The Ultimate Guide to Starting and Monetizing Your Blog

Are you thinking about starting a blog? You see so many people issuing income reports and hear stories about bloggers making 5 figures every month and you wonder if this is also something you can do.

But you wonder how long it will actually take to start making money.

You feel like you need to build a following.

And feel like you need lots of content and don’t have enough time…

Well, the truth is, it is totally possible to start generating income relatively quickly!

When I started my blogging journey, I just started. 

WITHOUT knowing anything about what I’m doing!

I soon realized ways to start making money right away with blogging.

It all depends on the strategy.

Yes, it won’t happen overnight. But once you have a strategy in mind and start executing a little bit at a time, it’s completely possible to start generating income in month 2-3 of your blogging journey.

In order to start making money with your blog, I highly encourage you to review my guide below and sign up to my 3 day FREE email course that teaches you ABCs on setting up your blog the right way to get started!

How To Set Up Your Blog In Quick And Easy Way

1. Choose The Right Platform To Blog

While there are a lot of platforms out there, by far WordPress is the king of blogging platform where more than 50% of all blogs use.

It is SEO friendly, and also easy to customize with various plug-ins. I sue WordPress.com and I would recommend using this platform if you are thinking of starting out.

WordPress has two different platforms – wordpress.org and wordpress.com.

Using wordpress.org would let you have your blog up for free but it has downsides.

Your domain would look something like xxx.wordpress.org. If you don’t mind your website looking like that then it may not be an issue.

But if you want to grow your blog professionally, it might be a good idea to have domain names ending xxx.com or xxx.blog etc. And when you use wordpress.org, you are limited to using the free themes that they have using wordpress.org.

If you want to make your blog look and feel in certain ways, you may have to upgrade to wordpress.com anyways in the future.

So if you intend to grow your blog and start generating income, I suggest you start with wordpress.com.

2. Buy A Domain

So now that you’ve decided on the platform, what to do now?

Decide on the domain that you want to use for your blog. You can purchase a domain anywhere like godaddy.com,  domain.com, or Bluehost.com, for as little as $0.99.

I share few tips on getting great ideas on your domain name if you are running out of ideas in my Day 1 of my Free email course so sign up if you are interested in learning about the trick I use. 

3. Find A Hosting Service

If you decided on using wordpress.com as your blogging platform, from my experience, using Bluehost as your hosting service has few great benefits as a beginner. Bluehost is great when you are starting out as it’s fairly cost effective, customer service is great, and it’s easy to use. Once you reach about 50K sessions, I suggest switching to a another hosting service, such as Bigscoots, to help your website become faster and handle larger volume of visits.

For wordpress.com users, it is really easy to get your theme set up and ready to go using Bluehost.com.  And when you use Bluehost as your hosting service, you can get a free domain with your hosting service!  Bluehost lets you host multiple domains and websites on your account with their premium plan which only costs $5.45 per month.

As an example, I typed in www.monkeylife.com.

The results show that the domain I entered is taken but there are other ones available. Once you select the shopping cart button, you are directed to purchasing that domain.

4. Install WordPress

When you are using Bluehost as the hosting service and get the domain through there, you can manage all the domains and hosting on Bluehost’s website. Installation of WordPress is pretty simple and easy.

Once you purchase the domain name, you can go to their ‘WordPress Tools’ section. And when you click on ‘New Install’ you can select the domain you want to install.

It’s simple as that! Now that you’ve installed wordpress on your domain, you can now log into your wordpress admin dashboard.

The login page of the wordpress admin dashboard is always yourdomainname.com/wp-admin. You just need to add ‘/wp-admin’ at the end of your domain name and you will be directed to the login page.

5. Purchase a WordPress Theme

You can either use a free theme, purchase a premium theme in WordPress, or purchase it somewhere else and upload the theme.

The theme I am currently using is a free theme called ‘Twenty Twenty-four’. I love this free theme since it’s ‘FREE’ (duh!) and it’s easy for a beginner to customize and make it beautiful.

