Recently updated on July 8th, 2023 at 11:16 am
Thinking to start a blog, but have no experience? It is definitely not a problem, because this beginner-friendly tutorial will show how to do it without requiring any technical skills or knowledge.
Starting a blog on these days can be as easy as ABC, however, you should also know how to market and monetize it.
Setting up and running a website costs, however, you will only need to pay for the website’s domain and hosting, and WordPress website building platform comes free. Remember,the price you will have to pay for your website is very little compared to how much you can earn from it.
This guide will show you the most effective and cost-efficient method, even if you have no experience at all.
Why Should I Start A Blog?
Before starting building your first empire online, let’s have a look at the number of reasons why you should do it:
- It allows you to earn money: Making money is the top reason why people blog. There are many ways how you can make some serious life-changing income from your blog. For that you will have to implement the right strategies and put enough work.
- Good for your mind: Blogging is a healthy way of expressing your thoughts, and for many people it works as a therapy.
- Gain exposure: By creating content on your blog you open gates to the 4.48 billion people worldwide who regularly use internet. The number is still growing…
- Self-improvement: It’s not a secret that blogging can help you to improve your writing, research, and planning skills, as well it helps to better structure your thoughts and ideas.
- Cost-effective: Running a blog costs very little compared to the financial returns you can take from it.
There can be a ton of other reasons why starting a blog is a great choice, but this article is not about that. This article is about how you can do it without experience, and in the way it makes money.
How To Start A Blog And Make Money Without Experience?
Here we will go through a very simple process of creating your blog from A to Z. We will start by choosing a topic of your blog and finish with some best marketing practices.
1. Choose a niche for your blog
– skip this part if you already have chosen a niche
Every blog needs a topic, especially if you want to turn your blog into a long-term income stream.
So, the first thing you need to do is to come up with your favorite niche. Your niche can be everything that involves your interests. The more you are interested in that topic, the more work you are likely to produce.
Usually, niches that are less competitive bring quicker financial results, but it’s okay to dive into the popular and competitive one if you have an interest in it.
Here’s a quick list of the most popular blogging niches:
- Travel
- Fashion
- Health & Fitness
- Computing
- Marketing & Business
- Cryptocurrency
- Cooking
- Childcare
- DIY
If you decide to write about any popular and broad niche, it’s a good idea to choose a sub-niche of it. It’s because it’s easier to become an authority blog in a smaller and specific niche rather than in a big and broad one.
For example, if you want to blog about Cooking, you could start with something like Indian Vegan Food and eventually expand wider in that topic as you grow your blog and gain more experience in your niche.
Remember, that the internet is big nowadays and every niche you can think of has the potential to attract readers and make money. So don’t be afraid to differentiate yourself and be original, when choosing your niche.
2. Create A Website
Disclosure: Bear in mind that we always recommend products that we personally rely on and some of the links in this post are affiliate links. So, if you go through them to make a purchase, we will earn a small commission with no additional cost to you – that helps to keep this blog online.
Now, once you know the topic you are going to blog about, it’s time for the fun part. In this tutorial, we will be creating a website with WordPress, and you don’t need to have any experience or technical knowledge when working with this beginner-friendly website builder.
Why WordPress? WordPress runs 35% of the entire Internet and it’s the most powerful easy-to-use website-blog building platform. The world’s Top Brands and Companies are using WordPress to run their websites, including – BBC, Time, Beyonce, Sony and many more.
In order to set up and run a website, you will need to purchase the domain name and web hosting.
Domain Name is your website’s name, for example, www.myfirstwebsite.com.
Web Hosting is a service, which allows your website to be present and accessible online.
There are many different domain and hosting companies, and often people choose to register with separate providers.
Having your domain and hosting registered on different services can be confusing, especially at the start.
Therefore, we will keep it simple and choose Bluehost service, where you can register your domain and host your website in one place.
In most cases, you would normally need to pay for your domain and hosting with other providers, but Bluehost offers a free domain and you only need to pay for the hosting.
Bluehost is a reputable web hosting provider, which has been serving websites for decades.
Here’re more reasons why to choose BlueHost:
- High-quality
- Cost-effective (Starts from $3.95/month)
- 99.9% uptime
- 24/7 support
- User-friendly
1. Choose Your Hosting Plan:
– Click here to start with the Bluehost
Click Get Started and choose your hosting plan:
If you are creating your first website going for the Basic plan is perfectly fine, and you can always upgrade later if you need it.
If you already own multiple domain names and would like them to be hosted in the same place, you can choose Plus plan and pay a little bit extra for the option to host unlimited domains.
2. Choose Your Domain Name
Choose a domain name that represents your blog. You also need to choose domain’s extension (.com, .net, .org)
We recommend choosing a .com domain extension as it is the most appealing for the worldwide audience.
However, there are chances that the domain based on your brand’s name is already taken, then you can go for different extensions, such as – .co (company), .net (network), .org (organization), .us (United States), .info (informational), or any other.
Or, a good trick is to add word “the” if it appeals to your domain name. For example, if domain www.apples.com is already taken, try www.theapples.com.
