We have good news because you are not the first person who tried to start a blog! (Shocker, we know!) In fact, we’ve gone through this process a few times ourselves, with a wide variety of failures and successes. That’s why we’re here to give you a roadmap detailing all the things you’ll need to know in order to start a blog with all the right ingredients to be successful. This is everything we wish we knew back when we first got started.

Take the time to build your automated sales funnel. There is so much involved with sales funnels, but the basic premise is that your visitors will show up to your site by discovering your content, drop into your sales funnel through an offer via your lead magnet or some other tripwire, and they'll then be led through a journey with drip-fed messages at some periodic schedule that will allow you to sell your products and services on autopilot.

Keep in mind that you’re not just building a blog, you’re going to be building a business and a brand. The more memorable you make your domain name, the more likely you’ll be to succeed with your blog. If it’s catchy and people can remember it, they might just come back to it over and over again as long as the content is great. But it all starts with a domain name.
_{6) Consider the Commitment – Starting a blog will take more time than you probably imagine. If you plan on doing everything yourself, realize that it takes time to learn each little skill. You can spend forever trying to design the site and find the right plugins. Researching an article idea and typing it all up also takes time. Expect things to move a little quicker with experience, but it all takes time!}
Another great exercise if you’re trying to decide on a niche for your blog is to think about who your ideal reader is. This is the person most likely to visit your blog and get value from your writing. For me, the easiest way to think about this is to use myself as an example. If you’re writing about an interest, then you’re most likely your ideal reader.
It’s hard to get noticed when you cover topics on a broad scale. Everyone has their own set of problems, and every blog is trying to solve them. What you need is a niche that will help you target a specific market in the broader topic your niche belongs in. It’s important for you to define your niche before you start blogging or in the early stages of your blog, at the very least.
Over time, as you move from this beginning phase of learning how to start a blog and into the stages where you're progressing in different ways to drive traffic to your website, growing your established base of readers and focusing on improving your domain authority, you'll be able to start competing on the bigger topics—but for now, picking a niche is the name of the game.
We’re going to go through seven specific steps you can take to find your own path to success, but first, let’s take a look at a common path most successful blogs have taken. It starts with a problem to solve and a product or affiliate product to sell. Ideally, this product is designed to solve that problem. Next, these sites use their blogs to provide free, valuable, high-quality content and use things like SEO, social media, guest posts and even paid ads to drive traffic to their websites.
Other measurements of success can include traffic, user engagement, social shares and email subscribers, but it all depends on your business goals in actuality. Do you want to sell more of your own products through your blog? Your version of success is going to include a healthy amount of revenue from those products alongside a decent-sized email list and a high level of user engagement. Do you want to simply earn more revenue from your blog as a whole? Your version of success would include high amounts traffic and user engagement.
This is an important one. If you don't know who your audience is, you don't know whether or not the content you're creating is truly having a positive impact in your niche. Sure, you can rely on keyword research and analytics to steer you in the right direction, and you should, but you should also consider forming a deep understanding of who your audience is, what they want and what problems they're facing.

Post your article links on social media and blog directories. Get traffic to your site with frequent updates on Twitter, Facebook, and other social media sites. Find blogging communities that match your readership and post links to relevant articles on their comments or forums. This helps in getting traffic to your site as well as raising your search engine rankings.

Our friend Bobby realized that soon after he started his blog. His site wasn’t making any money at the time, so he needed to find another way to bring in some cash. That’s when he started reaching out to other businesses offering his services doing the things he’d learned from blogging (Facebook ads, writing online content, social media strategy, etc.).
I’m a bit confused…are you talking about using WordPress.com or WordPress.org when setting a blog? I heard not to use WordPress.com for a blog even though its free because the blog isn’t really “yours” and they can do what they want with it. Can you clarify the difference between the .com and .org and which one should be used in setting up a website and blog?
Jaime, this is an excellent article. I’ve been blogging for fun for over four years, In the last year I’ve branched out and started a self-hosted blog about blogging for fun. I’m at the point think I have enough to offer on that subject and a few others. There are so many steps to get started, I think it overwhelms people, including those of us who are comfortable blogging. There are lots of courses available, but most of them that I’ve tried are pretty general. Do you recommend getting a coach?
Money. You should not start a blog to make money. We need to get that out of the way first. If your primary objective is to replace your full-time income from blogging, forget about it. It doesn’t work that way. Do you think that Jimi Hendrix picked up his first guitar so he could “supplement his income”? No, he didn’t. Rather, he did it for the love of it, for the joy and fulfillment he received, and the income came thereafter—much later actually.
“I truly loved reading this book!! I will admit, when I first heard the title, there was part of me that was tempted to think that there wasn’t “anything new under the sun.” But, I was wrong. Ruth’s fantastic writing grabbed me from the start with the encouragement that each of us has AWESOME in us somewhere…and growing a great blog means finding YOUR awesome. I just can’t tell you how much I love that. 🙂 The rest of the book goes on to give motivation, inspiration, practical ideas and action points at the end of each chapter. She includes her thoughts and ideas on writing good content, SEO, Pinterest, ads, reviews, and so much more. I also love that we get a “behind the scenes” look at a big blogger’s blog & how-she-does-it type material. And, don’t worry, at the end of the book she assures you that no one can do it all. 🙂 She shares ideas for goal-setting and time management. As one who has been blogging for 6-7 years, but only recently started trying to grow my blog and make a small, part-time income from it, I found this book very helpful!!”
At its heart, blogging is about sharing your knowledge with the world. Choosing a topic that you are passionate about makes the process of starting a successful blog so much easier. Writing about more than one topic is totally fine too. As long as you are writing about things that you are genuinely interested in, your passion will shine through and keep your readers interested.
Exactly! I’ve heard the analogy from many different people that you really just need to be one step ahead. It’s kind of like the model of discipleship. The people who are ahead in a certain aspect can help those who are a step behind, and hopefully you also have someone ahead of you to look up to and learn from. I hope you’ll come back and update me when you start your blog Kim!
My decision to learn how to start a blog and begin making money from it on the side of my day job, is what propelled me into building a six-figure freelance writing business with clients like LinkedIn, Zendesk, Google, Intuit and more. On top of that, starting a blog has helped me generate thousands of dollars in passive income each month and book interviews with some of the world’s top entrepreneurs for my podcast.
To make your site safe, all you need to do is turn on the SSL certificate. It controls the data transfer on your site and makes it unreadable to nosy people who might sniff the data from an outside. But before you start worrying that only technicians and internet experts know how to do this, let us show you how you can get a FREE secure connection in just a few steps:
The tools you use to reach people constantly change and you always have new options – more than you can handle. If however you understand the fundamentals, you realize that your core values stay consistent. How you present your value and what distribution formats you use to deliver it to people, fluctuates based on what is working best at any given time.

