How to start a profitable blog - step by step

So you’re thinking about starting a blog? Well, you’ve found the right place! This article is going to teach you how to start a profitable blog, step by step.

I’ve personally been blogging for over 15 years and can attest to the incredible power and benefits of blogging. It single handedly changed my life by helping me create the career of my dreams on my own terms.

Before you go any further, I would like to encourage you to listen to this episode… Is blogging right for you? 10 undeniable signs that you should start a blog:

✨ listen to this episode on the blissfully ambitious podcast ✨

Now, if you think you are ready for it, let’s get into why I love blogging and how blogging can change your life.

Reasons why YOU SHOULD START A BLOG:

1.Very minimal start up costs.

The cost of starting a blog can be way under $50 to get you up and running. You’ll need to pay for the domain, the hosting and that’s really it.

2. Your success is entirely dependent on you.

You have no one to answer to, no boss calling the shots. Your income potential will literally be determined by how much effort you want to put in.

3. You have the freedom to work from wherever.

This is one of my most favorite things about blogging, I have the ability to work from anywhere in the world, as long as I have my laptop and wifi.

4. A blog is a passive income portal.

You can create one piece of content one time and it will last on the internet forever. Meaning, if you have affiliate links and display ads on your blog, every time someone reads the blog, income will be coming in. So, just imagine if you had hundreds of blog posts. These are only 2 of the many ways that you can create an income from blogging.

5. Your blog is the best free marketing tool to grow your business.

With the right SEO strategy, you don’t even need a following to build awareness around your blog and business. You can use your blog to help inform your potential clients of why they must work with you.

You might find this post on 19 reasons why you should start a blog very helpful!

SOMETHING YOU SHOULD KNOW: Starting a profitable blog is actually hard work, this is NOT a get rich quick situation.

However, if you do choose put in the work, you can absolutely replace your 9-5 income with blogging.

It’s completely normal to start a blog with an extremely romanticized idea of what it will be like. During the first few months, you might even feel like it is a complete waste of time. However, if you do the steps outlined for you in the blogging course you WILL eventually get there.

In the first few months, I can almost guarantee that you will:

• Question your blog and your writing. You will be thinking to yourself that you must be doing something wrong.

• Feel frustrated by how much time it takes to put together a blog post and promote it to your bleak audience.

• Ask yourself why you are wasting your time doing this.

• Feel like quitting. Most people that start a blog quit at some point during the first year.

If you understand that a blog is a long term investment and can be a passive income machine for you if you do it correctly, you will replace your day job within the first year.

join my 5-day challenge, 5 steps to a follow-worthy blog here.

How CAN I start a blog?

(START HERE AND GO Step-by-step)

Step 1. ♥️ Choose a niche

When you first decide that you are ready to start a blog, you will want to get very clear on the niche you are going to choose. The reason for this is because if you want to start making money quickly on your blog, you will want to have a focused niche that you can start researching for content, data, ideas and keywords.

A simple 5 step formula for finding your profitable blog niche.

1. Passion/experience - It’s important that you choose a topic to talk about that you have experience in. You also want to enjoy talking about this topic for years to come, so choose something you have a strong interest in or passion for.

2. Solve a problem - Your blog should be focused on creating content that will help make other peoples lives a bit easier. You want to ultimately choose something that you enjoy figuring out, researching, continuing to learn about so that you can turn around and help others by your experience, expertise or perspective. Offering inspiration is also solving a problem

3. Interest - You want to make sure that people are actually interested in what you want to write about. I created a list of 10 of the most profitable blog niches for 2024, read it below.

4. Niche down. Get laser focused on a specific niche inside of a larger niche that really fits you well. For example: If your niche is Parenting, can you focus on moms of twins, boy moms, moms of children with disabilities. Or if your niche is fitness, can you focus on wellness for women over 40 or women who want to heal their gut issues. Or if your niche is home decor, you could focus on apartment dwellers, budget friendly decor or even dorm decorating.

5. Potential profit factor - Go to answerthepublic.com and see what questions people are asking in your niche. This may help you find easy problems to solve from questions that are the most popular questions asked online. You don’t want to create solutions that aren’t being asked on the internet, so do your research.

When you combine providing value with a popular public interest, you will find a niche for you.

10 of the most profitable blogging niches for 2024 according to experts:

1. Health and Wellness: This includes fitness, nutrition, mental health, wellness practices, and healthy lifestyle topics.

