How To Start a Successful Blog in 2022 and Make Over $11,000 Per Month
Table of Contents:
How to start a successful blog
Why do you need to start a blog?
What do you need to start a blog?
How to find keywords for your blog?
How to grow your blog?
How to get traffic to your blog?
How to monetize your blog?
How to Start a Successful Blog – Provide valuable content for your audience
5 reasons why you should start a blog
How to start a successful blog FAQ
How to Start a Successful Blog Summary
How to start a successful blog
Are you wondering how to start a successful blog? There are many people who have ventured into the blogging industry yet success is one thing that has remained far from them. This article will not only help you start your blog but also help run it successfully. Your blog is sure to impress when you finish reading this article on how we make more than $11,000 per month with our blog.
Why do you need to start a blog?
Blogging no doubt will expose you to a lot of benefits many of which you may not even anticipate. There are several reasons why starting a blog is just the right step for you:
Giving your thoughts a place on the digital space
There’s always a sense of achievement that comes when you get someone to feel better. Perhaps you’ve had the experience of inspiring someone to live a better life or take on a project.
The satisfaction that follows is amazing. With your own blog, you could extend such inspiration to over a million people outside your locality. Your thoughts get to be heard online and your influence gets to increase.
Blogging helps you build your brand online
One benefit of blogging is its tendency to make you an authority in your niche. When you consistently provide value in a particular field through your writing, people will want to frequently visit your blog. As your blog traffic increases, your online brand begins to gather recognition.
A source of income
Perhaps the most interesting benefit of blogging there is. Some people don’t just earn from blogging, they make their livelihood from it. And we are going to tell you how we make over $11,000 per month from blogging alone.
However, thousands of dollars don’t just roll in after your first month, they come after periods of working hard and smart.
Interacting with new people
Every blogging niche has its community of enthusiasts who are ready to engage. By getting your blog started, you set yourself up for the thrill of having new helpful contacts.
Interaction will come easy since you all share similar interests. There are events that may come up in your niche to help you get settled and experienced.
Helps you to hone your skills and also learn new ones
Starting your own blog can add skills to your repertoire such as SEO writing, social media marketing, website hosting, web graphics design, content management, WordPress design, and many more. Also, the more you write based on a particular subject, the more you tend to acquire knowledge on that subject.
Improve your writing skills
Putting words together with ease may feel pretty unnatural at the beginning of your blogging experience. As you consistently write, writing efficiency doesn’t only work for you, you’ll also discover a unique writing style peculiar to only you.
Blogging will help you understand what people in the digital space want to read. When you write about such topics, you can be sure to attract a large audience.
What do you need to start a blog?
To get your blog started, there are certain things you’ll need.
Buying A Domain
First of all, you’ll need hosting and a domain name for your blog. Your domain name is your blog’s identity on the internet.
Do your best to pick a domain name that can attract readers in their first impressions. A domain is also your URL which means it's your address on the internet. For instance, if you choose ‘www.myblog.com’ as your domain name, it automatically becomes what people will recognize your blog with and also what they will type in the address bar whenever they want to visit your blog.
Finding the best domain name for your blog can get demanding sometimes. Most people are stuck deciding whether to use their name, name of their businesses, an online brand name they just thought about or a name that symbolizes with their niche.
If finding the best domain name is giving you a hard time, I will suggest that you use Namecheap. Here is an Exclusive Discount. It is a tool designed to help you choose a domain name by giving you a range of the best options. You can then proceed to buy the domain name and make it yours.
After purchasing a domain name for your blog, you will be given guidelines to set up your blog account.
Finding the Best Web Hosting – (One of the most important steps)
The next step is to get your blog hosted. Hosting determines how fast the pages of your blog loads when visited, which is important for User Experience and Ranking High on SERPS. For your hosting needs, we recommend Siteground because of their amazing features suited for WordPress sites and blogging platforms. With Siteground, the security of your blog from hacking threats is safeguarded and their customer support is absolutely fantastic.
