How To Start A Blog That Makes $10,000/mo? Ultimate Guide

The best decision I ever took was to start a blog when I was just 14 years old.

Today, I own multiple blogs in various niches and they bring 4 to 5-figure income every month.

Back in the day, while all my friends asked their parents for pocket money and general expenses, I never had to ask for any money from them.

I bought my first motorcycle at 16 and my first car when I had just turned 18. And all thanks to blogging, I was lucky enough to purchase the gadgets I wanted without hesitating.

Here is a screenshot of the Mediavine dashboard for one of my sites:

How To Start A Blog And Make Money Online?

Starting a blog from scratch can be intimidating, especially if this is your first time.

I’ll explain how to launch your first-ever blog in a simple-to-follow step-by-step guide that even a ten-year-old could understand. So buckle up, and let’s create your first blog and make money.

Choose The Niche & Blog Topic

So, here comes the very first step of starting a new blog – finding a blog topic and a name.

No, I am not telling you that you should start a blog on a topic or niche you are passionate about or interested in. When selecting a blog topic, there are tons of things that you need to keep in mind.

You cannot start a blog purely based on your passion and convert it into a real business. Not all niches can be scaled equally.

Before selecting a niche to start with, you need to come up with answers to some questions.

In which niche I am experienced?
Am I knowledgeable enough to start a blog on XYZ topic?
Do I have any expertise or leverage points in the industry?
How well can I monetize the blog?
Demographics of the target audience
RPM of the niche

As mentioned earlier, you shouldn’t go ahead and mindlessly start a blog on any random topic. There are certain things that you need to keep in your mind before finalizing the niche.

Here are some tips to quickly figure out what niche to start with:

Is the topic/niche vast enough to write enough content
Get a little idea about the competition and already-established players.
Various monetization opportunities
Future projection and trends of niche
etc

These are a few points that you should keep in mind and questions you should ask yourself before starting a blog.

I suggest you shortlist 2 or 3 niches and then finalize based on various parameters.

Now that you have found the niche, next is finding a name.

Here are some tips for selecting a perfect blog name:

Keep it simple
Keep it short
You can either name it something related to the industry go with a brand name, or even start a blog based on your name.
See if the domain name is available (preferably .COM)
See if the name is trademarked or if the name is being used by any other company or brand
See if you can get the exact same name as the username on various social media platforms.

Once you have figured out both the topic and name, now its time to register a domain name for your new blog.

Register A Domain Name

The domain name is the virtual address of your blog or website. People enter this URL/address into the address bar of their web browser to reach your website.

Your domain name should be simple, short, and easy to remember.

First up, you need to brainstorm and find a name for your blog. I suggest you shortlist at least 3 to 5 names.

Next, head to any domain registrar of choice like GoDaddy, Cloudflare, NameCheap, etc., enter the domain in the search box, and hit enter. It will now show if the domain is available or not.

If available, you can register it right away. If the domain name is taken, find other available names or choose a different TLD. For example, if yourblogname.com is taken, you may register yourblogname.net, .io, .co, etc.

Create an account on the registrar
Search and add the domain to the cart
Ensure Domain Privacy is added (Available for free in most cases)
Complete the payment

Get A Good Quality Hosting

Now that you have the domain name, purchasing hosting is next. Hosting means uploading and storing images, blog files, articles, etc., on a cloud server.

There are mainly three types of hosting:

Shared hosting – The simple shared web hosting that is easy to set up, use, and manage. You don’t need much technical skills to get started with shared hosting.
VPS hosting – VPS, aka Virtual Private Server, is a bit more advanced type of hosting than shared hosting which offers superior performance but requires you to manage everything from start to end. If you are just getting started, you might find installing WordPress on VPS overwhelming. On the other hand, if you have more money to spend, you may go with managed VPS hosting, but right now, I think it is not necesary.
Dedicated hosting – As the name itself suggests, these are dedicated servers for your website alone. In simple words, an entire server will only host your website and you get exclusive access to all resources. Dedicated hosting is an overkill for a regular blog.

As you are just getting started and our primary aim is to start a website and not manage the server, I suggest you go with cPanel-based shared hosting, which is easy to manage and set up even if you have no prior knowledge.

Bluehost is a leading shared hosting provider with plans as low as $2.95/month. Bluehost also gives a free .COM domain upon hosting purchase.

Note: If you want more speed and performance, you may get cloud hosting from DigitalOcean, Vultr, CloudWays, etc.

Step 1: Head over to Bluehost.com’s hosting section or try Cloudways managed hosting.