2. Personal Finance: Covering topics like budgeting, saving, investing, retirement planning, and financial advice.

3. Technology and Gadgets: Blogging about the latest tech trends, reviews of gadgets and devices, software guides, and how-tos.

4. Beauty and Fashion: Sharing makeup tutorials, beauty product reviews, fashion trends, style tips, and outfit inspiration.

5. Travel: Writing about travel experiences, destination guides, travel tips, and recommendations for accommodations and activities.

6. Lifestyle and Self-Improvement: Covering personal development, productivity, time management, self-care, and life hacks.

7. Food and Cooking: Sharing recipes, cooking techniques, food photography, and culinary tips.

8. Parenting: Sharing helpful finds, tips on baby hacks, advice for new moms, tips for moms of twins, helpful things to do with kids, etc. This niche is HIGHLY profitable.

9. Blogging and Business: This is one of the most profitable niches because everyone is online searching how to make more money online.

   2 really good blogs in this niche that inspired me:

   Melyssa Griffin (Made $283,680 in December 2016 of which net profit $191,146)

   Love Family Health

10. Home Decor and DIY: Focusing on home decor, organization, DIY projects, interior design, and home improvement tips.

    This is my absolute FAVORITE NICHE because everyone can relate to it. It also is very visual, and creative. It’s also a very profitable niche if you narrow down the topics. Home decor is a massive niche. You can write about small homes, first apartments, decorating on a budget, dorm decorating, bohemian interiors, best home decor DIY’s, plant hacks, cleaning hacks, etc. It is a fabulous niche.

    Some of my favorite blogs in this niche:

    • By Sophia Lee (made $43,225.37 in May 2020 on a blog started in 2017!)

    • Jojotastic

    • A Beautiful Mess

Remember that regardless of the niche you choose, providing valuable and high-quality content to your audience is crucial for building a loyal readership and potential profitability. Conduct thorough research, understand your target audience's needs, and adapt your content strategy accordingly. Additionally, diversifying your income sources, such as affiliate marketing, sponsored content, digital products, and online courses, can contribute to the profitability of your blog.

HOT TIP: As soon as you begin to create your niche, you want to work on your personal branding. Grab my FREE workbook on how to create yours right here.

Step 2. ♥️ Decide on a blogging host.

You will want to decide on where to create your blog. There are several to choose from:

Wordpress.org <—very popular

Squarespace <—what I use & have used for 10 years

Wix <—easy to use and beautiful site builder

Substack <—this is a great way to blog and build an audience but I would NOT go this route if I was looking to use a display ad agency ( which should be your goal if you want to create passive income with blogging ).

Kajabi <—in my opinion this one is BEST for coaches and course creators

You will see a lot of bloggers preach the importance of using Wordpress.org to start a blog and using BlueHost as an affordable host. I personally used Wordpress for a year and hated it. I also used Blue Host ( which they ALL are making commissions from pushing this service ) and had too many issues with security and hacking my website, which cut into my ad revenue.

So, I moved over my blog to Squarespace.

I LOVE Squarespace because it is easy to use, the graphics are beautiful and I have full control over the design and back end of my blog. I did not want to hire someone else to be in control of the designs, the functions, etc. I want to be in full control.

Every year, Squarespace does an incredible job optimizing for SEO, E-commerce, email, memberships, etc. These are all incredible built in tools that I have personally used to grow my online empire which I dive more into here.

Step 3. ♥️ Pick a template.

As soon as you get signed up for your new site, you will be led to select a template.

The templates are gorgeous and so easy to navigate based on what you want your site to look like. They are so easy to implement and get started customizing your site.

I am a big fan of the Paloma layout for anyone wanting to create a gorgeous blog. The Paloma template comes with a very seamless layout to set things up for easy navigation.

Step 4. ♥️ Pick a blog/domain name.

Part one: You want to think long and hard about this because if you plan on blogging for years to come, which I hope you do, it’s going to stay with you.

My blog name process: Grab a journal and sit down and begin to brainstorm, this may take a few days. I did a brainstorm session using this tool. However, I always recommend to sleep on it.

Questions to ask yourself:

• What is your blog going to be about?

• Who are you writing this blog for?

• What will the reader get from reading your blog?

• What feeling with the reader walk away from your blog with? What will they do next?

If you are really struggling with this, you might want to pick something easy that is going to last with your forever and I highly suggest using your first and last name or even a nickname. Take my word for it, this will make things much easier when you plan on blogging a long time.

