Guide To Starting A Blog In 2024

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Starting a blog is an exciting prospect, but do you even know where to begin?

Actually starting a blog can be a rather daunting process. Have a clear strategy to get you started down the right path, you too can create a six-figure income with your blog.

Related: Ultimate toolkit for your online business

Everyone who’s starting a blog is secretly thinking ‘what’s the secret to building a six-figure blog?’ Truth is, there is no secret sauce, you just need a strategy. Whether you want to be earning $100 a month from blogging or $10000, you still need the strategy. A strategy that bloggers worldwide follow to starting a blog.

When you lay the right foundations in starting a blog, it will grow exponentially.

What Is Blogging?

You may have heard of blogging from seeing books about building six-figure blogs on Amazon. Or seen videos on YouTube mentioning it as a source of passive income. But you still don’t understand what blogging is. So let’s get down to the basics.

Blogging is basically content for a website or a magazine-style website that gives information around a specific topic. Topics could be ranging from

  • Beauty
  • Home
  • Entrepreneurship
  • Finance
  • Pets

These are just samples of just a few topics but you could create a blog on any topic. In fact, it could be on any topic that you can think of.

Is Blogging Dead?

Mention is blogging worth it in the business world and they’ll say it’s not. This is what’s fuelling the idea that blogging is dead. But the truth is that blogging is still a profitable venture. Profitable when you find a very specific topic and build up an audience who are interested.

For example, NerdWallet is a finance blog. that makes its money with affiliate marketing. Founder, Tim Chen start the site with only $800. Today, NerdWallet is worth $500 million. Other profitable blogs that make $100K per month include

  • Yaro Starak
  • Smart Blogger
  • Making Sence of Cents
  • Car Expert
  • Good Financial Cents

So is blogging dead? Not if these blogs are still making in excess of $100K a month.

Plus don’t forget this is just an example of a handful I’ve found. There are many other profitable blogs out there that are killing it every month.

Starting a blog that makes money

How Often Should You Blog?

Asking how often you should blog is a common question. The answer you get is completely different from whoever you ask. Income School says that you should be publishing a new blog post every day. But then Neil Patel says you should be blogging once a week.

Both sites are profitable so it can be hard to argue with them. Most important thing to consider when deciding how often to publish a blog is building your audience and quality.

Let me explain.

Building your audience so that you can drive quality traffic to your blog who are going to read your blogs. Also, you’ve built a relationship with your audience so they’re more likely to trust you and buy the product promoted in the blog.

Quality is the other important thing to consider. If you’re attempting to write a blog post every day but they’re not great then you’re not going to get that traffic and shares of your blog. So make a writing and publishing schedule where you can really produce your best work that’ll really wow your audience.

If you’re able to do this every day, then create a blog every day. Although if you’re surrounded by distractions and client work from your freelance business, then just blog when you can. Only you know what’s going to work for you. Take a look at your schedule and work out what’s best for you even if it’s only once a week.

How Is Blogging Useful For Freelancing?

As a full-time freelancer, blogging has been very useful for my freelancing business. Having a blog has helped in many different ways including

  • Improving current skills
  • Adding new skills in my niche
  • Creating a winning freelance portfolio
  • Attracting leads that convert into sales
  • Generating a passive income

Generating a passive income is important for freelancers. Freelancers are trading time for money especially if you just have an hourly pricing strategy.

With blogging, you can create evergreen blog posts that your audience love and monetize your blog. Watch it generate a passive income whilst you’re working with your clients. You end up with a system that helps you to increase your bank balance without taking on more clients.

Before you get started building a blog, find your blogging niche.

Guide To Starting A Blog In 2023

Find Your Blog Niche

Jump on the path to riches and choose your blogging niche. After all, the riches are in the niches, right?

Why Do I Need A Niche For A Blog?

This blog, started off by choosing one specific niche which was freelancing. As the blog grew, I learned more about my client avatar, their pain points, and interests. This then developed into writing about more topics.

Do you need a niche for your blog? It’s a good idea to start with a niche, but then over time your blog will naturally diverse into other areas. For example, let’s say you start a blog about having a baby because you’re recently had one. That baby will grow up, start school, and become a teenager. Your life will also include holidays, education, and seasonal activities.

This is just an example of when you start a blog, it will naturally evolve with your life and audience. So start with a specific niche and let the blog naturally flow into other topics. How do you choose a niche? Do you go after 

  • Current trending niche
  • Hobbies
  • Home life
  • Career

It can be a really confusing choice and if you’re not careful, you can spend months deliberating over which niche to go for. Spending months deliberating and you never ever get started blogging. Get off that first initial stumbling block by making a decision. To help you with your decision, take a look at what’s already out there. Go on Google and make a search related to the niches, how much competition is there in each one your thinking about.

You want there to be some competition, it shows there’s demand for the topic. What you don’t want is to be overloaded with tons of competition. Nor do you want to be blogging about a topic that has no demand.

If you find plenty of opportunities, you know you’re onto a winner. Now you’ve found which blogging niche to go after, it’s time to choose a blogging platform or build a website.

Create A Content Strategy

‘Fail to plan and your planning to fail’.

This is why you need a content strategy. You’re in a position right now to develop your strategy so you know what content to create. You’ve uncovered what your blog niche is and discovered what problem you’re helping to solve.