Websites and blogs hosted on Siteground were rated by GTmetrix to have 100% loading speed. If you intend to add images to your blogging content, Siteground has optimizations to load image pages with speed.
There are three plans on Siteground so you could easily purchase which best suits your blog hosting needs. The options are Startup, Growbig and Gogeek plans. We recommend the Gogeek Plan and you can use our exclusive discount code here.
Get the Best Caching Plugin – WP Rocket
There is no better WordPress Cache Plugin on the market than WP Rocket. You can see what WPRocket does in the image above which was in use whilst I was creating this exact blog post. If you look in the top right corner, WP Rocket has Lazy Loaded my images and videos, Minified my HTML Code, CSS and Java amongst other aspects to rapidly improve my page speed. This has resulted in a better User Experience which helps me rank higher on Google.
Here is an exclusive WP Rocket Discount Link.
Choosing a lightning-fast WordPress Theme (StudioPress Genesis Child Themes are our favourites)
When you’re done purchasing a plan, you will have to personalize your blog. By that I mean install features to make it unique and one way to do that is to install WordPress and then a super fast theme. Installing both is easy. Getting a WordPress Theme for your blog means getting a design you can use for your blog even if you are not a graphic designer.
If you are not an expert coder then you need a fast theme to make the design work much easier. You can use Studiopress Genesis Themes to help you with that. Studiopress has multiple themes to choose from which are made to assist your WordPress blog design.
They are known to be the cleanest in terms of code, which makes them lightning fast and as a result, increases User Experience and helps you to rank higher on Google. Studiopress also provides regular updates so you will never have to worry about having to purchase another Theme due to it not being compatible with future updates.
Here is an exclusive StudioPress Genesis Theme Discount.
How to find keywords for your blog?
Whatever the subject you wish to center your blog content on, there must have been other bloggers in that field.
If your blog content contains well targeted SEO optimized keywords, your blog will rank well on search engines. That means that your blog will have to have high visibility amongst the thousands of similar niche blogs. Some bloggers create valuable content, yet they do not have adequate visitors nor make enough money from it. This is because they either do not make research on keywords or do not use them appropriately.
Make an Empire of Long Tail Keywords
I will advise you to target longtail keywords if you are just getting your blog started. Longtail keywords are keyword phrases rather than singular keywords.
They help reduce the competitiveness of keywords by narrowing down the scope of the search. For instance, there would be millions of blog posts competing to rank when a query searches for the word ‘cook’ but the number of competing sites would be less if the target keyword is ‘to cook rice’.
To help you get the best longtail keywords use Longtail Pro or Semrush. With Longtail Pro you can find out how competitive a keyword already is by scoring the keyword between 0 and 100. The higher the score, the higher the competition for the keyword, and the less likely it is for your blog post to rank if you use it.
With Longtail Pro, you can observe your blog’s ranking progress on search engines as well as ascertain if your blog will rank better than competing blogs. Longtail Pro is easy to use, you simply type in a seed word and get hundreds of longtail keyword suggestions. SEMrush is another great tool for keyword research.
Although Semrush helps you research keywords, it's also useful in running audits on your blog. You can monitor your competitor’s backlinks as well as their traffic with SEMrush.
If you are just starting out, I would recommend starting with Long Tail Pro as Long Tail Pro is cheaper, and specializes in Long Tail Keywords which will be easier for you to start ranking for. Try out Long Tail Pro Here.
If you want an all-round SEO Tool, then Semrush will allow you to do everything from Website Auditing, to Social Media Posting, to Competitor Research and so much more. Here is an exclusive Semrush Discount for you.
How to grow your blog?
Everyone wants to see progress so we know you do too. Your blog needs to grow and developing an email list will help your email marketing strategy. If you are new to email marketing, it simply involves providing valuable information and offers to your current or potential readers.
This strategy often involves building a list of subscribers to whom you’ll send messages to. This repays you by encouraging your email recipients to revisit your blog thereby building a community. Email marketing helps your audience relate personally to your blog.
