How To Start A Blog In 2021 And Earn Over $10,000 Every Month From It
(Stage By Stage)
Written by
Shalom Shalom
Do you want to know how to start a blog in 2021 and grow it from ZERO to $10,000 per month in passive income?
Are you planning to start a new blog from scratch? You are in the right place.
The blog you’re currently reading now makes $10,000+ every single month in passive income.
In the last year i.e 2019, this blog generated over $120,000. In 2018, it generated $106,000 (proof here).
Decent numbers, right? Yes, this blog is consistently generating $100,000 every year. Not too shabby.
We know that growing a blog to $10K or more a month is doable.
Starting a blog is extremely easy but making profits from it is NOT.
In this detailed guide, you’ll not only discover how to start a WordPress blog in 2021 but you’ll also discover the PROVEN ways to make profits from it.
Over the last 10 years, we’ve started and built a ton of blogs so we know how to launch a blog properly that actually gets more traffic and makes decent profits. Here’s your ultimate one stop guide where you’ll discover how to create a blog in 2021 and actually start making $10k or more every month from it.
So are you curious to find out how to launch a blog in 2021? Let’s jump into the details.
How To Start A Blog In 2021 In 5 Easy Steps And Earn $10,000+ Per Month
Step 1: Pick A Profitable Niche In 5 Minutes
Step 2: Register A Domain Name And Purchase Hosting
Step 3: Give Your Blog A Design That Converts
Step 4: Write Engaging Blog Content
Step 5: Setting Up SEO And Analytics For Your Blog
Step 6: Create A Website Promotion Plan
5 Practical Things To Do After Starting A Blog
5 Mistakes To Avoid When Starting A New Blog Or Website
How To Build A Blog That Makes $10,000 Every Single Month?
This is the only guide you’ll ever need to start a blog in 2021 and make it profitable. It is a detailed guide on starting a new blog so make sure to grab your coffee and let’s get started.
Let’s first talk about the 5 easy-to-follow steps to build a successful blog and how we started making over $10,000 every month from this blog i.e Bloggers Passion.
Step 1: How To Pick A Profitable Niche [In 5 Minutes]
Thousands of new bloggers constantly ask me this one question “How should I pick a niche for my blog?”.
That’s a valid question to ask as a beginner. Your blog’s success starts with your niche selection.
Unfortunately, most people get this one thing wrong. Either they pick a BROAD topic or WRONG niche. That’s why 99% of the new bloggers quit!
If you don’t want that to happen and are looking for some foolproof ways to pick a money-making niche, here are 3 SOLID tips for you.
Focus On ONE Topic ONLY
When choosing a niche, don’t go for broad niche ideas like “make money online”.
Why? Because there are millions of sites covering the same topic. So even if you create exceptional content, it’s extremely difficult to succeed because of HUGE competition.
Instead, go for narrow niches like “make money with freelancing”.
When creating a new website, you should narrow down to just ONE method, for example, “make money with freelancing”.
You can narrow down even further such as “make money with freelance writing” so there will be even less competition so you can create epic content to get #1 rankings in Google.
That’s how you can build an authority blog in a smaller niche and dominate that niche to make huge profits in the long run.
That being said, here are some of the profitable niche ideas for 2021:
Make Money Online
Finance
Travel or Outdoor
Fitness
Self Help Or Personal Development
Relationships
Lifestyle
Real Estate
Quick Note: You can also check out the list of profitable niche ideas where you can find all the ideas on picking a niche.
Note that the above niche ideas are “broad niches”. You should narrow down those ideas to just ONE topic such as “affiliate marketing tips for small businesses” instead of “affiliate marketing” (OR) “SEO training for copywriters” instead of creating a site around “SEO”.
A great niche has the following 3 things in common:
What you enjoy doing (I enjoy doing “SEO”)
What people will pay for (people spend billions of dollars on “SEO”)
What you’re good at (I’ve been doing “SEO” my whole life)
Are you getting it? That’s why my blog BloggersPassion mostly covers the topic “SEO”.
You should also follow a similar approach. Only when you narrow down to just ONE method or topic, you’ll have high chances to succeed!
Use The “777 Method” For Niche Selection
Pat Flynn from Smart Passive Income introduced the concept of “777 method” for niche selection. It works well for anyone who wants to find a profitable niche idea.
Here’s how the 777 method works.
Grab a piece of paper and brainstorm a list of your 7 passions, 7 problems, and 7 fears
From that list of 21 ideas, pick any 10 ideas that you think are “worthy” and “evergreen”
Then, enter each one of these niche ideas into a keyword research tool like SEMrush or Ubersuggest to find a list of profitable keywords that you can use to start a new blog
Here’s the illustration of Pat Flynn’s 777 method.