Other great theme options that you can purchase that’s optimized for speed is Feast Plugin, Kadence or Generate Press which are also optimized for speed.

If you get stuck, you can always call Bluehost which has 24/7 customer support. My experience with them has been great – always responsive and got my issues resolved immediately.

6. Choose The Blog Topic – Find Content People Are Searching For

Now that you have the WordPress website set up, you can now start creating content!

In order to monetize on your content, you would want to first do some research on what topics people are searching for. There is really no point in creating a content that only interests you and not other people, if you want readers to come to your website and start reading!

There are few ways to do this:

  • See what topics are popular on websites that you follow – I normally go to Buzzsumo.com and type in a website that I follow to see what topics are trending or popular on their website. It gives me a great insight into how they are writing the content and how much traction it is getting from social media. Buzzsumo is free to use with their 7 day trial. Get as much information as you can within their free trial period get ideas!.
  • See what pins are performing well on Pinterest – I share all my secrets in my Pin and Profit: Boost Blog Traffic course. But I also share secrets in my free email course. If you haven’t already, I highly suggest you get the details by signing up here.

7. Have Monetization Methods In Place

There are so many ways to make money from your blog. Many start with putting ads on the blog and having affiliate links. Once you have good enough traffic and following, you can also sell digital products or writing sponsored posts.

1. Sign Up To Affiliates

In order to make money right away, the best way is to start having affiliate links in the post. Without much traffic, as long as you can write great content and can drive traffic to the post, people can click on the affiliate links which in turn will make you money. (Just so you know, driving traffic is pretty easy with Pinterest and I share all my secrets here)

Also, I find that for beginners, Amazon Associates is the best way to make money on your blog. I made $500 just from Amazon Associates the second month I started to seriously blog. This is because even if the reader doesn’t buy the product that you recommended on your blog post, Amazon gives you commission on any other product the reader ended up buying on Amazon.

Amazon simply gives you commission on anything the reader purchased within 24 hours of clicking the link. Now with so many people purchasing on things on Amazon, getting commission from Amazon is relatively easy.

You can also join affiliate networks which will be your gateway to becoming an affiliate with various companies and brands. The following are few you can consider:

 2. Put Ads on your blog

When you are just starting out, the option you can start with is Google ads. And then once your blog traffic hits 50K page views a month, you can apply to other ad networks such as Mediavine. The next tier would be Ad Thrive (Now Raptive) which requires minimum 100K page views a month for you to apply.

Just ads alone, I do make over $5K every single month from my blog. I get over 100K page views per month, just from Pinterest, which I teach in Pin and Profit course.

I really like this blog monetization method since it is truly passive. Once you have an established traffic from sources like google and Pinterest, you will notice you start to just earn money by having a blog.

It’s absolutely my favorite!

3. Sell Digital Products

While you are waiting for your traffic to kick in and you want to immediately monetize your blog, selling digital products is the best way to make money with small traffic.

Yes, you do need to get customers to see your products, and that’s where Pinterest or other social media like Instagram/Tiktok come in.

From my experience, I do find that Pinterest is the easiest to get eyes on your products for a long time, since Pinterest doesn’t penalize you for being new on the platform. It actually wants to see fresh new content from creators and distributes it to people that may be interested with keywords, vs. Instagram your content gets lost in the scroll pretty quickly and you end up being in a content creation hamster wheel.

You might think that you have zero skills to create digital product.

For those that have zero idea on how to create digital products, or how to really market online, I suggest you check this Done For You Digital Marketing Course. You can invest your time learning all about how to set up your business and monetize immediately by reselling the same course to others.

There you have it!

For those of you who are brand new to blogging, my 3 day email course walks you through the steps of setting up the blog the right way and also how to use Pinterest to drive traffic. So make sure you sign up to receive my tips delivered right to your inbox!