How to start a blog that Generates Passive Income

Years back before now, blogging was a hobby that people actually enjoy doing while working on there full-time Job or Part-time Job, they expected nothing to little profit because they wasn’t doing it for the money but for the passion. As you can see today in the blogging world, that orientation has changed with time coupled with the facts that most premium blogging platforms are no longer free to manage, blogging has seen a lot of hype as one of the most profitable online business one can venture into and actually make profits.

To stand out and be seen as a serious blogger, you need money to start a blog, but if you just want to play around then free platforms are always there and readily available for use. Click to Tweet

Can i make money blogging on wordpress?
Can i make money blogging on blogspot/blogger?
Can i make money blogging part time?
How to make money for blogging?
How to make money blogging online?

The above questions are some, out of the curious questions new and existing bloggers ask everyday (I call them amateur bloggers) so read along as i help you answer them in details.

There are bloggers who earn upto a million dollars annually from blogging and there are those ones who barely makes upto a thousand dollars from there blog and lastly lets not forget those ones who have been blogging for years but still haven’t figure out the strategy to make money from blogging. It is one thing to start up a blog and it is totally a different thing to earn money from your blog.

How to Start a blog and earn money

Choose Blogging Platform (Popular Blogging platforms are WordPress and Blogger).
Decide on what Niche you want to blog about.
Choose a short and memorable domain name that suite your niche.
Buy a custom domain name, if you are using wordpress.org you need to buy hosting as well.
Design your blog or hire a developer, make sure it is easy to navigate with a good UI.
Create useful contents. (Go extreme to make your contents useful and helpful for your readers)
Know your content readers through opt in forms.
Build engagement with your readers, offer give away sometimes.
Sign up for Advertisements, grow your Ad income by creating more useful contents, this time SEO Optimized.
Now that you have built trust with your readers, sign up for Affiliate marketing.
With useful contents, your readers will market your blog while you market other affiliate products.
If possible, make sure you have tested any product you are marketing else you stand a risk to soil your reputation.
Lastly, stay transparent as much as you can.

Sounds pretty basic right? the truth is, it is not as easy as it sounds, there’s a lot more to each step and without being properly informed you will lose.

Choose a Blogging Platform

There are a lot of blogging platforms but i am going to mention and talk about just two in this post of which are WordPress and Blogger. As a new blogger, you will want a blogging platform that is easy to manage and doesn’t require any or much coding skills. Starting off your blog with the wrong platform can make it difficult for you to switch later in the future.

Blogging with WordPress.org

wordpress is the world most used open source blogging platform, that started back in 2003, current statistic says it powers over 30% of all websites on the internet, WordPress is a great choice if you want full control over your site, with wordpress you can get your site or blog up and running withing 10 minutes. And because WordPress.org is self-hosted you must have to sign up with a hosting provider that hosts wordpress websites before you can be able to use wordpress. Some hosting providers are known for downtime which is very bad for SEO, we highly recommend you to use Siteground as your hosting provider, then use Namecheap as your Domain registrar.

Pros of wordpress.org

WordPress gives you full control and access over your site.
There are a lot of free themes and plugins available for use in the wordpress repository
WordPress currently has over 60,000 plugins which are always updated.
WordPress has a lot of awesome features which you can easily integrate with the use of a plugin
WordPress is search engine friendly plus good seo plugin to help you get started such as Rankmath and Yoast.

Cons of using wordpress.org

WordPress biggest downside is security flaws and vunerability.
You will have to manage your own backups and security as well
WordPress is expensive for beginners
Some theme customization needs coding knowledge

Blogging with Blogger.com

Blogger has been around for the past 19 years now and it’s one of the oldest blogging platform founded by Pyra Labs but was later acquired by Google. Blogger is the best option for the non tech savvy users who wants to own a blog.

