How to Start a Blog (and Make money blogging) in 2020 – Free & Easy Beginner’s guide to Blogging

Wondering How to Start a Blog? How to make money blogging?

Well, Guess what? You’ve landed on the right page. Hi, my name is Sudipto, I’m a Professional blogger and in this free & easy step by step tutorial, I will show you how to start a blog on a budget & also how to make money blogging.

Starting a blog isn’t as complicated as you might think. And with this beginner’s guide, this is going to be far more easier & fun than you could imagine (No coding or technical skills required).

Some of the links in this article are affiliate links, so when you purchase any product or service using those links, I might earn a small commission at no additional cost to you. Read our full disclosure – here. Now that we are clear of rules, let’s continue :

To Skip the rest of the introduction and jump to the steps [Click Here]

Before we get started, let’s get some Insights.

So, what is a Blog?

A Blog in a formal sense, is a website containing information regarding a certain topic (or sometimes a range of topics), which is primarily setup to share personal experience, knowledge or view about that topic or a particular type of product or to create influence or promote a brand.

Apart from being a strong medium to influence readers and generate an active target audience, blogging also serves as one of the most popular ways of making money online for hundreds of thousands of bloggers out there.

Why should you start a blog in 2020?

The blogging community is growing every day, raising awareness, spreading knowledge or promoting brands; and in 2020 the opportunities has raised the bar even more, the digital revolution is growing in a faster rate than ever before. So, here are some reasons, why you’ll love to start a blog of your own:

1. It opens doors for you to impact millions of lives, positively with your creative writing; you can share your thoughts, spread awareness or influence large groups of people.
2. Blogging thoroughly increases your writing & communication skills, which in turn helps you to connect with more people around you and also increases your networking & marketing abilities.
3. Blogging (in commercial niches) gives you a market insight & helps you in market research, which helps in an in-depth understanding of the market and create a marketing strategy.
4. The most Exciting Part!! You can make money online through your blogs.

So, without any further ado, let’s get straight into it:

How to start a blog in 7 easy steps:

Time Required: Less than 25 minutes

These are the 7 main steps which are required to start a blog & make money blogging:

1. Decide the topic (Niche) you want to blog about.
2. Choose a Blogging Platform.
3. Get a web hosting & pick a domain name.
4. Setting up Your Blog and choosing a theme.
5. Write & Publish your first Blog.
6. Promote your Blog.
7. Make money blogging (The fun part).

Let’s get started with the first one:

1. Decide Your Blog Topic (Niche):

Choosing a blog topic or a Niche is the first and one of the most important steps to start a blog.

It is recommended to choose a Niche that you have a previous experience on or you like writing about. You might wanna start a blog on the trending & hot topics on the internet, but that might prove to be a problem later on, if you have little or no knowledge about that Niche. Do your own research and find a Suitable Niche, which you can write a lot of original content about.

Always remember, “Content is the King”, if you have great and original content, you’ll always get readers (traffic).

When you understand the power of valuable & genuine content, you’ll learn that a blog on any niche can be scaled to be profitable with good content.

Great content, should always be a first Priority, but for commercial blogging (Blogging solely aimed at making money) there’s yet another important point to be considered before you choose your niche, i.e. the ‘Profitability’ of your niche.

Now, to understand the profitability of a niche or to find some profitable niches yourself, you must understand the current market conditions; you should seek for niches with good future scope or underrated niches which have or might have a high potential in the near future. You can also use Google Trends to look for rising trends or topics which are going to rise even higher in the near future.

Every Niche has it’s own target audience & hence a scope of generating Profit. There are niches which have a huge target audience and a high net Profitability, but most of those niches have a huge competition as well.

In such a case creating better content than your competitor is very important, so I suggest you to not just see the profitability of your Niche but also check whether that topic interests you, because great content comes out of interest and experience.

If you have a descent budget, you can also hire content writers, so that you don’t have to deal with the ‘writing part’.

I can’t decide on a Topic !

The Niche I chose has competition already.

2. Choose a Blogging Platform:

A blogging Platform is what lays the foundation of our blog, & we don’t have to deal with the coding part and build the blog from zero, which is a serious relief for non-coders like us.

When it comes to choosing the blogging platform, there are tons of options, but WordPress is my favourite and I recommend to start a blog on WordPress, which is by far the most preferred and the largest platform, with over 60 million WordPress run active websites on the internet.

WordPress acquires a huge chunk in the market share of CMS (Content Management System) Platforms.

Catering more than 60% of the CMS built websites, it comes out to be the most popular and reliable CMS platform.

Why choose WordPress?

