How To Become A Blogger: 8 Steps For Success

Are you working a 9 to 5 job or in between jobs and looking for a way to earn some additional income? Or perhaps you want to become your own boss? Well, learning how to become a blogger is one way in which you can do both.

Starting your own blog where you share your expertise and provide value to your audience if done the right way can become a very profitable way to earn more money.

If you are new to blogging, you likely want a blog that’s simple to start, can be managed easily, and more importantly, will earn you more money. But how do I know this? Well, you are right here reading the Clever Girl Finance blog which earns us thousands of dollars a month.

In this blog post, I’m going to share the resources we use as well as advice and strategies (all based on my personal experience starting this blog). These resources and strategies have allowed me to grow from just me making a few hundred dollars a month to now having a team and making thousands of dollars! And the best part of it all?  You can do it too with some time and commitment.

**FYI, this is a long post so if you need to, bookmark it and come back to reference it as you complete each step.

Benefits of blogging

Blogging does a number of really awesome things for me and my company. It allows me to share my expertise as a money expert, which I’m super passionate about. It also helps us build brand awareness, grow our audience and it gives us the opportunity to work with some amazing brands.

Plus based on the content we create here, we also get paid to write for several other outlets amongst other things. All of which contribute to our company earnings.

In addition, it allowed me to transition from running my company as a side hustle to becoming a full-time business owner. I am now my own boss, set my own schedule, and pay salaries to my team.

That being said, let’s get into how to start a successful blog.

How to become a blogger and start a successful blog

Don’t let the fancy websites you see online fool you. It’s pretty easy to become a blogger as long as you are willing to spend time setting it up the right way and I’m going to walk you through it. Here’s what we are going to cover:

• Deciding on your blogging niche (I’ll tell you some of the popular ones)
• Choosing a domain name
• Setting up your blog
• Creating valuable content (that you share!)
• Monetizing your blog

We’ll also go over specific tools and resources to help you start out the right way. e.g.

• A host for your site
• An actual blog and template
• Stock photos and a design resource
• An email marketing platform to engage with your audience
• Social content-sharing tools

Don’t forget that if your intention is to turn your blog into a money-making side hustle, you want to make sure you set your business up correctly.

1: Review different blogging niches and decide on one

Before you spend any of your valuable time (or money) setting up your blog, you need to decide on your topic or niche. What type of blog do you want to start? You’ll need to determine what you’ll be writing about and who your ideal audience is. This is a really important step.

When your blog has a content theme, you’ll attract an audience interested in learning about the particular topic you write about. If you write about a million different and completely unrelated topics then it will be hard to get your audience to stick around.

Why? Well, they simply won’t be interested in all the different things you are sharing.

For example, we write about personal finance and business topics for women. That’s our focus. Sometimes we write about fashion or beauty or relationships. However, we always write about it from the perspective of how it relates to money.

See where I’m going with this?

Popular blogging niches

Some of the most popular blogging niches include:

• Health and wellness e.g. Fitness, healthy eating
• Food e.g. baking, cooking
• Beauty and style e.g. fashion, hair
• Personal improvement e.g. personal finance, running a business
• Lifestyle e.g. a combination of two or more of the above niches makes you a lifestyle blogger!

Whatever niche you decide, you want to be sure that your content is helping your audience solve their problems. It’s all about adding value to keep them coming back. This is key when it comes to how to start a successful blog.

2: Choose a domain name and get hosting

This is going to be the name of your blog, so choose wisely. Once you’ve decided on your blog name, be sure to do a domain name search to make sure it’s not taken i.e. search YOURBLOGNAME.com.

I chose a blog name (Clever Girl Finance) that would make it immediately obvious what my content was about and who it was for. However, there are no rules for naming your blog.

Over time your blog name will become synonymous with the content you create, just make sure you like the name you choose. It shouldn’t cost you that much to purchase your domain name alone (without hosting) and once you find a name you like, I recommend that you buy it.

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve thought of a domain name, searched for it, and saw it was available and then procrastinated. The next time I tried to purchase it, it was taken. My advice would be to purchase it right away and keep it until you are ready to use it.

Once you’ve purchased your domain name, you are going to need hosting. Hosting is essentially where your blog and its content will be housed. A popular option for hosting is GoDaddy.

3: Set up your blog

Once your domain and hosting are out of the way, it’s time to set up your blog. Here are a couple of options:

Option 1: You can install your blog by using WordPress. They are the most popular blogging platform, due to their great SEO capability and easy to use.

Plus since a ton of people are on WordPress (about 25% of the world’s blogs – wow) there are also a ton of resources available to help you.

You can leverage a tutorial on how to set it up and it’s very simple – all you have to do is follow the instructions.  Once you’ve set up WordPress, the fun can now begin and that is selecting your theme and blog design!

Option 2: You can purchase your domain name but host your blog elsewhere and there are some excellent alternatives one of which is Squarespace.

Personally, I used and loved Squarespace for several years for different websites I owned and they’ve evolved tremendously over the last few years.

