How to Start a Money Making Blog (for Free)

Having a blog is a great way to showcase your talent, interests and a great learning opportunity both for you and your readers.

In Part 1 of this 5-Part How To Setup A Profitable Blog series, we are going to cover the first, more technical steps of starting a blog.

From the idea, to having one set up and ready for your content.

Little caveat: if you’re planning on making money with your blog you will need to have it properly hosted with a registered domain name.

This is both for professional/authority reasons, and for proper plugins. We’ll go over that more in Step 3: Hosting + Domain.

Rest assured it’s not that expensive and through this guide, every thing else you can setup and start bringing in money, for free.

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Step 1: What is Your Blog Topic/Niche Market

First up, what is your blog about. This is often called a niche market.

Drill down a bit on this one. You don’t want to be super broad because it will be to overwhelming for you to write, and confusing for your readers.

Ideally, you want to be more subcategory of a category or deeper.

For example: a homesteader with their expertise in chickens so they share in their chicken wheelhouse and just sometimes (if at all), in the rest of homesteading.

They can even niche down to a particular breed of chickens, or actual personal chickens they own. Kind of like those dogs on Instagram but with a chicken (or other animal).

This may take time for you to come to terms with. Rarely are people successful with broad topic blogs. It is possible but it takes a lot of work and time to start making money.

Find something you enjoy talking about and are happy to learn more about to share.

Unless you’ve written blogs before, most likely your niche will morph as you create content and really learn what your message is and who you are sharing it to.

Here are some questions to help you:

What do you enjoy doing? Drinking coffee – share coffee recipes or flavours, Inspirational coffee mornings for people to read while they drink their coffee.

What do people come to you for? Ie. Shating their problems – teach people how to listen to their loved ones, be empathetic, ask questions to create mind shift growth.

What part of your personality do people love? (Ie. Humour – great jokes – blog about how to tell better jokes, the anatomy of a good joke, favourite jokes, etc.)

You are teaching someone what you know. Now stop, you may not think you know enough about a topic, but you do. You have your own way that’s effortless and your own viewpoint or spin that is unique.

Take the easy thing and exploit it. Delve into it, share your tips, thoughts, ideas for someone else to get better or be amused by your take.

Step 2: Choose Your Blog Name

Don’t spend too much time here – you will most definitely will want to change it in the future as you narrow down your topic even more.

Keep it simple, easy to remember and spell.

Make it easy to understand what you’re talking about like Samanthabakes.com or even just use your name samanthasmith.com.

That way you can change your topic and rebrand without having to change your domain.

Come up with a few different options in case your first choice is taken.

If you’re stuck try adding an “a”, “my” or “the”.

Step 3: Hosting and Domain

This is the one place where you will have to spend money. I recommend you go for a basic 3 year plan.

You want to give this a shot, give it a year of actual, intense effort.

I mean writing, learning, actioning something every single day.

Life will get in the way but if you know you still have that investment for another two years, you’ll only have to worry about figuring out the rest – and I’m here to help with that!

BlueHost is what I started with and love. I haven’t tried any others but many people seem to like Bluehost too and I haven’t been disappointed.

They will register your domain name for free, and giving you annual hosting at a very low rate (click here to get it super low!).

24/7 support access too which is fantastic!

It’s also fully integrated and supported by WordPress which is how you will build your site.

Definitely get a domain and hosting. If you want to make any kind of money at any point, make your blog official from the beginning.

If you’re have absolutely no desire to make any kind of money (even $3), then use Wix or some other platform where you use their domain.

But for real, if you’re reading this then you obviously want to make money.

Get BlueHost and a WordPress site. It’s super affordable and you’ll have the support to walk you through.

Step 4: Select a Free Theme

Again, don’t overthink this one.

Don’t worry about making your site look pretty with a premium theme until you have about 50-70 posts.

There are plenty of free themes to choose from and are great options until you have the funds and desire to upgrade.

Some of the good free themes are:
Hestia, Astra, OceanWP, Bard

Give yourself just one day or max 2 hours to play around and get to know your setup, before you start in on the real work of creating content.

We’ll cover that in Part 2 of our How To Start A Money Making Blog series.

Writing a blog is a marathon, not a sprint.

Put in the work to lay your strong foundation and you will see the fruits grow more rapidly, over time.

Stephanie Taylor

Step 5: Set up the Tech: Plug-ins + Widgets

Each one of these will have a configuration wizard or videos to help you along.

These are your basic plugins to get.

The more tech you have, the slower your site speed might get (not good!).

You don’t need much to get started, and will add more as you grow into your site and direction.

First, go into Plugins and download and set up the following plugins.

Elementor – this is a useful page builder.

Google Analytics for WordPress by Monsterinsights – data tracking which you can tie into social media tracking to see what’s work and what’s not.

Pin if button on image hover and post – you want people to be able to save your content as easily as possible.

WP Super Cache – helps manage and clear your cache to increase your site speed.

EWWW Image Optimzer – large images makes your site load slower. You have about 3 seconds or a viewer may leave.

Yoast SEO – helps you a ton with on-page SEO (Search Engine Optimization). You want to start doing SEO from the beginning as it will take time to build the organic search traffic.

Opt-in form provider (see next step)

Smash Balloon Instagram Feed (don’t worry if you don’t have or don’t plan on using)

Social Warfare – allows viewers to quickly share your content across social media.

Widgets

Once your plug-ins are installed, you’ll want to set up where some of them are displayed, like social sharing and email opt-in forms.

On which social platform are you going to be? Where does your audience hang out? Start with 1 platform to learn until you can automate it.

We’ll go over social sharing in Part 3 of this series.

If you already have a platform of choice, download the best widget to display and link your account.

After you have a social platform you can connect it with your website to show the latest.

Here’s an example of Instagram connection.

Step 6: Setup Your Blog Email List

Your email list is where your main income opportunity is.

Yes, forget social media or ads or and affiliates. Sure those are great options but your best is email.

The money is in the LIST!

Why?

1. You own it. No one can take it away.
2. It is a list specifically curated for you, filled with your besties – people who love what you love and want what you’re offering. Literally. They gave you access to their personal inbox. Not a follow on social media. They want YOU!

Now to get started you can use Convertkit or Mailerlite.

Mailerlite is free up to 1000 subscribers and has many of the same features as Convertkit.

You can try Convertkit free for 1 month here, but I would wait until you’ve got a handle on the tech and people are throwing their email address at you.

We’ll go over this more in Part 2 of this series.

Start out with Mailerlite. once you get a handle on how things set up, how to drive traffic to your blog, and have a setup that’s converting people into subscribers.

Then refer back here and download your free guide to setting up your Convertkit account and how best to monetize with it.

Place your email signup form widget in the top 25% of your blog post, and in your footer.

Just use a simple text for now, something like, “Have inspiration and tips about [your topic] delivered straight to your inbox, every week.”

And have the button say, “YES PLEASE!”

Later, in Part 2, you will learn how to better grab people’s attention and get their emails but for now, you have a form set up.

Congratulations!

Your blog is now set up and ready for your content.

Next step: Part 2: Creating Content and Growing Your Email List: What to Do After Your Blog is Setup