WordPress, in simple words is a CMS (Content Management System) Platform. It stores content and enables a user to create and publish WebPages, requiring nothing beyond a domain and a hosting service. WordPress allows its users to install and switch between different themes and plug-ins, which helps in changing the looks and functionality of your website easily without any knowledge of Coding.

There are other platforms as well, where you can start a blog for free, such as Blogger, Tumbler & many more; the main problem with these platforms are that:

• They are not as flexible and customizable as WordPress or they are very hard to monetize.
• Most of these platforms do not give you full control over your blog.
• Many of them don’t allow you to self-host your blog.

WordPress has its own reasons to be the most popular and preferred platform across the world, here are some of those:

1. WordPress is free and most user friendly.
2. WordPress was launched in 2003 & has developed a lot since then.
3. It is highly customizable.
4. It has a wide range of free Plug-ins, and tools which increases the functionality of your website (or Blog).
5. WordPress is designed to be highly SEO Friendly. This reduces your effort significantly, in SEO optimization.

Now that you’ve chosen your blogging Platform, let’s get into the next step.

3. Get a web hosting & Pick a Domain Name:

Now it’s time to get your blog to life, and for that you need a web hosting, which will get your blog online and give you a space on the cloud to construct it and store all your blog files.

When I first started out, I’ve tried numerous web-hosting (including some popular and cheap web hosting) but none of their Load-time and support was up to the mark, until I switched to Siteground, and it almost Doubled my site’s load Speed, which increased my traffic overnight.

Since then, my favourite web hosting, which I use and recommend everyone to use is Siteground, which has unarguably the best support in the industry, which is what you’ll need the most, all throughout your blogging journey (especially when you’re just starting out).

There are several reasons for why this has been my favourite all these years:

1. Their industry leading Speed technology:  They have an extremely powerful setup to give you the leading speed results in the industry, combining NGINX servers, Solid state drives (SSD), PHP 7, CDN, HTTP/2 and along with these you get SG optimizer and Supercacher which comes free with Siteground hosting and increases your speed further.
2. 24/7 Expert & fast support (most important reason): Support is one of the biggest and main factors you should be considering before selecting a host, & Siteground support staff is the best I have seen so far, with the fastest & technically abled support in the industry, they have a dedicated support team to back you up at any time & time zone.
3. 1-Click Cloudflare Activation: Signing up for Cloudflare and learning to set it up used to be a tedious and complicated processes, which is not the case with Siteground hosting, now with the click of a button you can enable the free CDN.
4. Data Centre: Siteground offers four different data centres that you can choose from, which allows you to stay close to your target audience and increases loading speed of your website at the target Nation, hence improving Search Engine rankings.

You can choose any hosting of your choice and follow the below steps. But I highly recommend you to go with Siteground hosting.

Now that you’ve discovered the most reliable and the fastest web-hosting, let’s purchase your domain and hosting:

1. Click here & get Siteground hosting at just $6.99/mo (70% Off):

2. Choose a suitable Plan for your blog:

I recommend you to go with the StartUp Plan, which is loaded with features and is best suited for a single website (You can upgrade anytime).

Click on the Get Plan Button.

3. Pick a related Domain Name:

*Note: This Step is applicable only if you do not already own a domain.

Let’s buy a new Domain name for your Blog:

Click on

Choose a Domain name that Suits your Niche or blog topic that you decided on Step 1. Your Domain name should define your blog topic; people should recognize the topic of your blog, just by hearing the name. For Example, if your blog is about cars or you’ll be writing car reviews, it can be named as carreviews.com or carexperts.com.

Bonus tip: It is recommended that you have the keyword, in your blog name, which you want your blog to rank in SERPs for, which will give a huge boost in the SEO of your blog.

& Click on Proceed.

But if you already own a Domain then,

Just Click on

Type in the name of the Domain you own, and click Proceed. Later you’ll need to point your domain to Siteground name server or Transfer your domain to Siteground.

Then Click on Proceed.

4. Fill your Account Information and Client Information:

5. Enter your Credit/Debit Card Information:

Note: If you live outside of US, your Credit/Debit Card should have International transactions enabled. If you still have any problem paying directly through your card, you can ask them for a PayPal link, and pay through PayPal.

6. Fill in your Purchase Information:

Plan: StartUp (Recommended for one website)

Data Center: USA (Choose a Data Center that is nearer to your target audience, in this case it is USA)

Period: 12 months (Choose the period of hosting, recommended to go with at least 12 months for a discounted price).