Building an email list works more for blogging than other marketing schemes such as PPC or popup offers. Studies show that bloggers get about $44 for every $1 they spend on email marketing. Your email audience deserves to get frequent value from your blog because they are more interested in your blog than other readers.
To begin your email marketing campaign, you will need a list of subscribers. This can be a challenge but you can appeal to your blog readers to fill a signup form on your blog in exchange for an exclusive discount or a free resource such as an ebook. The signup form can be placed on your description page, home page, or at the bottom of every blog post.
Best Email Marketing Platform To Use?
Before you do this, you will need to sign up to an email marketing platform. It's impossible to manually send messages to individual email accounts so you need email software. You can ease pass this work through Getresponse or Aweber.
Both email marketing platforms are the best any blogger can use. You can monitor how much traffic to your website comes in through your email list using Google Analytics. This will help you assess the performance of your email marketing campaign. Yoast also offers marketing tools with which you can monitor your blogs email marketing campaign.
We personally recommend Getresponse, as you can build fantastic autoresponder messages which allows you to automate your emails once someone signs up to your list. Getresponse also makes creating landing pages and sign up forms so simple. Here is an Exclusive Getresponse Discount.
How to get traffic to your blog?
The best way to increase the amount of traffic your blog gets is to utilize social media. It doesn’t seem reasonable to solely pay for ads to promote your blog so social media becomes the best option after that. As easy as it sounds, employing social shares on social networks isn’t particularly easy for many bloggers.
There are many social networks to exploit, some are niche-specific, while others embrace all users. It sounds great attempting to mark your presence on all networks but this usually ends with poor results. I will advise you to focus on a few widely used social media platforms. Using these proven steps, you can be sure of getting traffic to your site.
- Firstly, you will have to identify which social network your readers use the most.
- Most bloggers discover that majority of readers use LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest and Twitter. These social networks have immense potential to generate traffic to your site.
If your blog deals more on professional topic ideas then it’s advisable you focus more on LinkedIn. Use Instagram, Pinterest or Facebook if your readers are more visually pleased.
- To make social media sharing easy for you, there are plugins you should install on your blog. These plugins make sharing from your WordPress easy to link with social media platforms.
Pinterest Tips for Blog Traffic
In my personal opinion, I believe Pinterest is the best social media platform for bloggers. I’ll outline helpful ways to successfully gather Pinterest traffic for your blog.
- To get traffic from Pinterest, create Pinterest boards for your blog posts. This allows readers to easily find your content or follow your board. Don’t forget to use the name of your blog title as your Pinterest board.
- When you create a blog post, attach it to your board. When pinning it to your board, add a quote from your content, use a relating picture, and add a link leading to your blog content.
- Breakdown your blog posts into categories so that they can be easily searched out. For instance if a reader searches Pinterest for ‘Football News' and your posts are categorized under that title, your board named ‘Football news' will come up.
- Employ personalized visuals to your Pinterest posts. It's so important to create Pins that are of the preferred Pinterest Size Requirements. Your Pins must also be visually appealing to increase Click Through Rate. Canva is a great free tool that allows you to create attractive Pins.
- Always interact on the Pinterest Platform. Just like every marketer on social media, interacting with your Pinners gives you leverage to convert them into one of your blog readers. To engage more on Pinterest, Pin unique and valuable content.
More Pinterest Marketing Tips
Pin frequently so that your followers are consistently reminded of your presence. Follow your Pinterest followers and also check out their boards and pins to know what content fascinates them.
- Always reply to questions your followers ask on your posts and rePin contents from authority figures that your followers admire.
- Use SEO best practices because Pinterest Pins are linked to search engines. Some tips to help your Pins become easily searchable include using important keywords in your post’s description. Your blog title should be the same as your Pinterest blog board name. Employ keywords in image “alt” tags for your Pins.
