when it comes to blogging. It is the process of promoting products or services to earn commissions when someone buys them through your affiliate links. A few popular affiliate programs are Amazon Associates and ClickBank marketplace.
• Membership exclusive content – If your blog has good and unique content, you can consider limiting visitors to read only a certain part of a blog post. Only when they purchase a membership, they will be able to read the full content. Medium is a good reference for this monetization model. Offering exclusive content is probably the hardest method to make money from your blog as few people are willing to pay to read online articles. However, if you manage to implement this model successfully, the reward can be enormous.
• Selling your products – If you have an established fan base, you can think of selling some of your own products like books, EBooks, or other physical products.

Those are some of the most common methods to make money from your blog. If you are not sure which ones to choose, consider researching this topic. For example, suppose you are starting a food blog. Search for food bloggers by typing “top food bloggers” and looking at what they are doing and promoting. Pinch of Yum makes money from her food blog by displaying ads. She also has Amazon affiliate links in each of her posts.

Before writing any post, think about which monetization strategies you would be using and how they would affect the content or the layout of the post.

Please keep in mind that you should always prioritize your content over anything else. If one of your posts has a lot of visitors, and both ads and affiliate links are displayed, turning off ads for that post to avoid distracting the reading experience is a good idea.

If you would like to learn more about this topic, visit The definitive guide to make money blogging.

8. Find blog post ideas

Chances are if you are just getting started, you don’t exactly know what to write about. Don’t worry! We’ve all been there.

A blog post idea doesn’t need to be completely new. In fact, you should opt in to write something that others have written about in the beginning. The benefit of this is that you can learn from their posts, how they structure the content, what problems they tackle, what their style is, and how they make money from it. It doesn’t mean that you should copy their content, and you absolutely shouldn’t. Learning from others and finding a way to make your post more engaging or more comprehensive is what you should do. At the end of the day, anyone learns from someone, right?

You can also ask your readers what they want to know or which problems they are facing. This technique not only gives you ideas to write about but also a very good way to build a loyal community.

Check out The ultimate guide to come up with infinite blog post ideas if you ever get stuck to find amazing blog post ideas.

9. Create your first blog post and publish it

To create your blog post, click on the “Posts” tab and click “Add New”.

A WordPress block editor will pop up.

The WordPress block editor (also known as the Gutenberg editor) divide your content into multiple blocks, thus allowing you to create media-rich posts and pages. You can easily add, manage, arrange, and rearrange your content in any way you want.

• Post Title: The title of your blog post.
• Blocks tab: Provides all blocks you can add to your post. Some of the most common blocks are paragraph, heading, image, and list.
• Patterns tab: Provides some ready-made block groups.
• Content structure: Helps you see information about the post’s content, such as the number of words, headings, paragraphs, and blocks. You can also have a look at your document outline there.
• List view: See which blocks you have added into the post.
• Preview button: See what your blog post looks like on various devices.
• Document tab: Edit general information, including the blog’s visibility, slug, excerpt. You can also allow for comments, pingbacks, and trackbacks in this tab.
• Block tab: Edit some of the settings of the block you are currently selecting.

Now, it’s up to you to write the content. Once you’ve done writing your post, click “Publish” on the top right corner to publish it. You can also click “Save Draft” to save your post as a draft and publish it later.

You can learn more about the Guttenberg editor by clicking the link here: Introduce to the Guttenberg Editor.

10. Promote your blog and start building your audience

Blogging, like any other business, it’s a fierce competition. Starting a beautiful blog and writing outstanding content is not enough to get you ahead. You cannot just publish a blog post and hope that people will flock in to read it.

To get readers into your blog, promotion is the key, and it takes time, especially if you are a beginner.

10.1. Write good SEO blog posts

With search engines constantly finding fresh, engaging content for people, this is actually an opportunity for you to get discovered. Additionally, if you rank high up on search engines, you can regularly attract tons of visitors to your blog without spending a fortune on advertising.