7. Check & confirm the Terms & Conditions:

Now, you are needed to confirm Siteground terms and conditions and Click on the Pay Now button. Siteground will take few minutes to process all the details, and after that you’ll be taken to this Screen:

And you will receive an email with the Purchase receipt and all the Necessary Details.

You’ll also need to verify the ownership of the domain you just purchased through Siteground, and for that you’ll receive an email with the verification link, just click on it and verify your ownership (it might take 24 – 48 hrs. to verify).

Click on Proceed to Customer Area.

Now that you’ve successfully Purchased your Domain & Hosting, we’ll go on with the Further steps:

4. Let’s Set your Blog up and choose a theme:

Here, we’ll set your Blog up Step by step:

1. Logging-in & installing WordPress:

Log-in to your Siteground account and you’ll be taken to your Dashboard:

Click on the Button.

Now you’ll see two options:

Start New Website: This is to build a new Website from scratch (this is what we’ll choose).

Migrate Website: Which is for transferring a website from a different hosting company (if you already have a website).

Now Select Start New Website> Then Select WordPress

(or you can choose WordPress + WooCommerce if you wanna setup a WooCommerce Website, but in this tutorial we’ll choose only WordPress)

Then put the E-mail address you want to associate with this WordPress account and create a password:

Then click Continue (Remember to copy the E-mail and password and store it Somewhere safe, you’ll need it everytime you sign-in to your WordPress account).

Now, you’ll be prompted to purchase SG Site Scanner and Domain Privacy, which I leave at your choice, as it is not very much necessary.

Then Click Finish.

Now Siteground will Install WordPress and create your site.

When it’s done we’ll choose LOG IN ADMIN. You’ll be taken to WordPress login page:

Enter the login credentials to Login.

After you login, you’ll be prompted to take WordPress Starter wizard. We’ll press “EXIT”. You’ll be taken to your WordPress dashboard (the back-end of your website):

This is the place where you’ll spend most of your time editing, customizing and adding posts on your blog.

Some of the necessary functionalities of your WordPress dashboard to get you started:

Home: This is the home of your WordPress dashboard, where you’ll see the recent activities and overviews of different Plugins of your website.

Visit Site: you can see the outlook of your website after you make any change or post a new article; by clicking on this option, it’ll take you to your site’s external interface.

Posts: This is the place where you’ll manage all your posts; you can add new posts, update & alter older posts.

Pages: This tab is used to manage all of your pages, such as: Contact, About, Home, etc.

Comments: You can alter, delete, approve & respond to the comments your readers post.

Appearance: you can customize the look of your website and install new themes on your site through this tab.

Plugins: This tab is for managing your Plugins, you can change settings, delete, or install new Plugins on your website through this tab.

2. Choosing a suitable WordPress theme for your blog:

For themes, there is an overwhelming number of free choices available, which I definitely do not recommend! Because most these free themes (except for a few good ones) are mostly developed by independent developers who provide limited or no support also most of these contains bugs, which compromises with your site’s security also, these free themes have very little customizing options, which makes it inconvenient for people with no coding knowledge to make the full use of it.

Moreover, free themes rarely with proper documentation or license which makes it easy to moderate and hence making it vulnerable to security attacks. With free themes you also get few or no updates at all.

The themes I’ve used and I personally recommend everyone are Astra and Generate Press, this particular blog, you are reading is made using Generate Press Premium.

Both, Astra and Generate Press have free versions as well, which works totally fine and can be a good choice when you’re just starting up. However if you want to step-up the game further, and use some of the most exciting features, such as premium templates and support; I recommend you to go with Premium version of Generate Press or Astra .

Premium versions of both Generate Press and Astra come at $49.95 and $59 respectively (annually). It might seem to be a little pricey or out of budget if you’re starting out but if you wanna blog commercially and make money out of it, investing in Premium themes and Plugins is highly recommended.

What if I don’t have a budget for paid theme?

What if I use nulled themes?

Let’s write your first blog:

5.  How to write an Effective Blog and publish it:

Now we are going to write & publish your First blog Post:

First, go to the left panel and click on “Posts”.

You will see there are already some posts, these are some default posts that comes with any theme you install, to give you an overview of how your pages and posts can be structured.

You can delete them or you can edit them, by putting your own content, which will reduce your effort to create the structure. You’ll see the necessary options available here:

To add a new post click on Posts > Add New.

Now you’ll be taken to the editing screen. Here you’ll see all of the required options to create a stunning blog post. The first thing you got to do is to add a Short and beautiful heading, and then you can start writing your blog, you can also add pictures or a collection of pictures (gallery) or link an online video.