See that? So grab a piece of paper and start brainstorming ideas for niche selection. It’s worth your time 🙂
Find A Problem And Build A Site Around It
The best way to build a profitable blog is to identify a problem you would like to solve.
Think about all the problems you are now facing or may be encountering in the future.
You can consider problems just about anything around relationships, making money online, college, career, family, and the list goes on.
Then, make a list of blogs that are already covering those problems (for instance, “how to lose belly fat”).
Now, you find out how these blogs are generating traffic, especially from Google. You can also check out their “popular blog posts” or use tools like SEMrush to find their “traffic-generating keywords”.
Repeat the same process with other blogs as well.
Now, you’ll have plenty of topic ideas or keywords to start a NEW blog around.
The best part? You’re now going to launch a blog that solves a particular problem!
Step 2: Choose A Domain Name And Hosting For Your Blog
The second step in starting a money-making blog is to pick a memorable domain name that’s easy to remember and type.
Your domain name is the first thing most first time visitors see when they visit your blog.
Not only it gives a good first-time impression but it also impacts SEO, sales, conversions and so on.
A good domain name defines your brand so make sure to spend quality time to come up with a domain name that’s shorter, easy to remember and easy to pronounce.
5 Quick Tips To Choose A Domain Name
Picking a memorable domain name is ALWAYS hard.
If you’re struggling to come up with a good domain name, here are 5 quick tips for you.
1. Domain length
Try to pick a domain that is as short as possible. Although you can’t find one-word domains like Amazon, Facebook, Apple, Google etc but if you brainstorm enough, you can find 2-word domains like BloggersPassion, HostingMonks etc which are easier to remember.
2. Always prefer .com for domain
There are so many domain TLDs (Top Level Domain) extensions are out there including .com, .net, .org, .info, .app and so on.
My suggestion for you is to always prefer a .com TLD because that’s what 99% of people use when they are searching for a domain/website online. You can also try looking at the expired domains if you want to grab the best domains with high domain authority.
3. Avoid numbers & hyphens
One mistake most people make while picking a domain is choosing a name that includes either numbers or hyphens. Don’t make that mistake. Avoid the numbers and hyphens if you want your domain name to be memorable.
4. Easy to remember and easy to type
Try to pick a domain name that’s easy to type and easy to remember. Yes, you need to brainstorm a lot of ideas to come up with such as “easy to remember” domains but it’s worth your efforts.
You can also get inspiration from other blogs in your industry. You can also try merging two different words to form a useful domain such as;
Fitness Pal
Hosting Monks
Copy blogger
Social Triggers
Blogging Buddha and the list goes on
5. Use domain generator tools
If you’re still struggling to come up with great domain names, then use domain generator tools.
Here are some of the tools you can use for free.
Domains Bot
Panabee
Name Station
Bust A Name
Instant Domain Search
Name Mesh
All the above domain name generators provide you a ton of domain name ideas upon entering a keyword or topic. Try them!
You can also check out our in-depth post on choosing a memorable domain.
After finalizing your domain name, next step is to choose a good web host.
We HIGHLY recommend you to go for Bluehost. It’s not only an affordable web host but it’s an official recommend web host from WordPress. It’s also used by more than 2 million websites worldwide.
Here’s how you can start a blog with Bluehost and get a free domain name.
1. Start Your WordPress Blog With Bluehost
Click This Link to Get Started
2. Select The Hosting Plan Of Your Interest
Pick the hosting plan from Basic, Plus, Choice Plus and Pro on the basis of your need as shown below:
3. Enter Your Desired Domain Name (You’ll Get A Free Domain For One Year With Bluehost)
Try to pick a domain name that is easy to read, type and remember.
4. Enter Your Account Information
Simply provide your basic details such as name, address, and contact details.
Choose an account plan.
Here are the Bluehost discounted pricing details for Bloggers Passion Readers:
36 Months: $2.95/Month
24 Months: $3.95/Month
12 Months: $4.95/Month
Uncheck package extras, enter payment details, and click on the submit button.
Once you’re successfully done with signing up with the Bluehost plan, you will see a confirmation message like this.
5. Create A Secured Password And Login
The next step is to create an account on Bluehost that will give you access to the Bluehost control panel (cPanel).
Click on the create account button above to create your Bluehost account.
Enter your domain name and pick a strong & secured password that contains alphabets, numbers, and symbols to make your password is not easily predictable.
Once you’ve set your password successfully, login to your Bluehost account to install the WordPress.
Click here to log in to cPanel.
Enter your domain name or email address and password you just created above and log in.
