How To Build Your Online Business Using A Blog

How To Build Your Online Business Using A Blog

There are many ways to build your online business, and one of them is starting a blog. In this post, I will share how to build your online business using a blog.

How To Build Your Online Business Using A Blog

I understand blogging is not as popular as it once was. You are one Google update to lose all your traffic overnight, but this is the risk that comes with any business. I have seen people lose their YouTube channels, Pinterest pages, Facebook pages, etc.

If you are going to build your business into another company platform and depend on it 100%, there is a big chance that you are one decision away from going into trouble. The idea is to build multiple traffic sources.

Pick a niche

Choosing a profitable niche for your blog is the most important decision you must make at the start of your blogging career.

Before you invest your time, money, and effort in driving traffic to your blog or creating content, you need to know if there is a demand for products and information in your niche.

What is a niche?

A niche is a specific market, interest, problem, or goal that people share.

Affiliate marketers make money by promoting products and services to people interested in the niche.

For example, “weight loss” is a huge market that interests millions.

My two steps of finding a profitable niche

  • Find out your topics of interest
  • Find out if people are paying for information or products on those topics.

You can read more about finding a niche here.

5 Easy Ways To Discover Hot Niches

Get a Domain name and Hosting.

After deciding which niche you want to write about, you need to get a domain name and hosting.

I know there are a lot of free options out there, but if you’re serious about building an online business, you need to have a blog with your own domain name and somewhere to host your files and content.

Buy a domain name

You must have your domain name to promote affiliate products using a WordPress blog. 

NOTE: You want to pick a title that includes a related keyword. If possible, go for a .com.

Unfortunately, many of the best domain names are gone, so you must be creative. Keep it short and snappy if possible.

You can use your name like sekihudson.com

I get my domain names from namecheap.com.

Online Business Tools and Resources You Need To Run Your Business

Host Your Blog

A hosting account connects your domain to the internet and stores all the data presented on your domain.

For example, websites you see online have data that allows them to be presented and loaded.
The data is loaded from a server connected to your domain name, where people can view it.

This is the perfect hosting for you. If you need fast and reliable but cheap web hosting, I recommend Cloudways. They start at $11 per month, and you pay only for the resources you use.

cloudways

Install WordPress

Installing a WordPress blog is very easy. You can just go to your hosting dashboard, find a WordPress icon, click it, follow the instructions, and in one minute, you will have WordPress installed on your servers.

But I know this is not easy for everyone, so my recommendation is to go to fiverr.com. For $5, you can get someone to install and configure your Blogger.

 If you want a really nice design and premium themes, there are many guys on fiverr.com who can do that for you for less than $50.

Please get in touch with me here if you want me to help you install your blog.

Add WordPress Plug-Ins to Your Blog

WordPress plug-ins enhance the effectiveness of your blog. Some plug-ins help with SEO, others help arrange comments, while others help you track stats with Google Analytics. Even without any plug-ins, WordPress is great, but adding a bunch of these free plug-ins will “soup up” your blog and make it work even better.

You can find the plugins at http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/.  Some of the plugins that I use on this blog  are:

Akismet is a comment spam manager included in the base WordPress install. You must enable this plugin; otherwise, your blog will receive all types of spam.

RankMath—This plugin really helps improve your Google ranking. The higher your rankings, the more traffic you get. The more traffic you get, the more opportunities you have to make some money and gain some readers.

WP-Super-Cache- Dramatically decreases the load on the hosting provider’s server, so everyone stays happy if you get a lot of traffic. If you don’t have this and you get a lot of traffic to your blog, your hosting company could shut down your site.

Pretty Links—This plugin has a free version that allows you to mask and shorten affiliate links you might be promoting on your website.

Smush-Reduce image file sizes improve performance and boost your SEO.

Wordfence Security – Anti-virus, Firewall, and Malware Scan

Create Basic Pages

You need to create basic pages for your blog. These are pages that you will find in every blog. These pages are the About page, Privacy policy, disclaimer, and contact page.

About page

This is the page about your blog and you, what your blog is about, who is behind it, and your story.

It will help people know who you are and your story, making it easier for them to connect with you.

About

Privacy Policy

This page tells people who read your blog what information you collect and what you will do with it.

This page is required by law and ensures transparency about the data you collect.

Privacy Policy For Affiliate Marketing-Why You Need It

Contact page

This is the page people can use to contact you, ask you questions, make business proposals, etc.

Contact

Disclaimer

People are not stupid; if you are making money from your posts and links that they click on your blog, you need to disclose it.

Earnings Disclaimer

Use Pinterest to drive traffic to your blog.

Pinterest is another huge social media. It is based on sharing images and boards. You can build your Pinterest page and post or repost pictures and videos.

Each post-Pinterest will let you add a link to the external website, although they do not let you send people directly to an affiliate link. To bypass this, you must create a landing page or a link tree.

You will need to post a lot of content to get traction on Pinterest. I recommend using Canva to create all the pins you need for a week and Tailwind to schedule and automate your posting.

Post regularly 

It would be best if you created a posting calendar. For a new blog, I recommend posting daily if you can, but I know you might have a busy schedule, so if you can post at least twice per week, that would be great.

If you post twice weekly, within a year, you will have at least 100 posts; in my opinion, with 100 posts, you should be making between $1000 to $3000 per month.

If you have 100 posts and make less than $1000 monthly, the posts have serious issues. It could be the keywords you are looking for or the quality of the posts.

Monetize your blog

There are many ways to make money using your blog. The easiest ways are affiliate marketing and display ads.

Affiliate links

After you write a few articles, you can apply to different affiliate programs, such as Amazon, Clickbank, Walmart, Impact, or any other affiliate product, and add links to your articles.

I treat each article as its page and objective. I always add a link that is relative to the article.

Walmart Affiliate Program-How to Make $100 Daily

Home Depot Affiliate Program

Wayfair Affiliate Program-How To Make $100 a Day

Display Ads

If you want to avoid dealing with affiliate managers, you can add a code to your website and earn income when people click on ads from your blog.

There are many display ad agencies, and the biggest one is Adsense. AdSense can accept your blog into their program if you get at least 20 visitors daily.

Other add networks that I use are Ezoic and Adthrive. Ezoic is easier to enter as it needs at least 10k page views monthly.

For your site to get approved for AdThrive, you must have at least 100,000 monthly pageviews. 

Build an email list 

You must build your email list if you want long-term success with your affiliate marketing career.

In simple words, list building is the process of collecting email addresses from your prospects. You give them something valuable, and they give you their email addresses in exchange.

Then, you send them emails with tips and recommendations, and you may include your affiliate links in those. If they buy from you, you make money.

To get started, you need to create an account with aweber.com and then create a form that will integrate with your blog. There is a plugin for that, and again, if you don’t know how to do this, you can get someone to do it for you for just $5 on fiverr.com

To get the sign-up form on your blog, you’ll need to get the HTML code for the sign-up box from your blog/website developer, and they’ll know what to do next.

Final Thoughts

Building an online business using a blog can be challenging. You can not make money immediately. It will take a lot of time and effort, and most people quit before making it profitable.

 You can make blogging enjoyable. As long as you have a niche that you love to write about and allows you to scale as high as you can in terms of monetization, you’ll be able to find success.

Just take your time; don’t overthink things. If things aren’t working, don’t be afraid to make some adjustments until something does. You only fail if you give up on it completely.

If you’re up for building an online business, then dig in and take on the challenge.

 

About the author 

Seki Hudson

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