How to Start a Blog that Makes Money on Autopilot

Hi guys, gals.

My name is Chris, and this is a no BS method on how to start a blog that makes a profit on autopilot.

Below is a report of paychecks I received for my blogging efforts.

Blogging paycheck

That’s from one of my websites I built on July 27, 2019. 

I know it’s not 5 or 6 figures that most of you want. But I’m not about to photoshop some fake reports, so you’ll listen.

I’m happy with this amount. It allows me to spend more time with my family. 

No more busy commute to work.

No more work politics that add more stress.

No one stealing your lunch.

And, no more 4 AM alarm!

What will $428 a week do for your life?

Extra mortgage repayment?

More movie nights with the kids?

Better car?

Whatever you want, you can get it by working in the comfort of your own home or anywhere, writing about the things you love.

How to start a blog (Simple step by step guide)

Starting a blog is not hard. Making a profitable blog that can either supplement your income or make it your full-time job is frustrating, lonesome, and challenging.

But, definitely worth all the sleepless nights, endless cups of coffee, and head injuries from hitting the table from micro-sleeps.

This simple step by step guide will break down everything in an easy to understand format so you can get your blog up and running in no time without the headache.

The following are steps or chapters if you will, on how to start a blog that will make you money. They are detailed guides on how to start making money with a blog. But, if you want just the gist of it, you can read on.

  1. Learn blogging and SEO
  2. Know your hobbies and passion
  3. Name your blog
  4. Buy domain and hosting
  5. Install WordPress

1. Learn SEO basics

Before anything else, you should know a little about search engine optimization (SEO). SEO is the practice of optimizing a website to increase its ranking in the search engine, such as Google, Yandex, Bing, and others. Yes, there are more search engines other than Google. 

You don’t need to geek out on SEO to be able to rank high in Google, but there are fundamentals that you should learn. You may hate Google, and prefer Bing (unlikely), but Google has the majority of the market share and users. You need to love Google to take some of the pie.

Countless searches are being done on Google daily. These searches are an opportunity to help your potential customers. Helping your readers is the best way to start a blog. And that should be your priority when your site is new, or when you got the ball rolling, and when you have so much money that you don’t know what to do with it. Be customer-centric.

2. Know your passion

What should you blog about to start a blog? Knowing your passion is crucial when picking what to blog about. Passion is crucial to make it in the blogging world. 

Why?

Well, you’ll be writing about it, day in and day out. Just imagine you had no idea or hated what you are writing about. You’ll quit in no time.

If you have no idea what your passion is, you can ask friends and family to help you out. Ask them things like, what would you guys come to me for? What kinds of advice would you take from me?

Or, you can ask them what you talk about all the time. What makes you go on and on and on?

Chances are, the things that you love talking about is what you are passionate about.

3. Domain name

Some people don’t give much thought to their domain name. Others, like me, take days to come up with one. It took me a week to decide on blogzn. And, after all that, I regretted not going with the other choice.

Should you give your domain name careful consideration or go with the first word that comes to mind?

My suggestion is to have a domain that best describes what your site is about. And to do that, you have to put your main keyword in your domain name. 

Google doesn’t put too much weight on keywords in the domain name compared to ten years ago. Back then, when you have the exact keyword as your domain name like “howtogetrich.com,” you’ll rank higher in the search engine results page (SERP).

However, when you add your main keyword in your domain name, it tells your potential reader to find out what your site is all about quickly. And, not a site that writes about everything under the sun.

For example, which of the following URLs would you click on when searching about how to get rid of belly fat?

  • healthfulmama.com/how-to-get-rid-of-belly-fat, or
  • blogzone.com/how-to-get-rid-of-belly-fat

Just by reading the word health in healthfulmama.com, you already know what it’s all about. I’m sure Healthful Mama knows more about belly fat compared to Blogzn that probably blogs about blogs.

If you searched how to start a blog instead of getting rid of belly fat, you’d pick Blogzn.

The domain name is still an essential factor in getting rank higher in the SERP, even if Google says it’s not. 

How? Well, one of Google’s ranking factors is the click-through rate (CTR). The more people clicking to your site, it tells Google that your site is more relevant to the user’s query.

But, when you build a brand, like Nike or Givenchy, your domain name doesn’t matter.

When you hear Nike, what comes to mind?

Shoes, sports, athletes, performance, Nike is well established.

Givenchy is all about luxury, perfume, and fashion.