Good SEO can greatly benefit your site in the long term. However, doing SEO is not an easy task. Furthermore, even if your site has good SEO, it takes a long time to see some results.

Here are some tips for a good SEO blog post.

Post Title

The title of your post should accurately describe your post content. It might sound a little bit obvious, but it is something that people often make a mistake.

The blog title is the first thing searchers and search engines take into consideration when determining the relevancy of your content. For this reason, many bloggers try to stuff in many keywords or even create misleading titles to get visitors to their blog. Doing this will not only hurt your reader experience but also hurt your site ranking.

Search engines like Google nowadays are smart enough (and they get smarter each day passes) to determine whether your title and content are relevant or not and whether you are trying to trick them into ranking your content higher. So, avoid that at all costs.

Description

Search engines often do a good job of choosing the most relevant section of your post to display in search results. However, providing a meta description is always a good practice.

The meta description should accurately provide a summary of your blog post for readers as well as search engines. It is what appears below your post title in search results (known as snippets) in case search engines cannot find a good section of content to display.

Try to summarize your post as descriptive and engaging as possible. Again, don’t try to fill your description with keywords or irrelevant information.

If you are using a plugin like Yoast SEO, you can click on “Edit Snippet” and start entering the post’s meta description.

Headings

You should break down your content into sections with heading tags to create an easy-to-follow structure.

Search engines look at these heading tags to ensure that users can easily navigate your post and determine which parts are more important than others.

You shouldn’t try to use too many headers as a way to include keywords. They should always come in as naturally as possible.

Post URL

Search engines also look at the URL of your blog post as a factor to determine what it is about.

Your post URL should be simple, friendly, and relevant to the post’s content.

Keywords

A blog post should focus on one or two long-tail keywords. They are long phrases that are more specific and relevant to the post content.

Users often search by long phrases instead of short ones, such as “How to start an online business” instead of “online business.”

Targeting long-tail keywords means that visitors that end up on your site is more likely your target audience.

You should try to incorporate these keywords in your post title, description, headers, or post URL. But again, don’t force it.

Categories

Assigning your post into the right categories helps search engines understand the hierarchy of your blog. WordPress also uses categories to display related content to your visitors.

Ensure that all your posts are assigned into specific categories. That way, it is easier to reach them through navigation around on your blog. Readers are also comfortable going from a blog post to a more general topic and vice versa.

Images

Search engines don’t always understand the meaning of images presented in your post. This is where the filename and the “alt” attribute play a huge role in helping search engines better define your images.

You might be wondering what an “alt” attribute is. It is the text which appears instead of your image when the image is not done loading (or cannot load).

Similar to other parts of SEO, filenames and “alt” attributes should be accurate and descriptive.

Link text

When linking to other sites or other parts of your websites, you shouldn’t just paste the link into your blog post. The link should appear as a link text which appropriately describes the content of the page you are linking to.

For example, when linking to the Google SEO official page, use a phrase like “The official Google SEO guide” and put the link in it. Avoiding lengthy or generic link text like “Click here” or “this article” is a good practice recommended by Google.

In conclusion, you should treat search engines like humans. If you deliver good, engaging, clear structure, and relevant content to your readers, it means that you deliver the same thing to search engines.

You can also read the full guide on blog SEO here: How to Search Engine Optimize Your Blog Content.

10.2. Utilize the power of social media

Social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, or Pinterest are great places to announce your new content and connect with relevant audiences. They are free to use and have a massive user base.

In the beginning, you should only try to focus on one or two social media platforms. Only when you have a good growth rate on those platforms, consider acquiring a new audience on others.

Before choosing suitable social platforms to put your effort into, you should research bloggers in your niche and find out which platforms they are most active on. Also, remember to pay close attention to their social content and try to replicate their success.

Anyway, on whichever platforms that you choose, try to post your content regularly. But, at the same time, try not to be too spammy with advertising content. A good rule of thumb is that 80% of your post should aim to add value to your audience. The remaining 20% is used to promote your brand, business, or products.

