How to start a blog from home [Ultimate guide 2020]

How to start a blog from home

Do you want to know how to start a blog from home?

Are you free at your home and want to spend your time doing someting productive and make money instead of wasting your time on Netflix?

You have just arrived on the right place at the right time!

I am a personal finance blogger and i teach people how to make money online from the comfort of their living rooms,

In this article i will teach you rather i will follow you along the step by step process of making a professional blog, driving traffic to it and making money from it.

I started this blog in May last year and till now i have posted only 20 articles on this blog because i am such a lazy person,

But you know what?

Still i have managed to make a good amount of money every month from this blog!

I made over $3000 in last 3 months,

blogging income

blogging income maxbounty

The purpose of showing you this is not to brag but to motivate you that if I can do it then why can’t you!

And btw this income is nothing infront of income of top bloggers out there or even most of the mediocre bloggers out there,

Just have a look at the income report of makingsenseofcents blogging income report,

blogging income report

Ok let’s just leave these income reports and start with the step by step process of making a blog,

I want to help all of you guys to start a blog and make it sure you build a profitable online business, so if at any point in this guide you have any confusion in mind, just comment down below or shoot me an email here, i will personally reply to you all and make sure your doubts are clarified!

Anyways let’s start with the step by step process,

How to start a blog from home

Step #1 Find a niche

Niche means the topic on which you would blog,

Some of the common niches are weight loss, fishing, yoga, tech reviews, gluten free cooking, home improvement, gardening, skiing, acne, fashion and personal finance etc.

There are thousands of niches out there but you have to choose one of them that suits you the best.

Now how do you know whether a niche is good for you or not?

It’s always great to blog about your hobby but what if your hobby is very rare and has little to no internet audience! or even it has good amount of audience but people are not spending money in it!

It’s not a rule of thumb, but I advise people to go with the niche that has public demand.

For example niches related to weight loss, nutrition, fitness, Yoga, personal development, personal finance, starting a business, and relationships are great because they have huge demand.

Since we will be promoting our blog on Pinterest and getting traffic from there, here are 25 top niches on Pinterest along with the number of their followers,

1. Home Decor- 60.5 Million Followers

2. Art- 54 Million Followers

3. Travel- 52 Million Followers

4. Photography- 47.1 Million Followers

5. DIY & Crafts- 45 Million Followers

6. Design- 44 Million Followers

7. Technology- 38 Million Followers

8. Quotes- 35 Million Followers

9. Food & Drink- 31 Million Followers

10. Humor- 29 Million Followers

11. Gardening- 27.2 Million Followers

12. Tattoos- 27 Million Followers

13. Animals- 25 Million Followers

14. Education- 24 Million Followers

15. Hair & Beauty- 21 Million Followers

16. Health & Fitness- 21 Million Followers

17. Architecture- 20 Million Followers

18. History- 20 Million Followers

19. Celebrities 16.5 Million Followers

20. Kids & Parenting- 14 Million Followers

21. Men’s Fashion- 11.1 Million Followers

22. Weddings- 10.2 Million Followers

23. Geek- 6.9 Million Followers

24. Women’s Fashion- 5.8 Million Followers

25. Birthdays- 4.8 Million Followers

26. Christmas- 4.7 Million Followers

27. Outdoors- 4.4 Million Followers

Analyze all of these niches and choose the one that you have interest in and you can write about it all day.

Mostly those niches work great on Pinterest that appeal to women so keep that in mind while selecting your niche.

Never chose a niche that has declining trend or has seasonal trend like travel and all the outdoor activities nowadays are on decline due to covid.

Also check if your niche has products on Amazon? This would ensure your niche has commercial value!

Step #2 Setup your blog

This is the main step of making a blog,

In order to start a blog we need a domain name and a web hosting.

A domain name is the address of your blog like the address of this blog is wealthynickel.com,

Whereas the web hosting is the service that hosts your blog online and handles all the visitors that land on your blog.

