How to Create Blogspot Step by Step and Make Money

Did you know that you can create a Blogspot website and earn money online from it for free without spending a dime? In today’s article, I’ll show you how to create Blogspot step by step so that you can use it to turn your business idea into reality in a matter of months.

 

The best part of this guide is that you can start and grow your own money making blog while you work from home as a side hustler and still be fine. As it were, this is how to make money online without spending anything if you ask me.

 

Like I said before in my previous blog posts, I decided to create a Blogger blog as a case study to prove that anybody can make money on the internet with little or no investment if you can work hard and work smart. Hard work from starting a blog to promoting your website is what you need to be successful.

 

In case you don’t know, Google.com owns both Blogger.com and Blogspot.com and Blogger manage all the Blogspot blogs on the internet. Interestingly, I discovered that most of Google’s products and services like creating a Blogspot blog for personal or business use are free. This is definitely pocket friendly if you’re working on a budget.

 

So, I want you to know that Blogspot is a free blogging platform where you can start a blog and make money blogging online without paying for website hosting services.  But if you’re ambitious like me, you may want to register a domain name for less than $10 and use it as a custom domain to set up your blog. This will look more professional and business like when you start promoting your website.

 

This is exactly what I did with this side project. I bought a domain name and simply mapped it to the sub domain name I registered with Blogger. I’ll be spending about $10 per year to renew the domain and I only need to close 2 to 3 affiliate sales to cover that expenses and be in profits.

 

With a simple and quick Blogger sign up using your free Google email address, you’ve what it takes to start blogging for money on the World Wide Web. And if you want to build your influence and authority in your space, the world is your oyster as well!

 

So, what I want to teach you in this comprehensive blueprint is how to create Blogspot step by step and make money blogging online for free. Stay with me as I walk you through all the steps to sign up with Blogger up to the point of monetizing your blog and earning money online from your efforts.

 

Step #1: Create a Free Google Account

 

Obviously, this is the first step to get started. You’ve to create a free Gmail email address for this purpose. You’ve to separate your business email ID from your private email address. This will help you to manage your business correspondences seamlessly without skipping, mixing or messing things up in the long run.

 

If your goal is to start a business blog, you’ve to be professional in everything about creating a Blogspot from the get go. Create an email ID that is generic or contains the main keyword for your target niche market.

 

For example, if your blog is about side hustle ideas, you can include “side hustle” in your Gmail account creation. You may come up with something like sidehustlepro-at-gmail-dot-com if it is not taken yet. This is exactly what I did with one of my Blogger blogs which I created recently.

 

The email address is the same with the Blogspot sub domain I got. And as luck would have it, I also registered the domain name which I may flip or use for business. This will always help in your SEO (search engine optimization) and branding efforts when it comes to online marketing.

 

Step #2: Sign Up with Blogger

 

Now that you’ve a free Google email, use it to sign up with Blogger. Open up your favorite browser and type Blogger.com in the address bar. As soon as the website opens, sign in with your Gmail account. From Blogger’s dashboard, you can create a Blogspot in any niche market you’re targeting as long as you’re within the ambit of Google terms and conditions.

 

You can take a look at the screenshot below.

 

That is where you can start creating Blogspot blog for yourself.

 

Step #3: Choose a Niche Market to Focus on

 

At this step, you’ve to decide what you’ll be blogging about. Do you want to talk about sports, beauty and lifestyle, entrepreneurship, travel and tour or cyber security? It’s your call!

 

Personally, deciding on a niche market to focus on at any particular point in time should be a function of the following:

 

1. What you’re passionate about,
2. What you’re strongly interested in, and
3. What you know a lot of.

 

For instance, I’m putting plans in place to start a personal finance blog in the near future. This decision was informed as a result of my keen interest in the personal budgeting space.  And because of my interest in this niche, it will get keyed up when writing content topics until the blog becomes profitable.

 

But before you finally settle for a niche market, you’ll do yourself a world of good to make use of good keyword research tool to learn more about search queries, volume and CPC (cost per click). This will give you ideas on search terms to target.

 

Basically, keyword tool will always help you to learn about different types of search queries which web users are typing into search engines to find information about specific topics to learn about, products to buy or service to subscribe to.

