Starting a Blog for Profit: What to Focus On?

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If you have the goal of starting a blog for profit, you need to know where the money is found in blogging.

It’s not easy to start a blog to make money, and not everybody can pull it off. You’ll need a few specific characteristics to have a fighting chance, including:

Determination
A willingness to learn
Incredible patience
Tunnel vision
Dedication

Without these characteristics, you’ll end up in the wannabe blogger’s graveyard with thousands of others.

According to hostingtribunal.com, it’s expected that there will be 31.7 million bloggers by 2020. While this may make blogging seem like a saturated space, you have to remember, only a small percentage of those bloggers are actively blogging on a daily or even weekly basis.

Just because somebody starts a blog doesn’t mean they follow through with it. I have owned about two dozen blogs over the past 10 years, and today, I own less than five. Some were sold, and others no longer exist.

Starting a blog for profit is a great goal, but it’s not one you will achieve unless you know what to focus on. In this blog post, I am going to explain to you a few things you need to get right, when starting a blog to make money, and I will also cover what you should be focusing on. I will back up many of the things I will talk about with real statistics, so make sure you read the entire post.

Table of Contents

What You MUST Get Right When Starting a Blog for Profit

If your goal is simply to journal about your life, you don’t need this information. However, if you’re starting a blog to make money, you desperately need to get the following right:

Your Blog Platform (I recommend self-hosted WordPress)
Blog Hosting (see my article on WordPress Hosting Sites)
Blog Post SEO (see my article on SEO Optimization for Blogging)
Consistent Posting (see my article on Successful Blogging)

If you don’t get these things right, you’ll struggle to make any money from your blog, especially if you miss the boat on hosting. My friends over at ConsumersAdvocate.org created a comprehensive guide to web hosting perfect for beginners. When you’re ready to start your own blog, I suggest checking out their guide to the Best Web Hosting available here.

Starting a blog and making money is a bit of an art form, but it’s not like painting. Not everybody can learn how to paint, but if you have or find a way to develop the characteristics I mentioned at the beginning of this post, you can learn how to start a blog to make money.

Get the Platform and Blog Hosting Right

You must get the platform and the blog hosting right, or you will have a weak foundation. This isn’t a difficult thing, and I have detailed how to get this right in the post mentioned above on WordPress Hosting Sites for Beginner Bloggers.

Choose any of the hosting companies mentioned in that article, along with WordPress, and you will have the strongest possible foundation for your blog. Personally, I recommend Kinsta WordPress hosting, if you can afford it. If not, choose SiteGround WordPress hosting. Both offer a great foundation for your blog.

An article from Crucial.com details how SEO and hosting work together. It talks about how server performance is a factor. A poor hosting company may overload their servers, neglect to maintain the server, or use outdated servers, which may cause problems you simply don’t want to deal with when trying to start a blog to make an income.

If you don’t get the hosting and the platform right, the following may hold you back from making money from your blog:

Slow Load Times
Inconsistent Uptime or Lots of Downtime
Poor Hosting Support when you need it most
Inadequate Blog Security
Inability to Grow your Blog without changing hosting companies
Lack of Tools

WordPress offers tens of thousands of plugins to help you do just about anything. In addition, Kinsta offers blog hosting you can trust with the best security and fastest load times I have seen without spending hundreds of dollars every month on a dedicated server from a company like LiquidWeb.

Both Kinsta and SiteGround offer very fast load times and great SEO hosting. Like I stated before if you can afford Kinsta WordPress hosting, it’s the best. If not, SiteGround is a close second and one of my favorite hosting companies.

Get Post SEO Right

Getting the SEO right within each blog post goes a long way to ensuring you gain traffic. Without good SEO, you will struggle to grow your traffic over time.

I recommend getting SEOPressor. It’s the best WordPress plugin I have found for SEO and provides everything you need to ensure every post includes great SEO for your specific keywords.

I also recommend getting SEMRush to help you choose the best long-tail Keywords for your blog posts. If you cannot afford SEMRush right now, use the LongTail Keyword Pro or for a free version, I recommend Ubersuggest.

All three are great, but SEMRush is by far the best SEO tool on the market. However, it can be a bit pricey, and it was a tool I had to work up to with my budget.

