Have you been thinking about starting up a blog? Are you passionate about writing or do you simply want to start up a side hustle to earn some extra cash? The truth is, you can earn from your blog in many different ways that I am going to show you in this post.
Starting up a blog is relatively easy and free, especially with Blogger, but there are some nitty-gritty that can make the process very complicated if not well understood. Blogger is a Google-owned blogging content management system (CMS) that uses the .blogspot subdomain. It is free and very easy to use even though it has some limitations, some of which you may learn about in this post.
In my personal experience as a blogger, I have had to go through many stages of mistakes and learning simply because I didn’t know there are resources like the one you are currently reading to guide me through the process. I learnt some lessons the hard way and I hope you don’t make the same mistakes.
In this guide, you are going to learn about how to start a new blog using the Blogger CMS and earn money from it for free. Here we go.
Requirements for starting a professional Blogger blog
Every single day, many new blogs are created. The number keeps increasing by the day but not all of these blogs survive it to the end. Even if it eventually does survive, it might take you a long heck of a time before becoming successful.
Nothing, they say, comes easy and that also applies to blogging. I have spent nothing less than 6 years blogging and here I am today. There were many things I was completely ignorant about and that cost me so much time, effort and money. Even though I may not quite have arrived there yet, I can say that I am not where I used to be 6 years ago. Why was it such an awful experience for me and how can you make it better for yourself?
To be able to succeed in blogging and to progress faster, here are some requirements you would need:
- You have to be passionate
- A fair knowledge of writing and SEO writing
- Some amount of money for the running and upkeep
- Web designing knowledge (HTML/CSS), however, is not compulsory. Build a website here
- The right knowledge about starting up a professional blog
The role of passion in the success of your new blog cannot be over-emphasized. There are times when you may feel really discouraged to the point you may want to give up but if you are passionate about impacting lives through blogging and writing in general, that will keep you moving on.
To be successful in blogging, you need to build up and sustain your passion because that is the only thing that will keep you going when the sheep are down. You must have to make your passion for blogging the primary motivation while your desire to make some cool cash, is a secondary motivation.
Also, the right information and knowledge about blogging is something you must seek even before you launch your own blog. In the next session, you are going to get more information about how to start up your professional Blogger blog and earn money from it.
Getting Started…
In my own experience, here was what I did. After realizing that I could also earn from writing insightful articles on a blog, I decided to create Knowseeker. I used the free hosting platform, Blogger, and did most of the things by myself. I wrote very poor articles because I just wanted to keep everywhere busy on my blog even when the quality of the posts was suboptimal. In my own eyes then, they were great articles but a few years down the line, I saw how disgusting they truly were and I had to take them down and edit them.
Here are 10 steps to create your Blogger blog from start to finish and start earning money with it.
- Choose a niche for your blog
- Choose a blogging platform
- Choose a domain name
- Install a professional template
- Buy a custom domain name
- Write your first blog post
- Promote your posts on social media
- Monetize your blog
- Keep learning, unlearning and learning
- Hire writers
Choose a niche for your blog
It is very important that you define what topics you want to cover on your blog. Choosing a niche for your blog is often not very difficult because you may already have pictured what you want to write about in your mind even if you do know how to name that niche you have chosen.
Some niches you should know about include entertainment, gossip, lifestyle, health, news, politics, and sports, the list is endless really. The reason why you need to niche down a little bit when starting your blog is that it is practically impossible to write on all the topics as a sole writer on your blog. Maybe as you grow and possibly get more writers on your blog, you can expand your coverage even more but for a start, niche down to your own personal niche you are passionate about.
As a rule, start with a niche you really love writing about and not because you think that is what everyone else is doing or because it is more lucrative. Any niche can be lucrative if you have become successful in it.
Choose a blogging platform
A blog is just like any website out there. The only difference is that blogs or blog sites are websites that mainly focus on writing articles, and entertaining the comments and contributions of visitors who are fascinated by any topic they come across on the website. By extension, you can build a blog from scratch using the conventional programming languages – HTML, CSS, Javascript, Python, PHP, etc – depending on the one you are comfortable with and is most appropriate.