 

A good and free keyword research tool to use is Google Keyword Planner tool.

 

Step #4:  Create Your Blogspot Blog

 

The following walk through will help you to create your Blogspot blog. From your Blogger dashboard after you’ve signed in, click on “New Blog” button on the left hand side of the page to create a blog within your account area as shown in the image above.

 

Firstly, you’ve to fill out your blog title which should include the main keyword phrase you’re targeting. The way to go about picking the title of your blog website is to make sure that the most popular search query is included in it.

 

For example, if you’re focusing on the “side hustle” market, you can pick a long tail keyword phrase that includes the main search term i.e. side hustle. Let me give you a typical instance which you can work with.

 

Side hustle: This is the main search query of the market or industry you want to focus on.

Side hustle business ideas: This is the blog title that includes your target long tail keyword phrase as well as the market’s primary search query above.

 

Here is a screenshot of the average monthly search volume and CPC (cost per click) of “side hustle,” “side hustle business” and “side hustle business ideas” with focus on the US market.

 

 

As you can see from above, by targeting “side hustle business ideas,” you’re automatically targeting “side hustle” and “side hustle business” keywords as well. You can always use variations of these keyword phrases to build authority back links to your blog when it comes to promotion.

 

Secondly, you’ve to choose your blog URL address to register. But it has to be a name or keyword that has not been taken. Obviously, you’ve to include the primary keyword of your target niche market if you’re actively in the side business space.

 

The sub domain you register matters a lot in your website promotion. For example I registered side hustle business ideas specifically to show you how to go about it targeting a keyword. In the above URL, I simply attached the word “vim” to my target search query.

 

Step #5: Optimize Your Blog

 

You can type and check your domain name blog on a browser to see if it is live after creating your blog. If it is live, it means you can go ahead to optimize your blog and start publishing blog posts on it.

 

At this level, you’ve already filled out your blog title. The next step will be to write a short blurb for your blog’s Meta description. This is a snippet of what your blog is all about. But you’ve to make sure that there is strong CTA (call to action) and also your target keyword is included.   

 

For example,

Click here to learn how to make money online with ease and without spending your fortune.

 

It should be short, concise and to the point.

 

Step #6: Custom Domain Set Up with Blogger Blog

 

If you don’t want to use Blogger sub domain for branding and promotion because it’s too long, you can register a domain name and set it up as a custom domain. The financial implication of this is that you’ll spend about $10 or less to buy a domain for a whole year and about the same amount to renew it in subsequent years.

 

For instance, I simply mapped my custom domain (EarnVim.com) for this blog to the sub domain I earlier registered with Blogger. So, I’ll be spending only $10 per year to renew the domain name to run my blog and make money since Blogger provides the free web hosting. For my blog website promotion and branding, this domain name is shorter and more brandable than the sub domain.

 

To set up your custom domain with Blogger, you can go about it like this. Register a domain name with your target keyword in it. You can get a domain from my recommended and good domain registrar like NameCheap.com. I use them often to buy domains for my online businesses and domain investing purposes.

 

As soon as you’ve registered the name, head over to your Blogger admin dashboard and click on the “Settings” link on the left hand panel. It’s time to do basic on-page SEO (search engine optimization) in order to make your blog search engine friendly.

 

Next, scroll down to the “Publishing” section of “Settings” and click on “Custom domain” as shown in the screenshot below.

 

The window that will pop up is where you can type your custom domain with www. You’ve to type www . customdomain . com for it to resolve properly. But remember to replace “custom domain” with the actual domain name you bought.

 

Blogger will return another pop-up window which will show you the CNAMEs records to configure your domain name with your registrar. This first CNAME is general while the second CNAME is specific to your Blogger blog.

 

Whichever domain registrar you make use of, you should be able to locate domain management section and edit the A-Records and CNAMEs to reflect the information Blogger gave to you. And if you’ve successfully done so and saved your changes, you’ve to wait for few hours for it to resolve to Google servers.

 

If you’ve done everything right, it will resolve; just wait. What this means is that your website visitors can go to your blog by typing your domain name on their browser or follow a link. But remember to click on the “Redirect domain” below “Custom domain” you just configured in order to make it active.

