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How to Monetize Your WordPress Blog from Scratch

How to Monetize Your WordPress Blog from Scratch

August 7th, 2019

If you are planning to quit your current job and start blogging as your main source of income or you want to make blogging as your serious secondary source of income, it takes some time and effort. The truth is that monetizing your WordPress blog is not as difficult as you might have thought it would be. All you need is to take the right approach and follow the steps mentioned below.

Step 1: Pick A Category

Choosing a specific category for your blog is the most important and number one stage. You will have more success rate if you stick to one category.

Think of it like this – let’s say you stumble on a blog article on “ how to start and monetize your WordPress Blog from the scratch?” and you subscribe to the blog site after reading the post as you just love this post and then you start getting emails from the blog site about summer smoothie recipes and cocktails. How would you feel? You would be turned off.

So, stick to one category because by jumping on to another category, you would only make your audience jarred off.

Here are the few categories that do really well online:

Personal fitness

Fitness

Career

Making money online

Motivation

Foods

Lifestyle and Makeup

Real Estate

You can start with your web design with anyone categories mentioned above and niche it down to a more specific category.

Do not select a broad category that has a large audience and huge competition. Celebrity blogs are the perfect example and money-making opportunity is pretty low for new bloggers.

2. Find A Domain

When it comes to starting a professional blog, you must run it on your own domain. There are a few things that you need to sign up for as you set up your blog. So it’s good to know about these things before you dive into the pool.

A domain: this is the URL of your website. You can consider it as the address of your business.

Domain Register: This is the company where you will buy the domain from. It doesn’t host your site. It just stores your site and points web traffic to your site which will be on your host.

Web Host: This is the company that hosts your website. Your blog site will be running on its server.

The Tool For Building Your Website: Only a few blogging websites are built with HTML an CSS these days. Most of the people use tools to build a fully functional blogging website. The best part of using a tool is that you can build a complete blogging website for yourself without having any coding knowledge. For blogging, this tool is known as CMS or Content Management System and hands down the line WordPress is the best and widely used CMS at present. Once you install WordPress on your host, you will able to start building your site.

In order to buy a domain, you will need to find one first. Make sure the domain goes perfectly with your category.

The best option is to keep searching for the perfect domain name until you find the right one that perfectly matches your category.

Step 3: Get A Host For Your Blog

Every site needs a web host. Your host is the company that stores your site on its servers and makes it available for your visitors.

When you start blogging for the first time, you should choose a hosting company that is reliable, easy to use, secured and offers a reasonable price.

Step 4: Point Your Domain To Your Host

Now you have a domain and a host for developing a website. The next step is to point your domain to your host so that people can land onto your site when people type in the URL of your domain.

Every hosting site has its own settings to complete the domain registration procedure and they slightly differ from each other. Every hosting site will provide you with the support doc where you can find all the details.

If you face any difficulties, you will need to contact the support team and they will walk you through the right steps.

Step 5: Install WordPress

When it comes to blogging, you will need a Content Management System to build your website and manage your blog posts.

WordPress, yes, it is the most viable CMS option for your blog site.

Just because of the huge popularity of WordPress, most of the hosting companies offer a one-click installation process for WordPress.

Step 6: Pick A Theme For Your WordPress Site

WordPress is the foundation of your website. You can change the entire appearance of your WordPress site and that too, without having any coding knowledge.

You can use “Themes”, the little packages of codes. Every time you change the theme, your site will also change. Don’t worry, the content of your blog post will remain the same. One of the best advantages of this is that you will always be able to evolve your website without having to restructure your site from the beginning points.

There are lots of online marketplaces where you can find both the premium and free themes.

Once you have purchased a theme, you can easily upload the theme to your WordPress blog.

You can upload the theme by following this step – Themes>Add New.

7. Install The WordPress Plugins

WordPress is nicely customizable. Since it is an open-source platform, you can implement whatever the changes you want.

Plugins are the small batches of programs that you can install within your WordPress to add more functionalities.

Always install the plugins that are needed. Using too many plugins will always create problems for you when it comes to managing them properly.

Always try to keep your plugins limited to 5-10 amazing plugins.

