How To Start A Blog And Make Money Online

The Pros

The Cons

The second option for the more tech-savvy is setting up your blog site on a web hosting platform like SiteGround.

SiteGround offers access to the free WordPress platform which will automatically install once you have created an account with them.

To begin the process, select a hosting plan that suits your needs. At the time of writing, the StartUp plan was discounted to $5.99/month – that is a 70% savings.

Head over to SiteGround for their latest offer

Once your account is created, Select “Websites” from the top menu,

Then select “New Website” from the top right corner.

If you purchased a domain through Namecheap already, then select the middle option "Existing Domain"

Enter your domain, and then select Continue

Select Start New Website

Select WordPress or WordPress + WooCommerce (if you plan on selling your own products from your site)

Enter your login details and select Continue

Add any extras you want and select Finish

In a few moments, your website will be created and then you begin with configuring your site.

Hint: Be sure to configure your SSL on your site before selecting your theme, as this will alter how your site operates and requires some work to fix if you already have created content on your blog site.

Next, select a theme for your website.

There are a number of free themes that are available from WordPress e.g. Twenty-Twenty, or you can purchase themes via word press and third-party vendors e.g. Verity Pro.

The theme you select will apply to the entire blog site giving it the same look and feel for each page.

Once the theme has been applied to your website, next you need to select which plugins you require to secure and improve the functionality of your website.

The security plugins (must-haves) are self-explanatory, they will protect your blog site against malware and malicious attack.

Our recommended Plugins are Jetpack and SiteGround Optimizer.

You will require plugins for Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) (a must-have) which I will talk about a little later. SEO is how to get your content ranking on Google, so that more people can click on your content and purchase the affiliated products that you are promoting. Our recommended Plugin is Yeost.

Word press offers limited, but functional, graphical editing for your blog posts.

If you want an editor (nice-to-have) that is easier to manage and has the capabilities of creating professional styled pages, then we recommend Thrive Suite.

Once these plugins have been purchased (some are free) and installed on your website, you can then create the content for your particular blog posts and publish them for the world to consume.

For my full list of plugins that I use on my web-hosted sites – click here.

The pros of using web hosting are as follows

Pros

Cons

Whether writing your first blog post or the 100th blog post you should follow this process whenever beginning to write an article.

It is no use writing about something that no one is searching for. Duh!

If no one is searching for it, then no one will be reading your post.

The article will be doomed from the start.

Amongst the many criteria Google uses in its algorithm to determine which article is going to rank on their site from position 1 through to infinity, the following metrics are probably the most important to consider when writing your blog posts.

These are

The keywords for your article are basically the topic you are writing about.

Keywords and Domain Authority are 2 metrics that go hand in hand.

When you start your first blog site, it is going to have a domain authority of 0.

Don’t worry we all start there.

Google will automatically rank articles higher in search results from sites it deems as “authoritative”, and the keywords they use can be shorter (known as short-tail keywords – generally the majority of searches will be for short-tailed keywords).

Let me give an example

If you were in the parenting niche, sub-niche babies and you wanted to write an article about “The best pull-ups”, it would be difficult for your article to rank on page 1 with a domain authority of 0.

Huggies, Pampers, and other well-known brands would easily rank for an article on this topic. This affords them the opportunity to be “generic” in the keywords they go after.

For your site to rank on the topic of “Best pull-ups” you would have to go after a long-tail keyword (usually fewer searches on this exact keyword), maybe something like this “The best pull-ups for babies that suffer from colic”.

As this is a lesser searched term, when someone does search for it and if your site is one of the few that have an article talking about this specific searched topic, your site and article will rank high in the search results.

There are numerous keyword tools available in the market that will help you in identifying which keywords you should be writing about to rank on Google.

When selecting a keyword to write about there are a couple of things you should consider.

Keyword difficulty refers to how much competition there is for a keyword and by implication, how difficult it will be for you to rank for this keyword. The lower the keyword difficulty score, the better chance you have of ranking on page one for Google for your particular article.

Go after keywords with a KD of 10 or less, to begin with.

Generally, domains with a higher domain authority should be able to rank on page 1 for keywords with a higher difficulty.

Search volume is how often the keyword is searched on Google.

Select a keyword that has a low search volume value

Even if the search volume for a particular keyword is set to zero (0), know that someone is searching for that particular keyword, and it is still worth your while to write articles about those particular keywords in order to rank for them.

The next metric that you should pay attention to is domain authority (DA).

This will identify how highly regarded your domain name is within the Google algorithm. The higher the ranking the more authoritative Google will view your domain.

When selecting keywords, look at the domain authority of competitors that rank on page one for the keyword you wish to write about. If the DA of your competitor is within 10 points of your domain's DA, then write a better article and you should be able to have your post appear on page 1 too.

By doing this, you know you are leveling the playing field and increasing your chances of making it onto page 1 of the Google search results.

As your domain authority increases, you can go after the keywords that have a higher KD and SV

Once you know what you are going to be writing about, you need to make sure you are using that keyword throughout your article.

Make sure the keyword is:

Using the keyword frequently and naturally throughout your article, helps the Google algorithm know what your article is about.

Remember that you are writing for human consumption. Someone on the other side of the computer or smartphone will actually be reading the words in your article.

Make it as easy and as enjoyable for them to read as possible.

Having an article that is readable is important for keeping the individual engaged, which will help with your ranking within Google.

Here are a few tips that you should consider when writing your article:

If you want people to read your entire article, assuming the content is good and relevant, you will want to present it in a way that is easy to read and has enough "breaks" to keep your readers attention.

Here are a few tips

Why is site speed important?

For Google to remain the number #1 search engine, it needs to provide reliable, accurate, and speedy answers to the questions people search for.

Google does not want to send people to a site that is slow to load.

After all, in 2022, humans apparently have the attention span of a goldfish!

Yikes!

With this in mind, Google takes the speed of your website and your blog posts into account when it determines the ranking of articles (known as Google Core Web Vitals).

With most of the website consumption occurring through a smartphone these days, Google places emphasis on how quickly an article will load on a smartphone.

Here are a few tips on how to get your post loading fast:

These items are more techie but will improve the performance and deliverability of your website to your reader.

And folks that is what it takes to start your own blog site. Don’t get caught up on all the details, or if you don’t know everything there is to know about the topic (after all you are not Google😊).

Start at the beginning and take it one step at a time. Most of the steps are a one-time-only kind of deal. Once completed, you won’t have to do them again.

When it comes to writing articles, you will get into a grove and the more you write and practice, the better and faster you will become.

The website does not have to be perfect, just start and fix the problems as they arise.