Make Money Blogging For Beginners [10 Step Guide]

In make money blogging for beginners we’ll cover… The ways to make money from blog articles, how to make money with a blogging website, and how do bloggers make money.

The current circumstances facing the world are driving more people online than ever. COVID19 has taught us multiple valuable lessons in just a few months. One of these is the importance of an online presence for most businesses.

In a recent article about making money from home, I shared some interesting statistics from Forbes. If you haven’t seen it yet I recommend you check it out here.

Today people are buying things online more than ever. Online conversions and sales have multiplied in just the last few months.

So how does this all relate to you starting up a blog? A blog is an online business, and as a blogger, you often sell stuff as an affiliate. What this all means is that this is one of the best times to consider starting a blog to make money!

We’re going to discuss shortly the 10 steps you need to take from the initial stages until your blog makes money. We’re even going to look at the different ways you can monetize it.

This is not going to be a short article. So perhaps you should prepare a cup of coffee and sit somewhere with no distractions.

Ready? Let’s walk through the process together, step-by-step.

IEVOLVE WEALTH’s 10 Step Guide On How To Start A Blog To Make Money

This is the list of steps that you can take to make money from blog articles on your website. The most critical aspect of a blog is its content. The biggest differentiator between success and failure when people start a blog to make money is content.

Remember, you need people to visit and return to your blog if you are to make money from it. For that to happen, you need to look within yourself.

Why do you frequent a particular blog? In 99% of the cases, it’s because you find it useful. You enjoy reading the articles and the information provided in them helps you somehow.

Make sure you don’t overlook this point. Most “make money blogging for beginners” articles miss this. Give your readers a reason to read your articles and come back for more. There is no specific “right” way to write, just make sure it’s your style.

What’s more important than your writing style is correct grammar and spelling.

Alright so let’s get to the game plan.

1. Decide What Niche You Will Blog In

The first step in our how-to make money blogging for beginners guide is to brainstorm a niche. This is the topic you are going to write about on your blog. What are you interested in?

This is very important, and I speak about this in many of my articles. If your niche is not something of interest to you, it won’t take long for you to get bored and jump ship!

Picking a niche sounds harder than it is. Don’t worry I’ll walk you through the easiest way I’ve found to do this. List down everything that interests you on a piece of paper. Don’t think about it, doesn’t matter if it’s silly, just write it down.

The thinking will come later, when we short list the niche you’ll operate in. Try to list at least 10 topics.

Got the list? Cool, now let’s narrow it down a bit. We will need to give each item on the list a score of 1 to 10 on each of the following criteria. 1 is low and 10 is where it fulfills this criterion fully.

1. Is it something people are interested in? I suggest using the “keyword surfer” and “WMS Everywhere” chrome plugins for this. They help you find out search stats for keywords in search engines. the higher the search the more interest a topic has.
   
2. Are there products that you can sell in this niche? Putting the terms in google with word “buy” should give you an indication. Like if hiking is on your list you type in hiking + buy. You will find results for hiking gear and other products that you can market.
   
3. Is there a continued demand for the products in this niche? You need to establish this because if you sell one time and that’s it you can’t make a sustainable income. Car spare parts is a good example, every few month you need to replace them. This way a buyer isn’t a one time buyer, sending them a reminder is more than enough to make them buy again. Another example is weight loss, there will always be people struggling to either gain or lose weight.
   
4. Rank them in order of how interested you are in the topic.

Once you’ve answered these 4 questions for each one of the items on your list add the score up for each. However, don’t include the interest score while adding up, this will come later.

Now reorder your list with the highest score on top and the lowest score on the bottom.

Do you see the top 3 on your list? These are your best options. Now you have one of two choices. You can either pick #1 on your list or the one from the top 3 with the highest interest score.

Just know that the #1 topic could be your best bet. On the other hand, if you pick a topic you are more interested in, you’ll stick with it better.  Well done! You’ve just completed the first step in our how to make money blogging for beginners guide.

So now that you’ve picked your niche, it’s time to begin putting it to good use!

2. Start A Blog To Make Money – Domain Name

Alright so we’ve got our topic, now we’ll need a couple of things to get started. We’ll need a domain name and a hosting service. I’ve written an article about where you can get these for free. If you’d like to read about it just click here and it’ll open up in a new tab.

I would advise you that if you go with the free hosting option I suggest in my other article that you don’t get a domain just yet. They will provide you with one. At least until you are ready to go premium or migrate to another hosting provider.

