Businesses of all kinds start business for starter blogging as a way to build up a long-term audience.
But the reverse is also happening, with more and more bloggers starting businesses as an extension of their blog. And it makes sense.
One of the biggest challenges new businesses face is building an audience for their products. New bloggers, on the other hand, often work backward, building an audience first by consistently putting out good content and then exploring ways to monetize their traffic.
Starting a blog is easy if you just want to have a side hustle. But if you’re thinking about creative ways to make money as a blogger down the road, you’ll need to be strategic about how you set your blog up for success.
This step-by-step guide will take a thorough look at what you need to know to start a blog and grow it into a source of traffic and income. And while our guide is meant for those who haven’t started a business yet, it’s also relevant for any businesses that want to get into the blogging game.
A blog is a website consisting of content, usually focused on a specific topic, that you regularly add to. Unlike other publications and articles, blogs tend to take on a personal tone, which helps them connect more deeply with their audiences.
People start blogs for all kinds of reasons, including:
A combination of any or all of the above
For these reasons, blogging can be incredibly fulfilling—especially when complete strangers start consuming your content—but it’s also a commitment.
Whether you publish daily, weekly, or monthly, it’s important to be as consistent as possible, not just in how often you publish but also in the type of content you publish.
It’s very rare for bloggers to see results right away, so to stay motivated in the early stages, keep in mind why you’re doing it.
Full-time bloggers can earn a healthy living writing online content. Finance blog Millennial Money reports that bloggers can increase revenue to more than $100,000 after building traffic and subscribers. It also suggests that you can make between $500 and $2,000 per month blogging in your first year.
The hardest part about blogging is finding the time and the ideas you need to do it consistently. Getting started, however, is fairly straightforward.
Starting a blog with the potential to be a business comes down to the following steps, which we’ll explore in this tutorial:
Find a way for your blog to make money
Pick a niche for your blog
Choose a blogging platform and template
Choose a blog and domain name
Plan your publishing strategy
Get people to read your blog consistently
If you’re wondering why we’re talking about monetization first, it’s because we need to think more like an entrepreneur than just a blogger in order to make this a profitable venture.
This might sound counterintuitive, but if you’re blogging to make money, you should start with the money part first and the content part second. Your monetization strategy will determine what types of content you publish and how you grow long term. So to start, you want to think more like an entrepreneur and less like an artist. business for starter
There are a bunch of ways you can monetize your blog, depending on the kind of blog you decide to start. For example, twinning a low-investment business with a blog creates a sustainable way to grow for little cost other than time and energy. But many people think using something like Google AdSense is the only way to start making money for some reason. business for starter
While ads can be lucrative ways to create income from blogging, they require large amounts of traffic before they become economically viable. Thankfully, there are tons of other ways a new blogger can monetize faster, without the need to have a massive audience.
This book, sold in digital and physical formats, not only made his blog economically viable, it also landed him on the New York Times Best Sellers list.
Bases Loaded Softball, for example, writes gear reviews to attract readers, then promotes a product from Amazon in the articles. If a reader buys the product after clicking the link, the blog earns money.
The truth is, there are better and faster ways to make money with your blog that don’t require a massive volume of pageviews every day. That’s twice as true if you can build a loyal audience, not just a large one.
Your most important consideration—more than making money—will be who your audience is and how you’re going to serve them.