- Add the “Pin it” button on your WordPress blog. This makes it easier for your readers to share your articles on Pinterest thereby increasing the visibility of your blog.
- You can organize interactive and engaging competitions on your blog and post it on a special board you created.
Best Pinterest Marketing Tool – Tailwind
Now here is where I tell you the secret on how all the serious bloggers get traffic to their blog from Pinterest.
It's called Tailwind. Tailwind is one of the only Pinterest Apps approved by Pinterest. It saves you hours in terms of scheduling pins and repinning other pins. It makes managing Pinterest effortlessly.
However, that is not even the best feature of Tailwind…Tailwind Communities is!
Tailwind Communities allow you to join secret Communities on Tailwind within your niche or industries.
For example, we are in a Tribe called Digital Marketing and a Tribe called SEO as they are both categories that WHR Marketing is involved with. Now what Tailwind Communities does, it allows you to post pins relevant to your Tribe and then all the other members of your Communities can reshare your pins with their audience, if you agree to share their pins with your audience.
This can lead to an insane amount of traffic coming to back to your website from the hundreds or thousands of members in your niche relevant tribe.
Stats: Tailwind increased our affiliate earnings by 32% in just 3 months.
Here is a Tailwind app Discount Link.
How to monetize your blog?
The wish to earn money from blogging is one of the biggest motivations that attract new bloggers to the industry.
At first, running a blog can be tedious with little or no sign of earning money. However blogging has not only earned people money, some bloggers live entirely from its proceeds. There are some proven ways from which you can earn money from blogging and I’ll list them out for you.
Earning through affiliate marketing services:
- If you are just starting out as a blogger, this is the easiest way for you to earn money. This is because at this stage, you may not have products or services of your own to market.
You simply make posts that link to the products or services offered by your affiliate partners. For instance, if your blog posts are about nutritional supplements, overtime you’ll attract people interested in that field. Since your posts already serve an audience fascinated by that topic, marketing nutritional supplements for a company will be easy.
In return, you earn passive income from the company and you could also reap other benefits from the company.
Advertising your products and services:
- One great way to drive your sales is to market your products and services on your blog after a value-rich post. Make sure your products are related to the niche of your blog.
You can earn huge sums if you combine affiliate marketing with marketing your own products. The larger your blog traffic, the greater your earning potential.
Ebook sales:
- You can write an Ebook that’s related to the niche your posts are about. If the content of the ebook addresses a popular challenge or answers popular curiosity, you could earn huge amounts.
Promoting your ebook on your blog will be profitable if your blog content is valuable enough to entice people to buy your ebook.
Digital online training:
- You can learn or develop in-demand skills and set up courses to teach them. Be sure to put a lot of effort into this to make your content value-packed.
In recent times, technical skills like graphic design or financial skills like Forex investing has been in demand. You can also sell other digital information on your blog as long as it tallies with your niche.
Adnetworking or Adsense:
- When your blog begins to get traffic of hundreds or thousands of visitors you could run Text or Display Ads for companies who would pay you for it.
How to Start a Successful Blog – Provide valuable content for your audience
Your very first reason is to give out value. Money or fame comes in as a result of providing value.
To help you offer value you need to define your niche. If it’s not your passion, blogging may soon feel like a burden for you and that’s not good. So choose a niche you are passionate about. For example, we have written about How to Start a DIY Blog.
You need to define who your ideal audience is, this will help you tailor your writing style. There are terms peculiar to certain fields, knowing your audience helps you tailor your content’s terms to meet specific needs. Be careful not to stuff your content with keywords without offering value. Also, be unique about your style as that will be your writing trademark.
5 reasons why you should start a blog
- You will become a better writer. Writing is a means of communication and your communication will get better the more you engage with writing. Writing consistently will sharpen how fluently your thoughts are transferred to pen and paper.
- You will learn more than you ever imagined. Blogging will get you exposed to new information in your niche and you may also pick up some valuable new skills for yourself.
- It boosts your confidence level. When you offer value and people get attached to your blog, you feel important and needed.