We have to buy the domain name and web hosting from some website,

Luckily nowadays many web hosting companies are giving discount on their packages and you can literally start your blog in just 65 dollars. These 65 dollars are paid upfront for the first complete year.

Once I started my blog last year in May, I paid 65 dollars upfront and now i am making about $600 a month.

The purpose of telling you my earning is not brag rather it is to motivate you guys that you can start this business in 65 bucks and make it your full time business.

Anyways let’s start the process,

step #2.1  : Open the web hosting website

Click on this link and open the web hosting website in your next tab.

a2hosting homepage

Now Click on the “Get started” button and you will be taken to following page,

a2hosting plans

Click on “Get Lite” because it is perfect for beginners, After clicking on this button you will be taken to the following page,

a2hosting domain

Enter the domain name of your choice and check whether it is available to be registered, try to come up with something similar to your niche, like if your niche is yoga, you can go for learnyogamyway.com

Once your desired domain name is available click on “Continue” button just below and you’ll be taken to the following page,

check out page

Fill the details exactly as mentioned above!

Do choose one year plan!!

Why?

Because if you’ll choose monthly, you’ll have to renew the hosting at the end of the month and while renewing you’ll have to pay $9.99 per month because discount is not available while renewing the plan!

Choosing yearly plan will give you discount for the whole year!

Don’t worry! Have confidence in yourself!

After that click on “Continue” button and you will be taken to the following page,

addons

Untick all the options as shown above and click on “continue” , then you’ll land on the following page,

review checkout

Just review all the details and click on “continue

After that you’ll be taken to the following page,

account details

Enter all of the details carefully and after double checking everything, click on “complete order

After completing the order, you will be mailed the Login details of your cpanel.

Cpanel is a platform where you will be able to install WordPress on your site to make it live.

You can also access the cpanel from your hosting account as shown below,

account

login cpanel

 

After opening cpanel, now it’s the time to install the wordpress so that our blog comes to life!

Click on the WordPress icon as shown below in your cpanel dashboard,

cpanel wordpress

Open “install” section as shown below and fill out all the details carefully,

install wordpress

Now you are done with installing wordpress on your site! Use the admin login details to login to your site and you’re welcomed with your website’s dashboard.

Step #3 Building your blog

Step #3.1 Install a decent theme

Now the first thing you have to do is to install a decent theme that is fast loading and modern,

Click on “Appearance” option from the menu shown to you on in your dashboard as shown below,

dashboard

Then click on “Add new” as shown below,

add theme

Now click on “Upload theme” as shown below,

Upload theme

Now search “Astra” in the search bar, install it and activate it as shown below,

install astra

I am using Astra theme on this blog, it has both free version and paid version but no need to go with the paid one while you are just starting out as the free one does the job!

Guess what?

I am also using free version!!! And it is super cool and blazing fast!

There are two other themes as well that i recommend, Generatepress and WP Ocean but i love Astra the most!

Now your theme is installed! Let’s move on to the next step!

Step #3.2 Do these things after installing the theme

1. Delete all the sample pages and posts from “Posts” and “Pages” options in your dashboard.

2. Install necessary plugins

Plugins are the addons/extensions that are used for various functionalities.

There are millions of plugins out there but for a brand new blog, you just need to install the following plugins,

  1. Classic Editor – Classis Editor is the traditional text editor which has now been replaced by “Gutenberg editor”. I prefer Classic Editor over it so i recommend you to install Classic Editor plugin and activate it.
  2. Yoast SEO – This plugin will help you optimize your blog posts/articles according to the needs of search engines like Google. This is very necessary because in order to get traffic from Google we have to optimize our blog posts according to it’s requirements.
  3. WP Forms – This plugin is used to integrate contact forms on your website through which any of your blog visitors would be able to contact you on your email. You can check my contact page to get an idea.
  4. Wordfence – Wordfence makes sure you website is safe from hacking attempts. It has a paid version as well, but free version is perfect for new sites having less traffic.

You can install the plugins from the “plugins” section by clicking “Add new” and searching the name of the plugin.