Step 2: From here, select a hosting plan of your choice. The BASIC plan, which costs $1.95, will be more than enough for you to host a single website. Click on the Select button.

Step 3: Next, you need to type your domain name that you finalized earlier. Just enter the domain name and click on Next.

Step 3: Enter basic account details like the name, email, address, phone number, and finally complete the payment. (Make sure to uncheck items like SiteLock Security, CodeGuard, SSL, etc)

Now we are done with the first part of the setup, which is registering a domain name and buying hosting.

Point Domain Name To Hosting

Now that we have purchased the domain and hosting, the next step is to link them together and install WordPress.

If you purchase the domain name from Bluehost, you may skip this step. Follow the steps below to link the domain name.

Select the domain and select Manage options.

Find the nameserver settings.

Copy and paste the Bluehost nameserver details in the field provided and hit save.

ns1.bluehost.com
ns2.bluehost.com

If you use CloudWays, DigitalOcean, etc, find the IP address and create a new A record pointing to the correct IP address.

Install WordPress & Configure It

WordPress is the most popular content management system (CMS) out there. WordPress has a 60% market share, and almost 14.7% percent of the world’s top websites use WordPress.

WordPress is extremely easy to use and customize. You can add more options and features to your WordPress website by adding plugins and customize the look by adding any themes. (We will discuss both in this article itself.)

Now, let’s proceed with WordPress installation.

Step 1: Log in to your Bluehost dashboard and click on the My Sites option on the left side

Step 2: Click on Add site and then on Create New Site

Step 3: Now it will ask you to enter the blog name and tagline

Step 4: Select the domain and click on complete. Wait for a few seconds and it will automatically set up WordPress for you.

Once done, click on the Login to WordPress button to log in to your WordPress dashboard.

Voila. You have successfully installed WordPress.

Tweak WordPress Installation

Now WordPress is set up based on default settings. You need to change certain things as soon as you install WordPress.

Let’s take a look at things that you need to change right away.

Firstly, you need to change the WordPress permalink structure. Just head over to Settings > Permalinks. Here, you need to change the type to “Post name“.

Change Default Preferences – Next step is to go through default preferences and change it according to yours. For example, you might want to change the country, time zone, bio, name structure, date structure, start day of the week and more. Just go through the settings page and change the necessary settings.

Delete Default Posts, Pages and Comments – After fresh installation of WordPress, it will have a dummy post, page, comment and plugin. Just delete them right away as we do not need them.

Install Must Have Plugins & Theme

Install WordPress Theme

WordPress is very flexible when it comes to customization. You can change the look and feel of WordPress any way you like it.

There are both free and paid themes for WordPress.

Since we are just getting started, a free theme will be more than enough.

Follow the steps below to activate a new theme of your choice. The WordPress theme repo contains many good-looking themes that are free to use. If you want more good-looking themes with advanced features, you might want to purchase a premium theme from websites like Themeforest.

Step 1: Login to your WordPress dashboard. Hover over Appearence and click on Themes

Step 2: Click on the Add New button to install a new WordPress theme on your blog

Step 3: You can search for any theme from the WordPress repo itself. All of these themes will be completely free to use. Below given are a few popular free themes:

Astra
OceanWP
Kadence
GeneratePress

Step 4: If you purchased a theme from sites like Themeforest then click on the Upload Theme button from the top left side and upload the zip file to install it.

Step 5: You also have the option to preview theme before installing. Just click on the Preview button to see how your website will look like if you install that particular theme.

Step 6: Finally, click on the Install button and then Activate it. Go through the theme documentation and further customize the theme according to your liking.

Setup Necessary WordPress Plugins

In order to add extra features and options, you need to install various WordPress plugins. Follow the steps given below to install a plugin on your newly created WordPress blog.

Step 1: Go to your WordPress dashboard and click on Plugins

Step 2: To the top right side you’ll find a search bar. You can search for various plugins here.

Step 3: After finding the required plugin, click on the Install button to install it and finally Activate button to make it live on your website.

Below given are a couple of plugins that you might want to use in your WordPress blog.

Yoast SEO
Yoast SEO is a plugin that will help you to optimize your blog for search engines. It will let you add meta description to posts, manage robots.txt file, generate an XML sitemap and more.

Contact Form 7
For visitors to contact you, you need to setup a contact from on your blog. Contact Form 7 is a simple and light weight WordPress plugin that will help you to add a custom contact form easily.

