How to Start a Blog and Make Money Online?

Now, this is the right decision to start a blog and make the living out of it. Here, I have given a full guide with a step-by-step process.

Believe me, starting a blog is very simple!

So let’s come directly to the point i.e how to start a blog and start making money out of it. I know this sounds like a miracle and just a few steps process.

Trust me it is not that simple and not even hard.

They say if you are not trying anything to start a new work you will not gonna succeed. But if you try to start something, there are at least 50-50 chances of winning or losing. Trust me that regret of not starting will go away.

At least you tried it! We learn from our failure, sir/ma’am. Remember this!

With that saying, let’s get to the point of getting into the blogging industry. In the end, I’ll show you my income from blogging in the last year.

How to Start a Blog and Make Money Online?

So here is the short step-by-step summary to start a blog.

  1. Buy a Domain
  2. Buy Hosting
  3. Install WordPress
  4. Start Making Money Online (Feather in the Cap)

Yes, this is a 4 step process. But it is not the end. Especially for a noob player in the blogging industry.

Therefore, I’m starting with the first step i.e buy a domain.

1. Buy a Domain

If you are serious about blogging, you should also be serious about your business name. And, in blogging, a domain name is the business name.

Moreover, make sure you include your niche keyword in the domain name so that you don’t miss the relevancy. This is good for both, humans and Google. Just like we included ‘job’ in 9to5job.in, because we write on earning or job-related stuff.

For newbies, it is difficult to choose the domain name at first. Even when I started blogging. My first domain was youthlisten.com and after it, I bought 4-5 more domains.

But nothing worked out!

Or you can say I was not serious at that time.

But later on, I realized the importance of blogging. And thought to share my experience with you guys.

Now comes the pain in the butt.

Buy a domain from GoDaddy.com (that is what I always prefer) or you can also try some other domain registrar.

The reason I buy from here is that I always get good deals from here. You can also check if there is any deal available or not for the first-time user.

You can try any TLD i.e .com, .in, .us, .org, etc.

It is important to be careful here. How and what does it mean?

It’s simple.

If you want to write for a country-specific audience, let’s say for Indian people only, then you might consider buying a .in domain. (Easy to rank for specific keywords). For the US audience, .us domain.

If your focus is all over the world then consider buying a .com or something. (Hard to rank because you are competing with all other websites in the world).

What next?

Search for Domain > Continue to Cart. (We are taking an example of a domain as youthlisten.com here)

buy domain from godaddy
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Make sure to uncheck all other options like domain privacy protection, no professional email, and other options.

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Godaddy Full Domain Privacy Protection
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You can buy the domain privacy protection plan if you want to hide your personal information from the domain (whois.domaintools.com)

Next, make the payment for 1 year or so according to your requirement and budget. For newbies, I’ll recommend you to go for a 1-year plan only.

Now you will receive the email confirming your payment and your domain name. Further, the step is to buy reliable and secure hosting on a budget.

2. Buy Hosting

UPDATE – January 5, 2022

I switched my hosting from Hostgator.com (will discuss later) to Cloudways. Here are the reasons:

  • The dashboard is 200% easier than Hostgator. It is for non-technical users and trusts me it is not going to confuse you like Hostgator. Hostgator’s cPanel, is very tough to use, there are so many options that make it a beginner hard to understand.
  • It is not that much costly.
  • Since it is a managed cloud hosting, the speed is really fast (an important factor in ranking)
  • Most importantly, you only have to pay when you consume the resources. You also get the feature of Real-Time Billing.
  • Their chat support is next-level support compared to Hostgator (they don’t even respond)
  • In 2022, if a beginner asks me which hosting to choose, Cloudways is the one that I would highly recommend.
  • You also get a FREE trial.

For Low Budget Users:

Here comes the most important thing after buying the domain. As this guide is for beginners, I’ll keep it very simple.

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There are a lot of hosting providers on the internet. You should be wise enough here.

I’ve been personally using Hostgator.com for the last 3-4 years. Remember that it is Hostgator.com, not Hostgator.in

I don’t have good experience with Hostgator.in because of customer support and other Cpanel features (will discuss this later).

Furthermore, you must be thinking of buying the hosting plan from GoDaddy itself. Please don’t.

They have a poor service with shared hosting. I tried their hosting once, some of my friends also tried their hosting. Disappointed. In my point of view, they need to work on the shared hosting plan.

Buy Hostgator Shared Hosting Plans with FREE SSL for as low as $2.75

Now I’m assuming that you have already landed on Hostgator.com. Now go to Web Hosting from the navigation bar. And, you will reach here.

Buy shared web hosting online-from Hostgator.com
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What exactly is Shared (Web) hosting, WordPress hosting, VPS hosting, Dedicated hosting, Cloud hosting, etc?

To be very clear, it all depends on traffic and usage. For beginners, it is always recommended to go for shared hosting. Here are the estimated average visitors that Hostgator Recommended.

Estimated-traffic-on-Hostgator-shared-VPS-dedicated-hosting
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As you can see, the shared hosting plan can easily manage 7000-8000 average visitors a day. That is pretty enough for a new blog.

Don’t worry, if your blog is getting more than this traffic, then you will be asked by the Hostgator to upgrade your plan or you can chat with their 24*7*365 support team.

