Follow this easy step by step tutorial for beginners and learn how to start a profitable blog and make money using WordPress! Earn a full-time passive income and work from home or anywhere. Launch your blogging career from scratch with this complete step-by-step guide on how to start a blog.
I get asked every week how to start a blog, so I thought I’d write it out and explain how to do it in a place that more people can access easily.
As with anything, there’s a right way to start blogging and a wrong way. If you start out the wrong way, you’ll be spinning your wheels forever, and you’ll end up having to hire someone to fix everything down the road when your site starts to take off.
Don’t make the same mistakes that I did. Start out the right way from the beginning. This free blogging tutorial will explain what you need to do and how you need to do it.
Anyone can start a money making blog. Yes, really, anyone can do it.
Let me be honest: blogging is not a get rich quick scheme or an easy path to an unimaginably high income. Blogging is a lot of work, and you’ve got to be smart in your efforts if all that hard work is going to pay off in a full-time income.
I often get asked how to start a blog and make money with it, so I’m going to share here how you can do just that.
How to start a blog that makes money
The first thing you need to know about making money with a blog is that you have to have a plan.
Despite what you may have imagined, you can’t just buy a site and start writing whatever you want. You won’t get any traffic, and subsequently, you won’t make any money.
There are millions of blogs on the internet, and most of them make less than $1 a day because they write whatever they want and they are blogging without a plan. If you want different results, you’re going to have to do something different.
Why are so many bloggers failing to make money?
In short, it’s because they are going about blogging with no training, no plan, and no discipline.
If you want to be a successful attorney, you have to go to law school, study for the bar, and stay up to date on current laws and rulings.
If you want to be a successful teacher, you have to go to college, student teach under a professional, and pursue ongoing continuing education credits.
If you want to be a successful in any career, you have to get training, practice the skills, maybe apprentice under a master, and wait patiently while your responsibility and prestige build over time.
Blogging is exactly like these other careers. You have to treat it like a job. You have to learn the skills. You have to work your business diligently. You need a mentor to help you with resources and training. You have to be patient and wait while you traffic and income grow.
Most people who start blogs expect to get instant traffic overnight. They expect to rank high for difficult keywords, and they get bored and frustrated when months go by without substantial income. They fail to learn about the business of blogging, and they don’t spend much time learning about the process and skills required.
It is possible to make a good income with a blog.
I think blogging is one of the best jobs in the world. At this point in my blogging career, I average almost $300 a day on this blog, working only part-time (less than 10 hours a week, although I worked much more in the early days).
Because I set things up well early on, my blog makes the same amount of money whether I work an hour a day or three hours a day or I don’t work at all. I can’t take endless days off, but I traveled to Europe with my kids for 3 weeks in December and January of this year, and I didn’t work at all while we were gone. And my blog kept on earning the whole time.
Who can make money with a blog?
There are a few requirements to start a blog that makes money.
First, you must be willing to learn and learn and learn. There is going to be A LOT that you don’t know, and you need to be willing to dig in and find out what to do and how to do it, or your blog will fail. Plain and simple.
You have to have decent communication skills. If you’re not a great writer, you can do videos. But you need to be able to effectively get your message across to your readers/viewers/followers.
You need to be determined and disciplined. You have to be willing to work on your blog even when you’re frustrated or bored.
You have to be a hard worker. You can’t be afraid to work long hours, especially if you’re already working a job. It’s going to take a lot of nights and weekends to get your blog up and running and make it profitable.
You need to be a problem solver. You need to be unafraid to Google things and seek out answers when you need them. You can’t simply assume someone will tell you what to do because when you’re an entrepreneur, you are the boss. For better or worse, the buck stops with you. When things are going well, you’ll get all the credit. But when things are going poorly, it’s all up to you to solve the problem and get it back on track.
You don’t have to be a tech genius. You don’t have to know HTML or coding or the inner workings of a computer. You do have to know how to make your computer work, and you need to be able to learn WordPress, but there are online courses and tutorials (even some free ones) to each you how to do that.
You can’t be afraid to invest some money in learning how to blog and then running your blog. I can’t think of any business that you can start for free, and blogging is a business. You will need to invest in some training, mentorship, and technical things like hosting and a theme.
You can’t be afraid of failure. You will fail and learn and succeed and fail and learn and succeed.
You can’t be afraid to get your hands dirty and make mistakes.
Finally, you have to have lots of perseverance. There are not overnight successes in the blogging world. Even those people whose blogs took off and made huge money in the first 6 months worked super hard for a lot of hours in that time.
If you haven’t been scared off yet, let’s dig in to how to actually start the blog that’s going to make you some money.
How to start a blog that makes money
Step one: Buy a domain.
Your domain is the URL where your blog lives. My domain is feelslikehomeblog.com.
You do not want to start with a “free” blog site that lives on someone else’s domain (like Blogger or Wix or SquareSpace). First of all, you won’t own the site. Second, it is a huge pain to migrate a site from a free site to a self-hosted site (that you own).
I know this firsthand. When I started blogging, I started on Blogger which is a free platform. Once my blog began growing and making money, I wanted my own domain, and I had to pay a substantial amount to someone who migrated it over for me. Every single URL from my old site had to be redirected to a new URL on my new site. It’s expensive, and it’s unnecessary if you just start out with your own domain from the beginning.
Finding a good domain is going to take a lot of digging and brainstorming. Come up with a list of ideas related to your niche and start Googling them.
Use a domain name search like NameCheap to find out if the domain is available, and then search the US Trademark & Patent Office to make sure there isn’t a current trademark on the URL you choose (or a close variation of it).
Be careful of using punctuation and variations on domain names. I once had to force someone to rebrand a site at feels-like-home-blog.com. Lawyers were involved, and it was ugly. Save yourself the hassle and do your research to begin with.
When you have found a domain name that’s available, buy it. I prefer NameCheap because their prices are good and they have free anonymous WHOIS protection forever. (That is a valuable service that protects your name and address from being published as the owner of the domain.)
Step two: Buy hosting.
Once you have a domain, you need to install WordPress and host your blog. Blue Host has a cheap hosting plan that will work well enough for you. It’s not the best; other hosts have better customer service and better reliability.
Yes, you get what you pay for, and higher priced hosting has definite advantages. I personally use a hosting company called BigScoots to host Feels Like Home, and they’re awesome, but they cost me $100 a month, and when you’re just starting out, there are more important things to spend your money on.
Start out with the cheapest plan on Blue Host and know that you can upgrade later, when you have money coming in and need more resources.
Step three: Install WordPress and start writing!
This post is starting to get pretty long, so I’m going to start breaking it up into smaller, more digestable steps. Stay tuned for those.
