Starting a Blog: The Basics
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Blogs are everywhere nowadays. Most of the articles shared around on Facebook and Twitter are blog posts. Almost every business has a blog, even ones you wouldn’t consider needing them, like car detailing places. You hear more stories every day of people quitting their jobs or supplementing their income by starting a blog.
So what’s all the hype about? What good can blogs do for businesses? How do people make money with blogs? In this article, we’ll walk you through the purpose of blogs, how you can create one, and how you go about making money with it.
What’s the Purpose of Blogs for Businesses
Blogs serve many purposes for businesses that choose to launch them on their website. First, blogs help provide their customers with relevant and useful information. Whether you run an antique business, bicycle shop, garage, etc., you can think of useful information your customers will find interesting and compelling.
Secondarily, blogs help drive the traffic to your website. The more your content appeals to your target audience, the more traffic it will generate. Furthermore, the more they like the content, the more they’ll share it, bringing even more traffic.
Lastly, blogs help to increase business’s search engine rankings in a few ways. Consistently posting on a regular schedule shows Google and other search engines that you’re active on the website. It also gives you more opportunities to work in keywords so that you can rank on more search results pages.
How Do People Make Money with a Personal Blog
Personal blogs serve a different purpose (with some similarities) on the internet. They’re a good source of information, product reviews, recipes, and more. In order for people to be able to afford to devote so much time to maintaining a blog, they have to make some money with it. There are a couple of ways bloggers can do this.
1) Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate marketing involves a partnership between the blogger and a business. The blogger includes the business’s ads or works their links into their content. The blogger is then paid per subscription, click, or purchase, depending on the business and their policies.
2) Free Stuff
One of the perks of managing a blog is the potential of getting free stuff. You can get free samples, early releases, free hotel stays, and even free access to events. These are offered in exchange for reviews, event coverage, or travel articles of varying sorts.
3) Guest Posting
Guest posting works a couple of different ways; many blogs do guest posting only to boost traffic for the writer’s blog and the blog on which the article is being posted, but some pay for the content. Some bloggers will write articles for other blogs or even for print sources as a means of earning some extra money and boosting the traffic for their blog.
4) Selling the Blog
Many bloggers and developers will make blogs, boost their rankings, build a following, and then sell them to the highest bidder to move on to the next project.
They then push their articles (or distribute them) to get more views and engagements, generating more money for them.
How to Make a Blog
If this sounds like something you’d want to pursue there are a few things you need to know first.
Finding the Right Blogging Site
There are a few sites that allow you to purchase and claim domains and help you build your blog even if you don’t know a thing about coding. GoDaddy is pretty well-known, mainly due to their advertising campaign with Danica Patrick, but most people I know that have taken this route often switch to another blogging site after the first year.
Wix is super easy for beginners and extremely user-friendly. However, you might find that your customization options are extremely limited.
WordPress.com offers a paid version of their widely-used blog service, where you can purchase your own domain rather than being domain.wordpress.com. This service is limited for customization, much like Wix.
WordPress.org, however, has no cap on their customization features. You can use their pre-made themes available for free, those available for purchase, make your own if you’re skilled with coding and developing, or buy them from places like Etsy.
What We Recommend
We prefer WordPress.org; it’s easy to use, very customizable, very accessible, and offers a lot of helpful plugins (there are a lot of other perks too, but they’re better saved for another blog post). The only thing with WordPress is that you need a hosting service.
Finding the Right Hosting Service
Finding the right hosting service takes time and lots of research. We spent months deciding on the right one for us. Part of what takes so much time is getting through the sheer number of hosting services available.
What to Look for in a Hosting Service
There are a few things that you should keep in mind as you research the various hosting services:
- Uptime – You want to be sure that your visitors can actually load your webpage so they can see your content.
- Cost – This may be more important to some than others, but regardless of your financial situation, you want to be sure you’re getting the best value.
- Support – You need your website to work for you 24/7. If something goes wrong, you want a hosting service that will be able to take your call and get your website back up and running at any time, day or night.
There’s a lot of different factors that will play a role in the decision you make, but for
What We Recommend
We recommend, and use ourselves, Bluehost as a hosting service for WordPress.org. Bluehost’s website is easily accessible, loads well, and is user-friendly. The websites they host run smoothly and have a good uptime score.
The best part about Bluehost to us was their value. At an incredibly reasonable yearly price, you can obtain a domain, several email accounts, tons of add-ons, and way more. They have special offers going on all the time, as well, so you can often get an even greater value (I know for a fact that there is a good Black Friday offer currently. They do offer 24/7 support if something should go wrong with your website.
As you can see, Bluehost met all our requirements. They are affordable, offer 24 hour support, and they run smoothly.
Picking a Theme
While we won’t go too deep into this section (because we already have), we will give a basic overview on how to pick a good theme.
Your theme should be user-friendly and easily navigated. It should be easy to read all your content and not too busy. Do keep in mind that if you choose one with a video on the homepage, it will a
Writing The Content
Now, this part is largely up to you; after all, it is your blog. You want to keep in mind, when choosing topics, that you want to be able to get and keep your reader’s attention and you want them to come back. Make sure your content is compelling.
You also want to be sure to vary the length of your content. If all of your articles are strictly 500 words, it looks fishy. If it’s all longer form content, not very many people are going to stick around to read it. You need to have a good mix of short form and long form content.
As an added tip from us to you, we recommend downloading the grammar, spelling, and plagiarism checking software, Grammarly. This will ensure that all your content is grammatically accurate with no spelling errors. It’ll also help to ensure that your content is plagiarism-free, which is crucial to your blog’s success. You can find out more about Grammarly in our previous post on it.
Finding Affiliates
Many, many companies offer affiliate programs. More than you probably ever thought possible. You shouldn’t just pick any and all affiliate programs, though. For each affiliate, you’ll need to organically work in a review of their product or some other way to get your link in there and put their ads on relevant content. If you choose a bunch of products you’ve never used that have nothing to do with the theme or niche of your blog, you’re in trouble.
The best way to ensure you’ll get clicks on your affiliate links is to market them to the right people. For example, if your blog is about living a gluten-free lifestyle, but you put affiliate banners for, say, Sarah Lee bread, no one in your audience is going to click that ad. You need to pick affiliates that fit within your niche.
While it’s not required for you to have used the service or product you’re affiliating with, it helps to make better, more compelling content. It’s a whole lot easier to sell someone something you like than something you don’t.
While we covered a lot in this post, we hope we helped to guide you through the early basics of operating a blog. We’ll continue with more helpful tips in the coming weeks, diving deeper into these broadly mentioned elements of blogging.