- You will be exposed to new people. One thing blogging does is make you relate with people you may have never met. It could be through blog comments, email replies, or from social media.
- Down the line, there are financial benefits to blogging. It could come through affiliate marketing, sale of digital courses etc. but blogging can be extremely lucrative.
How to start a successful blog FAQ
Can anyone start a blog?
Yes, if you can read and write then you can start a blog. Just use the tips above to set up your blog and you’ll be ready to go.
How much content do you need to start a blog?
Once you've done your topic and keyword research, just start writing. Try to aim for at least 2,000 words per article. Once you have 50 articles, analysis how many of your pages are ranking on page 1. Imitate what worked for those pages and continue til you get to 100 articles. At this point, if you need help with your SEO, contact us and we can provide free advice on what to do next.
What can I start a blog about?
You should blog about something you’re passionate about. If you’re finding a hard time locating your passion, write about your helpful values. You can also write about what excites or upsets you and how that can solve others' problems.
Is it hard to build a blog?
As long as your passion keeps driving your blogging, the building process won’t be a challenge for you. It generally involves SEO On-Page Optimization, Social Media Linking, and Email Marketing.
Should I start a blog in 2022?
Yes you should! Blogging is such an enjoyable and lucrative industry.
What type of blog makes the most money?
There are some blog niches that make monetizing difficult but the following niches have proven to be money rich. They include: parenting, business, food, travel and tours, pets, health, finance, digital skills, and craft making.
How to run a successful blog?
Most people say that creating quality content is the most important thing when starting a blog… But it's not. It's actually having a proper plan for your content that counts. In addition, there are some other important steps to take if you want your blog to be a success.
People will always read more posts than they can comment on, share or link-build. You have to talk about what they are interested in reading! Don't expect every post of yours to become viral just by itself! People don't have time for that.
How do bloggers get paid?
There are three types of bloggers: Hobbyists, Professional Bloggers and Freelance Bloggers. Hobbyist bloggers post on their blog for fun. They never expect to be paid, but it happens sometimes.
Professional bloggers start blogging as a source of income with the goal to make enough money out of it to quit their day jobs. They usually get paid per post and for banner ads. Freelance bloggers sell their services by selling blog posts or articles to companies, other businesses etc.
Do bloggers really make money?
Yes, bloggers make money and a lot of it. Some bloggers start making money as soon as their first post goes live, others take months or years to see some revenue coming in.
As you grow older and more popular the income will grow as well, but this won't happen without producing content that people like! Nobody is going to pay for what they don't want to read! Quality content is always a must.
What do bloggers need to know?
Blogging is a business and you have to treat it as such. You can't expect people to care about your blog if you can't be bothered to take proper care of it yourself. Blogging takes time, effort and dedication. You can't expect to make money if you don't even know what you are doing!
The other important things bloggers need to know is SEO (Search Engine Optimization). The better optimized your blog the more people should find it through search engines like Google, Bing etc. You can take advice from any number of places, but staying on top of things is the only way to grow your blog.
What would be a good example of a successful blogger?
A great example of a successful blogger is Penny Hoarder . They have tons of posts, most about saving money. They are one of the top bloggers when it comes to growing an income through blogging. You can check them out yourself.
Most of their posts become viral right from the start, but you don't have to worry about that as they already have a huge audience! They know what people want to read and how they want it written.
How do you write a beginner blog?
A beginner blog doesn't have to be written differently than any other. People usually think that you need to take things slower when it comes to building your audience, but this isn't necessarily true. You can write about anything you want and see how it goes! Of course, taking smaller steps is always a possibility, but why do that if you don't have to?
You need to write about topics you are already familiar with. You can research them if necessary, but keep in mind that this might take up precious time! Write what you know best and expand from there on out.
What makes a successful blog?
A successful blog has to have a steady income. In addition, it needs to attract the right type of people and keep them around for as long as possible. You need to know what your audience is interested in (and willing to spend money on) and deliver awesome content. People will usually return if you make them feel like they are actually part of the blog.