Pros of blogging with Blogger.com

Blogger is free with a subdomain like youname.blogspot.com if you want a custom domain you have to buy from domain registrars.
Blogger is easy to use without coding skills
Blogger is secured and reliable in terms of security.
Blogger hosts all images on its free cdn which is an added advantage

Cons of blogging with blogger

While using blogger you are limited to some blogging features and tools especially if you don’t have coding knowledge
Themes/templates are limited
Blogger does not receive updates (Except for the once in a decade kinder update)
Google can suspend your account or its services at anytime as they have a bad record of abandoning some of there services without prior notice.
To get a custom design in blogger, a coding knowledge is required, unless you might be needing the job of a developer.

How to Choose the perfect domain name

Now that you have made up your mind on what platform and niche to use, it is time to go for a domain name, a domain name is important for your website because it is your website address on the Internet. Choosing the wrong domain name can hurt your blog success so you have to be careful while choosing a domain name.

While choosing a domain name an outstanding and a memorable name is more likely to perform better, as it helps your visitors to easily remember your website address whenever they want to come back.

Choosing a smart domain name can tell search engine what your site is all about, a domain name has Impact in SEO, as name has powers in the real world so it is in the visual reality called internet.

How to choose a great domain name
Use keywords related to your niche while choosing a domain name, there are also free tools for researching a good keyword that will suite your domain name. For researching on a quality domain name you can use Google Keyword Planner or Ubersuggest if you don’t have an Ad account with google.

You can also get a great domain name by using domain name generator as it will help you with a good number of awesome domain names that are not already registered. To get the best suggestions out of domain name generator, use two keywords for example King Stuntz you can use a domain name generator tool like Namecheap Domain name generator.

Design your blog to be fast and mobile friendly
When it comes to website design, its awesome to design a good website and its even more awesome to design a good website with an easy navigation buttons, tabs and user interface. (UI) if your design can’t meet all of this, its a wise decision to Hire a developer

Create Useful Contents
The truth is, your readers will bookmark your site if he finds your site helpful. Look, you don’t need to run any campaign to boost your audience, if your blog has a lot of helpful contents, your readers will be the one to promote your blog for you and they won’t even know when it happened. Surprised?

Okay, now tell me how will you feel if you have been searching for a solution for something over the past few weeks but couldn’t get a well explained solution and then luckily you stumbled on a page that has written a more clearer and easy to comprehend solutions for what you have been searching for? I bet you will feel excited and never forget the name of that page that its content helped you out — this is how quality content works.

Create Optin forms
As your blog grows it is important to create optin forms so as to enable your readers subscribe to your blog, this way you can send them your most recent posts thus keep a healthy relationship with your blog readers, each email subscriber is a potential customer, engage your subscribers with new posts but don’t over-do-it because some subscribers will unsubscribe if you send them a lot of mails in few days. At least 3 times in a week is quite good and don’t only send new posts to your subscribers, offer give aways too This is one of the many tested and trusted ways to promote your blog to a bigger audience.

Make money with your Blog
Now that your blog is rapidly growing, it is time to host advertisements, serve ads and make some money; so let’s start by signing up for an Ad network. One of the most popular ad networks used by bloggers are Google Adsense and Media.net ads, while serving adverts on your website make sure it doesn’t disturb users interactions

Excessive Ad is bad for your blog, place ad in a way that it doesn’t disturb users interactions
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Focus on growing your email list and reader base, if you have a good fan base you can try affiliate marketing where you will promote other company’s product and get a commission for each sales, a lot of people are making it in affiliate marketing and you are not exempted. If it is possible for you to test the product before promoting, please do it and never promote a false product always stay honest and transparent make sure you give unbiased reviews about products which you are promoting as this will create more trust between you and your readers.

Final Thoughts
If you was searching for how to start a money making blog, i hope this post puts you together to the right mindset on starting your blogging career, the process is not much difficult as i try my best to break each part down to your understanding.

A hard work without a smartwork is a wasted work
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