So before you jump into writing your first blog post, here are some information which might prove to be useful to you:

How to write an engaging Blog Post?

How to write SEO friendly articles?

Now,we proceed to a very important(yet underestimated) step:

6. Promoting Your blog:

Promotion is one big step for your blog to flourish.

‘Writing good content is the most important thing’ but at the same time without promoting your blog, you can’t expect lot of visitors to come to your blog. To Promote successfully, using different platforms, you need to understand your content’s target audience, you need to do your research about your ideal target of audience.

You can target different age groups, gender, cultural groups or populations of different countries, depending on the relevance of interest of your content consumers for promoting it.

Social Media:

Social media is one of the biggest sources to drive traffic to your blog. You can promote your blog and leave a link to your website, so that people can click through it. Promote your blog in different Social media platforms; Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, Pinterest are some of the gateways to bring in huge traffic.

Advance tip: You can get information about composition of users of different Social media platforms, here: Demographics for Social media. This might help you in finding your target audience and the Social Platform to focus promoting more on & also to strategize your promotion campaign.

Email Marketing:

After you start a blog and start promoting it, the second thing you want to do is to build your E-mail list. You can ask your visitors to sign-up for your newsletter and E-mail them every time you post a new content on your blog with a link to it, and if you write original and attractive content, most of them will sign-up for your newsletter. This is how you can build your E-mail list which will be a second gateway for traffic to come-in to your site.

Comment Section:

You don’t just wanna write your blogs blindly, and stay far away from your reader’s feedback, right?

So having a comment section in your blog is a must. This will allow you to engage with your readers and take their feedback, which is far more important than you can imagine, this will help you tremendously in improving your content, serving their needs in your content, be in touch with your readers by replying them and also create a personalised experience for your readers, which builds a sense of trust and makes your readers to come back to your site, every time you post a new content.

You have successfully created your blog. Now comes the part we’ve been waiting for:

7. How to make money Blogging:

There are a number of ways how you can monetize your blog or make money blogging. But before you focus on the money part, be aware that if you focus only on making money out of your blog, you won’t be able to make much out of it. To become a successful blogger, you must focus on adding value on your content which will attract traffic and eventually serve you with numerous opportunities to monetize your blog. Just like every profession, blogging requires dedication and hard work, which you must put-in, in order to be successful.

Ways to monetize your Blog:

There are literally many ways to make money blogging. Here are some of the most widely known ones listed and explained for you:

1. Monetizing through Ads:

This is one of the most famous ways to make money blogging. The moment your blog grows prominent & starts driving a descent amount of traffic, Advertisers will start approaching you, to place their Ads in banners on you site. Managing different advertisers and their banners on your site might turn out to be a headache, and that’s when signing up for Advertising programs help. You can apply to different advertising programs, once your website starts driving some traffic & once you get approved they’ll take care of all the hassles and you get paid for advertising on your site.

Some of the most prominent Advertising Networks:

Google Adsense:

This by-far the most popular Advertising program run by google, and is used by a huge number of blogs worldwide through which these websites advertise using text, images, video, or interactive media that are targeted to the site content and audience. These advertisements are administered, sorted, and maintained by Google. Sign up for your google Adsense account here.

Media.net:

Being the second largest contextual ad network worldwide, it is also one of our favourite, we highly recommend you to try it. Media.net is a leading global contextual advertising company that provides a wide range of advertising and traffic monetization solutions to a substantial and diversified client base. Media.net manages high-quality ad supply on over 500,000 websites worldwide. If you have great content on your site, getting an approval is cake-walk. Create your free account here.

PropellerAds:

This is one of the world’s biggest ad networks, helping website owners, traffic sources, and networks monetize their global mobile and web inventory. This network also offers different types of ads such as native display ads, push notification ads, interstitials and pop-under. It has a network of over 150,000 publishers with the goal of generating more revenues from web and mobile traffic with the most effective monetization solutions in the industry. Their robust optimization technology and auto-learning algorithms match relevant advertisers to every individual visitor to deliver only the highest paying ads on your sites. Signup for PropellerAds Here.

Now let’s take a look at some of the pros and cons of monetizing your blog through Ad Networks:

Pros:

• Hassle free setup – Either they’ll provide you with a code which you just need to paste on your site or you’ll have to install and activate a plug-in on your wordpress site (depends on the ad network), and it will start running ads.
• Easy to track tools – Your ad network account dashboard will help you to keep track & fetch all the necessary information you need, at your fingertips.
• You’ll make money on automation – You don’t need to check on anything as long as your site is attracting traffic, you’ll make money on automation.