The best way to do this is by writing a post every now and then about your thoughts on certain topics. People want to feel like they know you! That's how they'll come back for more! It all comes down to the people, content and income in my opinion. You can't do without any of them as they all go hand in hand!
Is blogging still relevant in 2022?
Blogging is very much still relevant in 2022. There are more people blogging today than ever before! People have realized the importance of having a blog and they are making great money out of it!
It's not only popular, but also profitable which means that people will continue to use blogs as a way of making money.
How Long Should blogs be?
Blogs can be as long or as short as you want them to be. You can write one post and just stop there, but that's not the only option! There are many types of blogs out there, some are general with tons of posts, others are more focused on one topic.
It all comes down to what you are trying to accomplish with your blog. Of course, you can combine things so that you have both short and long posts! That's totally up to what you are most comfortable with.
What do bloggers need to know about monetizing their blogs?
Monetizing a blog is easy as pie! All you need is an Adsense account and some Adsense ads! That's it. You can manage everything in your Adsense account which means that you'll have to do practically nothing after setting things up.
The money will show up in your bank account every month so there are no risks associated with the whole thing! Of course, if you want to be more flexible, there are tons of options for you. You can use affiliate links and promote other people's products in return for a commission, or you can use something like Google Adsense to make money from your blog!
Is it worth it to start blogging?
I think that everyone should have a blog. Why not? It's a great way of self-expression and a way to make money as well! You can blog about anything you want and see how it goes. As I mentioned earlier, you don't have to take huge steps if you don't feel like it.
You can slowly build your audience by writing a post every now and then and seeing what happens. It's totally up to you how fast you want to grow, so blogging is definitely worth it!
What blog should I start?
There are so many types of blogs out there, it's impossible to pick just one! You can start a beauty blog, fashion blog or even a tech blog. It all depends on what you're most passionate about and who your audience is. A tech company might not want to use the services of your personal beauty blog for example!
How often should you blog post?
There is no specific time for how often you need to post. Some people can only blog once a week and others will post every day. It all depends on what you feel like writing and how fast you want your blog to grow!
It's important that you're consistent though, so don't forget about your audience if they visited your blog recently because you haven't posted anything in months. They'll probably forget about you!
What kind of blogs make money?
All sorts of blogs make money! There are fashion blogs that will help you find your next outfit, beauty blogs for reviews and inspiration and tech blogs to keep you up to speed with all the latest gadgets.
What are some blogging mistakes people make?
There are many mistakes that bloggers make, but there is one mistake I see constantly. People don't have an email list or even a blog subscription somewhere on their site! This is so important because you need to communicate with your audience in some way.
If you don't have an email list, you're missing out on a lot of potential subscribers who might come back to your blog in the future. It's also important that people are able to subscribe wherever they are because it means that they are truly interested in what you have to say!
Can I blog about anything?
Yes, you can blog about anything you want! There are no limits to what you can or can't write about. You can blog about politics if that's something you're interested in or beauty products, there are no rules!
What matters is understanding your audience and writing something that they will find interesting / useful.
How many blog posts does it take to grow traffic?
It takes time to grow traffic. You can't expect your blog to get thousands of hits overnight. Just like any other type of media, blogging is something that you need to be consistent with if you want it to succeed!
If you keep putting out high quality content every day or week, you'll see that things will slowly but surely start to improve!
How to Start a Successful Blog Summary
That's it in our How to Start a Successful Blog Article. Most successful bloggers today were not great bloggers when they began. With consistency, resilience, research, and making use of the tips and tools within this article, you could become the blogger of your dreams. And that is how WHR Marketing makes $11,385 per month on average from its blog as of real-time 15:43pm on January 1st 2022.
We hope you enjoyed our article on How to Start a Successful Blog.
Here’s to your online business goals,
The WHR team
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How to Start a Successful Blog – January 2nd 2022