Picking a domain is an interesting step.

It is the most important initial step in our how to make money online for beginners guide, after niche selection. This is because your domain could help you score some extra ranking points on search engines. So how do we go about picking a domain?

Remember how we determined interest in a niche earlier? Now we need to use the same approach to pick a domain name. We’ll look for words related to the topic that have a reasonable search volume.

Once we find a word that we like and has a good number of searches it’ll be what we use in our domain name.

Now we need to look at your content.

But first, let’s get your website presentable. If your website isn’t visually attractive visitors may suspect the quality of your content.

3. Make Money Blogging For Beginners – Website Design

Roll up your sleeves and put on your creative hats because we are about to get busy! The design is the first impression you give your visitors. Many will look at your design and assume the quality of your content. This is why we included web design in our make-money blogging for beginners guide.

It’s ok if you don’t know how to code, we’ll work together and get it done. Moreover, we’ll use a free plugin to make the website more appealing than the standard look.

The builder I recommend is Elementor since it was created with the non-coder design in mind.

They offer a free version which is more than enough as you are just starting up.

You will download it and install it on the plugin section in the WordPress admin area. We need to access our WordPress admin section. This is usually yourwebsite.com/wp-admin. You replace “yourwebsite.com” with the actual website address.

Once in WordPress on the left side there is a menu, click “plugins”. When you get to the plugin section you click “add new” and then “upload plugin”. Select your plugin zip file and click “install”. Finally, click “activate”.

Elementor has plenty of templates to start from.

It also gives you the option to build the design from scratch. The key here is on the WordPress setting to choose “elementor full width” or elementor canvas.

Now it’s just a matter of “drag and drop” to make it look beautiful. I won’t get into the design details here, as this is up to you. However, if you ever get stuck there are thousands of videos on youtube teaching how things are done.

So you have a design that you are happy with, well done! Now we need to populate it with content so people and search engines can find it. This is exactly what the next step in our how to make money blogging for beginners is!

4. Content Is How You Make money With A Blogging Website

Alright now you need to create content, but you don’t want just any content. You want content that people will read, content that fulfills a need or solves a problem.

If you are an experienced mother let’s assume you decided to write about nursing children. Ask yourself, what problems did I need solving as a new mother? What advice could I have given my younger less experienced self?

Go back to your notepad and start writing these down in bullet point form. Now just like we did with domain names and niches, let’s ask google.

Start typing variations of what questions people interested in this topic would ask. As you type google will give you recommendations, note them down. These recommendations are based on what others are commonly asking.

Start using the chrome plugins I mentioned earlier again.

They are free anyway! Another thing that is often not spoken about in other how to make money blogging for beginners guides is how to do this right. You need to look for topics that are between 300 and 3,000 searches. Remember you are a new site and will need time to rank for more competitive searches.

Now that we have our keywords we start preparing our content. We’ll head to hemingwayapp.com because they will help us prepare easy-to-read articles.

I like them because as you type they will highlight the text and give you tips to fix issues with it. It’s like having someone beside you telling you when you do something that will harm your score.

Start with typing an introduction (the title we’ll use later). Remember to include your keyword(s) in your introduction. This helps your readers and search engines to know what this article is about right away.

Now as you type you need to pay attention to a few things:

• Use images and put your keywords in the image alt attributes and titles.
• Make your article between grade 5 and 7 readability (hemingwayapp.com will tell you).
• Write for your readers, not for search engines.
• Every 300 words break the article with a smaller heading.
• Do not keyword stuff your content or photos
• Make sure your articles are over 1,000 words, more words rank better.

Now that we have our content we need to put it in our website.

We need to access our WordPress admin section again. This time instead of clicking “plugins” on the menu we’ll click “posts”, then “add new”.

Remember how we said we’d need the title later? Well now is the time for it, place it in the title box in WordPress. At this stage, it’s just a matter of copying and pasting regardless of whether you use the classic editor or Gutenberg. Gutenberg is the new block builder natively installed in WordPress.

Once done, don’t publish just yet, we need to check our on-page optimization with a plugin. So for now click “save draft” and read through the next section of our guide on how to make money blogging for beginners.

5. On Page Optimization To Make Money From Blog Articles

Alright, so what is on-page optimization? This is often referred to in how to make money blogging for beginners guide. However, what they forget is that a beginner needs thorough guidance.

