How to Start a Blog Step by Step and Get Free Traffic

How to start a blog step by step. This blog post is a plan on how to start your own blog from the very beginning and goes as far as giving you free strategies to bring or send traffic to your blog posts. Also we will talk about ways to monetize the traffic that will come to your website.

Some links in this article are affiliates links.

This plan is going to show you how to start your blog with the potential to grow it until you get your first 20,000 visitors. A blog owner make money then.

How much money can you make blogging.

Well it depends of a number of factors. The main one is the niche you choose in regards of the number of people interested in. Another one is the monetization potential of the niche meaning are there enough products to sell and promote. Another one is only about you. Will you be persistent and post high quality content on a regular basis for the coming months and years?

I encourage you to do your on research on Google under ” blogger income reports”. I found this website who has this post about a list of more than 200 bloggers. The list shows some monthly revenues starting from under a $100.00  to a lot a few $1000.00 up to skies the limit ($1,000,000) as we can say.

On the startamomblog website there is a list of 53 income reports and there is a graphic showing the status over time. This is interesting also because we can see what blog idea is working well and more profitable than others.

How long does it takes to get visitors.

In the real world, what happens is yes a dedicated blogger will make money and will be able to make a living out of it. Our good fellow marketer Greg Kononenko (cafeniatedblogger) repeatedly says that it takes a few month of posting high quality 2000 words plus content before seeing some serious Google seo traffic coming every month.

Google wants to see if your blog is serious and is worth to show your work in the first page for a given keyword phrase. Also you should post 20 to 30 high quality 2000 plus words articles before seeing a lot of visitors coming everyday to your site.

So make up your mind in writing or have articles written for you to post for now on. If you do so the ball will get going and the reward will come. After a while all the work you did in the first place will bring passive income. You will get money and you will have the possibility to hire a professional writer to free up some time for yourself.

All this can happen in a few month with work and a little chance.

Find a niche for your blog

The first step to start is to choose a niche. A niche is a domain, a topic that you focus on where everything you write is related to this topic. This is the way to get free traffic from Google. If you write high quality 2000 plus words articles regularly, Google may consider your blog as an authority and will favor you by showing your blog posts in the first page when people searching for keywords related to your posts.

Here is a list of 150 profitable niche ideas you can download.

How to monetize your blog

I presume that you will choose a niche you like and are familiar with. But you should check out that your niche could be monetized easily with a lot of products available for you to promote. There is no shortage of physical products to promote, but if you are in the digital world where you promote information, course, software etc, you may want to check what products are available that you can promote as an affiliate. Affiliate marketing means marketing products that are already made in exchange of a commission.

More on affiliate marketing here on our blog. 

Products to promote as an affiliate marketer.

There are websites that have a huge repertoire of affiliate products for the affiliate marketers. Clickbank is the most popular and has products in a lot of niche. The good part is if you dig a little, you will find products with a very elaborate professional sale funnel to get the visitors to buy from them.

So when a visitor comes to your site and click the affiliate link, there are more likely to make the purchase and for you to get the commission. Did I say that Clickbank commission is about 50% average?

Clickbank exists for a long long time and has a lot of experience with affiliate marketers. So they built a full blown course to make the student achieves its goal to make money online. Clickbank claims that their affiliates made billions of dollars altogether. So this business model works and their course Clickbank University is there to show any marketers the path to success. Hand on hand, steps by steps with a big community to get help, support, knowledge and stimulus when things get tough sometimes.

See the video and get the free trial. You will learn invaluable things for your online business. (Clickbank University is offline for the moment)

Monetize with Google adsense and the like

When reading blog posts, I am sure you seen those ads cutting the text. Most likely those ads are Google adsense. There are others companies to but adsense are the most used. If the visitor click on those ads, the blog owner make a small amount of money. This is a no brainier way of monetizing your blog. Google will analyze the topic of your blog post and will post ads related to your topic. In this way it is easier for you to write article without taking car much of a sale pitch workaround.

So now I think that you have a good idea on how to choose your niche. Find a niche you like, check out how you are going to monetize it to have the better chance of making money with your work and start writing articles.

Choosing a domain name

Ideally you should get your main niche keyword in your domain name. There are tools online like Namemesh to help you find a domain name that has punch. In the old days having a main keyword in the domain name helped for seo, but rumors are saying that it is not the case anymore.

Choosing the name is not enough, you have to check if it is available. Personally I use Namecheap for keeping all my domain names at the same place.

Signup with Namecheap and you will find the domain finder page that look like this. You type the domain name you want with the extension desired and look if it is available. In the example below, the dot com extension is not available. So if you want a dot com you will have to modify your name a little. When you find what you want you just have to buy it from there and your domain name will be registered ready to be redirected to the hosting company later.