A content strategy is developed so you’re doing everything you can to help your reader to achieve their goals.

To start your content strategy, look at your core topic and break it down into sub-topics. For example, if you were to start a blog on social media marketing, you would break down that core topic into subtopics. These sub-topics being the different social media platforms that are now your content pillars.

social media content planner

Content Pillars

With content pillars, we need to dive a little deeper. Diving a little deeper with keyword research. Keyword research may sound scary to do if you’re new to creating content for the Internet, but it’s actually not that hard to do.

Getting Started With Keyword Research

To get started with keyword research, simply go to Google and type in your subtopic. Google auto-fills with the keyword people are searching. Give it a try right now and come back and learn how to narrow it down for the best keywords to go after.

Not All Keywords Are Created Equally So Narrow It Down

All keywords that you’ll find have different

  • Volume of searches done
  • Level of competition
  • Search difficulty

As a new blogger, you want to target keywords that have a high amount of traffic but the lowest level of difficulty and competition. How do you find this out? With keyword research tools.

Keyword Research Tools

There are many keyword research tools out there that give you this data. Even better they don’t always cost a fortune. Some of the tools are free. You can check out these top keyword research tools for SEO. Check it out and decide which is best for you to create your blog and which fits your budget.

Using Keyword Research In Your Content Strategy

You’ve been using those keyword research tools, now create a list of the best keywords you’ve found. Typically, I create a spreadsheet on Google and list the keywords. Don’t just list the keywords, also list the important data such as search volume and competition. Now create a new column titled search intent.

In this column, you want to write a note about the search intent for the keyword. Knowing the search intent will keep you on track of what you should be putting in your blog.

It’s also important to note that you want a variety of keywords for each sub-topic that represent the value ladder. For example, someone who clicks on a how-to blog is on a different stage of the value ladder compared to the click for the best products for a product.

Google loves it when you have internal links.Internal links tells their spiders how each blog relates to each other. What this does for you is boost your SEO. In your blogs, add internal links where you’re linking to other blogs. Blogs on your site that are relevant to what the user needs.

Get inside the head of your user and think about what else they need to help them solve their problem. This will increase the number of pages your user has visited and if you have display ads, increase your earnings.

You’ve now got a content strategy for your blog and you know what content to create that your audience wants to see.

Build A Website

Currently, there are 64 million bloggers using WordPress to build their blog and there are very good reasons for this

  • Fantastic content management system
  • Keeps you looking professional
  • Build your blog to offer ecommerce, coaching and services
  • You can customize with themes and plugins
  • It’s SEO friendly
  • Safe and secure

There are of course many other blogging sites you can use to host your blog, but give WordPress a try first, and then if you decide you hate it take a look around. But you might as well start with the best platform for bloggers.

If you need help building a WordPress site, read here your guide to building a website on WordPress.

Writing Your Blog & SEO

You can’t call yourself a blogger if you don’t write blog posts. But if you ever sit down to write one there’s a collection of feelings; frustration, hesitation, overwhelm, excitement, or confusion. The reason why you may start to have these feelings is because you don’t have a process.

The greatest cure to beat overwhelm as a blogger is to have a checklist. A checklist providing a sequence of steps you’re supposed to take. Wth this checklist by your side, it makes life a whole lot easier as a blogger.

Here’s my 4 step checklist to writing blog posts.

Do Your Research

You’ve got the content pillars and keywords, now I look at what blogs are already ranking for those keywords. Not just ranking on search engines but what’s being talked about for those keywords. I particularly love to check out Pinterest for this, but if your audience is on other social media sites check them out.

Determine Your Objective

Before you sit down to write your blog, think ‘what’s the point in this post?’ This helps you to stay focussed and not wondering off the topic in your writing.

Determine also what your reader needs to be reading in order for them to solve their problem. Afterall, they more than likely found your blog when searching for a solution. So if you start writing about one thing and then go in a completely different direction, you’re going to lose readers.

To keep yourself focussed always think about your keyword and headline. Ask yourself, does this really fit my main point I’m trying to get across?

Outline Your Blog

This really is the simple part of blogging. In this step, you want to be outlining the steps.

To do this, start a new post. Add the heading and subheadings. Then add your idea for what to write for each heading. This doesn’t have to be long. Just a short paragraph, keywords you want to mention, and any research you’ve found related to your blog post.

Create Images

Images are a great way for your blog post to get readers. But your images must be original and relevant. This is important for SEO like keywords are.

I love to use Canva to create images for Freelancer Lifestyle, as it helps me to template my images and build a brand.

Another use for images is that they naturally build backlinks to your site. Backlinks are relevant to you. When you get backlinks, your domain authority goes up and you naturally get more traffic. This is because you’re seen as a trusted site in the search engines robot eyes.

Now you’ve got your basic checklist to writing a blog post, it’s time to start writing. After you’ve published your blogs, you’ll start to see which blogs are getting the most traffic. This is when you need to start monetizing those posts.

Conclusion

Starting a blog doesn’t need to be difficult to do. In fact, when you see the path that you need to follow you can be starting a blog that makes money and becomes a solid business. Just follow the guide to be building those foundations to starting a blog.

About Post Author

Alison Wolf

Helping you to build an online business so you have an extra stream of income or quit the day job. Don't forget to follow me on social media using the handle @heyalisonwolf