 

If you’ve left your Blogger sub domain URL address somewhere on the web before setting up the custom domain name, it will automatically resolve your custom domain name. This is a proof that business domain name is working properly.

 

You should also ensure that visits to http redirects to https is on as shown below.

 

 If you scroll down, you’ll be able to know other fields you should edit and configure to your personal requirements. For instance, at the Posts section, you can set the number of posts to display at your homepage. The default is 7 posts.

 

Step #7: Create Your First Blog Post

 

Now that you’re set to write first blog post, all you need to do is to click on the “New Post” link on the left hand pane of your dashboard.

 

Blog post template will open up where you can type your blog post title followed by the main content field. If you make use of any form of word processor, you can simply copy and paste your content in the box which is what I usually do. I hardly type directly into this field.

 

Across the main content box are blog post editing tools which you can use to highlight and hyperlink any text you want, upload images, set ordered and unordered list, bold text, etc.

 

 

Also, on the right hand side of the page are “Post settings” where you can schedule publishing date, assign related labels or keywords to post, set custom permalink to target your blog post keyword phrase and so on.

 

As soon as you’ve completed the house keeping details of the blog post with respect to SEO, you can “preview” your post to see if there is any further edit or correction to make. If everything is okay, you can click the publish button to make your blog post go live. It can never be easier!

 

I’m writing a comprehensive ebook on how to create Blogspot step by step and make money blogging which will include building backlinks to your blog, monetizing your blog in addition to Google Adsense, how to do internal linking structure in order to get most of all your blog posts indexed, how to transfer your Blogger blog to a paid website hosting like HostGator company when you’ve made enough money to purchase web hosting, etc.

 

If you’re interested in the ebook when it is ready, you can indicate your interest from the comments section and I’ll point you to where to download it.

How to Start Affiliate Marketing for Beginners Guide

 

If you’re searching for information on how to start affiliate marketing for beginners successfully, I can assure you that you’re in the right place. But before I go into the business of the day, let me tell you a secret. For you to become a successful affiliate marketer, you’ve to take consistent action to implement the tasks which I’ll discuss in this guide. Reading this text is not just enough to do the magic of making money on the internet. No, it will never happen that way!

 

Affiliate marketing business is one of my top 10 online side hustles to make money which I published sometime ago.

 

As a digital publisher, you’ve to understand that affiliate marketing business is simply driven by researching and finding the right solution with an affiliate program and recommending it to solve the problems and pain points which your target market is currently grappling with.

 

Beyond that, you should be able to show and demonstrate with proof to your target audience that the affiliate product or service you’re recommending will actually work for them.

 

This is why affiliate marketing success hinges more on “use, show and tell” promotional tactics. This is what I mean. If you buy and use a product and you’re satisfied with its efficiency or efficacy, you can promote that product if it has an affiliate program by signing up and relating your experience with the people will who need it also to solve similar problems they may be contending with as well.

 

It’s easier to close a sale of an affiliate product when you’ve first-hand experience than just philosophizing about a product’s features and benefits on an abstract level. More often than not, the discerning web users will know fake product reviews when they see it.

 

For example, I use HostGator for my web hosting services. My WordPress blogs and niche websites are hosted with HostGator Company.  And because I’m very satisfied with their services including their excellent customer service, I boldly recommend HostGator to my digital marketing training students and blog readers.

 

What I do is to simply describe the benefits of signing up with HostGator and show them screenshot of my HostGator billing dashboard as a proof that I’m actually using them for my website hosting services.

 

This serves as a social proof that I have personal experience with the website hosting company and anybody following me will reasonably believe what I’m saying regarding the pros and cons of using HostGator hosting.

 

So, in this affiliate marketing guide, I’ll walk you through all the steps on how to make money with affiliate marketing right from the very basics to the point of promoting your blog website.

 

With that said, let’s dive in.

 

What is Affiliate Marketing?

 

Simply put, affiliate marketing is a system whereby a virtual sales rep (otherwise known as affiliate, affiliate marketer or digital publisher) signs up with a merchant (also known as vendor, product creator, product owner or advertiser) who has an affiliate program in place in order to promote and sell his product or service and/or generate leads for a fixed or variable affiliate commission.