For example, if you plan to start a blog about making money online, passive income and things of that nature, which is extremely competitive, then it’s going to take you considerably more time to start generating money from your activities. You can’t simply expect to prop up a blog, make a few posts and become a millionaire overnight. It doesn’t work that way.

Google Blogger supports advertising through Google AdSense, PayPal links, and limited affiliate links. If you use excessive affiliate links, fail to add relevant content when including affiliate links, or get paid to increase someone's search engine ranking, Google will move your blog much lower in the search rankings, greatly decreasing your audience traffic.[11][12]
There are many ways to keep an email list engaged. Which will work best for you and your readers will depend on your style of communication and their content preferences. We recommend to write your emails in a similar tone as you write your blog posts. Here are a few types of emails you can send on a regular basis to keep your list paying attention:
Readers want to reach a goal. What are common goals people have? Have you set and reached some significant goals? Can you spell out how you did it and inspire others on their journey? Fitness and weight loss come to mind here, as well as getting out of debt. Pursuing big goals can be disheartening and lonely. Knowing someone else has been there does wonders.
Wonderful post! Thanks for sharing. I’m blogging about healthy food. I’ve been trying put traffic to my newly blog for months into no avail. The only thing that get me from stale mate point is that I’ve performed some serious keyword expansion. I’ve got help from support guys from the SEO tool I’ve been using. Now I know how to rank well for as many relevant keywords as possible and it did miracles to by blog. The tool calls SERPstat and the guy were awesome. Thanks for this post. And huge thanks for the guys who helped me. I’m starting to believe that if you put efforts into something, the universe will oblige)
Some bloggers may scoff at the idea of giving away anything for free, but it’s actually one of the most effective ways to grow an audience. This is because most Internet users aren’t going to take a chance on a product from a blogger they’ve never encountered unless that blogger has some form of social proof. Instead, you should fill your blog with free content your readers can use as “free samples” of your products or affiliate products.

Once your hosting account is set up, it’s time to actually get WordPress up and running. Bluehost makes it really easy by installing WordPress in the background. You will be asked to choose a theme. A theme is like a skin for your blog. You can change your theme at any time. Scroll down and choose ‘Skip This Step‘. On the next screen, click on ‘Start Building‘ button to configure your blog.

Search for blogs that cover similar topics. Use a search engine and the search bar on blog hosting sites to find blogs that cover your topic or related topic. Read a few blog posts from the most popular ones, that show up high on the search ranking, have the most comments, or display a readership of 20,000 or more.[7] Get an idea for how much interest and competition there is.

_{A blogger should always be ready to learn. I m still a learner. I read a lot of other blogs to gain more knowledge. Mostly bloggers share their experiences so that others can learn from them. So do spend some time to read other blogs so that you can increase your knowledge. I’m sure you are one of those who are willing to learn, and that’s why you are here. But even you achieve few goals and get initial success, don’t quit reading. Reading is an essential requirement which will help you to stay updated with the latest information.
A very good sharing! Referring to point 13 I’m keeping the existing customers as well as attracting the new ones. The reason I’m still attracting the new ones is because whenever I broadcast my newsletter I noticed that the sales (own product and affiliates sales) and Adsense earning were increased too. If I could double up my list this means I can double up all my earnings.}
I will read it and refer to it again but I'm still a little undecided about it. For one thing, this author has been SO successful that to have her level of success described in detail just feels overwhelming. She has all manner of assistants, a lawyer, a CPA, etc. on her payroll. It didn't make me feel inspired, like "I can do that, too!" It just made me think well, lucky you but right now I'd rather hear about what I as an individual can do. Also I kept waiting for her to talk about how the profit comes into the picture. Not that I wanted to ignore all the stuff you have to do to get to that point, I just wanted to hear about how it works because if you're telling me about all this difficult work I need to do, I want to see some money at the end of it. She did eventually discuss it but it took a while. And in saying all this, I've already had two blogs in the past. So if you are an absolute beginner you may want to start with something else. I also wish I'd bought it in paper (if it's available, I don't remember) instead of on Kindle, so I could highlight, skip around, and refer back to it more easily.