And if you have already purchased a domain with another provider you can still sign up with Bluehost by easily transferring your domain.
Quick Tip: Try to choose domain name that goes along with your blogging niche, for example, if you are in a Dog Niche, your website URL could look like www.thedogworld.com. If you are not 100% sure about your niche, you can go with something brandable that could appeal to other niches, like www.houfs.com or any other random name.
3. Complete Your Order
Here you just need to enter your personal information including your correct email address.
The longer you buy your hosting for the cheaper it gets. Choose a pricing plan according to your business needs.
If you’ve chosen the Basic Plan your pricing is as follows:
- $5.95/month for 1 year
- $4.95/month for 2 years
- $3.95/month for 3 years
Adding SiteLock Security to your website is recommended, but not necessary as you can purchase it later if needed.
By having SiteLock Security on your website you will demonstrate your customers that you are a trustworthy business that verifies its credentials such as email, phone, and address.
Also, SiteLock Security automatically scans your website and ensures there is no malware or spam, so this option is quite handy to add.
Once your payment goes through you can complete your sign up by choosing your password.
4. Choose a WordPress Theme
Bluehost will automatically install a WordPress for you, and you can use it forever for free. Here you can choose a theme for your site. The theme is what controls all design aspects as well as the functionality features.
Log in to your WordPress dashboard and select a theme that you love (you can change it anytime later).
There are over 40,000 themes available on WordPress so you should definitely find the one you love. Again, you don’t have to overthink in this step as you can always come back and change it.
5. Final Steps
The following screen will ask you whether you are building a website for personal or business needs. Answer it genuinely as it will help Bluehost provide you accurate further recommendations and guidelines.
Here’s how your WordPress dashboard should look like. You may want to design and fill your website with content before you launch it.
But before that, you can have a look at the 9 most important WordPress dashboard features.
6. Get To Know WordPress (Video-Series Tutorials)
1. Login & Admin Area
Here’s a quick overview of the back-end area that you will control and the most important WordPress dashboard sections. These include Pages, Posts, Media, Appearance, Plugins and more.
2. Creating Pages
Pages will help to organize your content. This video will show you how to easily add the first element of your website – pages.
3. Creating Blog Posts
If you want to turn your website into a blog – you must add blog posts where you will be creating your content.
This video will show how you can schedule, design, publish and add media to your posts.
4. Categories and Tags
Categories are important for search engines like Google, and it also helps to organize your blog posts.
Watch this video to learn how you can easily categorize your posts.
5. Using Plugins
Plugins are responsible for your website’s functionality. They automatically add features to your website like contact forms, image galleries, shopping carts and many more.
Here’s a quick guide on how you can install, manage and use your plugins.
6. Customizing Themes
Themes are responsible for your website’s design and overall appearance.
There are plenty of free themes you can choose from and this video will show you how to install them.
7. Menu & Widgets
Menus and widgets help to adjust where your content appears on the theme. It also helps a visitor to navigate and find the elements on your site.
After finishing this video-series you should feel knowledgeable and confident in your website building process. If not, don’t worry, building and managing a blog with this easy-to-use platform will become the second nature of yours as you keep gaining more experience.
How To Make Money From Your Blog?
Now since you have your blog up and running, it’s time to focus on the best methods to make money online. There are several methods that we are going to discuss here, and they all share one common thing.
All of the methods to make money online require having visitors coming to your website. Once you have them in, here’s how you can monetize your blog:
1. Affiliate Marketing
Today you can make money by recommending other people’s products and getting a commission every time someone buys them. There are thousands of different products in different niches available out there that you can promote for money.
The commissions can range from 3% to 75% on average, and there are products that can make you over $1000 from a single sale. Check out marketplaces like Clickbank, ShareASale, Amazon, JVZoo and many more for endless lists of products in every niche you can think of.
Once you choose the product your mission is to create content that solves a certain problem and offer the affiliate product as a solution to your readers.
2. Advertising
This is another very popular yet effective way how bloggers monetize their blogs. For this one, you will need a decent amount of traffic, and that’s not the right method to focus on when you just start your blog,
Once your blog becomes a little bit advanced and you have at least 100 daily visitors, you can sign up with one of the advertising networks to display the ads on your site. These will automatically put ads on your website and you will get paid every time someone clicks the ad. There are many advertising networks to choose from, but the most popular is Google Adsense.
3. Sell Your Digital Products
This is the last method you want to pay attention to when trying to make money from your blog, as it requires some knowledge and experience to implement. When you get advanced and knowledgeable enough in your blog’s niche you can create and sell, products like software, ebooks, video training, tutorials, and any other media files.
You can sell your digital downloads on your website by simply installing certain plugins to WordPress. If you manage to create a great product, selling them becomes an easy task and you can make very good profits from it.
Paul Lian is a researcher, writer, and founder of WayToChanges.com. With over eight years of experience in blogging, digital marketing, copywriting, and digital products, he has built multiple six-figure income streams. Through his blog, Paul shares his best expertise, strategies, and tools to help readers achieve financial freedom and success in their own digital ventures.