As soon as you login you will see Bluehost cPanel which looks like this;
In the highlighted box, you will see a temporary address of your site which will automatically change to your domain address after some time.
Click on the WordPress button to install WordPress. Once WordPress installation is done, you can access your WordPress blog dashboard by visiting domainname.com/wp-admin directly.
Look how convenient a WordPress site dashboard is.
Now customize your blog the way you want and start blogging.
Step 3: Give Your Blog A Design That Converts
Now that you have set up a blog, you would want to give your blog a definite look and feel.
Notice how each blog looks and feels different even if they are hosted on the same WordPress? This website design is due to WordPress Themes.
Your website design is what represents your blog’s persona, your brand feel and decides how your visitors convert. This is why you must choose a premium WordPress theme
PRO TIP: If you’re wondering why I am suggesting paid tools to make a blog, I would say these three are the most essential and perhaps the only compulsory investments you need to launch a blog. WordPress comes with free themes and they are so generic that you would better not use them, leave alone the featureless properties.
My Recommendation:
My blog is powered by a custom designed theme which can cost you anywhere between $1000 or so. But, you don’t need to shell out so much money. For starting a new blog, you need a simple yet professional theme. You should go for Elegant Themes which costs $80 for 87 uniquely designed themes.
Other Tips To A Winning Blog Design:
Don’t clutter your blog with ads, at least not before you have a meaningful number of visitors.
Leave a lot of white space.
Elegant Themes above gives you 87 different themes, choose the one that best fits your need.
Invest in a logo. You can get yourself a decent logo for $5 using Fiverr or hire someone (if you have the budget).
Use some social sharing buttons to help your readers spread the word about your posts. The best thing about WordPress is, it has a ton of plugins (like tools) that you can install and get the work done.You can choose a premium social sharing plugin like social warfare or get the work done with free plugins like add this.
Step 4: Create Great Blog Content For Your Readers
Now that you have setup your blog, it will be blank and will have nothing for your readers.
Hence, you need content to showcase to your readers. This content can give an idea about what your visitors can expect from your blog and initial posts on the topic you are going to write. Your first blog entries would be divided into two types:
The basic yet important pages
The content that sells (posts)
Quick Tip: Pages are when you want to have content that is timeless (stays same over the time) and cannot be included in RSS feed. Posts on the other hand are changed over time and are more share-worthy. Pages mostly include informational content like a about us page, privacy policy page etc.
1. The Basic Yet Important Pages:
These are the pages that almost every blog must have. You need to write a compelling about us page (see mine here) which will house your purpose of blog, team members, what the visitors can expect etc.
Other pages that you must add are:
Privacy policy page (example)
Contact page (example)
Any services page (if you offer) (example)
2. The Content That Sells (Posts):
This part of the writing process is what is going to continue as far as your blogging continues. These are called blog articles or entries. Writing your first blog entry can be difficult if you have never managed a blog before but it doesn’t need to be complicated.
Here is a step by step process for publishing your first blog entry easily.
Few things to keep in mind while creating a content strategy side by side of your new blog launch announcement:
1. Make Sure You Have Enough Articles To Satisfy Your Visitors:
When you get the word about your blog out there, you need to have enough articles that your visitors will stick around for a while. Having not less than 5 articles is considered ideal but you can have anything more than that. The more, the better!
Having enough content on the blog before launching will:
Reduce your bounce rates
Increase your business impression by showcasing your expertise on the subject
Give you enough time to focus on next step, that is, promotion.
2. Create A Pillar Post:
Pillar posts are something that are resourceful guides on the topic. These posts are often the one larger than other posts and should be catered towards problem solving in your niche. Here is a guide to create pillar posts that rank. You should definitely write at least one pillar post prior to your launch so that you can show your authority in your niche.
For example: If you are starting a food blog, you can create a resource on complete guide to food photography or the complete guide to kitchen maintenance.
Now the question arises,
3. How Do You Create Posts That Bring Traffic To Your Website?
In the blogging world, website traffic is the other name of money. The more and targeted your traffic is, the more you earn. So, it is very essential to write content that brings traffic and converts.
You cannot do it manually, and there are a lot of tools in the market that can help you do it faster and better. If you want to come up with content ideas for your newly launching website there is no better place than competitor research.
And the tool to help you find golden keywords that are easier to rank and bank is SEMrush.
I have been using this tool since quite a long time and it has helped me go from writing random posts to writing posts that get traffic and convert into sales.
How To Use SEMrush To Find Content Ideas For Your New Blog?
Use this link to get SEMrush for 30 days absolutely free of cost. You can buy it for sure (check here for discount coupon) but if you are tight in budget using the 30 days free trial is a no brainer.