You can always add a tagline down the road which can more formally summarize the essence of your blog. Mine is Ashlina - Do less. Be more. live Blissfully and my domain name is Ashlinakaposta.com.

Part two: It is EXTREMELY important that you DO NOT use a blog name with a .squarespace or .wordpress. You MUST have a .com website name for your blog site to be primed for making money. I also suggest purchasing an email with your domain name at the end. For example: ashlina@ashlinakaposta.com

I suggest you use NameCheap for purchasing your domain. I love them because the customer service is top notch and they make it very easy to work with blogging!

Brainstorm several blog names that fits both your aesthetic and vibe. You want to do this just incase your ideal blog name is already taken. Think of a set of names that fit your personality that you can imagine having for years to come.

Most of the time, your first choice isn’t going to be available so brainstorm a few dozen backup names. Get creative!

Step 5. ♥️ Begin writing your blog content.

Now here is where it gets really fun. Based on the niche you selected, you can begin researching ideas you want to write about and do some research on the keywords that are most popular.

Here are some content ideas that usually work really well: 

• How-to posts

• How to train your baby to get to sleep

• How to organize your Fridge – The Home Edit Inspired

• List posts

• 7 Ways to get your front porch fall-ready

• The 10 best gluten free recipes of 2022

• Recipe posts

• The ultimate vegan chicken salad recipe 

• My deliciously juicy green smoothie recipe

• The perfect charcuterie layout

• Tutorials

• Step by step guide to turning your garage into a kick-ass home office

• My foolproof recipe for making the perfect grilled cheese sandwhich

• Reviews

• The ultimate iPad Pro review – The pros and the no’s

• Hulu vs. Youtube TV – What’s right for you

• Before and After post

• How I lost my baby weight – and kept it off

• Our kitchen renovation story – before and after

Step 6. ♥️ Create your pages.

The pages that you want to include on your blog, especially as a beginner are:

• About me

• Contact page

• A page for your products and/or services and Pricing (if you have that yet)

• Legal Pages

Your legal pages are extremely important. You will want to include the following at minimum:

Disclaimers-

• Your blog content is not to be taken as professional advice

• You accept no liability for your blog content or third party links

• There are no guarantees for success if someone follows your advice

• An affiliate disclosure (if you use affiliate links on your blog and don’t have a separate Affiliate Disclosure page)

Terms and conditions-

• Your intellectual property rights

• An explanation of your site visitors rights & obligations

• Your right to make changes to your site or to terminate anyone’s use of your site

• A limitation of liability

Step 6. ♥️ Spread your content all over the internet.

Here are 5 things I do after I create a blog post:

• I make Pinterest pinnable images in Canva to help promote my post on pinterest. I am obsessed with Pinterest for blogging.

• I link the new post to 2-3 other related blog posts, its called rich linking.

• I add the post url into the images inside the blog post.

• I request to index the post in the google console.

• I post the link to my Facebook page, Instagram stories, Linkedin, Twitter,etc. I spread it everywhere I can.

Step 7. ♥️ Plan for passive income.

There are a few ways you can set yourself up for your blog being a passive income stream. I am going to share all the ways that my blog is set up for me to make money.

One. I started making money within weeks of first starting my blog by using an ad network. So that every single time someone views my blog, I get to make money from that with absolutely ZERO cost to the reader. It’s a win win.

Google Adsense was the very first ad network that I started with and it is a great idea to set it up along with Google Analytics. Google Analytics will help you track your traffic so you can begin to measure your progress.

Recently, I switched to She Media and I love this ad network for several reasons. First, they have great customer service and are incredibly helpful to get your ads set up. I also love women platforms, they give you helpful videos, content ideas, ways to increase traffic. They even help you land paid sponsored posts and brand deals. You an actually apply for She Media here.

Two. Set your self up with affiliate marketing programs so that you can add them into your blog posts. You make a small commission every time that someone purchases using your blog site/link, again at absolutely no cost to the customer. Which is very helpful for you if you are working hard to create great content.

My favorite affiliate programs are:

Share a sale.

Reward Style/LTK

Amazon Associates.

Hope this beginners guide to starting a profitable blog helps you.

If you want to learn more quickly, join my 5-day challenge, 5 steps to a follow-worthy blog here.