10.3. Advertise your blog

Since it could take a long time for your SEO to kick in and do its job, it might be worthwhile to invest a little bit of money into advertising your blog. Paying for Ads campaign can help you gain exposure, thus creating the opportunity to promote your products or services with a wider audience.

The two most popular services to advertise your blog is Google Ads and Facebook Ads. They are vastly different in terms of user behaviors, ages, genders, and interests. Therefore, starting with one and expanding to the other later.

It is important to note that despite some claims, paying traffic doesn’t benefit your SEO rankings, at least in the case of Google. As noted in Google Search policy, it is committed to put users at its core and keep its search results as trustworthy as possible.

10.4. Grow your email list

People who sign up to receive newsletters from your site are the most enthusiastic ones about your content. They are more likely to share your blog with others and respond to your promotional efforts. For that reason, your current audience is much more valuable than any others, and they are the ones you should pay attention to the most.

Building your email list when you are just getting started might be an intimidating task. However, with the right strategies, you can grow your email list to a few hundred or thousand in no time.

One of the most common methods to collect email addresses is to put signup forms sparingly throughout your site. Your site header, footer, and sidebars might be the most appropriate places since they are the least distracting elements on your site. You can also try putting signup forms on the home page, about page, or contact page.

Placing the signup forms inside your post is another method that many bloggers apply. However, make sure that you don’t overuse them as putting them on your post severely interferes with the user experience.

A technique that you can implement to minimize that problem and also increase your chance of collecting email leads is to provide a benefit for people who sign up. Don’t just use the form that says, “Sign up to receive notifications when the latest articles come out.” Use a form that gives readers a clear benefit like “Want to receive our latest course on Facebook marketing? Enter your email below.” Signup forms like those are also called lead magnets.

If you think static signup forms are not enough, popup forms might worth a try. They are a great way to grab visitor’s attention and generally have a higher conversion rate (the percentage of visitors completes a specific goal) than normal signup forms.

Still, be sure to display them in the right places and at the proper time to avoid distracting the experience of visitors navigating on your blog.

10.5. Engage with your readers

Besides promoting, engaging with your audience is a must if you want to build a loyal community. When your readers leave a comment or ask a question either on your blog or your social page, try to reply to them as soon as possible. In this way, your readers feel a sense of connection, and they will have the motivation to come back to read more and even convert into loyal customers.

When engaging with your readers, be sure that you communicate confidently. It will prove that you are knowledgeable about your topic. Don’t be afraid to make mistakes either. Blogging is ultimately all about your personal experience, and your readers understand that.

10.6. Engage with other bloggers

Think of bloggers within your niche as your friends rather than your enemies. Each blogger has their own fan base, and they are always trying to broaden their audience size as much as possible. This is your opportunity to build relationships and help each other spread content.

Commenting on other blogs is a good way to start building friendships. Note that don’t provide the link to your site when commenting on other blogs. You don’t want others to think that you are trying to promote your own content. Answer them as their fan, not as a spammer or an advertiser.

11. Turn your blog into a business

Now that you have a pretty solid understanding of how to start a blog as well as how to make money from it. Let’s turn it into a business.

Start by creating a content strategy.

A content strategy is a suitable plan for the creation and publication of your blog. Think of it as a strategy for the long-term publishing activity of your blog posts. Having a content strategy is important in helping you grow your blog in the right direction.

To define your content strategy, you need to make sure that you have a clear goal for your blog.

As mentioned earlier, a clear goal is an important factor in assessing how successful your blog is. For example, the primary goal of this blog site is to try to provide you with knowledge about online businesses and how to build them cleverly and successfully.