 

Majority of beginners, bloggers, internet marketers, webmasters, and so on are into affiliate marketing business because it has low barrier of entry and easy to start. As an affiliate marketer, you can quickly create a blog around a popular topic with affiliate products and services, promote these products and services so that you can close sales and earn affiliate commissions for yourself.

 

However, I noticed that a lot of people are not doing it right. If you want to become successful with affiliate marketing promotions, you’ve to build an email list of subscribers in your target niche market so that you can continually reach out to your potential buyers with high quality content and occasional promotional messages. It will help you to generate more clicks and sales.

 

In addition to that, you’ve to maintain a high quality content driven blog website where you can demonstrate your expertise with your target audience and continually build relationship with them on a longer term. As it were, online shoppers are mostly comfortable buying products and services from who they know, like and trust.

 

Also, they buy from e-commerce stores or websites they trust. This is why one can say that the likes of Amazon.com are so successful in the retail industry today. Your goal is to become a trusted expert in your field so that your followers, readers and subscribers will know, like and trust you for any product or service you recommend to them.

 

Let’s take a look at a typical PDF ebook for sale on a topic on domain flipping. let’s assume that the merchant sells the ebook for $47 and he has also integrated an affiliate program so that affiliate marketers can sign up and sell it on his behalf for 50 percent commission rate.

 

What this means is that for every affiliate who is able to close a sale for the vendor through his own online marketing efforts and promotional methods, he will earn affiliate commission of about $23.50. So, if you’re an affiliate to this vendor and you’re able to sell 10 copies of the affiliate product every month, you’ll earn an average of $235 commission per month.

 

That is, affiliate commission per sale is: $47 X 50% = $23.50

And $23.50 X 10 copies = $235 affiliate commission per month

 

But here is the caveat! If your digital marketing campaigns cost you $1,000 per month to generate $235 profits, that is a big loss already. And if it costs you only $35 in advertising to generate the same profit, you’ve earned $200 in net profits.

 

This is why a lot of affiliate marketing bloggers usually resort to SEO (search engine optimization) to generate free targeted traffic from search engines to their blogs and specific web pages. In the course of this side hustle blog, I’ll write a blog post on search engine optimization so that you can use it to prime your blog website for SERP (search engine results page) while targeting profitable long tail keyword phrases.

 

How Does Affiliate Marketing Work?

 

For you to understand how affiliate marketing works, first let me explain the 3 to 4 parties that are usually involved in the affiliate marketing business relationship.

 

Depending on the choice of the merchant, there are usually 3 or 4 parties involved in any affiliate program, namely: merchant, affiliate, consumer, and/or affiliate network.

 

The Merchant

 

A merchant may also be referred to as vendor, advertiser, product owner or product creator. It could be an individual, JV (joint venture) partners or a company. A merchant owns the affiliate product he wants digital publishers to sign up for, promote and sell for him.

 

A vendor do most of the heavy lifting of researching product ideas to create, creating the product, writing the sales copy to promote the product or hiring a copy writer to do it, setting up sales or landing page, creating help desk to attend to customers issues, and so on. He also sets up an affiliate program so that he can invite affiliates to sell for him.

 

The Affiliate Marketer

 

An affiliate marketer is usually a blogger, internet marketer, webmaster, digital publisher, etc, who decides to sign up for an affiliate program of any particular product or service, promotes it and makes money online if he successfully closes a sale.

 

An affiliate will create a blog, build an email list of subscribers and publish constant content on his website or third parties’ websites to drive targeted traffic to his lead magnet page or the landing page of the merchant. It’s mainly about using content marketing to curry the favor of potential buyers to get clicks to merchant’s website and converting them to sales.

 

For instance, I’ve spent quality time to write this blog article on how to start affiliate marketing for beginners. And by extension, I’ve also included links to affiliate products which I’ve personally used to create affiliate websites over the years.

 

If you find this blog post helpful, useful and relevant to your affiliate marketing journey, you may want to follow my links to make a purchase of the essential tools which I use to create affiliate websites. So, it becomes a win-win situation for everyone!

 

This is how affiliate marketers operate i.e. providing unique content related to specific topics and products and complementing it with partnership links to merchants’ products and services that could help the consumer to solve his problems or achieve specific goals.