The next step would be plug in any of your competitor sites on the search bar of the SEMrush dashboard. Taking our example of food blog above, I typed Pinchofyum.com on the place.
SEMrush is quick to give you all the possible keywords that the site might be targeting including the paid (adwords) keywords (remember seeing ads in search results? That is adwords ads).
See the screenshot below to see top 5 keywords and if you click view full report, it gives you complete report and even more keywords.
And if you want even more sites, the competitors of Pinchofyum would be your competitors. So, SEMrush even gives you the competitor list of your entered website so that you can target those sites and see for some low hanging fruits (keywords) to target in your newly launching blog. Check out the same pinchofyum.com example.
This is the exact formula I use to create a content plan for all my new blogs and guess what, they rank faster and generate sales sooner than those sites which do not have a solid content or keyword strategy.
Read the detailed guide to finding keywords for your blog.
Here is your 30 days free trial link again!
Step 5: Set Up SEO And Analytics For Your Blog
Now the next and most important step is to optimize your blog for search engines.
This is crucial because search engines are what will drive organic traffic to your blog.
Here are the steps you need to perform to make your blog search engine optimized.
1. Install WordPress SEO Plugin:
WordPress SEO by Yoast is the most used plugin that will make sure your posts are SEO-optimized, help you in setting up search snippets and also create a sitemap for your blog. All this for free.
PRO TIP: Use this guide to setup Yoast SEO on your blog.
2. Add Google Analytics Code:
Google analytics code is like the soul of your blog. It helps you track your page views, unique visitors at any point of time. Much more than that, it tells you which pages get the most traffic, what keywords bring you traffic and a heck load of data about your visitors like demographics, device used to access your blog and interests etc.
Installing Google Analytics on your blog is a must-do if you want to blog professionally. Here is the video guide to install Analytics on your site.
3. Submit Your Site To Google Search Console:
Google search console is a platform where you can manage your site, the sitelinks that you want to appear, disavow bad backlinks etc. You can submit your sitemap to Google here. Click here to learn more.
Similarly, submit your blog to Bing and Yahoo webmaster tools. These aren’t necessary but why leave even a small piece on the table?
4. Create Official Pages On Social Media Platforms:
This is essential for creating your brand presence and will also give your domain some trust signals. Pinterest asks you to verify your domain ownership which can be done with Yoast easily.
Step 6: Create A Fool-Proof Promotion Plan To Get More Traffic
Once you’ve launched a new blog, written content on it and set your social profiles, the last step would be to get the blog launch announcement wording out there.
Initially, search engines won’t send you any traffic. This is the time you have to focus on marketing and networking to make your blog launch successful.
Here are some ways to get some initial traffic to your new blog:
1. Write Guest Posts:
Guest posts are a very good way to get some initial traffic from targeted audience of other blogs. This can be done by building a relationship with other authority blogs in your niche and pitching them your guest posts.
Most blogs don’t allow backlinks to your new blog but you can suffice it by adding a link to your coming soon page or even homepage on your author bio. Guest blogging can bring you tons of initial visitors and subscribers even before you officially launch your blog.
Jon Morrow used this same principle to get over 13,000 subscribers even before launching his now authority blog SmartBlogger.com. Similarly, Leo Widrich of Buffer managed to get 100,000 visitors to his 9 month old blog just by guest posting.
2. Ask Your Peers And Friends To Share It:
If you are a business organization dealing with launch of your company blog, the best thing you can do is ask your teammates, colleagues and employees to share your blog to your network. You can even do a press release if you wish.
Otherwise, you can use social media platforms and ask your friends, fellow bloggers to get you the initial exposure. If you have the money, using facebook ads is the best option to reach your target audience on autopilot.
3. Broadcast To Your Email Subscribers:
You can use your email list, if any, to broadcast about your new blog launch.
4. Leverage Blogging Communities:
Blogging communities like Blogengage and social media sharing communities like viralcontentbuzz or justretweet are sure to give you the initial traffic flow and social media shares that will boost your blog visibility.
5 Practical Things To Do Immediately After Starting A Blog
So you’ve successfully started your blog on WordPress. Congrats.
But here’s the thing. Your job is not fully done. There are few more essential things you need to do right after launching your blog to make it search engine and user friendly.
Here are the top things you should do immediately after starting your WordPress blog.
1. Connect Your Site With Google Analytics
You can’t build a money making website without tracking your site’s traffic and user behaviour, right?
Google Analytics is a tracking tool which is developed by Google to provide you all the information you need to track your website visits, user behaviour, website bounce rates and so on.
It’s completely free to use and can be easily integrated with your WordPress site through an embed code provided by Google. If you’re not a tech savvy and prefer a much easier way, you can use a plugin like Google Analytics by MonsterInsights.