Here are a few of the excellent Plugins that you can consider using:

Akismet: It detects the spammy comments and clears them out.

Yoast SEO: It’s an excellent SEO plugin which handles tons of tasks automatically and makes your On-Page SEO a very convenient job.

Contact Form 7: it’s the most popular contact form ever. Every time when someone fills out the form, this plugin notifies you via email.

TinyMice Advanced: It’s an awesome WordPress editor which makes your writing process a lot more convenient.

Mailchimp WordPress: Create an email sign up form with it and start collecting the email subscribers.

Step 8: Google Analytics Installation

It’s the free website analytics tool offered by Google and presently, it is the best tool out there in the market. All you need to do is sign up for a Google Analytics account and install it on your blog.

There are two crucial reasons why you use Google Analytics:

It stores your data over time and later, you will be thankful for it because it has been collecting data over time.

Second, it tells you about the visitors on your website. The more you know about your traffic, the more relevant content you will be able to come up with.

Once you have the account in Google Analytics, you will have a unique JavaScript code for your website. All you need to copy and paste that snippet code into your site and it will start collecting data for you.

9. Set Up Your Email List

Email marketing has much more ROI than any other marketing channel.

The response from email will always dominate any other channels that you run campaigns on. But before running an email campaign, the first thing that you need to do is acquire the emails first.

Mailchimp could be the best tool for you to capture the emails of the subscribers. Have patience as it takes time to build a good list of emails.

You just need two things:

A Mailchimp account

An opt-in to sign up on your sidebar

The free subscription of Mailchimp allows you to have 2000 subscribers which is enough for the initial stage of blogging.

Step 10: Get Into Your Posting Mode

Always remember that writing Marathon isn’t a sprint, it’s like a marathon.

So when it comes to blogging, you need to be consistent.

Here are some posting frequency rules of thumb:

At the bare minimum, post at least one blog per week.

Serious bloggers post at least 2-3 times per week

Larger sites post 5-7 posts per week and that requires multiple bloggers.

The companies that rely on content marketing for customer acquisition post at least 25-50 posts.

Step 11: Build An Audience

The truth is getting 1,000 true fans means that you have become a professional blogger and you can quit your regular job. So, at the beginning stage, your goal is to have 1000 true fans.

Here are the things that you need to focus on in order to have 1000 true fans:

Always post one content per week. Never skip a week.
Start posting 2-3 times if you can.
Always focus on the quality of the post. See what other people are saying about the topic that you are writing about. Always try to be a better writer.
Always try to come up with the new take or perspective on your topic so that your readers can find always something new on your blog.
Find your voice and be authentic to people. It builds a connection with your audience faster. The best advice for this is to write like you are talking to a close friend.
Always strive to make your content valuable to the readers.

Step 12: Finally It’s Time To Monetize Your Blog

Finally, your blog is running without any glitch and now, you should focus on monetizing it.

Affiliate Marketing

It’s a kind of performance-based marketing and it could be a very effective way to monetize your blog. With this form of marketing approach, businesses reward affiliates to bringing the customer through the affiliate’s own marketing technique. There are four key players here:

The merchant

The network

The publisher

The customers

If you are planning to become a good affiliate marketer, it’s a good idea to sign up to a good affiliate network like Sharesale or ClickBank.

Advertising:

Adsense

Cost Per Click advertising (CPC) are ads that can be displayed on your website. You will be paid when someone clicks on these ads on your website.

If your blog has high traffic volume, Google Advert could be a very effective way to make a solid revenue from your blog.

CPM Ads

Just like CPC, the CPM or Cost Per Mile can be a great avenue for generating a good amount of revenue if your blog has considerably high traffic.

The only problem with CPM is that it brings a very low return. There are some ads that pay around $0.10 per thousand impressions. So if you don’t have high traffic, using CPM could be a useless venture.

Direct Advertising

Instead of using third party ad-broking channels, you can directly advertise the service or a product of a business.

Banner Advertisement

Apart from using the third party advertising platform like Google Adsense or any other network, you directly talk to the business to place their ads on your banner. Usually, the banner ads are paid on a CPM model, which means you will be paid for 1000 impressions.