Once you determine your blog goal, you will also need to specify an objective for your blog posts. For example, this blog post has a couple of objectives. Firstly, it aims at providing you with a comprehensive step-by-step guide to start a blog (the content objective). Secondly, it aims to get you to click on affiliate links (the main objective). Finally, it aims to collect your email addresses (the sub-objective). You can have more or fewer objectives for a blog post. However, remember to tailor your content for a specific objective only.

Next, determine your target audience. For instance, if you start a blog about traveling, but you promote it for people who love playing games, it will likely not work.

Understanding your audience helps you create and deliver your content to the right readers. Sometimes, your target audience might not be that obvious. Therefore, consider conducting market research for your blog. You can use tools like Facebook Audience Insights or Buyer Persona to do that.

A technique you can use to create your content strategy is to create a content pillar and write your blog posts around it. For example, “starting a blog” can act as a content pillar. Some blog posts under this pillar can be “How to start a blog and make money,” “How to create a beautiful blog,” “How to write a blog post fast,” etc. In short, a content pillar helps keep your blog focused and help you generate content ideas.

You can read more about content marketing plans at How to Develop a Content Strategy.

Next, create an editorial calendar.

An editorial calendar is a regular publishing schedule that will keep you organized and gradually help you create a writing habit. By setting an editorial calendar, you set yourself and also your readers the expectations of when your new posts will be coming out and what they will be about. It is essentially a way to create consistency, and just like any business, consistency is the key to your success.

There are many tools that can help you easily create an editorial calendar. Trello is one of the few free services which will not only help you create your schedule but also help organize your work and manage your team in case you have one.

First, signing up for Trello and go to your home page.

Select “Create a board” to get started. A board is an area that helps you manage all your work. You can also choose a ready-made template to quickly set up your board.

There will be a lot of stuff popping up. However, for now, you only need to pay attention to lists, cards, and power-ups.

• Lists: A list is a collection of ideas. They can also represent different stages of your work. You can always add a new list to your board by clicking “Add another list.”
• Cards: A card contains information about an idea. You can add a new card to a list by clicking “Add a card.” To include more details to the card, simply click on the card you have created.
• Power-ups: A power-up is a plugin that adds more functionality to your board, such as Callendar, Map, Chat, etc. You can only add one power-up in the free version of Trello. To add a power-up to your board, simply click on the “Show menu” button in the top right corner, then click Power-Ups. Select a power-up that you want to add to the board and click “Add.”

For blogging, a typical Trello board will contain three lists: To Do, Doing, and Done. Dividing your board into three lists helps you better keep track of all of your work.

The To-Do list will contain all the posts you are planning to write and publish. In the example image above, the list contains some cards like “How to start blogging” or “What is a blog.”

The cards’ description should include important factors, such as the targeted keywords, categories, related resources, and some notes if you wish. You can label the card to indicate how important it is. Also, set the due date to keep track of your schedule.

The Doing list will contain posts that you are currently working on. Simply drag a card from the To-Do list to a Doing list.

Similarly, The Done list includes posts which you have done writing.

If you are the owner of a team, consider adding another list named “In Review” between the “Doing” and “Done” list. That way, you have a chance to review blog posts before actually publishing them.

To better visualize your publishing schedule, you can add the “Schedule” power-up to your board.

After installing the power-up, just click on “Calendar” near the “Show Menu” button. It will let you see all your work in a calendar manner.

For the complete Trello guide, visit the link: Trello 101.

That’s pretty much everything you need to create an editorial calendar for your blog.

Alternatively, you can use Google Sheets and Google Calendar to keep track of your writing routine.

Finally, treat your blog like a real business.

It is not redundant to stress this again and again. If you want to be successful with blogging, treating your blog like a real business is indispensable.

Before you write a blog post, set up necessary tools, do research, determine your goal, plan out what you will be writing about, which keywords you will be using, how competitive those keywords are, which monetization method you will be using, and the list goes on. In that way, you have the opportunity to analyze the result of your post, understand what you do wrong and right, learn from your failure, and make it better.