 

Basically, affiliate marketing works by generating referral link or banner for an affiliate product and sharing it with your target audience on your own website or any third party web properties.

 

As an affiliate marketer, this is what I suggest you should always do.

 

1. Choose a niche market to focus on.
2. Research pain points that require urgent solution.
3. Find existing products with affiliate programs that could be the right solution to the problems which you discovered in (ii) above.
4. Sign up for the affiliate program and get approval so that you can generate affiliate link or banner to promote and sell the product.
5. Set up web property preferably WordPress blog where you can monetize your blog and promote the affiliate product by publishing high quality and unique content, building a list of subscribers you can continually reach out to with email messages and content marketing.
6. Make money online, rinse and repeat.  

 

The Consumer

 

A consumer is the buyer, customer or client who has paid for the affiliate product or service. He is the final decision maker in the affiliate marketing relationship. He can decide to open his wallet now and pay for the product immediately or defer it to a later date before buying it.

 

However, there are usually cookies set on the potential buyer’s browser on his laptop, PC or device to track the sale and credit it to him as the referral affiliate even if the consumer doesn’t buy immediately. The number of days for cookie tracking, of course, will depend on the affiliate program agreement in place. 

 

For you to generate more clicks and get sales of the products which you’re promoting, you must be ready to subscribe to reliable email marketing software. Autoresponder will help you to collect email addresses of potential buyers who you can market to later down the sales funnel.

 

As a matter of fact, you’ll sell more of an affiliate product if you’ve targeted list of subscribers who know, like and trust you.  If you ask me, list building is an integral part of affiliate marketing business success.

 

The Affiliate Network

 

This is the fourth and last party in the loop. Some vendors can decide to set up an in-house affiliate program and manage it themselves such as Amazon Associates program. This will limit the parties to just 3 i.e. merchant, affiliate and consumer.

 

But where affiliate network is involved in the relationship, they usually handle everything related to the affiliate program of every vendor who has signed up with them. Affiliate network acts as the middleman between the merchant and the publisher. This will extend the process to four parties i.e. merchant, affiliate marketer, affiliate network and consumer.

 

Affiliate network may host the affiliate product and landing page for the merchant and at the same time handle the product delivery to the buyer after payment has been processed. From there, merchant is paid his share of the sale, affiliate is paid his appropriate commission and the network takes their cut to cover their administrative expenses and then some.

 

For ease of management, making use of an affiliate network program is critical to your affiliate marketing success. For me, I only sign up with reputable affiliate network programs which will give me the confidence to focus on creating blogs, publishing content and doing content marketing to generate more  leads for the merchants who I’ve partnered with.

 

Some of these affiliate networks include:

 

• Impact.com
• CJ.com
• MarketHealth.com
• Clickbank.com
• JVZoo.com
• ShareASale.com
• Rakuten.com
• FlexOffers.com
• PepperJam.com
• Affiliate-program.amazon.com
  
• Etc

 

I get paid by these networks without working with individual merchants all the time.

 

Essential Tools to Start Affiliate Marketing Business

 

You’ve to invest in the following essential online business tools before you can run and grow an affiliate business profitably and successfully. In short, they are the bare minimum which you’ve to include in your digital marketing toolbox.

 

1. Domain name
2. Web hosting
3. WordPress blog
4. Email marketing software
5. Keyword research tool
6. Content (for your blog and promotion)

 

For domain name registration, I mainly use Namecheap to buy domain names because they are cheap, reliable and have excellent customer service. And as a digital marketer, I usually separate my web host from my domain registrar.

 

As for website hosting, I use HostGator. As pioneers in the web hosting industry, HostGator have the resources to manage your websites and blogs in terms of bandwidth, disk storage, security, customer service, free SSL certificate, etc. Click here to sign up with HostGator web hosting and reach out to me for my premium blogging ebook. I’ll send it to you gratis!

 

For self-hosted WordPress blog, it’s free to install and set up if you’ve signed up with a web host that supports WordPress hosting like HostGator. WordPress is an open source CMS (content management system) platform which makes it easy for non-techie blogger to install it on a domain name.

 

Email marketing software is the bread and butter of affiliate marketing business. Reputable and reliable ESP (email service provider) will have the capacity to manage and automate your list building campaigns. GetResponse email marketing software has a 30-day free trial which you can take advantage of if you’re on a budget to get started.

