In this post, I’m going to show you how you can earn money online by starting a blog. 
I often hear that blogging has become oversaturated and it’s hard to stand out.
Indeed in the last few years, millions of blogs have been created but 87% of these blogs aren’t taking the correct steps to stand out and make money online.
The truth is a simple WordPress blog is more than enough to start making money online but it has to be done the correct way.
The bloggers that are making $100.000 a month all started with a simple blog.
Most people that get into blogging fail because:
- They just throw spaghetti against the wall hoping it sticks
They don’t know if what they’re doing is right and they lose motivation. - They quit too early
People have unrealistic views about how long it’s going to take to make money with your blog.
It’s a shame because some of these blogs had the potential to succeed.
This article is meant to show you the process you have to go through to make money online so you won’t become part of the group that fails at blogging but a success story that keeps getting better.
I will also show you the exact steps you’re going to have to take to escape from the 87% group that won’t even make a dollar with their blog.
To take it even further. You’ll see me go through these 5 steps to create a simple niche blog.
I can’t guarantee you’ll be able to make $100.000/month because these are without doubt outliers but it is more than possible to have +$100 days if you’re patient and put in the work.
I have divided the whole process of starting a blog in 5 steps that can be done in a week.
It doesn’t matter how much experience you have with computers or creating websites to go through these steps.
The process I have laid out here is the same process I and hundreds of others have followed to create blogs that bring in money on a daily basis.
Use these steps as your starting point for creating your income-generating blog.
I also recommend this training program called Wealthy Affiliate to further develop your blogging business after you have read this post.
I have also added additional content that goes more in-depth and links to resources that’ll help with putting everything together.
What do you need before taking these steps?
Hosting, Domain name & Keyword Research Tool
Don’t worry I’ll set you up with these things for free.
A host provides you with a storage space where you can store all your content. This is especially important if you’re going to start a blog.
You’ll also need a domain name. Your domain name can be compared to the address of your house. It’s the way people can find your content.
For example, the domain name of this website is realdigitalsuccess.com.
Unlike a website that is being used as a greeting card with just 4 or 5 pages, a blog gets updated regularly with posts which means you’re going to need a lot of space to store your content.
Professional hosting often costs somewhere between the $30 – $50/month but I’m going to set you up with free hosting and a free domain name.
The training program I mentioned earlier has a free starters account that provides you with unlimited free hosting and 2 free domain names.
So before we start with the steps I’m going to assume that you already created a free starters account.
If you haven’t joined yet you can do that for free by clicking here.
The starters account also includes a keyword research tool that’ll give you 30 free searches.
Should you decide to go premium you’ll get unlimited searches, 15 free domain names, and space for 50 other domain names.
You’ll also get premium training and a lot of other features that’ll speed up the process of making money with your blog but for now, let’s just focus on getting started with your blog.
Now Let’s get into it!
Step 1: Pick a niche
This is the first and in my opinion the most important step in making money online. According to the Collins dictionary, this is the definition of a niche:
“…A niche in the market is a specific area of marketing which has its own particular requirements, customers, and products…”
Picking a specific niche to focus on will prevent you from becoming a jack of all trades that knows a little about everything.
Instead of that, you’ll become the go-to person for a specific audience.
It also helps with getting people back to your blog because they know what they can expect.
A niche will have a lot of influence on:
- How long it’ll take to start making money online.
- How much money you can make.
- If you’re able to succeed.
This is why I recommend you do some research before picking a niche.
How do you start your research?
I’d start with looking for niches in 3 categories:
- Your hobbies and things you know a lot about
My Examples: Basketball, Mobile Phones, Architecture - Interests that you know nothing about
My Examples: Podcasting, Piano, Speakers - Things that frustrate you and a lot of other people
My Examples: Bad phone battery, cooking after a long workday, cleaning bbq grill, etc.
For the sake of this post, I’m going with the niche “speakers”
How do you know if a niche is a good fit?