Now choose the plan. I recommend you to buy the Baby Plan. Why? Because you can host unlimited domains in this package.

Don’t limit yourself to one domain only i.e in the Hatchling Plan if you are serious about blogging. Later on, you need another domain also. That is what most bloggers do.

Click ‘Buy Now’ on Baby Plan and you will land here.

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As we already purchased the domain from GoDaddy (youthlisten.com), so click on ‘I Already Own This Domain’.

Many of you must be wondering, why not buy the domain here? It’s simple. I prefer buying a domain from GoDaddy because of the offers and deals.

You should check this from where are you getting good offers/discounts.

Put in your domain name and choose the billing cycle. Remember that, the longer period you choose the more discount you will get. If you ask me, then buying a plan for 1-Year is enough for beginners.

So based on your budget, go ahead. Similarly, fill in all the necessary details.

Scroll down further and uncheck all these additional services. You don’t need this in the beginning. Then why pay for this?

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Next, enter a coupon code if you have, otherwise for first-time users, you will get it automatically.

Bonus Tip: Before making the payment, wait for some time and see any pop-up comes or not with some offers on the same pre-payment window. Or you can talk to their sales support and ask for any coupon/discount. It works most of the time but NO GUARANTEE!

Hit the ‘Checkout Now’ button and make the payment.

Hoorah!! Now you are done with the initial steps of starting a blog.

Now check your email, you will get an email from Hostgator with a subject line that could be like this ‘Thank you for choosing HostGator!’

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You will get a billing portal link, your login email, and a password. You can also see the date at the top right corner of this email when I first purchased this and still I’m using the same hosting. But before this, I was with Hostgator.in (Not Recommended).

Now click on the portal link and sign in to your account.

After login, make sure to change the password first. See the screenshot below. Make the password strong.

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Now, it’s time to launch cPanel.

Go to your dashboard on the left side and click on ‘Launch cPanel’

cpanel-hostgator
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Now you will reach the cPanel dashboard. Now many of you wondering what is cPanel?

cPanel means Control Panel or Customer Panel where you can manage all your published websites, databases (MySQL Databases), manage website files, create professional email accounts, manage SSL, and a lot more things.

Don’t worry, you don’t have to touch anything here. This is why I love WordPress because even a non-technical guy can learn and start his website without any technical or coding knowledge.

Now the first thing you need to do is to connect with the tech support team and ask them to install the SSL certificate for your domain that you have purchased or added when you were making the hosting payment. (Remember ‘I Already Own This Domain’)

You can also install it manually but why hit your head when you already have the free resources?

SSL certificate is FREE with all the shared hosting plans on Hostgator.com. SSL is the Secure Socket Layer that secures your website and keeps the information secure or encrypted.

This is a must install on every website as it is also recommended by Google.

Still have doubts about web hosting? Read this article on what is web hosting.

3. Install WordPress

Before installing WordPress, you need to change the nameservers of your domain name in GoDaddy.

Here is how.

When you purchased the hosting, you will also get two nameservers in a separate email. You can also check them on your cPanel dashboard at the right sidebar like this.

hostgator-nameserver-update
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Why do you need to change the nameservers? Because tells your servers where exactly is the domain. It acts as a directory for devices and IP addresses attached to them, the language that only a computer will understand.

Copy these Primary and Secondary nameservers.

Now open your GoDaddy Dashboard > My Products and click on DNS in front of your domain name.

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Now change your DNS name and paste here the Primary and Secondary Nameservers (that you copied from cPanel/Email) in their respective places.

Hit ‘Save’.

It will take some propagation time and will be updated after some time.

Now let’s move to our Hostgator cPanel and start the process of installing WordPress or start a blog.

Now click either on Website Essentials or Softaculous App Installer. You can install by choosing any ONE of them.

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In my case, I clicked on Softaculous App Installer > WordPress > Install.

Choose installation URL as https + your domain name.

Fill in all the necessary details and leave others as default. Make sure to uncheck ‘Enable Multisite (WPMU)’. This feature allows you to run multiple sites off a single installation of WordPress. That is NOT required now as it will confuse you more.

Use any admin name, strong password, and your email. (You can change all these settings later also).

Scroll down and hit ‘Install’.

After some time, you will get your wp-admin URL, username, and password to log in to your WordPress dashboard.

Now your WordPress is installed.

Hmm, that is a long process but I tried to keep it very simple to start a blog. Don’t choose any other option as it will confuse you more for the first time.

Now, what next?

4. Start Making Money Online

Here is my earning proof for this year from Jan 1 – April 2022.

amazon affiliate earning from mobile
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This is the earning from my Affiliate Marketing that I do on my blogs. If you want to learn about it, please let me know.

Write your first post and install the important plugins and a lot more. If you need help in how to write your first blog post or you want me to guide you further in installing plugins and other WordPress settings, please let me know in the comments below. I’ll make all the guides on this.

Conclusion

I hope you find this blog useful and understood how to start a blog. This is the initial step to making your first online income from blogging. But there is a lot more. Don’t forget to comment.

All the best!

Hi, I'm Sagar Verma, founder of 9to5Job. I quit my job in 2019 to pursue my passion for blogging and digital marketing. I'm very much interested in sharing my little experience of corporate life, make money-related topics with all of my lovely users. Read more

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