
How to Start A Blog in 2020 and Make money -For Beginners.
An Easy 7 Step-by-Step Beginner’s Guide to Create a Blog in (2020)
This blogging quick-start guide will provide you with an easy steps and guide to launch a profitable WordPress blog.
*Note: may contain affiliate links to my recommended products.
1st STEPS
Know Your Why and Write Down Your Goals:
Before you start your blog, you have to deeply understand why you’re getting started and what you want to achieve. Write down your 1, 3, and 6 month goals. These may include: launch my blog, write five 2,500+ blog posts, get 50 backlinks, generate $1,000/month, etc. Your short term goals turn into long term success, so start with the end in mind.
Use this document to outline your goals and strategy.
Choose Your Niche:

Your blog’s niche should be in an area that matches both your expertise and interests. It should also have good search volume and monetization opportunities. Most importantly, your niche needs market demand and a high-paying audience. Read tips from email #2 and use a tool like Ahrefs of SEMRush to do keyword research.
Get started with a free 7-day trial with SEMRush today.
Research Other Blogs:

Once you’ve picked your niche, perform keyword research and look into your competition. Make a list of the top 20 keywords you want to rank for and see who’s already ranking for them, then check these sites’ Domain Authority. Your niche should have keywords with high search volume and competition levels under 0.3.
Pick Your Domain Name:

Your blog’s domain name is very important for your personal brand. Make sure your domain name is catchy, short, matches your niche, and can be used for a long time. For example, if you’re not 100% sure of the exact direction your blog will take, a broader domain name ensures you’re not pigeonholing your options.
2nd STEPS
Get Your Domain and Hosting for WordPress with Bluehost:

Your web hosting plan is one of the most important choices when starting your blog. When you sign up, you get a free domain, free SSL, easy 1-click WordPress install, and a great 24/7 support team. Their plans start at $3.95/month and they have a 30-day money back guarantee.
You can get started at 50% off with my Bluehost link here.
Install Your WordPress Theme:

Design is crucial to your blog’s user experience, site speed, average time on page, and lead generation efforts. Luckily, there are a ton of great WordPress blog themes that you can choose from. You can either pick a free or paid theme. I recommend a paid theme as they look nicer and typically offer 1 year of support.
Check out ThemeIsle for some excellent and easy-to-use WordPress themes.
Plan Your Sitemap:

In addition to your blog posts, your site needs a few key pages that should be included in your top level navigation. These pages may include: Home, Start Here, About, Services, and Contact. Write out your full sitemap in a document.
Perform Keyword Research and Plan Your Blog Posts:

Create a list of 10 potential blog topics that you’d like to write about. First, perform keyword research with a tool like SEMRush to view your target keyword’s search volume, competition, and current top 10 results. If your target keywords have high competition, it will be difficult to rank for them. If they have less competition (under 0.3), your new blog has a chance of hitting page one faster. Remember, your target keywords will be included in your blog post title, URL, and throughout the body of your post. Secondary and semantic keywords should be added too.
Get started with SEMRush free for 7 days.
3th STEPS
Install Your WordPress Plugins
Properly choosing your WordPress plugins has a huge impact on your site speed, SEO, design, and lead generation efforts. Here are the top plugins I recommend you install on your WordPress blog right from the start.
- MonsterInsights – Easiest way to install Google Analytics
- OptinMonster – Best pop up and email opt-in tool
- Autoptimize – Best to minify your code
- Easy Table of Contents
- Elementor – Best WordPress landing page builder
- Mashshare Share Buttons
- ShortPixel – Great for image optimization
- Quick Page/Post Redirect – Great for 301 Redirects
- Yoast SEO – Best SEO plugi
Install Google Analytics:

To track your blog traffic and visitor behavior, you need to install Google Analytics. It’s super easy with the free MonsterInsights plugin.
First, go to Google Analytics and create a new Google Analytics property with your blog’s URL – make sure to use the https version. Next, go to the Google Analytics settings in your MonsterInsights plugin and authenticate your Google account.
Set Up Google Search Console:

Google Search Console is a free service that allows you to monitor, maintain, and troubleshoot your appearance in Google search results. When setting it up, create four versions of your blog (www/non-www and http/https), and make sure your primary account is your https version. Other items to optimize include international targeting, preferred domain, and submitting your sitemap.
4th STEPS
Optimize Your WordPress Settings:

