How To Start A Blog in 2021 From Scratch & Make Money

Want to know how to start a Blog in 2021 and make money?

You can start a blog in 2021 using a CMS or coding, many people don’t know the coding language and want to start a blog to make money. They can start a blog using a CMS (Blogging platform), CMS is a Content Management System where you can add, edit the content of your blog.

How to Start a Blog in 10 Easy Steps:

1. Choose A Perfect Niche for you
2. Buy a Perfect Domain Name
3. Choose your prefered Blogging Platform
4. Buy web hosting from a good Hosting provider
5. Set up your Blog
6. Do Keyword Research
7. Publish your first Article
8. Index your Blog on Search Engines Like Google, Bing.
9. Share your Blog on Social media
10. Promote your Blog to get instant traffic
11. Implement ads, join an affiliate network and earn money

1. Choose A Perfect Niche For You

Before you start a blog you have to choose a perfect niche in which topic you can provide quality content. Choosing a perfect niche for your blog is a very important and crucial step for your future in blogging. Always choose that topic on which you can provide quality contents regularly. So before you start a blog in 2021 choose a niche that is perfect for you.

A niche is the topic that you write about most often, or even exclusively, in your blogs. Basically niche means the topic of your blog, you write content about.

Starting a website on biography niche is very simple and easy, you can start earning money very quickly with a biography niche. The good thing about the biography niche is that you will get huge content for free. Here you can see an example of a biography post that will also help you to know how to write SEO friendly biography articles.

You start blog on any niche of your choice, here you can check an example of auto repair website. Some people make their website just to get customer here is an example johnyautorepairservice.com

2. Buy a Perfect Domain Name

A domain name is an address that you can type in a web browser to visit a website. The domain name is the web address of your website/blog. if a website is your house, the domain name will be its address. Before you start a blog you need a perfect domain.

A domain name should always be unique and should not be shared between two websites, and is a combination of letters or numbers attached with the extension (.com or .org, for example).

For a website, the domain name is also the actual name of the site seen by all the users on the web browser web address and even in Google and other places. You should also choose a domain name as the name of your website/blog, it will help on SEO.

So selecting the right domain will get you one step closer to building your successful website, blog or business; Choosing the wrong domain may create many problems for you.

Here are some tips to buy a best domain for your website.

• Do your research:- Start with a few relevant keywords which can be used in your domain. Try to do not add any number or special character and add only alphabets on your domain name. Keep the domain name short and relevant to your website/blog business.
• Find brandable domain:- The domain should be something that can resonate with your brand. Your domain name should be brandable, unique and creative as it is very important for the online presence and success of your website. You should choose a unique and short domain name which you can make your brand on the internet.
• Choose the best extension:- The extension of your domain is the most popular, common and popular point of your domain. There are many popular TLD Some are gTLD while some are ccTLD. If you try to target a specific country then you should choose a country-level domain unless you should go with a generic top-level domain (gTLD). Choose the best domain extension before you start a blog in 2021.
• Avoid EMDs:-  EMD stands for Exact Match Domain. Sometimes Exact Match Domains look like spam. EMDs are very easy to rank on SERP. it’s not a good idea now to go for an EMD. These don’t work now as many abused them, and then Google released an update in 2012 to drop all the spammy EMDs from its search results.

• Check Trademarked Domain:- By chance If you add a trademark in your domain name, you are putting yourself and your site at risk and may face legal issues for your website/blog, business. So use any free trademark checker tool available on the internet to check trademark before registering your domain name. Check the trademark checker tool before you buy a domain to start a blog.
• Try to include keywords:- It is not necessary to add keywords in the domain name but if you add your niche related keyword on your domain name then it will be helpful in SEO(Search Engine Optimization). If you add niche related keyword to your domain then it will be helpful and easy to understand about your website, business.

Also Read: How To Upload WebP images To WodPress

3. Choose your prefered Blogging Platform

There are many content management systems like WordPress, Blogger, Tumbler and more. Some blogging platform like WordPress.org and Blogger are fully free to use while some blogging platforms like Tumbler and Wix provide basic features for free and charge fees to use their full features. Blogger & WordPress are the most used blogging platform to create a website in India. Below I have given statistics of blog technologies used to build websites in India.

