How To Start a Blog – Forbes Advisor

Taking one step at a time helps take the confusion out of starting and monetizing a blog

Blogging is a lot of hard work. Even doing what you love takes time and effort. While blogs are relatively inexpensive to start monetarily, your time investment can be significant. Taking the time to create a plan early helps avoid pitfalls that cost even more time and could damage community-building.

1. Pick a Niche

There’s a big difference between casting a wide net and throwing spaghetti against a wall to see what sticks. Even if you have multiple areas of expertise, each blog needs a focus. You might later wind up creating a family of blogs, but each needs to appeal to a definable audience and brands if you want to try for sponsorships.

Reasons To Start a Blog

A great blog requires a great topic, but it also requires staying motivated. Examining your motivation to blog can help prevent it from becoming a slog later on if you’re only in it for the money. Building a fun side hustle or a full-time income blogging are far from the only reasons to start a blog.

Common reasons to start blogging include:

Having a creative outlet
Feeling connected to others by sharing experiences
Trying to influence public opinion
Building a personal brand to promote existing work
Teaching a skill or hobby to others
Creating a record of events—a digital diary of sorts
Practicing writing for an audience

Knowledge and Passion for the Blog Topic

If your blog niche is fueled by personal knowledge and passion for the topic, you generally have a better chance of building a community and creating a successful blog. You don’t have to be perfect at any of it, but the authenticity and passion shine through and connect with audiences.

Competition

Regardless of why you started blogging, when it comes time to try and make a little cash from it, you’ll need to know your competition. Research how many other bloggers are covering your topic, what kind of content they publish, what their website looks like and if there are any big names already out there that you must compete with. Niches with less competition are sometimes easier to break into, build a community and monetize.

2. Plan Monetization

The monetization plan you choose, that is, how you hope to make money from your blog, will determine the content you make and where you publish your content. Because of that, it’s a good idea to at least roughly plan monetization methods before starting your blog.

How To Make Money With Your Blog

There are a lot of different business models for blogging and vlogging. Some work almost exclusively from built-in social media ad programs that depend on traffic levels, others build exclusive sponsorship relationships with a specific brand and still others use their blogs to sell subscriptions to gated content such as fitness tutorials.

Which features you’ll need from your blogging platform will depend on what type of monetization you want to use. Ads and affiliate links are the simplest, but gated content and sales of any sort require payment processors and checkout e-commerce features.

Common monetization methods include:

Affiliate links and ads
Ads
Social media built-in monetization features
Brand sponsorships
Custom app subscriptions
Gated content
Digital product sales such as printables and e-books
Subscriber-only newsletters
Direct merchandise (merch) sales, often branded

Blog Monetization Platforms

For bloggers, monetization platforms save a lot of effort and give you access to brands and audiences who might not give you the time of day otherwise. The two biggest categories are ad networks and affiliates.

Ad network programs such as Google AdSense allow you to sign up to have ads placed on your website. Ads are placed based on your traffic and topic. However, while easy to set up, low-traffic websites attract the lowest-quality ads. Ads such as “one weird trick” or “new law for drivers in (viewer state)” bid pennies for ad placements and are used to fill in anywhere there’s a cheap unused spot.

Affiliate advertising gives you more control over your ads. While you can go directly to a brand to set up an affiliate relationship, most affiliate advertising is handled by affiliate aggregators. These affiliate platforms manage affiliate programs for hundreds of brands and getting started usually just requires filling out a bit of “about you” data and applying to the brands you are interested in.

Two of the biggest affiliate groups are CJ (formerly Commission Junction) and ShareASale.

I’ve personally used both and never had any issues with payouts.

3. Get Your Blog Online

The bare basics of how to get a blog online is create content and upload it to a platform. However, as with most things worth doing, there’s a lot of nuance and surrounding steps involved in getting those two main items done.

Pick a Platform

Where your blog will call home is important. You can supplement content elsewhere, but you need a primary spot online to act as a hub and host the bulk of your monetization efforts.

The main choices for where your blog will live are social media, a video platform such as YouTube, a third-party publishing platform such as Medium or a stand-alone hosted blog website. Each one has pros and cons, and different ones work better for different goals and styles.

Whichever platform type you choose, whether it’s one of the reigning best blogging platforms, a budget-saving free blog system or an underdog, match the features as closely to your specific needs as possible.

For example, if you want to offer on-demand gated video workout tutorials, you’ll need to look at a website builder, CMS or a video platform with that option. Likewise, monetizing by brand sponsorship may work on social media, but you can’t place Google ads as you could on your own website.

For a website blog, you’ll need a hosting package. Many prefer a website builder with blogging features, such as Wix offers, because it is hosting and blogging all for one cost. However, WordPress is still the reigning blogging champ and offers more flexibility in hosting and customization. Just keep in mind you’ll need separate WordPress hosting.

Register a Domain Name

Whether you set up a full blog website or work through a third-party platform, registering a custom domain name helps your personal brand recognition and credibility. It also protects the name from being taken by someone else, even if you don’t have a stand-alone website yet. For a blog website, you’ll absolutely need to register a custom domain name as part of setting up hosting.