WP Rocket
No one likes a slow loading website. We need to make sure that our website loads fast. WP Rocket is a caching and WordPress speed optimization plugin that will let you speed up WordPress for load time.

ShortPixel
ShortPixel is an image compressor and optimizer plugin for WordPress. Oftentimes, the images and screenshots that we upload to our blog will be huge in term of size. ShortPixel will automatically compress the images and makes your website load faster.

These are some of those plugin that you can add to your blog. Depending on the features you want, you can easily research and add more plugins.

Publish Important Pages

Once you install essential plugins and configure the theme before you start posting articles, there is one more thing to do.

Every blog should have basic pages like About, Contact, Privacy Policy, Disclaimer, etc.

As for the contact page, you may use the Contact Form 7 plugin to insert a contact form inside the page.

WordPress, by default, provides a Privacy Policy page. Just hit the edit button, make the required changes, remove the “Suggested Text” placeholder, and publish the same.

Post Your First Article

It’s finally time to publish the first article on your brand new blog.

Keyword research is necessary to find low competition and high volume topics. But since you are already familiar with the topic, you must have some basic idea about content in the niche.

If you have not found any keywords yet, I suggest you do keyword research and find at least 10 topics to write about.

Below is a high level overview of how to post an article on your WordPress blog.

Let’s go through the basics of posting a post on WordPress using the Gutenberg post editor.

In this section, I will only cover the basics of using the WordPress post editor to post content. If you want to know how to write an SEO optimized article then make sure to checkout our article on the same.

Now the WordPress post editor (Gutenberg Editor) will open up.

First up, you need to type the title of the article. It will be in H1 tag.

Next, you start writing your actual content.

Just click on the Plus button to add new blocks. You can add various kinds of blocks including:

Paragraph
Headings
Images
List
Buttons
Columns
Shortcodes
Embedded content and more.

Now it’s time for you to mix and match various Gutenberg blocks and format your article as well. Once you are done with writing the article, next we need to specify the category, tag, featured image, etc.

On the left side, under Post settings, you can add a new category, and tag. Also upload or select a featured image as well.

To optimize your article for SEO, use the Yoast SEO plugin to add meta description. Specify the focus keyword and then optimize your blog post for both SEO and readability.

Finally, once you are done, click that Publish button to make your very first post live on your blog.

You may even use AI writing tools like Creaitor.ai to write long articles in relatively less time as well.

Build Traffic

Starting your blog and posting content is only the tip of the iceberg. To make money from your blog, people need to visit your website. But how will people find your blog and how will you make money?

Building traffic is the next big thing.

There are multiple different ways to build and grow traffic to your blog. We’ll discuss some of them below.

SEO

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. It is the process of ranking high on search engines like Google, Bing, etc, and bringing consistent traffic. Getting started with SEO can be a bit overwhelming and challenging for beginners. Keyword research, link building, topical authority, EEAT, and much more go into it.

Pinterest is a visual search engine with over 400 million monthly active users. Unlike Google, you must post images directly on Pinterest to build traffic. Everytime people search for something on Pinterest, they will be presented with tons of high-quality pins (images), and upon clicking the pin, it will take them to the target webpage.

Social Media

Following the recent Google algorithm updates like the HCU (Helpful Content Update), relying only on a single platform like Google is super risky. You need to diversify your traffic source and social media is a great way to build traffic. Start a Facebook page, Instagram account, Twitter, etc, to post content and bring meaningful traffic to your blog.

Email Newsletter

From day one, set up an email newsletter service and start collecting email addresses right away. This way, you can build a private community of highly targeted people and send them emails about offers with affiliate links, new articles, and much more.

Direct Traffic

Working on branding your blog will help to bring direct traffic. That means people visit your website directly without relying on search engines or social media accounts. For this, you need to keep posting highly valuable content and build a brand out of it.

Wrap Up

I hope you found the ultimate guide on starting a blog helpful. Starting a blog is pretty simple, and you can get going in less than an hour.

Once you set up the blog, post high-quality content and build meaningful traffic. Then, it’s time to convert that traffic into money by monetizing the blog with display ads, affiliate links, sponsorships, and more.

Now, let’s go through the steps once again and summarize what we did.

Brainstorm and come with a blog niche and a name
Register the domain name
Get a web hosting to host our WordPress blog
Install WordPress
Install and configure a WordPress theme
Setup necessary WordPress plugins
Make little tweaks to default WordPress settings
Post your first article
Promote your blog
Search Engine Optimization
Scale up!

If you have any doubts, make sure to comment down below, and I will get back to you at the soonest.