However, you don’t have to go through all that stress. There are several blogging CMS platforms that can simplify the process for you, for example, Blogger (which I will talk extensively about in this post), WordPress, etc. WordPress looks like a better alternative to Blogger, but in WordPress, you will need to pay for hosting before you can use the advanced features. WordPress allows advanced plugins that can make your website perform excellently well with minimal effort on your part. However, Blogger does not require you to buy a hosting plan. Only a custom domain will suffice but it has the limitations of not allowing you to manipulate files in the website root, and it does not allow advanced/custom plugins other than the default addons built by the platform.
In this post, I will walk you through the steps of creating a Blogger’s blog. Visit the site here to proceed.
Choose a domain name
Choosing a domain name is a matter of personal preference and wants but you should try to use a name that represents the central theme of your blog as much as possible. Other rules surrounding the choice of a domain name include making it as short as possible and choosing a domain name that is as readable as possible. For example, my domain name, “Knowseeker.com”, tries to describe someone who seeks knowledge. I chose this name because it was the closest available domain name to what I envisaged for Knowseeker – that is, to create a place where people get the best knowledge for related areas on the blog.
On Blogger, here are the steps for getting started and choosing a domain name;
- Log in to www.blogger.com and click on “Create New Blog” as shown below.
- Sign in to Blogger with your Gmail account.
- Next, choose a domain name by typing in the address as shown below. By default, Blogger will retain the ‘.blogspot’ subdomain to the name you input, for example, the input “knowseeker” would become www.knowseeker.blogspot.com which of course was my domain name before I got the custom domain pointing to www.knowseeker.com
Check here to see how you can set up a custom domain for your Blogger blog.
Install a professional template
If you are new to Blogger, you will realise that the default templates look too classic, some of them lack the modern look and do not have those interesting functionalities you find in some of the other websites you may have come across.
However, the good news is that there are free custom Blogger templates you can install on your Blogger blog, though some professional templates may cost you a small amount of money.
Buy a custom domain name
As I mentioned earlier, Blogger gives you the .blogspot.com subdomain by default but this subdomain makes your blog look unprofessional. That means you will need to register a custom domain so that the “.blogspot.com” can be replaced by “.com”.
The cost of registering a domain is often not very high, but you are expected to renew it every year depending on which period it was registered for. Domain hosting platforms and registrars include Qservers, Godaddy, Namecheap, Google Domains, etc.
After buying and registering your domain at your domain registrar, you should proceed to link your custom domain to your Blogger blog. After doing this, “www.yourdomain.blogspot.com” should change to “www.yourdomain.com”.
Write your first blog post
Before you get started with your first post, remember that this might not be your greatest post of all time but it is important that you start putting your work out there. Don’t be shy to publish your first post, in short, it is an achievement you should be proud of.
You should pay special attention to Search Engine Optimization (SEO) practices as they relate to article length, relevance, keyword optimization, keyword research, etc. If you are lucky to have an audience that openly criticizes you, you should take advantage of it to improve the quality of your blog posts in subsequent times. No matter how your article is, you must summon the courage to publish your first article so that other people can critique you and make it better.
Promote your posts on social media
Social media platforms are not only for gist and gossip. There is a lot you can achieve from effectively utilizing your social media handles. Platforms like Twitter can be a very great channel to promote your posts and website. Promoting your posts, in this regard, can be in the form of sharing and re-sharing, increasing other users’ engagement with your posts and even running an ad.
A Facebook ad would drive good traffic to your website, and if you have written great articles, you would be sure to get some faithful disciples that way.
Monetize your blog
Your blog is not run by air or water. In fact, water and air (oxygen) are not free anymore, especially when the natural sources are unusable to you or available altogether.
You need money to maintain your blog and also to meet some of your personal needs but like I would say, making good money from your Blogger blog does not come overnight. Here are some ways you can make money from your blog:
- Google Adsense
- Affiliate marketing
- Sales of products
- Dropshipping
- Copywriting/product reviews, etc
Google Adsense
Google Adsense is an advertising platform built by Google that connects advertisers to publishers. The technology when properly installed on any blog shows ads by advertisers on the network. If users interact with the ads in ways that can potentially bring leads or conversions to the advertisers, you earn a certain commission.