You may also like:

♥️ 10 lessons I learned from 10 years in blogging

♥️ 3 mindset shifts that will take your business to the next level

♥️ 4 strategic power moves for women entrepreneurs

The benefits of making lists & 15 lists that will help organize your life

This blog post is going to share with you the benefits of list making and 15 lists that will help you get your life together.

As a mom, my life can sometimes feel like an open internet browser with 3941 open tabs running at all times. Having an organized calendar, consistent routines and structures can really help. However, there is one thing that has completely changed my life in terms of mental organization.

Making lists.

Back when I started learning about bullet journaling, I started getting in the habit of making lists. I would whip out my notebook and just start making running lists of things going on in my mind. This did two things for me; one, it helped my mind calm down and leave me to feel more grounded in the day to day. two, it gave me more time.

Over the years I have cultivated a list of the lists that make life feel more balanced and organized and I am going to share 15 of them with you. Before I do that, I want to tell you some of the health and wellbeing benefits that making lists can do for you.

The benefits of making lists:

• Mindfulness and Present Moment Awareness. When making lists, you engage in a form of mindfulness. You become present in the moment as you assess your tasks and intentions. This mindfulness helps prevent the mind from wandering into future worries or past regrets, promoting a sense of calm and contentment.

• Stress Reduction through Organization. Organizing your thoughts into lists creates a sense of order in your life. This organization minimizes the stress that can come from feeling overwhelmed by an ever-growing to-do list. Having a clear plan helps you prioritize tasks, making them feel more manageable and achievable.

• Reduced Mental Clutter and Anxiety. The act of making lists allows you to transfer your thoughts from your mind onto paper or a digital device. This simple action helps declutter your mind, providing a sense of relief from mental chaos. By externalizing your thoughts, you free up mental space, reducing anxiety and promoting a clearer, calmer state of mind.

• Enhanced Focus and Productivity. Lists serve as roadmaps for your day, breaking down tasks into actionable steps. This structured approach enhances your focus and productivity. As you check off items on your list, you experience a sense of accomplishment that boosts your mood and motivation to tackle the next task.

• Avenue for Creative Expression. Lists are not limited to tasks; they can also include ideas, goals, dreams, and more. This flexibility provides an avenue for creative expression and self-discovery. By listing your aspirations and interests, you engage in a positive, self-affirming activity that fosters a sense of purpose.

Okay, now that you know the benefits of making lists, I want to help set you up with the proper tools for list making.

I suggest using a spiral notebook, something small that you don’t mind carrying around with you. I personally am obsessed with the Bando spiral notebooks, they feel so good to write in and I love that they can lay flat and sit with just one page open. As I got more into making lists, I switched over to a disc bound spiral notebook.

Here’s how to set up your lists:

Grab your notebook and make a title page for each list. You can even make a directory at the front of your notebook with a numbered list and then use post it tabs to label each page with the number associated.

15 lists that will help organize your life:

1. Monthly intentions. I like to set intentions for the month ahead that help give my month clarity and focused direction. ( ex. gym 3 times per week, more meal planning, etc. ) I also list out the affirmations I’m currently working with to reprogram my subconscious mind.

2. Things to buy. I keep a running list of things I need to get.

3. Master to-do list. Anything I need to get done, goes on this list.

4. Spending list. I like to keep a list of what I spend on during the month so I can pay attention to my spending.

5. Recipe list. I like to include things I want to try or make.

6. Things to clean out / declutter. Each area of the home you need to tackle goes down on the list so you can check it off when you’re done.

7. Inventory list. Toilet paper, paper towels, supplies, etc.

8. Appointments to make list. Any and all appointments need to go on this list. Dump your brain with all the things you need to schedule in.

9. Fitness plan. Make your monthly goals around your health and wellness.

10. Emails/Cards/Notes to send. This always helps me to remember birthdays for the month or just to make sure I stay in touch with long distance friends.

11. Errands to run.

12. Bills to pay.

13. Books to read/shows to watch.

14. Restaurants to try/ places to check out. This will always help when you need to find a place to go to dinner, especially if you want to try new places.

15. Things to manifest. This might be my favorite list. Keep a running list of anything and everything that you want to manifest into your life. It really helps to write it down and act as if you just put an order into the universe.

Listen to this episode of the Blissfully Ambitious podcast where I break down each list more specifically for you. Hope you enjoy.

This post may contain affiliate links, which means I'll receive a commission if you purchase through my link, at no extra cost to you.