 

Keyword research tool is necessary to have in your marketing arsenal as an affiliate because you need to write blog posts targeting profitable long tail keyword phrases. And the only way to discover these search queries is to launch keyword research software like Google Keyword Planner tool which is totally free for advertisers if you sign up for Google Ads program.

 

As a digital publisher, creating content is free and should not be a problem at all. But if you hate writing, it means you’ve to outsource content writing to a freelance writer.

 

How to Create Affiliate Marketing Website

 

The affiliate marketing steps below are what I usually follow to create affiliate website and you can follow suit.

 

1. Choose a niche market to focus on
2. Identify pain points and problems to solve in the niche market
3. Find existing affiliate product or service to solve the problems identified in (ii) above
4. Conduct keyword research to identify profitable search terms to target
5. Register a domain name with your target main keyword in it
6. Get web hosting
7. Create affiliate marketing website using WordPress
8. Configure, customize and optimize your blog website
9. Regularly write and publish content on your blog
10. Monetize your blog website and content therein
11. Promote your blog and build backlinks to gain authority
12. Track, measure and review your website metrics
13. Make money online and grow your affiliate business

 

This is my step by step affiliate marketing for beginners’ outline which I always follow to a Tee.

 

As you can see, this is how to make money with affiliate marketing and it’s not rocket science. And I’ll be publishing a detailed blog post on how to start a blog and make money blogging online to complement this article so that you can hit the ground running in a matter of weeks.

 

How to Start a Side Hustle Business and Thrive Online

 

In this blog post on how to start a side hustle business and thrive online, you’ll discover a lot of ideas and steps to achieving your financial goals this year. You can work from home or anywhere in the world as you successfully take your business ideas to the marketplace without spending a fortune.

 

In this guide, however, I’ll be focusing on online side hustles and not offline. There are offline side hustle business ideas that will require you to get out of the home to perform the jobs or tasks before you get paid. But I love and prefer online side business which I can come home at any time of the day to do without getting too exhausted.

 

Even if you don’t have any online business idea to work with right away, don’t worry yourself yet! I decided to write and publish this complete side business blog post to help beginners or newbies like you to get started and hit the ground running. I want to assure you that there is nothing complicated about starting an online business. All you need is business common sense of becoming a solution provider in the marketplace.

 

A lot of aspiring entrepreneurs over complicate business systems to a fault. What you need to succeed as a side hustler is focus, commitment, consistency, patience, time, energy and little money to invest in essential online tools and resources to get things off the ground.

 

If you follow the steps outlined and discussed shortly to a Tee at the section of starting a side hustle business, you should be able to get your blog website visible on the World Wide Web in a matter of months. As you already know, regular wages or salary is no longer enough to take any worker home and make a living. So, it’s essential you’ve to supplement your income with side business if you want to pay the bills, live your lifestyle, save for the rainy day and build wealth from the ground up without stress.

 

Some years back, I was holding down a hectic 9-5 day job and I asked myself, “How long will I continue to grind at this job?” With this in mind, I went out of my way to research online business ideas which I can start while working at home at nights and without interfering with my day job.

 

Surprisingly, I discovered that there are 101 side hustle ideas which any aspiring online entrepreneur can start without breaking the bank. These include affiliate marketing business, ebook writing, domain flipping, website flipping, blogging for money, freelance writing, virtual assistance, brokerage services, just to mention a few.

 

And let me shock you with this secret information! You can start 2 or more of the above side hustles from one place i.e. by creating a blog of your own. Yes, all you need to get started is to create a blog on a self-hosted WordPress blog and begin to publish high-quality content that your target audience or readers will find relevant and helpful to their needs.

 

For a whole year with less than $100 business startup costs, you can start a blog and make money from home. Yes, from a single blog, I’ve been able to provide freelance content writing services, promote affiliate products, buy and sell domain names, write and sell ebooks online, and so on.

 

The good news is that owning and managing a side hustle blog earns you trust and credibility in the marketplace. I’ve entered into several joint ventures (JVs) simply because I maintain a business blog regularly updated with unique content.