Cons:

• Demands Good amount of traffic – To generate a good amount of revenue through Ad networks, your site must drive a great amount of traffic.
• Huge risk of getting your account banned – Google has strict Adsense policies & if you don’t comply with their Terms & Conditions, your Adsense account might easily get banned. Many bloggers have got their different accounts banned several times.

2. Affiliate Marketing:

This is a very effective and popular way to monetize your content, be it in any form (blog, Video or Audio). In this method, you need to enrol in one or more (depends on your blog) of the numerous affiliate programs available out there and you need to promote those products by writing your own genuine experience or review stating about how amazing that particular product is, how has it solved your problem and it can for your readers as well, and ask your readers to buy it through your link if they’re interested (which they will, if they have found enough value in your content) and when they do, you’ll receive a commission at no extra cost to them. However, always remember to disclose your affiliation.

Our choice of best affiliate networks to start with:

Amazon Affiliate:

Amazon is the biggest online ecommerce store, AI assistant provider and cloud computing platform as measured by revenue and market capitalization, having such a reputation calls for itself. This is a highly recommended affiliate program, especially for beginners. You can sign up for their associate account here and promote their products using your own affiliate link and when your readers buy using your link, you receive a commission depending on the commission/compensation rates (Check compensation rates) decided by amazon.

Let’s say you have a blog where you review & promote tech related products and you wrote an in-depth article about a newly released laptop which has a commission rate of 6% and is priced at $1,000 at amazon. At different parts of your blog you can strategically place your affiliate links in the form of buttons or images and ask your readers to buy using your links. And when they buy through you links you receive a commission of 6% (i.e. $60). Create your Amazon affiliate account here.

ShareASale Affiliates:

ShareASale is an affiliate marketing network which requires slightly more skill that amazon affiliate marketing. ShareASale serves two customer sets in affiliate marketing: the affiliate, and the merchant. Affiliates use ShareASale to find products to promote, and earn commission for referrals on those products. It is in business since the year 2000 and has definitely been levelling up their game throughout these years, which builds a sense of trust. With a wide range of products to promote, you’re never gonna run empty. So, Create an account and get started.

Teachable Affiliate Program:

This is a very different platform as compared to the other two on our list. Teachable is a great platform to promote, which helps you create and sell courses online. As an affiliate you promote courses and earn recurring commissions, every time your referred customer renews. They have a cookie life of 90 days which increases your scope of receiving commission when the user signs up. The most amazing part of this affiliate program is that affiliates can keep earning a recurring commission of up to 30% for a lifetime. Create your Teachable Affiliate account today.

You can promote Teachable on various platforms. Self-improvement Blogs & blogs related to skill development are some of the great places to promote such programs.

Let’s take a look at some of the Pros and Cons, Affiliate marketing involves:

 Pros:

• You don’t need huge traffic – You can make a descent amount of income, even through a small amount of traffic (if they are strategically targeted).
• There’s no upper limit – You can literally earn millions of dollars working as an affiliate, which might seem to be impossible to do, through Adsense. Hundreds of affiliates are already generating six figure income through Affiliate Programs.
• You are In-charge – Even though Affiliate networks have their own policies but they are not as strict and binding as Adsense’s, which gives you freedom to promote your affiliate product without any barriers.

Cons:

• Demands some credibility: You will need to have some experience in the relevant field for your content to be encouraging for your readers to click and buy through your link.
• Beginner(if not expert) Marketing skills required: Though it is a gradual learning process, which you’ll master throughout your journey, but having some prior marketing knowledge will boost your results and keep you ahead of your competition.

Sponsored Posts:

Once your blog gains some height, you’ll be approached by Advertisers and brands to post sponsored content revolving around their product, to give their product some positive promotion and advertising. This has its own set of Pros and Cons as well:

Pros:

• You get paid for what you do for free – you generally write content for your blog for free and then earn by monetizing it, but this time you get paid just for writing and posting.
• You make your income all at once – In general, you’ll be writing your content and then earning through it over the time, but with Sponsored posts you get paid at once.

Cons:

• Fake content – Some Bloggers often write fake reviews about products that haven’t been used by themselves or by any of their trusted sources due to the huge compensation offered to them. This induces trust issues among the readers and affects their reputation inversely.

Thank you so much !

for sticking till the end.

That contained most of the information you should be aware of, before you start a blog and make money blogging; I hope that helps you & wish you a Great Success in your Blogging Journey! And don’t forget to leave your valuable Feedback below.

How long does it take to make money blogging?

How much would it cost to start a blog?

What if the domain name I chose, is already taken?

How often should I post content?

Where do I get help?

Why do blogs fail?