1. Change permalink structure

Permalink structure is the structure of a URL, and it does not look very good by default in WordPress which is not all friendly both to search engines and users,

So follow these steps to change it,

permalink

Change the option to post-name and save changes,

permalink change

2. Make sure the following option is unchecked,

encourage search engines

3. Add necessary pages

A blog or a website must have these three pages,

  1. About (This page contains all the information about your blog e.g why this blog was started and how it benefits the readers)
  2. Contact (This page contains a simple contact form through which anyone can contact you. This form can be made using WP forms plugin)
  3. Privacy Policy (Privacy policy of your blog)

You can add a new page as shown below,

add new page

add new page

Research content ideas

Now once all the necessary tweaks have been done, finaly it’s the time to start creating content.

Now how can we get ideas to start creating content,

Since we rely on Pinterest to get traffic so we will find the content ideas from Pinterest,

so follow these steps,

1. Create a Pinterest Business Account

Check out this video by Anastasia Blogger in which she explains the whole process step by step on how to create a Pinterest Business Account. Remember! you have to create a business profile not a personal one!

 2. Search for your niche

After setting up your Pinterest Account and choosing your interests, just search your niche name in the search bar as shown below,

pinterest search

Now one by one, check out all the pins that are there on the front page, go their websites and check out what type of content are they writing and how many repins are they getting on their pins.

This way you’ll get tons of blog posts ideas for your blog and you’ll also know what kind of content performs best on Pinterest.

Make a list of atleast 10 best content ideas alongwith catchy titles that you’ll use for each piece of content.

Start writing content

Finally it’s the time to start creating content!

Make sure you content is better than any other blogs in your niche,

Because Content is King and if your content is good, you’ll get a cutting advantage over your competitors.

I know it’s difficult for a beginner blogger to create the best content but after all you are starting a business and business requires you to come outta your comfort zone and burn the midnight oil.

I started blogging in 2018 and i got success this year!

In these two years i struggled a lot but this is part of business!

And i forgot one thing!

How to create beautiful images for your blog posts and Pinterest Pins?

Well the answer is simple and straight forward!

Canva!

Yes! Canva is a wonderful tool bloggers use to create beautiful graphics for FREE!

Check out this tutorial by Anastasia Blogger on how to create beautiful pins for Pinterest using Canva,

Getting traffic to your blog

Now it’s the time to get traffic to your blog,

Check out this video by Caffienated Blogger in which he explains how you can get traffic to your blog using Pinterest.

Making money from your blog

There are a lot of ways you can make money from your blog,

Three primary ways to make money from your blog are,

1) Ads – The most famous and widely used way to make money from your blog is by placing ads on your blog. You don’t have to contact any brand for that rather there are many ad networks for that. The top 5 ad networks are,

1. Google Adsense
2. Mediavine
3. Ezoic
4. Monumetric
5. Adthrive

2) Affiliate Marketing – Affiliate Marketing involves promoting the products or services of some company and getting commission on every sale or lead.

There are a lot of affiliate networks out there that connect bloggers and brands, however there are some independent affiliate programs as well.

Top 5 affiliate marketing networks are,

  1. Amazon Affiliate
  2. Shareasale
  3. Commission Junction
  4. Flexoffers
  5. Impact

3) Selling your own services/products – Being a blogger, you can also create your own digital/physical products or services of any kind and sell it your audience. A lot of bloggers make hundreds of thousands of dollars doing this.

My recommendation

I personally make money from this blog using affiliate marketing and i recommend you to start with affiliate marketing because you can make money with less amount of visitors as compared to ads where you have to get a lof of traffic to make a good amount of money.

I made 520 dollars last month with 10k visitors only. If i had been using ads instead of affiliate marketing i could have barely made 100 to 150 bucks.

Final words

That’s it!

I tried my maximum to make this guide as much useful as i could in a short span of time, i hope your doubts are clear and now you are ready to kickstart your blogging career!

If you have any kind of questions, please do ask them in the comments section below or contact me here because i want all of you to start a blog and make money!

With this the guide on how to start a blog from home ends!

I wish you best of luck!

Cheers!

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