Many of the best website hosts offer first-year free domain names, but renewal costs may be inflated. All reputable hosts allow you (on packages allowing a custom domain name) to point a domain name you register with a third-party domain registrar without needing to actually transfer the domain to the host.

Customize Your Blog

Regardless of platform, customize the look as much as possible. For social media and other third-party platforms that are often limited to a few color choices, you can include your profile text and an image or two. For a full-fledged hosted blog, your choices are nearly limitless.

Start by picking what pages to include. Even blogs can have (and usually have) supporting pages such as about us, contact us, legally required disclaimer pages, gated content, promotional free digital download samples and, of course, your blog.

Next, you’ll choose a theme that supports the pages you want to use and customize the look of your theme. Adjust layouts, colors, images, fonts and even sort orders for your blog posts to make it reflect you and your blog topic well.

As part of customizing your theme, you’ll connect any plugins or activate specific features you need, such as e-commerce features for an online merch store or paywalls for gated content.

With regard to legal announcements, remember that being online doesn’t free you from laws; it often makes you subject to more regulations, such as international laws enforced due to treaties. Check with your local Small Business Administration office to get help ensuring you meet legal requirements or a referral to a lawyer who can help.

4. Add Content

Content is king in the blogging world. While personal charisma helps build communities, your content is what keeps the monetization flowing long term. Content includes text posts, photos, videos and even reposting old content. There are no set rules on tone or style; the only rule you must follow is staying within the law, and that includes honoring copyrights and trademarks.

How Much Content Do I Need To Start a Blog?

While I personally recommend having several posts before launching, you don’t have to have a ton of content. The point is to keep people coming back. That said, I do always recommend creators keep at least several posts in reserve in case something happens to disrupt your creation schedule.

How Long Should My Blog Posts Be?

Blog posts should be long enough to make readers happy they read it. There’s no magic blog post word count that equals success. Search engines don’t really care about word count as much as what keywords you use.

That said, content agencies pushed 2,000-word minimums for years so they could get enough keywords into articles for decent placement in search engine result pages (SERP).

The rise of mobile devices and social media took the legs out from under that trend, and typical word counts for blogging have been dropping to 300 to 1,500 words, depending on the topic and depth of the article.

For example, recipe blogs no longer need to put long blocks of text before the actual recipe. A short introduction paragraph with keywords such as the recipe name, main ingredient, cooking method and which meal it works best for is perfectly fine.

Set a Schedule

Set up a blogging schedule to keep fans hyped up. Randomly posting whenever you feel like it slows down traffic, reduces community-building and can negatively influence the possibility of brand deals. I generally recommend posting no less than once a month, although some topics may allow weekly posting.

As a one-person business, you are often at the mercy of illnesses or outside influences, such as weather (if you have an outdoor topic), that can affect creation schedules. Keeping several reserve posts helps to give you a safety net.

5. Set Up Monetization Channels

The first step in setting up most monetization channels is to set up accounts with different platforms such as Google AdSense, affiliate platforms or direct affiliates with brands. You’ll also need to install any plugins for features such as gated content. From there, the exact setup mostly depends on the type of monetization and your platform.

After you’ve signed up for an ad network, setting up monetization is usually as simple as pasting a bit of code in sections of your blog. However, the process will vary by platform. Be sure to pick ad placements where they are easily visible but don’t interfere with viewing your content, as that interference creates a poor user experience.

E-Commerce Features

If you are using merch sales, dropshipping, subscriptions or even digital downloads, you’ll need to set up an e-commerce store. A CMS such as WordPress will have options for different e-commerce plugins, and most website builders offer e-commerce features as well.

Setup will vary based on what you are selling and the fulfillment method, but at the very least, you’ll need a checkout system and a payment processor.

For gated content, you may need an additional plugin or integration to allow you to place password protections on certain pages of your blog and control how many times digital downloads can be downloaded.

Affiliates

Affiliate marketing can come in the form of links that include a tracking code, or a designed ad with graphics. Most brands provide some graphics if you want to use the ad version. Add affiliate links to text in your content or place the ads in content or in sidebars on your website blog.

Be sure to pick affiliate links that make sense for your audience.

However, remember that there are rules around affiliate links. In most cases, you need a disclaimer somewhere near the affiliate content letting people know about the affiliate relationship.

Brand Sponsorships

Direct brand sponsorships, where a specific brand pays you to create content related to its product, probably won’t be available to you until you grow your audience significantly. However, you can set the stage for that avenue by creating a contact page for brands as part of your website.

It’s also a great idea to research what other influencers in your niche are charging for those services so you can make a few turnkey packages to offer brands. Also, while I’m a huge opponent of working for exposure, there may be times when posting in exchange for a product sample works for you, depending on the brand’s prestige and what the product is.

Pro Tip

Don’t fall for the numerous pet and fashion “brand ambassador” scams on social media. These seek to convince you to buy a product for a discount if you talk about it.
The reality is that, in the best case, the products are often garbage, and the scammers rely on desperate small influencer purchases as their business sales model. In the worst case, it’s a phishing or identity theft ring where the scammers take your personal information and credit card to go on spending sprees.

Originally Appeared Here