Blogger is a service of Google and free to use but with minimal features available in it, if you want to do more customization in Blogger then you should have coding knowledge. Blogger also offers free hosting means you don’t need any web hosting to store your blog data. To make a beautiful, well designed and responsive Blog you need to use WordPress. Blogger is providing it’s all its features for free, when you create a blog on Blogger you will get a URL with Blogspot subdomain (yoursite.blogspot.com). You can always change this blog URL and can also link a custom domain.

Also Read: How To Remove Date From Blogger Post URL

You can earn money from Blogger blog by implementing ads, publishing sponsored post and promoting affiliate links.

By default Blogger blog post URLs contain month & year, below you can see an URL of Blogger blog post.

WordPress is a very customizable blogging platform, you can create a very beautiful, responsive website on WordPress. There are many themes & plugins available using which you can customize your website, some are free to use while you have to purchase other themes & plugins. When it comes to WordPress.com you have no option to choose a Hosting provider and you have to purchase their hosting service which is very expensive.

When you go for WordPress there are two options WordPress.org & WordPress.com.

WordPress.com is like Wix and Tumbler but it has more options to customize. The basic features of WordPress.com are free and you have to pay to use full features. When you create a blog on WordPress.com you will get a blog URL with the wordpress.com subdomain. You can also add a custom domain to your WordPress.com website.

Also Read: Blogger VS WordPress: Full Comparison 2021

WordPress.org is fully free to use and you can start a blog on it for free. But you need a web hosting to store the information of your blog. You can purchase webhosting from hosting providers like Hostinger, A2 Hosting, Siteground and Bluehost.

Hosting providers like Hostinger and Bluehost also provide free domain name registration when you purchase web hosting plans.

In WordPress you have to options to keep the date or not in the blog post URL, below you can see an example of a WordPress blog post URL.

When you start a blog on Blogger like the platform you have to follow their rules and regulations and they may remove your blog if you violate their policy. But when starting a blog WordPress.org you have full control over your blog and it is a self-hosted blog.

My recommendation is to create your blog on wordpress.org and buy hosting from A2 Hosting, Hostinger, Bluehost or Siteground to start a blog in 2021.

Also read: Best Cheap Web Hosting Provider in India

4. Buy web hosting from a good Hosting Provider

Hosting is a service where you store information & files of your website and users access your blog. The hosting provider provides storage where you store your files, images etc of your website. Performance, downtime etc affects your blog very badly so you have to choose the best web hosting to start a blog.

Never start a blog with some cheap quality hosting providers (Rs.10/month or free) because it’s a very important factor in your blog. I recommend you to start a blog with good hostings like A2 Hosting, Hostinger, Siteground, Bluehost and GreenGeeks.

Chose the hosting provider as per your requirements, Here I am sharing some tips which will help you to choose the best web hosting provider for you. Keep these 11 points in your mind while choosing a web hosting provider to start a blog.

• Reliability
• Connection
• Payment
• Easy Control Panel
• Features
•  Server Location
• Bandwidth
• Backup
• Security
• Support
•  Reviews

My WordPress Blog roseblogging.com is hosted on A2 Hosting and some of my other blogs are hosted on Hostinger. Currently, a huge discount is live on Hostinger, A2 Hosting and Bluehost.

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5. Set up your Blog

Now you have a domain name, web hosting and its the time to set up your blog. Setting up a blog on WordPress Platform is very easy, connect domain name and web hosting by updating DNS (Domain Name System) of your domain name.

First you need to know the name servers of your web hosting provider, next visit the dashboard of the domain name registrar where you have registered your domain name. Now update name servers of your domain name with the new record provided by your web hosting provider, this process may take up to 24 hours.

To know how to update nameservers of a Godaddy domain name you can watch this video below.