 

The best part is that I get highly targeted inbound marketing leads and prospects that I never sourced for simply because I’ve strong online presence in my target market and I’ve demonstrated above average expertise and authority in the minds of my target audience.

 

What I am saying is this. If you want to know how to start a side hustle business and thrive on the internet, simply go ahead and create a blog website which you can continue to manage as your business.

 

Thereafter, develop a regular habit of publishing high impact content on it while targeting profitable long tail keyword phrases. Continue to use your blog as a platform to interact with your focus audience, gain traction, connect with other bloggers and gain insights into the needs and wants of your potential customers.

 

Starting a blog is quite straight forward if you sign up with a reliable web host that supports WordPress hosting. You don’t need to learn how to code, build website or anything that is techie in nature. Installing WordPress blog on your domain name is a breeze if you follow the on-screen prompts and instructions on how to install WordPress blog on your domain from your web hosting account dashboard.

 

I use HostGator website hosting services and you can click here to sign up with HostGator and also register a free domain name for the first year. Blogging is my number one side hustle business idea and for good reasons.  Creating a blog for your online business serves different purposes. It can double or triple as your ecommerce store, digital office and consulting outfit if you’re an expert in your field.

 

With that said, let’s go through everything you need to know on how to start a side hustle business and thrive online.

 

What is a Side Hustle Business?

 

A side hustle is a business you do on the side outside your regular day job. The basic idea and motivation is to use the profits accruing from your side business to supplement your salary or wages from your 9 to 5 day job. With inflation constantly rising globally, bills are piling up and increasing for homes and families. And to meet up with spending demands of individuals and maintain their lifestyles, you’ve to find ways to augment your weekly or monthly income. It’s become a case of survival of the fittest!

 

This is why side hustling has become the buzz word on the internet today. Personally, I was able to quit my day job when I discovered that I was making money online more than my regular salary while spending even less time to run and grow my online business.

 

However, the type of side project you start should depend on a number of factors such as what you enjoy doing, your passion, interest, experience, education, training, and the like. Even if you cannot think of any side hustle idea at the moment, you can learn digital marketing skills in a matter of weeks or months and use it to start an online business successfully.

 

I’ve discussed with a lot of successful bloggers who started off with nothing fantastic or spectacular but having the end in mind i.e. to add value to the marketplace and get rewarded in return at the end. You don’t have to be an expert at the beginning but you must strive to stand out ultimately with an USP (unique selling proposition). This will be part of your branding strategies.

 

Tools and Resources You Need to Get Started

 

Although you can learn how to make money online without spending anything, this will be a long route to ply for you not to get worn out any time soon. You’ve to invest money, time and energy in order to translate your side hustle ideas into minimum valuable product, service or information that people will be willing to pay for.

 

For instance, when I signed up with HostGator web hosting to create a blog website, I paid about $86.04 for one year for my website hosting fees. And because I was willing and able to perform requisite daily tasks to succeed with my side hustles, I made that money back in less than 90 days of blogging. It's even cheaper now to sign up with HostGator as of writing.

 

I’ll be releasing my side hustle business playbook soon where I chronicled my entrepreneur journey. You can reach out to me for a complimentary copy of this complete digital marketing guide when it’s ready if you make use of my partnership link above to sign up with HostGator hosting. 

 

Please be aware that you’re not paying extra money for using my link. You’re only supporting me to maintain this content driven blog website to remain free to my readers, subscribers, fans, followers and others who find it helpful.. 

 

In the online marketing guide, I outlined and explained how to make $1,000 per month online and above as a side hustler. You’ll love the power of sacrifice, generosity and tenacity in making money on the internet.

 

With that said, here is the list of online business tools and resources which you’ve to invest in to become successful.

 

1. Domain name registration. I register most of my domain names with NameCheap.com.
2. Web hosting services. I subscribed to HostGator website hosting and you can sign up from this link.
3. Free WordPress blog website. It’s free to install and set up if you make use of reliable web hosting company that supports WordPress hosting.
4. ESP (email service provider). ESP will provide you with email marketing software, autoresponder and marketing automation to build an email list of subscribers from scratch. GetResponse email marketing software is a good place to start from because they offer 30-day free trial for you to test the waters.
5. Constant content to feed your blog for stickiness. If you want to attract, nurture and retain your target audience, you need to write blog posts and regularly publish them while targeting profitable long tail keyword phrases. You can write SEO articles and blog posts yourself if you don’t want to hire freelance writer.
6. Analytics to measure data such as knowing the sources of your website visitors. The free Google Analytics and Google Search Console will suffice for a start.