In your WordPress dashboard, there are a lot of different items to tweak in your settings tab. Here are a few to optimize:
• Settings/General: Add your site title, tagline and URL.
• Settings/Reading: Home page display, search engine visibility.
• Settings/Permalinks: Make sure your blog’s URL structure is optimized for SEO and uses this Custom Structure: https://www.blog.com/%postname%
Design Your Blog:

Now that your WordPress theme is installed from Themeisle and plugins are installed, it’s time to start updating your blog’s design. To edit the look of your theme, go to Appearance/Customize and use the WYSIWYG editor to update your site information, logo, colors, menus, and widgets. If you have coding knowledge, you can go to Appearance/Editor to adjust your blog’s CSS files.
Build Out Your Blog’s Pages
Once you’re happy with your blog’s design settings, you can start adding your pages. Go to Pages/Add New to create a new page. You first want to design your homepage, as well as the main pages that will live in your menu navigation. Use the Elementor drag and drop editor to give your homepage a custom look. Also, make sure to check your tablet and mobile settings within Elementor to make sure your pages look great on all devices.
Using either Gutenberg or the Classic Editor, it’s easy to add text, images, and links to your pages. Ensure your pages’ titles and URL structures include target keywords. Save your pages as drafts and hit publish when they’re ready.
5th STEPS
Write Your First Blog Post:

While it’s easy to assume that you need 10-20 blog posts ready before you launch, this isn’t the case. Remember, it’s quality over quantity. One 3,000+ word blog post can be more valuable than five 500 word blog posts. When writing your post, start with keyword research to choose your blog post’s title.
Here are some tips to optimize your blog post titles:
- Use numbered lists: Numbered lists have very high blog title click through rates. Additionally, odd numbers at the beginning of your post perform better than even numbers. For example: 87+ High Paying Affiliate Programs (2019).
- Title length: Keep your title under 60 characters so that it doesn’t get cut off on search engine results pages (SERPS).
- Place your target keyword at or near the beginning of the title (and URL).
- Add the year at the end of your title if your topic is timely.
After your pick a title, here are some blog writing tips with SEO in mind:
- Structure your headers correctly: Your main post headers should be H2s and include your target keyword or variations of your target keyword. For subsections, make those H3s and number them.
- Strategically place internal links: Time on page and bounce rate are important metrics to Google. One way to improve these numbers is with strategic internal links. Add links to related blog articles near the beginning and end of your post to improve the chances readers will interactive with more of your content.
- Add secondary and semantic keywords: Use SEMRush to find keywords related to your target keyword and leverage a tool like LSIGraph to find semantic keywords to add into your post.
- Write long-form, compelling content: Longer, more useful posts will outrank your competition. Add infographics and images to keep your readers engaged.
6th STEPS
Optimize Your Blog With Yoast SEO:

The Yoast SEO plugin is the best tool to ensure your blog is 100% search engine optimized. Once installed, this plugin appears at the bottom of every post and page. On every post and page, plug your target keyword into Yoast, add in your page title and meta description, and follow their tips to improve on-page SEO. Next, make sure your Yoast settings are all set up correctly. Here are some of the top settings to update when you first install Yoast.
• Connect Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools
• Edit your taxonomies: These settings will change how your sitemap indexes your content. If you are just starting out, you can turn off Tags in search results as well as date archives.
• Add your social accounts and turn on Twitter cards.
• Enable your robots.txt file
YOAST SEO 2.3- Making you site even better
Set Up a Content Delivery Network (CDN):

A content delivery network (CDN) is a geographically distributed group of servers providing faster delivery of Internet content. If you’re using Bluehost, you can easily connect to a CDN like Cloudflare to greatly increase your site speed.
Optimize Your Plugins For Site Speed
Strategically choosing site speed plugins can improve your page load time – now a major ranking factor on Google. Here are some of the best tips to optimize your plugins for site speed:
• Autoptimize: Make sure the following boxes are checked – Optimize HTML Code, Optimize JavaScript Code, Aggregate JS files, Optimize CSS Code, Aggregate CSS Files, Also Aggregate Inline CSS.
• Leverage aggressive caching.
• Use a3 Lazy Load to load images after your initial page load.
• Use ShortPixel to compress your images. Make sure your PNGs are converted to JPEGs.
• Use a fast social sharing plugin like MashShare to reduce external requests.
• Remove any plugins you aren’t using.
• Use a tool like Google PageSpeed Insights to keep track of your site speed.
7th STEPS
Get Ready to Launch Your Blog

