How to Start a Money Making Blog: Ultimate 13 Steps Summary
When I started blogging caluyadesign.com, I wished that I could know all of the steps on how to start money making blog, how the process of it flowed.
You can read all about “how to start” kinds of articles from other blogs, but I could not find “flow chart” on how I could manage to start monetized blog efficiently.
Well, here it is. I have put together a “flow chart” for you to look through, based on my experience with my blog, which generated 5K per month on its 5th month.
Let’s get started!
This article may contain affiliate link. Please read more details from HERE
Step 1. Decide your Niche
Time to brainstorm WHAT your blog to be about, and HOW you want to present it.
Pick something you love or interested in, otherwise you will be stuck with writing something that you don’t even enjoy. That can cause you to stop working on your blog.
I myself tried to do a blog on health topic (because of its high demands and high ads pay rate), but on its 3rd month I got so sick of it. After all I wasn’t really particularly healthy person, what kind of healthy person have 3-4 cheat days a weeks?
Honestly, building money making blog takes time, effort and patient. You’d have to learn, research and write about the topic daily bases.
Let’s do what you love!
Step 2. Pick Blog Title & Domain
Once you decide your blog niche, you can now think about what your blog will be called.
Most of the time, blog title & domain name will be the same
(If the blog title is “My Creative Life,” then the your website URL wil be http://mycreativelife.com ).
Try come up with a title that are:
Fairly Simple – visitors will be able to remember easily
Self-explanatory– visitors can have good guess what your blog is about
Not too narrowed– better to have “ Valentine Craft Ideas” than “Seasonal Craft Ideas”, in case if you want to blog about articles on different holidays other than Valentine’s day, etc.
Check if your domain is available from here:
Step 3. Get domain & Reliable Server
Was your domain available?
Then you better hurry and register it under your name!!
Growing number of bloggers every year is making it hard to find a domain name that best suit you. Even if you find it available now, it does not mean it will be tomorrow.
The key to having successful blog is to have self-hosting blog with your own domain.
WHY you can’t use free website offer?
Because if you want to have your blog monetized and have display ads by Google Adsense or others, you are required to have a blog/website with proper domain name.
Simply put, if your blog URL address says something like these:
http://lovelycraftlife.wix.com
http://craftingjourney.sitebuilder.com
THEN Google Adsence will reject your application. You don’t want that to happen.
You can get server & domain all ready and set up with BLUEHOST with just few clicks, and they are super reliable because their customer service is on point. You can start your blog with only $3.95.
It might be good idea to get your domain name registered for now. You can do it from HERE.
4. Set up WordPress
Once you are done setting up hosting services, it’s time to launch your blog with WordPress.
What is WordPress you may ask.
It is the easiest and most powerful blogging and website content management system there is.
I strongly recommend you to build your blog with WordPress.
Why? Because:
– Has HUGE collection of FREE blog templates (called themes).
– Has EVEN MORE collection on PAID blog templates (usually more customizable & comes with customer services).
– Many tutorials & blog articles on how to use WordPress to find solutions or answer to your questions.
– Easy to find someone who can take over the blog maintenance
If you’d like to educate yourself, you can read: “WordPress for Bloggers 101: Easy Guide that will save you SO MUCH TIME”
5. Design Your Blog
This is the fun part- at least it is for me.
With WordPress, you can simply pick a blog design, and they are called “theme.” There are literally thousands of WordPress themes out there, both free and paid.
Deciding a theme for your blog is like picking a dress from a huge shopping mall. It’ll get you excited, but it’s so hard to pick one. Themes are both available from WordPress dashboard and online (Creative Market, Envato, etc).
You can find plenty of good free themes via wordpress, but I like purchasing a well-built and highly customizable themes.
Powered by Creative Market
Powered by Creative Market
Too over whelmed?
No worries! If you want to avoid this process and let someone do the technical part, you can always hire freelancer from freelancer recruiting website such as Fiverr.com .
Usually you can find someone to set up your blog somewhere between $80-200. If you end up finding someone you like, then the person will be a big help when you want to re-design the website or add more widgets to your blog in the future.
6. Add your logo, headers.
Let me say one thing: Don’t try to be TOO perfect in this process.
This designing and branding process can be never ending story when you try to make “perfect” looking blog. I recommend you to go on Pinterest, look for some logo ideas.
There’s 3 ways to brand your blog:
1: Do It Yourself
you can design your own from scratch by using designing programs such as Adobe Illustrator or Adobe Photoshop.
You can start using these programs 7 days for free. To be honest, if you are going to take this blogging seriously and make money, you will need to be able to use these 2 programs. Making banners and images for social media marketing is a crucial part of blogging business. Consider getting yourself familiar with them.
2: Buy Pre-Designed Kit
If you already know how to use Illustrator and Photoshop, but you don’t know how to design, then I recommend you to look for pre-designed branding kits. With these kits, you can just add your blog title, and ta-da! You have well-designed logos and headers for your blog.
3: Hire a Freelancer
If you want, youcan just ask someone to do all of this.
There’s many graphic designer freelancers out there who are willing to work for you. Branding can be done between $30-100, and once you build a good relationship with the designer, you can continue to order marketing images, blog elements and such. Start looking for freelancers from HERE.
7. Create Pages
Now., it’s time to add required web pages to your blog.
-ABOUT US
-CONTACT
-PRIVACY POLICY & DISCLAIMER
Google Adsense requires these 3 pages, and without them they will reject your application.