You should also try to build your own brand. It isn’t in your outstanding domain name or your beautiful logo. It’s in the unique value you will bring to your readers. Try to create the difference between you and other bloggers. Find what you can do better than others, and focus on it.

Additionally, focus on building credibility as much as possible. You should understand the limitations of what you can do and don’t promise what you cannot do. It will be a vital weapon for your evergreen success.

Conclusion

It can feel a bit overwhelming if it’s your first time starting a blog. There are a lot of things to do and learn.

But like anything in the world, consistency is the key. If you invest in enough time and effort, once day, blogging can change your life for the better.

Remember to treat your blog like a real business. In that way, your success will come much sooner.

Useful Resources

• Blogs, Blogging, Blog Posts, And Bloggers: Have a general look at blogging and how to make money from it.
• How search engine works: Understanding what happens when you type something in Google Search can be a big advantage in keyword researching.

FAQs

Or you know what it is, but don’t exactly understand why there are so many people trying so hard to create a fantastic blog. Is it merely because they enjoy doing it, or is it for something more?

This blog post (Yes! you are on a blog!) will explain everything you need to know about blogging, why it is such a popular subject, and how people actually make money from it.

What is a blog? – Blogs, Blogging, Blog Posts, and Bloggers definition

“A blog is regular records of your thoughts, opinions, or experiences that you put on the internet for other people to read .”

Cambridge Dictionary

Blogs

A blog, in short, is an online journal. The content of a blog is varied, ranging from opinions, news, stories to tutorials.

In the past, most people wrote blogs solely for fun or for sharing and gathering opinions on a specific topic. Nowadays, many entrepreneurs use blogs as useful tools to market products or services, thus turning them into online businesses.

Blogging

Blogging is the activity of writing blogs. Because many websites provide excellent blogging-related tools and services, everyone can now start blogging anytime.

Like almost any job in the world, it takes time and effort to be good at blogging, especially for the purpose of marketing. The reason is that writing new and engaging content for advertising requires a lot of knowledge, not only about the products and services but also the skills necessary to write and maintain an excellent blog.

Additionally, as the popularity of blogging grows stronger each passing day, tons of new content is produced every day. People can easily find popular blogs by typing a few simple words in a search engine, making it even harder for a new blog to prevail.

Blog posts

In a way, a blog post is like a Facebook post, and a blog can be seen as a Facebook homepage.

Similar to the relationship between the Facebook post and the Facebook homepage, a blog contains one or many posts organized in reverse chronological order. Thus, readers are informed of the latest news.

Bloggers

A blogger means, as you might have guessed, someone who writes blogs.

There are probably millions of bloggers nowadays whose purpose is varied, from hobbies to marketing products to improving their public presence.

Because bloggers can be anyone, the information presented in blog posts is dependent on one’s knowledge or one’s wish. Therefore it is subjective. Everyone should see blog posts as opinions, not concrete evidence.

The differences between blogs and websites, blog posts and website pages

Plenty of people might be confused between a blog and a website, and there are good reasons for that. 

A blog, at its core, is a part of a website.

The confusion stems from the fact that many websites are devoted entirely to blogging, for instance, blog.google. The sole purpose of these websites is to update the latest news, stories, or opinions for readers. Therefore, when referring to these types of sites, people usually call them blogs.

Nowadays, websites often include a blog page as a means of updating the latest news on their products or services. Thus, when comparing a blog and a website, people are actually talking about the differences between a blog-devoted site and a traditional one.

Unlike a traditional website that updates content occasionally and focuses more on showcasing products or services, a blog informs readers with news or stories frequently. It also allows people to comment or share their thoughts or opinions, making it more dynamic than a traditional one.

It is important to note that a media website like Forbes or BBC cannot be considered a blog, although they update even more frequently than a blog-devoted one. As said earlier, a blog is dependent entirely on the owner’s knowledge or will, making it nowhere as objective as a media website.

So is this site a blog or a traditional website? Although this site has many static pages, such as the homepage or the about us page, the website’s primary focus is still to provide readers with additional knowledge as frequently as possible. Therefore it is a blog.