Congrats on making it to the 7th STEPS. It’s officially launch day! Here are some final tweaks and settings to check before going live with your blog.
• Ensure your blog’s URL is properly placed in your General Settings.
• Uncheck the box “Discourage search engines from indexing this site” in Settings/Reading.
• Make sure your primary sitemap is in Yoast and there aren’t other plugins like JetPack submitting a separate sitemap.
• If migrating from another website, double check your 301 redirects.
• Quality check your blog on multiple browsers and devices.
• Input your blog’s domain in Bluehost and turn off the Coming Soon Page.
• Set your posts and pages to published.
Launch Your Blog
With this blog launch quickstart guide, you planned your content and niche, got started with WordPress, picked your theme and plugins, built your site, optimized your settings, and launched your new blog.
Once you have put in the effort of creating great blog content and promoting your blog, making money from your blog is actually the easy part.
Blogs have the potential to be extremely lucrative, but don’t assume that you’re going to start making money in the first week, or even in the first month. Blogging takes work and dedication, but once you develop a large enough audience, there are several methods you can employ to monetize your blog.
Start Making Money with Your Blog
Different people have different purpose of starting a blog. Someone may use this as a hobby or personal blog. Someone may use this as a business blog. Alternatively, someone wants to become a professional blogger like me.
However, making money with a blog is one of the most common goals to start a blog.
NOTE: Here are the steps if you want to make money after creating your blog. Add some Affiliate income site by visiting google.com on ads.
Write on Regular Basis
You must write on a regular basis after starting your blog. Your posts should have excellent research and original ideas where people can get something new. People like and share such content.
More quality content you like, more the traffic you can get.
Promote your blog
This is the most important step to get the traffic on your blog. Making money without traffic is difficult. It takes time to get traffic on your blog.
There are many things you can do to get traffic on your blog.
Learn SEO and implement on-page & off-page SEO techniques on your blog. This way you can get good traffic from Google.
Share your content on social sites like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, Pinterest etc.
Write comments and guest posts on other blogs.
Create videos and upload on YouTube and other video sharing sites.
How to Monetize your Blog with Affiliate Fast and Easy.
This is the ultimate aim of every blogger after starting a blog. There are number of ways to make money from a blog but I won’t recommend many.
I will keep it simple and suggest you just 2 ways as a beginner.
You can make money with Google AdSense and Amazon.
Sign up with AdSense here (try only after you receive some traffic on your blog). Google displays ads on your blog similar to you see on this blog. When a visitor clicks on any ads, Google pays you.
Another excellent way is making money as Amazon associate.
Just signup with Amazon Associate USA or your country (available in all major countries). Login to your associate account and get an affiliate link for any product you want to promote through your blog.
Whenever someone goes to Amazon by clicking on the affiliate link on your blog and buy something, you get 4% to 12% of the ordered amount from Amazon.
Don’t look for any other ways right now as you will get confused and focus more on making money rather than making your blog successful. Even after 5 years of blogging, I prefer AdSense and affiliate marketing to earn from my blogs.
If you made it this far, I appreciate the time you took to read this and deeply value every relationship I make from this blog.
I’m here for you as both a blogging guide and a friend. I respond to every email and want to learn how I can best help you on your journey.
I want to hear your stories – both the good and the bad. I want my blog to provide a safe place where new bloggers can collaborate and help each other out. Since we’re all new bloggers, we need to band together, pick each other up, work smarter, and rally together to win.
If you’re looking to finally take the leap to launch, grow, and monetize your blog, ……you can start here or enter your information below.
I hope that the story of your life is filled with peace, freedom, happiness and Love.
Need more help?
I hope this guide has answered any questions you had on how to start a blog.
If you enjoyed this guide and would like to work with me further, please visit sightncash.com or for 1:1 coaching, Email: sightncash@gmail.com