2. Create A Sitemap
If you launched a new site, you must need a sitemap. With such a sitemap, it’s much easier for the search engine crawlers to see the complete structure of your site and access your site more efficiently.
You can install Google XML Sitemaps plugin and it will take care of everything things where it supports all kinds of WordPress generated pages as well as custom URLs. If you’re using this plugin to create a sitemap, you don’t need to anything additionally such as creating sitemap files.
3. Install These Essential WordPress Plugins
When it comes to WordPress, you’ll find a ton of plugins and here are few of the most essential plugins you must install on your new blog.
Caching plugin: A caching plugin generates static HTML pages of your website and saves it on your server.
That means each time a user tries to access your website, your caching plugin such as WP Rocket or W3 Total Cache serves up the lighter HTML page instead of processing the comparatively heavier WordPress PHP scripts and it dramatically improves your page loading time and overall performance.
There are a wide range of caching plugins available for WordPress but the widely used and recommended are mentioned below.
W3 total cache: It is the most downloaded caching plugin in WordPress directory and it helps you reduce download times by using features like content delivery network (CDN) integration. It also offers up to 80% bandwidth savings via minify and HTTP compression of HTML, CSS, JavaScript and feeds.
WP Rocket: This is a premium WordPress caching plugin which we’re using on this site. You can use options like Lazy Load It can improve actual and perceived loading time as images, iframes, and videos will be loaded only as they see which reduces the number of HTTP requests. We also have written a detailed review of WP Rocket where you’ll discover all the essential details and find out whether it’s worth paying or not.
WP Super Cache: Another popular caching plugin which you can use for free. This plugin generates static html files from your dynamic WordPress blog. This is especially useful when your site is hosted on a low bandwidth hosting environment as this plugin servers better to quickly load static files.
Make sure to also optimize your site for the following things.
GZip compression (GZip compression helps you reduce the size of data to save storage space or increase the data transfer rate and it’s widely used to compress web pages on the server end for decompression in the browser)
CloudFlare compatibility (you can easily use a CDN like CloudFlare and integrate it along with caching plugins for superior performance in your website loading times)
Backup plugin: Backup plugins let you save all of your website’s data automatically so you can restore and retrieve them any time you want.
Here’s a list of few backup plugins you can consider in 2021.
VaultPress (You’ll get automated backups feature where your data is stored in an exclusive offsite digital vault in real time and it’s the same backup plugin we’ve been using at Bloggers Passion for over 3 years now)
BackupBuddy (Another popular backup plugin which gives you access to backup your data and also allows you to restore or move your WordPress site to a new hosting environment or domain easily)
UpdraftPlus (This is the most popular free WordPress backup plugin and it allows you to backup and restore with a single click on a schedule daily, weekly or monthly. It gives you access to complete manual or scheduled backups of all your WordPress files, databases, plugins and themes)
Duplicator
BackWPup
WordPress security plugin: Whether you know it or not, thousands of WordPress sites get hacked every single day. So if you want to secure your site from hacking or cracking (or brute force attacks), you should consider installing the following plugins.
Limit login attempts (it secures your sites from brute force attacks and it limits the login attempts and blocks the IP address of hackers temporarily)
Anti-malware security plugin (it’s an incredible security plugin as it can secure your WordPress sites from all the malware and viruses)
Bulletproof security plugin (protects your .htaccess file by providing a rocking firewall around it and no one can access your root files and it also restricts access to the admin dashboard without your permission)
4. Set Up Social Media Accounts
We recommend you to create social media profiles for your blog as soon as you install WordPress on your hosting.
In fact, professional bloggers first search for social media profiles and only purchase domains if they find unique names. As a rule of thumb, your social media profiles should include your website name.
For example, all the social media profiles such as Facebook, Twitter etc are available for our site Bloggers Passion.
Here are few social media accounts you can create;
Facebook
Twitter
Pinterest
Instagram
LinkedIn
Quora (although a Q & A platform but definitely a great channel to promote your content and website)
Also make sure to submit your site on few high authority blog submission sites as they allow you to submit your blog and/or blog posts so you gain more exposure and build some backlinks to your sites.
5. Most Basic Yet Important Changes To Make From WordPress Dashboard
After you install WordPress and logging into dashboard, you’ll see plenty of options ranging from posts to media to comments to settings.
Here are few most important changes you need to make from your WordPress dashboard to make your site search engine and user friendly.
Firstly, give your site a name. You can go to “Settings” and right at the top of the screen, you’ll see two options, one to change your site’s title and another to alter its tagline. It looks something like this;
Simply give your site a title and include a tagline which best describes what your site is all about.