If you chose to use this platform, they provide the hosting for you and so all you’d need to do is purchase your domain name and connect it to your Squarespace site. Again, this is also very easy to do and they have a great tutorial here.

4: Start creating valuable content for a profitable blog

Ok, so your blog is ready to go. Now, this is where you’ll need to put in the effort to create your content. This will help you grow your audience, improve your web rankings, and get closer to your dream to start a successful blog. Like I mentioned, creating valuable content helped me work with brands, grow my audience, get paid to write for other outlets, and more.

It’s a good idea to create a content calendar or plan each month on what you’ll be writing about and how often (daily, bi-weekly, weekly, etc). Not only will this help you stay on track as you create content, but it will also ensure you don’t run out of ideas of what to talk about on your blog. Spend some time looking at the type of content the big bloggers in your niche are creating to help you get inspired.

Today, use a free tool call Asana to plan out our content calendar and blog post content. It keeps us organized and we set reminders in it so we don’t miss our content creation deadlines. It’s pretty awesome.

In addition, you’ll want to enhance your content with photos and graphics to make them more appealing and easy to digest depending on the topics you create.

For stock photos, we love PixaBay, the images are free and they have a really broad selection. For less common images, you can get paid images from Adobe Stock Photos. And for design, we use the paid version of Canva since I have a team. However, I started out with their free version which is also excellent.

A few other tips on creating content: The spell checker is your friend (and mine too). Also be sure to break up long paragraphs, use bullets and create easy-to-read and interesting headers based on your topic, etc. A visually appealing, well-written and well-organized blog is not only attractive, but it will also make people want to share and that’s exactly what you want!

In addition, here’s our list of the best books about blogging to help you gain more insight on how to become a blogger!

5. Build your email list

Your list of subscribers that is! These are the people who will sign up to receive emails from you because they are interested in your blog. The reason why you want to build a list is that you’ll actually “own” this audience and you can communicate with them directly via emails to them.

Even if people follow you on social media, you don’t own those followers. This means that if for instance, Instagram goes out of business today, your followers will be gone along with them.

Also growing your own list of subscribers means you can let them know when you launch products or services. Once you launch, you can turn a percentage of your subscribers into actual paying customers.

You can encourage people to sign up for your list by providing them with a freebie like a checklist or a mini eBook. Also, be sure to place your subscribe button in visible areas on your blog. To host our list, we use an email marketing platform called ConvertKit. Another popular option is Mailchimp.

I love how robust it is when it comes to organizing our audience into categories based on their interests, sending automatic welcome emails, and much more.

6. Promote your content everywhere

As you are creating content, you want to make sure people are reading it and that your blog is getting noticed so don’t be afraid to share it far and wide.

Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest, etc are just a few social media sites where you can get started with promoting your content. Hey, you can even start with friends and family!.

In order not to get overwhelmed though, pick one or two platforms to start. Set some time aside once a week and schedule your content for sharing. We use Later (specifically for Instagram) and SmarterQueue (for Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc) and love them both.

6. Earn money blogging

This is where all your hard work will pay off; by monetizing your blog! Because at the end of the day, how to start a successful blog also includes making money.

When it comes to monetization, there are a number of ways to do it. You can:

• Create digital products like eBooks, webinars, and worksheets
• Sell physical products and depending on your niche the options are endless
• Develop a course and/or offer coaching based on the content you share / problem you help your readers solve
• Become an affiliate and share products you love and use
• Have advertising on your blog
• Build brand authority through your content that will invite brand collaborations and attract other opportunities.

Start with one of these avenues and then add on others as time goes by. These streams combined can create a highly profitable blog (and business) for you.

7. Get more traffic to your blog

One thing I really want to stress when it comes to how to start a successful blog is, you can’t build it and expect people to flock to it in droves.

It just doesn’t work that way. You are going to have to proactively attract your audience to get traffic and that includes sharing your content everywhere. Some of my favorite ways to share my content are through Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest, my podcast, and on my YouTube channel.

Keep in mind I only began podcasting and creating videos after my core idea of having a blog was established. I also encourage my existing audience to share my content they found most valuable as well – like this blog post.

To grow traffic to your site, learning how SEO works can be a game-changer. And this is simply because most people don’t have the patience to do it.

In all honesty, the results of SEO can take a while. But if done right, it’s 100% worth implementing to grow your traffic and in turn, grow your income. Moz offers an incredible SEO resource to get your feet wet if you are interested in implementing SEO.

8. Be patient

Once you build a blog, scaling it can take time but if you are consistent, you will reap the benefits. As your content library and audience grow, opportunities to monetize your blog will increase as well.

There are a ton of possibilities to create a blog that’s extremely profitable. For instance, increased advertising revenue, opportunities to work with brands, product reviews or even creating your own products. Keep in mind though, the foundational piece of your blog is quality content first.

In closing

Those are my insights on how to become a blogger and build a successful blog. Keep in mind that when it comes to blogging, it takes work and it takes time. However, with focus and dedication, you can build an incredibly successful blog as a side hustle or even full-time!