You can put whatever you fancy in your domain name like “zysdch.com,” I’m not going to stop you. But, brands take a long time to build. 

What if the blog you want to start is about you, as a portfolio to showcase your work? Then it’s probably best to go with your name. If your name is taken, then add a little spice to it. Like, photo, fit, cook, dance, or tea, you get my point.

4. Buy a domain and hosting for blog

A domain is a little piece of the internet that you own. Think of domains like lands in real life. When you buy land, you can do anything you want on your land. It’s your soil, your rocks, your trees, anything that grows in it, you own.

But, if you don’t own the land and build a hotel instead of what “they” want, you have no say when your hotel is taken down. 

I suggest that you purchase a domain, so you’re not at the mercy of anybody.  

Hosting

At this moment, you don’t need blazing fast hosting for your blog, but you do need a reliable one with plenty of customer support.

In saying that, Google announced that speed matters now that they are switching to mobile-only indexing; this means that your site should be optimized for mobile phones and not desktops. At this stage, abandon desktop versions.

Mobile-first indexing means Google predominantly uses the mobile version of the content for indexing and ranking. Historically, the index primarily used the desktop version of a page’s content when evaluating the relevance of a page to a user’s query.

by: Google dev mobile first indexing

You must pick a host that can grow with you. Moving hosts and site migrations can cause a lot of downtimes, headaches, and loss of revenue. You don’t want your website down for more than a second, with hundreds of people searching for your site.

Pick a host that features the following:

  • Good uptime
  • Secured
  • Great customer support
  • And one that scales with you. 

Uptime

Websites go down all the time. And the host needs to get your site up and running when this happens. Good uptime is 98% and above. Pick a host that has an uptime of more than 99%.

Secured

Some hackers will attack your site and slow it down. Security is ever so important since Google has implemented a “back to safety mode” when entering a non-secure site.

You only have two options, either go back to safety or DGAF and continue to the website. When your site is not secure, you bet users are getting the “back to safety warning” when they enter your site, affecting your bounce rate. The bounce rate helps Google determine a page’s ranking.

Customer support

Having excellent customer support could mean thousands of hours wasted in fixing something you shouldn’t be fixing. You could have spent that time making more and better content for your blog.

Scalability

Last but certainly not least, scalability. A good host should be able to scale with your website. You may not need a blazingly fast server now, but when you reach over 25,000 visitors a month, a shared server may not be ideal. 

When a server gets congested, it slows down, affecting user experience. You don’t want that because Google keeps a tab on user metrics.

5. Install WordPress

I don’t care what anyone says; WordPress is the best. See what I did there?

AHREFS made a comparison between Wix and WordPress to see which is the best SEO friendly content management system (CMS).

[source: Wix vs WordPress]

The study was inconclusive, but in my own honest, humble, a decade’s worth of experience opinion, WordPress is optimized better for SEO. 

WordPress has many options, plenty of plugins to enhance SEO, a significant number of dev contributors, and it has been around far longer than other content management systems. 

I don’t recommend anything else other than WordPress for your CMS. 

Conclusion

Look, I’ve been trying to make money online for almost two decades. And, I had to rewire my mind about pretty much everything.

You’ll look at things differently once you get this in your head.

Nothing worth having comes easy.

Theodore Roosevelt said it better with the following quote:

“Nothing in the world is worth having or worth doing unless it means effort, pain, difficulty… I have never in my life envied a human being who led an easy life. I have envied a great many people who led difficult lives and led them well.”

Theodore Roosevelt

I was too comfortable with my day job. It was too easy, safe, and made life simple.

Go to work I hated, make money, travel to relieve stress, go to work, repeat. That summed up my life well.

And that’s not all. There are more things that I’ve learned about making money online. Something that helped me believe that it is possible and made blogging my full-time “work.”

Now that I found the simple formula to “making money online.” That this actually works, it is life-changing. And, it’s totally replicable by anyone. You don’t need to be a coder, internet savvy, or a rocket scientist. 

If you can follow a simple three-ingredient recipe or these simple steps, you can make a living off of the internet by blogging. 




SEO Geek, Copy Nerd, Cheesecake monster.

As a dedicated SEO professional, I help businesses improve their online visibility and attract more customers through search engine optimization. Whether you’re a small local business or a large corporation, I can help improve your search rankings, drive more traffic to your website, and ultimately grow your business.

Christian Tanobey

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