How to start a money-making blog for beginners
Yes, you need a content strategy for your blog. In fact, I would say that creating a content strategy for your blog is the important thing you can do before setting up your website. Although, to be fair, if you’re already a fair way into your blog and you’re struggling with traffic, you can implement … Read more
I’m assuming that a lot of you reading this post want to be freelance writers. One of the most common questions I see asked is ‘how can I build a portfolio?’ It’s a great question to ask, and you will definitely need somewhere to demonstrate your abilities. I personally think that starting your own website, … Read more
Let me preface this with some of my stats. My house plant website receives 30,000 page views per month, most of them (a good 95%) from SEO. Which means that I didn’t have to do ANYTHING to get that traffic EXCEPT write. Isn’t that the dream for writers? No social media, no networking, no syndication, … Read more
I see this question a lot on Reddit, and I believe the confusion arrives from people signing up for wordpress.com rather than wordpress.org. I started on a wordpress.com site, and if you even want to monetise your blog, I would recommend starting out with wordpress.org. You can migrate your site, but I found it really … Read more
I personally don’t think that it’s necessary to shoot for every Google snippet – certainly don’t compromise the quality of your post in order to get it. Google snippets are certainly desirable, but rather than designing my post to hit the snippet, I try to stick to a few formatting rules that make it more … Read more
If you know how to write, and have followed my advice about using a fast host and fast theme, you’re pretty much two thirds of the way the way there. The final third (although chronologically it comes after setting up your site and before writing your content) is keyword research. If I’m being totally honest, … Read more
Blogging initially started as an online journal. Not many people had them, and only a niche crowd read them. Then in the late noughties, it became a way of sharing lifestyle tips. We were all sick of glossy magazines promoting the products they were paid to, and relying on adverts and a few vague specifications … Read more
0. You don’t need any. I’m not kidding. You’ll get as much organic traffic from zero blog posts in the first few months as you would if you had three or four. I’ve started many blogs (I must be in double digits now), and every time I’ve started a new one, I’ve done it slightly … Read more
I know, I know, there a million of these articles out there, and I find them all a bit biased towards the author’s preference. Whilst I do have a preference, I also know what it’s like not to have £75 to drop on hosting and a domain name. Especially when you’re not guaranteed an income, … Read more
There are a lot of articles out there detailing what to do in your first six months of blogging, and they have their pros and cons. I personally believe that the first six months of building a blog are an almost private thing. You don’t have enough content to be actively sending random users to … Read more