This is what we’re aiming for here. On-page optimization is the process of optimizing your content to rank on search engines. I won’t get into the details here as it would require another full article just to cover it.

Luckily for us, I already have an article exactly about that which you can read by clicking here. Moreover, the plugin we’re about to install will tell you how to optimize your content.

The plugin is called Yoast and all you need to optimize your site is available in their free version. Let’s go ahead and install it using the same steps as we did with Elementor.

Now you need to go through their onboarding wizard.

Don’t worry it’s straightforward, will ask you a few simple questions. With your answers, it’ll then set up everything on autopilot.

It will create a robots.txt file and sitemap for you which are both necessary for search engine indexing.

Once Yoast is installed just open up your post again. If you are using block builder the Yoast logo will be on the top right of the screen. Click on it to get instructions for better optimization. On the other hand, if you are using the classic editor, it’ll be under the WYSIWYG editor where you put your content.

Follow the instructions and publish the post. Congratulations your first optimized post is now online, all we need to do now is get you indexed.

Indexing is when you tell a search engine to crawl your website and see all its content and pages. Don’t worry we tell you exactly how in this guide about how to make money blogging as a beginner.

6. How to start a blog to make money – Search Engine Indexing

As we said earlier if your blog is not seen by search engines it won’t appear in search results. If it doesn’t appear in search results, people won’t find it. How would people read your articles and buy your products if they don’t find your website?

Makes sense? Great, let’s get you indexed.

Head over to google and type in the search box “search console”. You will then add a property and follow the instructions there. They will ask you for the sitemap link. If you already installed Yoast, it created one for you, take the link and stick it in there.

Complete the process and let google do its part. Now let’s go over to bing and search for “bing search console” sign up and follow the steps there. Bing will index you on both bing and yahoo.

Now keep posting new articles regularly until the site has been crawled and indexed.

Once you have around 20 articles in your blog or more let’s start working towards your first pay-day. This number is rarely mentioned on other how to make money blogging for beginners, but this seems to be AdSense’s sweet spot.

7. How do bloggers make money with Adsense?

The first income you will most likely earn is through Adsense. This is unless you are in a highly competitive niche in which case getting approved could get tricky.

It won’t make you a lot of money unless you have massive traffic but at least it’ll cover some or all of your expenses. And then some.

So to get signed up with Adsense you look it up on google search and add a new account. Then follow the steps to add the code to the head section of your website.

To do this you will log into wordpress again, under appearance pick theme editor.

This will reveal a box of code with a menu on the right-hand side. Click “header” and then look in the box for <head> then some code then </head>.

You will place your code either right after the <head> tag or right before the </head> tag. Just make sure not to place it in the middle of another code, so as not to break anything. After all, that is done click save (under the code box).

Head back to adsense again and confirm that you’ve added the code.

Your work here is done, go back to creating your posts and in a few days, Google will email you their confirmation.

Once you’re approved you will get a code snippet from Google to insert on your website. With Elementor this couldn’t be easier, just drag in a code widget into the page and place the code in it and you’re all set!

I would also suggest you install Google Analytics on your page you can do it in the theme editor.

Like we did with AdSense’s authorization code, or download one of many plugins to do it for you.

This will help you keep track of where your traffic is coming from and the search terms getting you clicks.

8. Make Money From A Blog By Selling Products

This is the meat of where the money comes from on blogs. During the process of picking a niche in our how-to make money blogging for beginners guide we established that there are products to sell on the topic. Now we need to start looking at what exactly we can sell and how.

Of course you could always sell your own product.

However, for most beginners, this is not a likely option. So how do bloggers make money when they don’t have their product?

Simple, we sell other people’s products for a commission. In the online world, this is referred to as affiliate marketing! I’ve discussed this in many other articles that I will leave links to below in the conclusion.

The most important thing to know here is that commissions could reach up to 100% on the first purchase. This “first purchase” is referred to as a “front-end” product/offer, in the industry.

Alright, so how do we go about finding products to sell and how do we sell them?

Firstly, let’s find us a product. Go back to our trusty friend Google and type in the words “your niche” + “Affiliate program”. Another alternative is affiliate product(s) and of course, replace “your niche” with your topic.

On the other hand, maybe you are talking about kitchen equipment and know that Amazon and eBay carry such products. In this case, we type in google “brand name” + affiliate program.

Then it’s just a matter of signing up, getting approved, and getting your links.