Use the optimized Permalink structure
One of the best ways to optimize your WordPress site is to optimize your permalink structure (also known as URL structure). It helps you easily optimize your primary keywords for search engines and easy to read even for your readers.
To optimize permalink structure from your WordPress dashboard, go to Settings > Permalinks screen, and check out the options within. There are various permalink structures you can choose from, including a custom option. It looks something like this;
From the above Permalink options, “Post name” permalink structure is usually the best option, since it gives search engines like Google and your readers a clear idea of what your page is all about.
Whether you know it or not, Google truncates if it finds a lengthy URL in search results and that’s the reason why going for a shorter Permalink structure like “Post name” works best for most of the WordPress sites.
5 Mistakes To Avoid When Starting A New Blog In 2021
Building a new website is easy but there’ll be a ton of blogging mistakes most beginners make.
While there’s nothing wrong in making mistakes but you’ll be building a profitable blog quickly if you can avoid a few costly and common mistakes.
Here are the top 5 mistakes to avoid when launching a new website in 2021.
1. Don’t Cover Too Many Topics
Seriously, a lot of bloggers cover too many topics. They cover something about fitness. The next day they cover something about technology. If you want to build a money making blog, don’t do that mistake. Focus on very few topics that you master in the long run.
As a rule of thumb, we recommend you to stick to just 2 to 3 topics and create blog posts only around those topics.
2. Don’t Ignore SEO
SEO is the #1 reason why the majority of the blogs and websites get a ton of traffic and sales. If you want to survive in the long run, make sure to give importance to SEO. SEO basically involves keyword research, on page optimization, building backlinks and so on.
Here’s an ultimate guide around SEO where you can get every detail around SEO to improve your search traffic and sales.
3. Your Website Speed Matters A Lot
The more time it takes to load your website pages, the higher your website bounce rates will be. Make sure your site loads within 2 to 3 seconds. The best way to get faster loading times is to use a faster hosting service (we recommend WPX hosting).
Above all, make your site mobile responsive because smartphone internet usage is increasing at a rapid rate.
4. Don’t Steal
One of the most common mistakes beginner bloggers make is trying to steal from others. Don’t copy others content. Don’t steal others images. It doesn’t add any value. In fact, it degrades your online reputation in the long run.
5. Invest Where Its Needed
It takes money to make money online. Always remember that. Here are a few things where you should invest money to make your blog successful in 2021.
Website design (invest in premium WordPress themes)
Get a unique logo
Proper hosting
Email marketing and SEO tools (like Drip, SEMrush and so on)
How To Build A Blog That Makes $10,000 Every Single Month?
The blog Bloggers Passion which you’re currently reading generating us around $10k every month (which means, we’re earning around $2500 every single week).
We made more than $106,000 which is around 75 lakhs in Indian rupees in 2018 which is increased by almost 35% (earlier I made $67,000).
Here’s the income vs earning chart of blog for the years 2017 and 2018 (you can see the Bloggers Passion income report from here).
In the month of November 2018, we made over $17,000 (just within a month) and you can find the details from here.
Here’s a screenshot of one of the products we sold where we made great commission (in just 2018).
As you can see above, we earned around more than $18,000 from one particular affiliate product in 2018 only. That’s a ton of commission, right?
Whether you know it or not, there are a ton of successful bloggers who make about 6 to 7 figures a month.
Isn’t that incredible?
Just to give you a real example, Michelle from Making Sense of Cents earned $159,592.42 in business income in the month of November 2018.
Here are few of the ways Michelle made so much money.
Bluehost – $30,240.00
Survey companies – $10,192.50
ConvertKit – $784.95
Ebates – $500.00
Sponsorships & advertising – $23,500.00
Making Sense of Affiliate Marketing Course – $38,018.00
Display advertising – $2,295.00
Six Figure Blogger – $2,282.00
Miscellaneous affiliates – $12,377.00
If you want to find more of such top bloggers, you should check out this post.
How To Start A Blog That Generates $10,000 A Month In 2021: 5 Steps
Building a 6 figure income generating blog is not rocket science. You basically need two things;
Building your blog audience
Monetizing your audience
That being said, if you are looking for a detailed layout and blueprint of how to launch a blog that generates $10k or more every single month, here are 5 PROVEN steps for you.
1. Create A Solid Monetization Strategy
First things first. You need a blueprint. You need a monetization strategy. You need to know how to make money from your blog before you even launch it.
Do you already know how are you going to monetize your site? Are you going to use affiliate marketing? Or do you want to sell online courses? By creating a monetization strategy in advance, you can easily follow a framework which helps you actually generate profits from your blog.
That being said, there are multiple income sources you can consider to create a monetization strategy and we’re going to discuss briefly about 3 of them now.