Hosting your WordPress website

Now you need a platform to host your content. the most popular and the easy to use is WordPress. It is a software that installs in the hosting server. You can build literally any website from the simplest to the more elaborate with WordPress. There are wonderful themes and page builders available and sky the limit to create the look and feel you want with your blog. But you can start small with the basic text editor include with the basic version of WordPress.

So all the hosting companies are not equals. In fact not all their plans give you the power and the features you may need with your hosting.

For Google the speed of page load is an important factor for ranking. So you want speed from your hosting plan. You should know that you will share space in a computer server with other clients. So it could slow down the speed if to many queries are going at the same time. Also there are some technical operations could speed up and slow down the page load time.

So you may want to choose a hosting plan dedicated to WordPress to get the fastest speed available for your budget. You can get a dedicated server but this is another ball park.

Siteground as prefered hosting service.

I recommend Siteground company. Siteground has a solid hosting reputation and their plans included some components that you may pay as extras with other companies. Like number of email box, ssl certificate, forwarder, number of addon domain and subdomain, excellent customer service etc…

Here are Siteground hosting plans available specially for WordPress. The startup plan is enough for a beginner. It is always possible to upgrade to a bigger plan later if needed.

Connecting your domain name to your hosting account.

It is the same for any hosting company and domain name registrar. You need to find what is called the dns codes in the menu inside your account. It look like this: nsxx.siteground.com. Usually there are 2 of them. Copy them and find the dns page in Namecheap under nameserver1 and nameserver2.

Find the name server in your Hosting panel

Copy the name server usually 2 in your Namecheap account under your domain name

Now when anybody who will type your domain name url into the browser, your WordPress blog will show up in the browers. It could takes a few hours to show up until the dns propagates to the entire internet.

Installing WordPress in your cpanel

Inside your hosting account you will get access to the cpanel. It is where you have access your files, stats, domain, software etc. Under software you will see WordPress.

Installing WordPress is very straightforward. You just fill the form and click the install button.

Accessing your WordPress backend

The back end is where you do make your posts. For accessing your back end you type this url in your browser. http://yourdomain.xxx/wp-admin. A page will open for you to write your blog user and password you selected when completing the form during installation.

Once there you will notice all the menus on the left and the editor on center and right. The block editor by default let you ad blocks to your post. Blocks are heading, text, paragraph, image, video etc. You just choose the desired block and fill the blank. You just have to play with it to learn.

Your blog look and feel

The next step is to choose how your blog will look like. You have a ton of themes available. Some are free, some cost money. So you go to the menu “Appearance” in the left sidebar and click theme. You will have access to a huge selection where you will be able to find one that you like and is related to your niche.

WordPress plugins

Plugins are addons that ad tons of options to the basic editor. Plugins ad functionality to serve any purpose according to the need of your business.

Some are for protection, some are full blown builder so you can build a very complex or very attractive website. Some will add social buttons, other will get you analytics. You get the picture.

How to Start a Blog Step by Step…

Well at this point you should be able to start your own blog. You choose a niche, you have registered your domain name, you have your hosting and hooked your domain name to it, you have installed WordPress, choose a theme and you have played with the editor and wrote your first test blog post. You are now ready to go.

Getting visitors to your blog.

I will show you a few free strategies here. Assuming that your blog has a few in depth 2000 words plus posts, you are ready to go out and promote them.

With Facebook

I am sure you are familiar with social medias. So let us start with Facebook. Try to find as much Facebook group as you can, signup with them, make a name for yourself, post relevant content and link back to some of your posts in your blog. You can do the same with forums and the like.

With Pinterest

You can use Pinterest to send traffic to your blog. Play the Pinterest game, make beautiful pins everyday with a link to your blog. You can use Tailwind to automate the process.

With Quora

Answer Quora questions. You already have great content on your blog. Just answer partially the related question to your posts and put a link to your website post.

With Seo

You can do seo. Seo means search engine optimization. You already wrote your blog posts around a low hanging keyword phrase that has the potential to show up in the first page of Google. Just do some more articles. Write two three posts every week. In a few months Google will begin to send you serious traffic.

With Youtube.

Make Youtube videos with the link to your blog in the description. Find inspiration looking what others are doing in your niche. Look at the number of views and get inspired to do something similar. Surely you don’t have to show your face if you are a bit shy.

How to start a blog step by step. The end.

That is it. You have a plan to start a blog step by step. Of course this is the basic, but this article gives you enough information to get you going. Now it is time get your big idea and make it happen.

Good luck

Chriss Lance.