From here it should be smooth sailing (to a certain extent). Note down your affiliate link to the product, we’ll need it in a minute.

How do bloggers make money selling other people’s products then? There are a couple of options here in our guide on how to make money blogging for beginners that you can use.

Some programs will give you banners that you stick on your pages. It usually comes in the form of a code, which we insert the same way we inserted the google Adsense earlier with Elementor.

The other option is the most common way how bloggers make money from affiliate links. You embed the link in your text. This is a better option in my opinion as it allows you to pre-sell and pre-condition your reader to buy. All before them ever click the link.

You would write a useful article with information your readers would need.

It doesn’t have to be complex maybe you’ve used the product and can give a review with it. Or how the product can help people do something in particular like start a campfire more easily for example.

You then invite the reader to purchase it through the link on your page. However, you need to know there are FTC rules. The FTC is the Federal Trade Commission. They understand how do bloggers make money. However, there are restrictions related to affiliate linking which you need to follow.

If you intend to use affiliate links you will need to have an affiliate disclosure on your website.

This is usually a page like the one we have here. You will need to also mention on your posts clearly that there are affiliate links on the page. It will explain in short how bloggers make money and the impact it would have on the reader clicking the link.

This is to protect people from unknowingly clicking an affiliate link. If you think about it, it works in your favor, if people know how bloggers make money, and that it’s at no additional cost to them… More of the ones clicking will be people with “buyer intent”.

Don’t forget to check your article with Yoast to ensure it is SEO optimized.

9. Social Media

SEO alone will not bring you the kind of traffic you need fast enough. This is why we need to bring in the big guns, social media. It’s one of the many ways how bloggers make money quicker.

All social media channels have billions of active users every month. We’re going to try and get some of these on our blog for free.

Here’s what I want you to do right now, open a new tab and start creating accounts at least on the big 5. These are Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Youtube, and Pinterest.

If you will be creating videos to accompany your blog posts, great if not you can leave youtube out for now.

Are you all done? great, now, I’m going to teach you how bloggers make money by automating the social process. Go to zapier.com and sign up for a free account. This will help you set up automation so as soon as you publish an article it posts to all your social media.

Just create a new zap and follow the instructions, it’s pretty straight forward. This will populate your pages and profiles with new posts shortly after publishing.

Now if you want to be more proactive and grow your following faster share these posts. Join pages about your niche and share your posts (from your social media pages) on them.

This way you route all people to your website through your social page first. Two birds, one stone. See I told you it’s one of the secrets of how bloggers make money, and they keep this secret under lock and key.

Now let’s turn your blog into a money-making machine. Let’s build you a massive list.

10. How Do Bloggers Make Money With Email Marketing?

The Money Is In The List! This statement couldn’t be more true when done right. We’re not going to talk about the standard capture pages you read about everywhere else. You are a blogger now, you have value to offer, and your readers like what you have to say.

So a small section on your home page and under blog posts will do the trick. You write something along the lines of “get more exclusive guides, tips, and tricks”. Then leave them a form to fill in their name and email.

For this, you will need an autoresponder. You can read my “How to make money from email marketing” article to get a more in-depth look at it.

What I don’t mention there and is different in this case, is you can setup zapier to also send an email to your list.

This way all the people who have been known to read your posts and requested to get notified will know about the new post.

And this, ladies and gentlemen, is how bloggers make money from email marketing.

Bonus: Future Steps…

Once your blog has begun to garner a loyal following there is another trick how bloggers make money that you can do too. You can start selling merchandise. These are branded caps, t-shirts, hoodies, etc. with your brand on them.

Later on, you can start creating ebooks, information videos, and your products. Selling these on your website will increase your income significantly. This is another way how bloggers make money and grow their income. However, don’t worry about doing this now, it won’t help much if you don’t already have a following. Just keep it in mind as part of your business growth strategy.

As promised here’s a list of other articles that can help understand how bloggers make money faster.

• High Ticket Affiliate Products – In Depth Understanding
• Affiliate Video Marketing Tips & Tricks
• What Is Legendary Marketer
• What Is An Entrepreneurs Mindset?
• How To Develop An Entrepreneur Mindset?
• How To Make Your First Million Dollars In 2020?

That’s it for us today but we’ll be back with more tips, tricks, and guides to help you grow your wealth even further!

Let us know all your questions, ideas, and thoughts in the comments section below. Also, feel free to share this post using the buttons below with anyone who you think can benefit from the information it contains.