Consistency with Posting

The final thing you MUST get right if you want to start a blog for profit is consistency. If you don’t get this one right, you’ll never make money online with blogging.

Whether you have time to post to your blog once a week, once a month or once a day, you need to be consistent. According to Hubspot, posting to your blog 16+ times per month will give you 250% more traffic compared to bloggers that don’t.

I recommend publishing at least three new blog posts per week. Set up a goal that works for you and stay consistent. The more you publish to your blog (as long as it’s quality), the faster you will grow and the better your chances of starting a blog that makes money.

Where to Focus When Starting a Blog for Profit

You’re probably expecting me to tell you to focus on the writing or focus on posting to your blog often. While the quality of your posts and the frequency matter, your focus needs to be on building a list of email subscribers.

You need a lead magnet (free giveaway or reason for someone to sign up) and you need an autoresponder/newsletter. I prefer using GetResponse for all my email marketing because they have everything I need to build, monetize, and maintain my list today, tomorrow, and ten years into the future.

You may be thinking this is something you’ll do later once you have some traffic coming to your blog. Trust me when I tell you, starting a blog for income requires you to start building a list immediately.

Don’t wait until you have traffic.
Don’t wait until you’ve made a little cash.
Don’t wait until you think you’re ready.

Start building your list now. I wish I had started building my list from the very beginning instead of realizing how important it was a few years into blogging. My old blogs never utilized list building, and I could have thousands of subscribers if I had listened to the experts telling me to start building a list immediately.

This time around, I paid for an entire year of GetResponse to ensure I have no obstacles in the way. I don’t have to worry about list building, as it’s now my focus, and it should be your focus, too.

The money, for bloggers and many others, is truly in the list.

Starting a Blog for Profit: Email Marketing Stats

If you don’t believe me when I tell you that your focus should be building a list, maybe the following stats will convince you.

Consumers who purchase products through email spend 138% more than those that don’t receive email offers, according to WordStream.
Email Marketing provides a 4400% ROI and $44 for every $1 spent, according to Campaign Monitor.
Email subscribers are 3 times more likely to share your content via social media than visitors from other sources, according to QuickSprout.
Email marketing drives more conversions than any other marketing channel, including search and social, according to Monetate.
A message is 5x more likely to be seen in email than via Facebook, according to Radicati.
57% of email subscribers spend 10-60 minutes browsing marketing emails during the week, according to ChoozOn.

If you want to make money blogging, you need to build a list.

Your List Building Focus When Starting a Blog for Income

When you decide to start a blog to make money, you need to focus on building your list. Some of the skills to master include:

Creating lead magnets
Developing squeeze pages
Monetizing your list with an autoresponder
Driving traffic to your squeeze pages

These four skills will make you a ton of money if you take the time to master them.

Your lead magnets will be freebies you giveaway when someone joins your list. The squeeze page is the landing page you will use to get them to sign up.

There are several ways to monetize your list, but the best two include affiliate products and your own products. I like to start with affiliate products, and then replace those products with my own products later on.

The hardest part of this equation is driving traffic to your squeeze pages. Blogging consistently will help you to drive traffic to your squeeze pages and build your list. Just make sure to mention what you’re giving away regularly, or you may struggle to get anybody to sign up to your list.

For example, if you’re interested in starting a blog for income, you need to head over to my Start Here page. I will walk you through the steps you need for starting a blog to make money, and you’ll be able to get my FREE 10-Day How to Become a Blogger Course! Go to my Start Here page by clicking here now!

I just told you where to go and how to get on my list. I am giving you something of value, which is my lead magnet. In addition, I am promoting several affiliate products through my lead magnet (all of which I use for my blog or have used in the past).

My Final Thoughts on Starting a Blog for Profit

Making money through blogging isn’t difficult if you know what to focus on, the characteristics you need, and how to build your foundation. I have given you everything you need in this blog post when it comes to starting a blog for profit.

All you have to do is take this information about starting a blog for income and formulate a plan. Use my other blog posts and my FREE 10-Day How to Become a Blogger guide to help you create the right plan for starting a blog to make money today.

Having a plan will put you miles ahead of other beginning bloggers. Following through with your plan will put you in the circle of successful bloggers.

Now, it’s time to get started by clicking here immediately!