In getting Google Adsense to work on your Blogger blog, there are a few things you must put in place to get approved. First, your Blogger blog must have existed for at least 30 days. Then, you need to have done the following things:
- You should be getting a minimum of 500-1000 traffic per month.
- Your site should be visible to search engines (submit site to search console)
- You should submit your sitemap to the search console (GSC)
- You should have a minimum of 20 articles with at least 600 words per article
Even though there is no exact fixed amount of traffic before your Blogger blog get’s Adsense approval, 500-1000 per month is a good place to start. Another importance of this is that even if Adsense is approved for your Blogger blog, without significant traffic, you might not even get more than a few cents a month. Many people have had to abandon their Adsense because of this. To earn well, you need more traffic.
One pre-requisite for Adsense approval is that your site must have been submitted to search console or webmaster tools. It should be visible to search engines, especially Google. You will also need to submit a sitemap for your blog.
Blogger automatically creates a sitemap containing the URL of all your published posts to “www.yourdomain.blogspot.com/sitemap.xml” or “www.yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml” if you have a custom domain. For example, for knowseeker.com, the sitemap will be located at “www.knowseeker.com/sitemap.xml”.
Lastly, you should have more articles and should be writing more frequently. To ensure that your posts are visible to search engines, ensure that no important pages are being blocked in the robot.txt file because this will affect the approval of your Blogger blog for Adsense.
Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate marketing is one cool way to monetize your blog. In affiliate marketing, as the name implies, you become an affiliate with another company that has products for sale, services to render or some other business-related activity. The aim is to convert your traffic visitors to potential buyers or patronizers for the product or service of your affiliate.
This also requires that you get enough traffic because most affiliates would propose a certain commission from every sale you make. So, if your traffic is too small to give you buyers from your site, you may never earn a dime from the affiliate program.
Sales of Products
Selling products directly is one great way you can turn your blog traffic into a source of income. If you have a physical business or you do some physical trade, you can provide information about it on your blog and include your contact so that people within your location (to who you can send your product) can make orders directly. This can greatly boost your business.
Dropshipping
Dropshipping is when you buy products from a third-party store online for a customer who needs them. You purchase the item for the customer after they might have paid you, and get it sent to them at their own address, that is, you may not necessarily have to see the product yourself.
You can turn your Blogger blog into a dropshipping hub by including contact forms where people can indicate if they want a product you may have reviewed on your site. For this to be successful, you should also be building your site’s trustworthiness and credibility.
Product Reviews
This is one great way to earn from your blog. It is not easy to get reviews for many products out there and not to talk of getting featured on a professional blog. Featuring a product on your blog increases the chances of it being purchased by customers. Also, providing a link to the product page on your site also gives it more credibility and visibility on Google search and thus, more visitors and sales.
To be able to do this on your Blogger blog, you should work on boosting your domain authority and monthly traffic stats because most, if not all product vendors want their products to be reviewed on quality websites with good traffic and domain authority.
Keep learning, unlearning and learning
If you think you’ve known everything about writing, blogging or both, you may be surprised. I had to take down many of my first posts on my Blogger blog because I discovered they were suboptimal for performance and user satisfaction. From the things I learned from SEO and content writing, I could personally diagnose my weak points myself even though I didn’t realise them early.
To make your Blogger blog successful, or as a matter of fact, your blog on any platform, you must keep an open mind for learning and unlearning to improve your writing/blogging skills and increase your authority in your niche.
Hire writers
At some points, there will be a need to diversify your content to include other areas within your broad niche. If you are naturally not abreast with some of those niches and you appear too busy to research all of them, you can hire one or more other writers to write on your blog. This makes blogging easier and also improves the quality of information your visitors get but this can be expensive. You should only do this when you are already earning enough money from your blog to pay them.
Final words
Blogging is one sure way you can earn some extra money. If your blog has become really successful, you can earn money from it in the comfort of your home. The journey may be hard and very time-consuming but it’s totally worth the stress. Following these steps, begin the process of creating your Blogger blog now.