8. Write Articles
Ok, now let’s start stock up your blog. Unfortunately, this process takes the most time.
When you are done prepping the foundation (blog designs & posts), your biggest and probably THE most important job is to fill your blog up with high quality contents.
Try writing 15-25 articles, before you promote your blog or apply to affiliate links. You need to make sure that you have enough content to draw visitors. You want to make sure to give good reasons for visitors to follow you & come back to your site.
Promoting your blog without articles is like opening up a shop without products to sell.
!!WARNING!!
Make sure your articles are “monetized blog appropriate.” Writing a wrong articles not only does not attract people, but also can harm your blog business.
9. Get your e-mail list created
You can get e-mail marketing set up while you are writing your initial articles, since you might want to do something different other than writing during this phase.
BUT DO MAKE SURE to set up e-mail list for your blog– even though you will be actively promoting your blog on social medias, e-mail is your best promoting method.
E-mail promotion advantages:
– 100% up to you what you writ
– Can freely promote your affiliate products & paid products
– High reach-out rate
– and most of all- no one can take the list away from you.
For bloggers, Convertkit e-mail marketing program is strongly recommended and highly rate among other professional bloggers.
You can try 14 tree trial from HERE
10. Apply to Display Ads
Once step 1- 9 is ready, it’s time to finally get your blog monetized.
Having display ads on your blog is the first and the most common way to earn passive income.
Google Adsense is the most popular choice among bloggers, however they are known for high rejection rate. You can have alternative choices such as Media.net (run by Yahho! Bing Network).
Once you reached more than 25K session per month, you can also apply MEDIAVINE, seems like many of the successful bloggers are shifting once they reach the required session counts.
Remember that displaying ads is a initial step to monetize your blog- you do not want to stop here. If you’d like to know more about why you do not want to sorely rely on display ads as a blogger, you can learn it all about it here.
11. Be active on Social media
You have your display ads all set up and have placed e-mail subscription sign-up form on your blog.
Congratulations, you are ready to start promoting your blog to the world!
But don’t be greedy and start ALL OF THE social network at once.
You need to pick 1 or 2 to start with, and focus on these platforms- because this social network marketing can be extremely tricky and frustrating sometimes.
Personally, I recommend you to start with Pinterest and Facebook.
You can read how I reached 15K Facebook Page likes withitn 5 months from HERE.
Also, how I promoted my blog on Pinterest and increased my daily viewers by 850% (257K to 3M) is HERE.
12. Write more articles
Blog is all set up, you are reaching out to the world and promoting your blog, every thing is going so well! Your first few months will be all about writing more articles and adding more contents to your blog.
Because simply put, more articles you share with the world, more traffic you get. How simple is that. If 1 article generate 50 page views a day, then having 5 articles generate more than 200 page views (although it’s not as simple, but you get the idea).
Remember, high quality contents bring more traffic and have more chance on going viral.Even though you need lots and lots of content, QUALITY wins over QUANTITY.
By writing more articles, you will start to get the sense of it and figure out your own style. Then, you can start to see what other possible ways to earn passive income.
13. Strategies other source of income
Remember that I said, do not rely sorely on display ads? Once you are gaining popularity on social medias and have good amount of articles, it might be a good time for you to consider to add multiple sources of income.
Let’s think: “What other source of income I can add to my blog? “
You can sign up for a affiliate program such as
-Amazon Associates
-Click Bank
–ShareASale (Cricut, Expression Vinyl, Crafty…craft related affiliate program)
But, most of all-
COME UP WITH YOUR OWN PRODUCT.
Treat your blog like it is your business. Think about what you can sell, what you can utilize and what potential risk that may hurt you in the future. replaying on display ads and affiliate links can not go on forever, and you never know when they end their program.
If you come up with your own product that you can sell on your own, or business strategies that does not involve others, then no one else can take that away from you.
Reach out for a stability.
In my case, even if display ads are for any reason disabled, I know I can still make income off by selling commercial licenses for my creations. I know for a fact NO ONE can take these away from me.
Be creative, and simulate every possible good & bad situation you can possibly think about. Take risks & yet keep educating yourself.
Learning never stops.
I hope this step-by-step flow chart lesson helped you and motivated you in any way to start your own blog! Like I said, if I could do it, you CAN do it. Just jump right in, and you’ll know what to do.
With our free 7-days e-mail course, we will send you step-by-step guide for you to follow on how to start your money making business, based on these steps you just read through.
We will go through A LOT MORE DETAIL on each topics, making it easier for you to follow!
Let’s get it started, and see how far you can push it!
YOU CAN DO THIS!
Resources:
To start set your blog with own domain with BlueHost: FROM HERE
WordPress themes & blog design kits from Creative Market: FROM HERE
Se up your e-mail marketing with ConvertKit: FROM HERE
Apply GoogleAdsense: FROM HERE
Apply Media.net : FROM HERE
Apply affiliate program ShareASale (recommended for crafters) : FROM HERE
You May Also Read….
Thank you for mentioning Mediavine as an option for monetizing websites through ads.
As publishers with our own websites, we believe that successful monetization is all about finding the balance between ad revenue and user experience and we would never sacrifice one for the other. This is why we set our threshold at 25k sessions a month. Below this number, the ad revenue you’d be able to earn isn’t worth the sacrifice in user experience that happens when ads are put on a site.
We’re here to answer any questions at publishers@mediavine.com.
Thanks again!
~Jenny, Mediavine Marketing Associate