After you successfully connect the domain name with web hosting, you can install WordPress and other CMS like Joomla etc. Now install WordPress on your web hosting and now your WordPress blog is ready, you can also visit your website.

You can also set up your blog with other CMS (Content Management System) like Joomla and Drupal etc.

Design your blog

Now its time to design your blog. You have to design your Blog user-friendly and keep easy to navigate so readers can view maximum content very easily.

You can create a navigation menu, a home page, blog page which will help users to view content on your website. You have to create some categories and tag to organise the content of your blog which will also help users to view content easily.

There are many free and paid themes available in the WordPress theme library, you can use them to give a beautiful appearance to your WordPress blog.

To change the theme on your WordPress website go to Appearance>Theme. To customize your website go to Appearance>Customize and customize your blog with live preview and publish these setting to your blog.

You can also use some plugins on your WordPress blog to optimize, check SEO and secure your website.

6. Do keyword Research

To become a successful blogger you need to research keywords carefully. To rank on Search Engines you have to do keyword research properly. If you are very new to blogging you may work on low competitive keywords to rank fast and easily.

Use some keyword research tools to find keyword volume, competition etc. There are many keyword research tools, some of them are fully free to use, while others provide some basic features for free & you have to pay to use their full features.

Below, I have listed some popular keyword research tools used by many bloggers.

• Ahrefs
• Semrush
• Ubersuggest
• Google Keyword planner

7. Publish an article

Till now you have successfully published your website, have done the keyword research. Now it’s time to publish your first blog post.

To write a blog post, log in to your WordPress website dashboard (yourdomain/wp-admin) and click on Posts>Add New.

Add title, subtitle and content to your blog post. You can use a page builder to design your blog post if you want. While writing the article try to provide unique, original, query solving information.

Publish your first blog post and share it on social media, sharing your blog post on social media will increase the visibility of your blog on the internet.

8. Index your blog on search engine

After publishing the first blog post on your blog you need o request the search engine to index your blog. You will get traffic to your blog if search engine like Google and Bing index your blog. To index your blog on a search engine you need to submit a sitemap of your Blog/website to the search console. Below you can see a screenshot of Google Search Console.

It is very easy to submit the sitemap to search engines like Google and Bing, you can simply watch a video on how to submit a sitemap. To generate a sitemap of your WordPress blog you need to install an SEO plugin like Yoast SEO and Rankmath.

Also Read: How To Create WordPress Sitemap Easily (With Screenshots)

To use Google Search Console add your domain name to Search console and verify ownership of the domain name, after some time you can check the performance of your Blog like Impression, Clicks and CTR etc.

9. Share your blog on social media

It is not an easy task to get traffic on a new blog, when we start a blog we need readers and want users to visit our blog which will help us to earn money from our website. As the blog is new so we have to share it on social media to get some initial visitors to our blog. Try to write blog posts solving query and focus on trending topics which will help you get more visitors.

You can simply share your blog post with friends on social media that will increase the visibility of your blog.

10. Promote your blog to Get Instant Traffic

Promote your blog to drive instant traffic o your blog. You can run Google Ads, Bing ads, Social media ads or any advertisemetns to promote your blog. A new blog need some time to get indexed on Google so you will get less traffic from Google to your blog, So you need to promote your blog.

It is not mandatory to promote a blog, but you can promote your blog using some ad networks and get new visitors as it takes some time to get organic traffic.

11. Implement ads or join an affiliate network to make money

Basically, we start a blog to make money, there are many different ways to make money online from your blog. You can earn money through the sponsored post, promoting affiliate products and showing advertisements.

You can join advertising networks like Google Adsense and Media.net to show advertisements on your blog and make money.

You can join affiliate networks related to your niche and make money by promoting affiliate products on your blog. You can also earn money from your blog by publishing a sponsored post.

Thank you for reading this blog post till the end, I hope this helpful for you to start a blog in 2021. Please do share this article on Facebook & Twitter. If you have any doubt, question or query related to Blogging, Affiliate marketing, SEO you can share them with other Bloggers on our Facebook group and Telegram group.

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