1. Making Money Through Affiliate Products
Majority of the income which is generated by our blog Bloggers Passion comes from selling affiliate products. So our monetization strategy mostly revolves around selling affiliate products.
That’s why we rely heavily on SEO and organic traffic as it converts really better when compared to other traffic channels like social media or referrals. If you’re looking for a passive income source to make money even while you sleep, affiliate marketing works great.
Basically affiliate marketing is all about selling others products for commission where you’ll get paid whenever you make a successful affiliate sales which is generated through your affiliate referral links.
Affiliate marketing is growing rapidly and users clicked more than 5 billion times and the affiliate marketing networks carried out more than 170 million transactions worldwide.
Affiliate marketing spend in the US is estimated to grow by a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 10 percent between 2015 and 2020, to reach a projected $6.8 billion. eMarketer estimates affiliate marketing represents 7.5 percent of total digital marketing spend among retailers, $15.81 billion.
Here’s the affiliate marketing spending forecast.
If you’re looking to create a monetization strategy using affiliate marketing, you should create contents which educate your audience (and you should also target commercial keywords).
Here are few content types which work well with this model;
Case studies
Affiliate marketing product reviews
Comparison posts
Discounts and promo codes
2. Making Money by Selling Your own Products
There’s also another fantastic monetization strategy you can use apart from affiliate marketing. It is selling your own products.
It can range from anything including;
Selling your own merchandise
Selling your own stuff such as eBooks, plugins, tools
Selling online courses
And the list goes on
The best examples of such blogs which are already using this type of monetization strategy include;
I will teach you to be rich
Videofruit
Social Triggers
The above blogs make millions of dollars by selling online courses. If you want to use this type of monetization strategy then the following type of content performs well.
Create in-depth articles around the products you want to create
Highly educational stuff
Problem solving contents
And so on
3. Making Money From Consulting
You can also offer consulting, private mentorships or 1 on 1 consulting services from your blogs as it’s another great monetization strategy.
The key to make more money from this kind of monetization strategy is that you need to focus on increasing your personal brand. You should establish yourself as an expert or thought leader in your industry.
2. SEO Can Be Your Best Bet
Building a blog that makes $10K a month is not easy. In fact, it takes time.
You can’t make $10K a month right after launching your blog especially if you don’t have any prior experience. The best bet can be an SEO.
SEO simply means, Search Engine Optimization which helps you optimize your site for better organic visibility. It helps you attract the right audience who are eager to buy stuff from you.
When it comes to SEO, here are the 3 things that really matter.
Content
Keywords
Backlinks
Let’s talk briefly about each one of them so you can build a blog that gets more traffic and sales in 2021 and beyond.
Content: Don’t create short articles. Focus on creating long form of articles with at least 2000+ words as they tend to rank well in search engines and also attract more social shares and backlinks.
Keywords: Before you publish any blog post, make sure to do keyword research. Keyword research is all about finding keywords which help you rank well in Google search. Make sure to find low competitive long tail keywords with high CPC (Cost Per Click) to generate better organic traffic.
You can use tools like SEMrush to easily find great keywords no matter what industry you are in. You can use the below link to get a free trial of SEMrush.
Use this EXCLUSIVE Link to Get 30 Days Free Trial of SEMrush Pro Account (Worth $99.95)
Backlinks: Google considers backlinks as “votes”. If you want your content to perform well in Google search, you need to attract highly relevant and quality backlinks.
Here are a few ways to get backlinks to your site.
Guest posting (writing posts for other sites to get links to your site)
Using blogger outreach
Using weekly roundups of other bloggers
Broken link building
3. Diversify Your Traffic And Income Sources
Don’t put all your eggs in one basket.
You need to diversify your traffic sources.
1.3 million page views in one year which is 2018 and 1 million page views in 2017.
These are our website Bloggers Passion traffic stats. The best part is that, we didn’t spend even a penny on marketing it.
Here are the traffic sources at a glance;
Organic search (83%)
Direct traffic (12%)
Referral traffic (4%)
Social media traffic (1%)
We’re now mostly focusing on other social media channels as well such as creating Facebook groups, writing on Quora, focusing more on email marketing etc as we want to diversify our traffic and income sources.
You should also do the same things if you want to build a profitable blog in the long run.
4. Think Long Term
You can’t start a money making blog overnight. It takes time. We started Bloggers Passion in 2010 (exactly 9 years ago). We’re now earning $10K each month which means, it literally took us 9 years to go from 0 to $10K in revenue.
If you want to build a money making blog, think long term. Don’t expect quick results. Find out what strategies work better for you after 1 or 2 or 3 years. Then, work towards such goals from today. That’s how you can succeed.