Congratulation! You now know the difference between blogs and traditional websites, but how about blog posts and website pages?

A blog post, at its core, is a part of a web page. Again, When comparing blog posts and web pages, people are talking about the differences between a blog-post-devoted page and a traditional one. The comparison for these two is pretty much the same as for blogs and websites. So there is no need to go over all of that again.

Why do people write blogs?

Numerous companies nowadays, especially big ones, equip themselves with a blog in one form or another.

One of the reasons is that they want to keep customers informed about their products and services. Updating news about their business frequently signals that they genuinely care about what they are doing. It significantly improves the companies’ public image, which in turn creates trust between them and their target audience.

Another key reason lies in the fact that search engines (like Google) love fresh content. Updating content regularly creates an opportunity for websites to be ranked higher, thus driving in more organic traffic.

For individual bloggers, aside from those who just want to write blogs for fun, the purpose might be a little bit different.

In the case of companies, their blog’s primary focus is more inclined to improve brand images. Individual bloggers, on the other hand, usually blog to indirectly (or sometimes directly) market one or more products or services. Of course, they have to offer valuable knowledge for readers first before thinking about the advertising part.

In either case, blogs are a powerful method to build a strong relationship with their target audience and a useful tool for marketing.

How do bloggers make money?

There are various ways for bloggers to make money. Let’s go into detail what they are and how much bloggers can make from them.

Displaying ads

Displaying ads is probably the most common way to make money for websites, not just for blogs. It’s perhaps the easiest way to start earning your first few dollars from blogging.

The steps it takes to start displaying ads are also relatively simple. First, sign up for an ads network, for example, Google AdSense, Mediavine, or AdThrive. Then, choose a place on your website to show up the ads. Next, write content to attract people. Finally, when someone clicks on the ads on your blog, you make money.

Mediavine and AdThrive often pay more for ads than Google AdSense. However, they might need a website to have thousands of regular visitors before being able to join their network.

Sounds simple enough, right? The steps are that easy, except that making a substantial amount of money from displaying ads alone is hard. A blog probably needs hundreds of thousands of visitors per month to start making a real deal of money.

It is also crucial to note that many huge websites decide to annihilate ads entirely. Instead, they focus more on other creative methods to make money. One reason is that ads are not as nearly as profitable as other sources of income. Furthermore, they are usually a significant factor that interrupts the reader’s experience, which can hurt those other sources.

Sponsored posts

Sponsored posts are a type of advertisement, but they usually look just like typical articles.

Although the purpose is more or less the same, sponsored content is less intrusive than displaying ads since the writers ofter orchestrate them in a way that fits into the theme of their website.

How to find a sponsor for your website? You might ask. Unless you are a famous blogger, you might have to reach out to relevant brands by yourself via email. Then, ask them if they want to have a post featuring their products.

In general, sponsored posts are a good source of income that you should consider. Not only can you make a decent amount of money from the posts, but you can also make your website look less “advertising.”

Affiliate marketing

Affiliate marketing is the process of promoting a product or service and earning commissions when a person buys that product or uses that service.

At a glance, affiliate marketing appears at the same form as sponsored content, which is a blog post. The primary difference between the two is that bloggers usually get a one-time payment to write a featured article for sponsored content. In contrast, in the case of affiliate marketing, bloggers put referral links into their blog posts. Whenever someone buys products through those links, they get commissions.

In short, affiliate marketing is a combination of displaying ads and sponsored posts. Since it inherits strengths from both, it is considered one of the best choices to start making money and create passive income.

One of the most established affiliate marketing programs is Amazon Associates. With millions of products to promote, anyone with relevant blogs can sign up for the program and earn money with every qualifying purchase through their affiliate links.

So, how does the affiliate link work?

The affiliate link contains codes that help keep track of all sorts of information, such as the name of the affiliates (people who join affiliate marketing programs), the products customers buy, etc.