There are 3 things that determine if a niche is a good fit:
- Your interest in it (Would enjoy making content in this niche)
- The profitability of a niche (how high is its financial ceiling)
- How much competition a niche has
Your interest in the niche
How you know if you’re interested in making content in a particular niche doesn’t need to be explained so let’s go to the next step of evaluating your niche.
Figure out the profitability by doing keyword research
The profitability of a niche can be found by looking at the popularity of a niche and the products you can sell or promote.
The best way to find out how popular a particular niche is is by putting the phrase in a keyword research tool and look at how many people type this phrase into Google.
watch me do this right here:
The search volume will show you where the interest of people in that niche will be.
Speakers might be hard to rank for because you’re going to compete with a lot of other websites but “wireless speakers for tv” seems to be a good keyword for the blog.
Now I need to see if there are specific brands that pop-up in the list of keywords for “wireless speakers for tv”.
Three brands that came up in my search results are Bose and Sony, and Sonos.
I just pick the most popular one and sell or promote wireless speakers of that brand.
Related content:
Analyze your competition
You can find how many people you’re competing with also by using a keyword research tool but I’d also advise you to type your niche keyword into Google.
The websites on the first page of the search engine results are the ones Google thinks have the most valuable content for its users.
Study them and see what they have in common.
Use that and add your original flavor to it.
Related content:
Step 2: Create your headquarters, your command center, your website!
As the title said you can view your website as your headquarters for all your endeavors.
It’s the number 1 place people can go to see what you’re all about, what you stand for, and what you offer. There’s a lot of content out there that talks about making money online without a website, but I’d advise you not to do that.
It’s possible to make money without a website, but you’ll put an unnecessary handicap on yourself by doing that.
You can use platforms like Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, etc as a way to make money online, but in my opinion, they have their limitations.
With a website, you have full control of what you want to show your website visitors.
Creating a website has never been as easy as it is now. You can literally make a professional-looking website within 3 minutes.
Watch me create a website within 3 minutes right here.
After this, you’re going to have to get some essential free plugins. Read more about this in the recommended reading section of this step.
Recommended reading:
- WA Training: Building Your OWN Niche Website
- WA Training: Setting Up Your Website
- WA Training: Getting Your Site Ready for Search Engines
Step 3: Showing what you’re all about through the content you create!
Now that you have a fully functional website based on a profitable niche you’re going to have to focus on communicating with your niche.
Communication and trust are the most important things in selling products.
Content helps your audience understand who you are and why they should trust you.
Ever heard of the marketing rule of 7?
It’s a marketing rule that states that someone has to have been in contact with your brand at least 7 times before they’re able to connect with your brand.
This means until that 7th time, the chance is low that people are going to invest financially in a product you promote.
Every blog post you write, every podcast you record, every video you upload will help with this process.
This has to be done effectively though.
You’re going to have to create content based on which phase of the “buying process” your website visitors are in and connect them to the next phase with the rest of your content.
You’re mostly going to do this by doing keyword research for your content subjects with your keyword research tool.
You could also use another method and find keyword opportunities with Google Search Console but that’s a little too advanced for right now.
Recommended posts:
- WA Training: Creating Your Initial Website Content (Important!)
- WA webinar creating content that ranks (Premium)
Step 4. Build up your kingdom with Linkbuilding
You can have the most incredible content and helpful offers but if nobody knows it exists you won’t make any money this is why it’s important to let the world know that you exist.
The best way to do this is by ranking your content on search engines (Google, Yahoo, Bing) and getting the top spots on the first page.
Why do you need one of the top spots on the first page of search engines?
Here’s a graph that shows the percentage of visitors that click on each position on Google search result pages.
As you can see, most visitors go to the top 5 spots and if you’re ranked 11th or lower ( this is where the second page begins) you won’t get any exposure.
There’s this marketing joke about if you want to hide something where no one would look you should place it on the second page of Google.
Funny but very true.
The more authority your website has, the easier and faster it’ll be to get your content ranked high.