5. Invest In The Right Tools
You can’t build a money making blog without actually investing money. It takes money to make money online.
If you get that right, you can build a profitable blog really quickly. Although there are a ton of premium tools out there but you should invest money in the following places.
Web hosting (consider a reliable hosting like Bluehost)
Email marketing (you can check out GetResponse or MailChimp)
SEO tools such as SEMrush
If we had to start again from scratch and invest in just one tool, it would be SEMrush.
At Bloggers Passion, we’re using SEMrush for more than 3 years now and the results are outstanding.
Here are some of the things you can do easily with SEMrush.
Keyword research
Site audits
Site positioning
Content creation ideas
Competitive analysis
SEMrush gets regularly updates its databases to give you accurate and fresh data
PLA ads reveals your competitor’s ads information
Advertising analysis tools
Domain comparison
Keyword rank tracking
Backlink analysis
And the list goes on
So if you’re interested in giving it a try, use this exclusive link to get a 30 days free trial of SEMrush.
6. Build & Grow Your Email List From Day 1
Email marketing helps you build strong relationships with your website audience. If you’re NOT building an email list, you’re making a huge mistake.
Did you know that email marketing gives you a whopping 4000% ROI and $40 for every $1 spent?
So make sure to build and grow your email list from day 1. Although there are many email marketing tools out there but we recommend you to try ConvertKit.
ConvertKit is the same email marketing software we’re using at Bloggers Passion.
It’s affordable and offers excellent features to grow your email list. It also offers you features like tags and segments to easily manage your email subscribers for better conversion rates.
Try ConvertKit Free for 14 Days
Quick tip: If you’re just getting started, you can try their Free plan as well as it helps you build an email list of up to 1000 subscribers absolutely for free. You can also read our review of ConvertKit to know more details about their platform and features.
FAQs On How To Start A Blog In 2021 And Earn Five Figure Income
Here are a few important questions you might want to know about how to start a blog in 2021 and make it successful.
1. How To Launch A Website On WordPress And How Much Does It Cost?
Launching a WordPress site is extremely easy and basically involves in 3 easy steps which are;
Register a domain name (when you’re on hosting like Bluehost, you get a free domain for 1 year)
Get hosting (we recommend Bluehost)
Install WordPress on your hosting
It’s as simple as that.
Now coming to the question of the cost of setting up a WordPress site. It costs you around $100 for a year (along with hosting, domain etc).
2. How To Choose A Memorable Domain Name For A Website?
Choosing a memorable domain name is not easy. There are some characteristics of good domain that you must consider to be able to register a great domain. You can also use tools like Panabee.com, Namemesh.com, Dot-o-mator.com and so on to easily come up with a ton of ideas. You can also quickly know whether the domains are available or not.
3. How To Install WordPress On Bluehost Hosting?
Installing WordPress on Bluehost hosting is so easy. We’ve written a simply step by step tutorial on installing WordPress on Bluehost just within few minutes and it’s also included all the screenshots.
4. What Are Some Tips For Making Money Online With Your Blog?
There are a ton of ways to make money from blogging but majority of the bloggers choose the following ways to make money.
Affiliate marketing (which means selling others products where you earn a commission for every successful sale made through your affiliate referral links)
Display advertising networks (such as AdSense, Chitika, RevenueHits and so on)
Selling your own products (such as eBooks, videos, plugins, themes and so on)
Selling online courses
Paid reviews (you’ll get paid for promoting others products where you need to publish reviews of their products or services)
Blog consulting
Offering services (such as freelance writing, design, SEO and so on)
You can also check out this post on best alternatives to AdSense where you can find over 25 ultimate platforms to make money from your blog.
5. What Are The Top Earning Blogs In India?
So are you curious about knowing the top earning Indian blogs? There are literally hundreds of blogs in India that make a lot of money but here’s a list of few best Indian blogs where you can find a ton of Indian blogs along with the blog owners.
Browse More Resources About Starting A Profitable Blog:
How to Make a Fashion Blog and Make Money from it
How to Build a Successful Food Blog and Earn Money from it
How to Launch a Soccer a Blog and Make Money from it
How to Create a Free Blog on Blogger.com and Earn Money from it
List of Free Creation Sites for 2021
Final Thoughts: How To Start A Blog In 2021 And Earn Over $10,000 Every Month
If you were wondering how to start your dream blog, I hope this step by step guide gave you the exact idea. There is no alternative to have a perfect blog launch without following these steps.
You can do it.
This process is nothing difficult. You just have to follow the steps one by one and I am sure you will get the hang of it.
If you have any doubts or questions about how to build a blog that makes money, kindly comment below and I will assist you in launching your dream blog the right way.
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