In the case of Amazon’s affiliate marketing program, when a customer clicks through the affiliate link, if he/she purchases a product with the 1-Click feature, or adds the product to the shopping cart and buys it later (within 89 days), the affiliate earns commissions.

Membership exclusive content

If your website has useful, regularly updated, and unique blog posts, you can restrict people from being able to read them freely. Only when they join the membership program will they get unlimited access to all those exclusive content.

The membership model is probably one of the challenging ways to earn money from blogging. Since producing unique content is very, very time-consuming. Furthermore, few people are willing to pay to read online articles.

Having said that, if you somehow manage to create a successful membership program, it can be much more valuable than any other income source.

Selling online courses

Online courses are another popular source of income for bloggers.

Blogs in this situation are often used to provide readers with some basic knowledge on specific topics. Then when people want to understand them at a deeper level, online courses come in to save the day.

Creating a quality online course requires a lot of advanced knowledge. Furthermore, bloggers might have to establish some sort of public image first before someone starting to care about their courses.

Others

There are many other sources of income that you could take into consideration, such as selling books, EBooks, couching, or selling freelance services.

Before deciding which methods are suitable for you, you should understand which content your website focuses on. Next, research similar blogs to figure out the best sources of income for your own need.

How much money can bloggers make?

Before answering this question, let’s take a look at some of the top bloggers.

The Savvy Couple

The website is founded by Kelan and Brittany Kline. In May 2019, they made $43,547 in that month alone, which is quite a significant number. You can check out the report here: The savvy couple income report in May 2019.

In less than three years, they paid off their $25,000 in student loan debt, grow The Savvy Couple into an online business, and they were able to quit their jobs.

Two Wandering Soles

Two Wandering Soles is a travel blog that is founded by a couple named Katie and Ben. They focus on sharing their travel experience and giving practical tips and advice on saving money. In March 2019, they made $14,179 according to their report Two Wandering Soles income report in March 2019.

Let’s Reach Success

Let’s Reach Success is another successful blog that is founded by Lidiya. According to her June 2020 income report, she made $4000 from various sources, including Mediavine Ads, sponsored content, online courses, and affiliate marketing. Take a quick look at the report here: Let’s Reach Success income report in June 2020.

DollarSprout

DollarSprout is a financial advice website founded five years ago by Jeff and Ben. They are among one of the most successful bloggers out there. In February 2019, they made a total revenue of $167,390. Crazy number, right? The interesting bit is that they made almost $0 from DollarSprout in their first year. And here they are now, making a six-figure revenue consistently from the blog every month.

You should check out their report. It is comprehensive and transparent in terms of expenses and earnings: Dollar Sprout income report in January and February 2019.

As listed above, some bloggers make $4000 per month or much lower; others can make $167,390 or much higher. If you are a beginner, chances are you would earn little to no money in your first few months. However, with enough time, effort, and the right monetization methods, you can expect to make a decent amount of money out of blogging. It all depends on your niche, strategies, and your consistency.

How to start a blog

Now you understand what a blog is and the benefits that blogging can bring in. It’s time for you to take action!

Starting a blog has the potential to improve your life significantly. It doesn’t take much time to get into, and once you get the hang of it, it can become a passive source of income or even your main income stream.

If you are ready to start your own successful blog, click the link below to learn more.

Start a blog successfully: The most comprehensive guide.

Conclusion

Nowadays, blogging is an essential activity for any companies that want to improve their online presence and brand image.

From a simple hobby into a full-fledged business, blogging has changed a lot since the first time it appeared.

Starting a blog might seem a little bit daunting. Still, with the right guidance and tactic, you can start your own blog, turn in into a full-time business and start making money just like any other business in the world.

Useful Resources

• BlueHost: One of the best web hosting services that can help bring your blog online in no time.
• WordPress.org: The most popular CMS (Content Management System) to create and manage your blog.

FAQs