How do you increase the authority of your website?
There are a lot of ranking metrics that go into this but you do this mostly by creating high-quality content, having a fast website, and getting websites with high authority to link to you.
The higher the authority of the websites linking to you, the more your authority will increase.
This is where 99% of bloggers mess up.
They don’t have high authority websites linking to them.
Wealthy Affiliate can be a huge help in getting your first link from a website with high authority.
Currently, the wealthy affiliate website has a Moz Rank of 55 and a domain rating of 88 which means it’s in the top tier of websites.
As a Wealthy Affiliate member, you can get a link from Wealthy Affiliate by referencing your website in your personal blog on Wealthy Affiliate and placing your content on their feedback page to get feedback from other members.
By doing this, you already have something 99% of blogs on the internet don’t have and you can use this as a stepping stone to increase your authority.
Last, but not least.
I want to leave you with a few link building strategies from my friend link building expert Julian.
Related content:
Step 5. Start Your Blogging Journey!
With the help of the steps in this post and resources from Wealthy Affiliate I have shown you:
- How you identify a profitable niche in the market
- How to create a fully functional website dedicated to this niche
- How to find a product that you can sell/promote
- How I make the blog ready to get indexed by Google
- How I Lay out the foundation for creating blog posts
- How you can get your first link from a top tier website to boost my authority
From this point, you’re ready to start your blogging journey.
I have tried to give as much information as possible without overwhelming you.
This doesn’t mean you’re done learning.
The steps in this post merely function as a beginner’s guide to starting a blog that makes money.
That’s enough reading for today.
Start making your niche list like in step 1 and pick a possible niche you’re interested in.
If you have any questions feel free to leave them in the comments.
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I’ve always wanted to make a wedsite the information you gave will help thank you very much But when you choose a host is does it have to be wealthy affiliate or it can be someone different. Is there a reason why you chose wealthy affiliate is there benefits that only wealthy affiliate has that makes it better than other programs.
You could indeed choose other hosting services but I picked it mostly because it’s free.
In the past, I tried other hosts but it was always a hassle with paying and how much content I could store without upgrading to a higher package.
With Wealthy Affiliate, you get an all-in-one package that’s really cheap.
thanks a lot for sharing such an awesome review that is so chuck full of ideas on how to make money online, I must say you did an amazing job and putting up such an informative article it will go a long way to help a reallocate high rate of unemployment.. thanks for sharing I look forward to share it on my blog..
Hey evansese,
I’m glad to hear you liked the article. I hope it can help a lot of people to.
It’d definitely mean a lot to me if you shared it on your blog.
Thanks!
This is a really nice article. Starting a blog is not easy, most peopke get to start and the along the line they loose focus and give up. Your write up is really something every bloogeer should read cos i know a lot of people doing it the wrong way. My friend who was a blogger started well and then at some point ran out of contents and was just posting rondom things before he finally stoped. I will make sure to share this. Thank you.
Thanks for the kind words.
I hope it inspires your friend to get back into it. Even in 2020 its still a great way to make money online.
This was a great post you have written on starting a niche. I listen to you video and it gave me and idea. I will also listen to the video to refer with jay on how to rank. Thanks so much for sharing.
Hey Norman.
Good to hear it inspired you.
Jay’s webinars are great. Every time I am stuck I turn to his webinars because he’s got solutions for everything.
helllooo dear, wow what an amazing post you have here, it has been really helpful alot to me. i am glad i got to see these post, i really had no idea on how to create a website or start a blog not to even talk about making money from it, i am glad you shared some light on it, thanks alot for the info, i already saved these post so as to come back for future referencing
Hey Skuchmane.
It’s good to hear that you found the post helpful. If you ever have questions feel free to place them in the comment section and I’ll get back to you.
Great content you have provided about learning the basics in order to be an effective blogger. You have broken down the steps in a way that is easy to understand. Thank you.
Thanks, Joseph! I tried to make it as easy to consume as possible.