 Steps to Start a Side Hustle Business and Make Money

 

The steps below are what I always follow as a ritual to build any side gig which I’ve researched and I’m convinced that it will earn money online for me as quickly as possible.

 

1. Choose a side business idea
2. Research market viability for (i) above
3. Get a domain name and web hosting
4. Create a WordPress blog on your domain
5. Create content and publish
6. Monetize your blog
7. Promote your blog
8. Measure, review and analyze
9. Make money online

 

I’ll discuss the above 9 steps on how to start a side hustle business successfully and you can start implementing the tasks involved almost immediately. As for me, I see the side hustle business beyond making money to pay the bills or live the life of my dreams. I take it as a religion. It takes faith and sacrifice to get the expected results.

 

Step #1: Choose a Side Business Idea

 

If you ask me, there are so many side hustles you can do to make money from home. But you’ve to settle for a profitable idea to start with. Broadly, you can create your own digital product and sell it online, provide freelance digital services and get paid or simply start a blog and make money blogging by recommending affiliate products to your website visitors and earning affiliate commissions in the process.

 

There are no hard and fast rules for you to choose a particular side hustle idea to start with. What is important is to align your choice with your passion, hobby, interest, knowledge, experience, education, training, etc. This will help you to get keyed up and flow for the long haul when creating content to publish on your blog and/or doing guest posting or content marketing.

 

For instance, I’m thinking of starting a personal finance blog in no distant future because I’ve a strong interest in this niche market. Besides, I’m an accountant by education, profession and training. So, I should be able to easily read up on this topic so that I can meet up with my goal of becoming a successful personal finance expert.

 

I’m brooding over this niche because I’ve worked as a financial advisor and business consultant at some point in time in my working career. This is how to start a side hustle business idea which you can relate with at a personal level. The best thing you can do now is to take a pen and paper and take inventory of the side hustles that appeal to you.

 

Obviously, you’ll prune this list down to a sizeable number when you conduct market viability test on each of them. If it’s not going to be profitable in your wildest imagination, there is to point dissipating your time, energy and money to get started in the first place.  

 

After going through step 2 of this side hustle business guide which I’ll explain shortly, you should be able to decide for yourself the type of side business idea that will be good and profitable for you in the long run. But I strongly recommend that you create a blog to get started and learn the ropes.

 

It will give you a sense of direction and an edge as you learn, grow and progress in your target niche market. The worst case scenario that could happen is to end up monetizing your blog with Google Adsense which will still be able to pay the bills and then some.

 

To sum up this section on how to start a side hustle business and thrive online, you can:

 

1. Create digital product or service and sell it for profit if you’re an expert on something.
2. Provide freelance business services and get paid e.g. website design, graphic design, content writing, etc.
3. Write product reviews as a digital publisher and include affiliate links in your content to useful products, services, apps and software which you are affiliated to.
4. Provide other essential web services based on your creativity or digital skills such as domain flipping, brokerage services, website flipping, and so on.

 

Step #2: Research Market Viability for Your Side Hustle Idea

 

Although your primary goal of starting an online business is to make money and get comfortable, it certainly goes far beyond that. Even if you’re doing this for the money, you should always find ways to add value to people’s lives by solving their pain points with the right solutions.

 

The first point of call is to go to where your target market congregate and take the market pulse. What are their challenges, pain points, problems, etc? Will they be “willing and able” to pay for the solution if provided? Are there desperate buyers in this market? How is the demography like? Is it an evergreen market or a passing fad?

 

What about the market size? Can you spot market gaps you can easily fill up which existing products did not address? Is there sufficient information you can research and glean to create high quality and unique content? What types of search queries are available to work with?

 

You should be able to distinguish between informational and transactional search terms in this regard. Is there list building opportunity so that you can make passive income online sooner or later while growing your side hustle? There is whole gamut of market viability and profitability tests you’ve to conduct in order to be sure whether to step your feet at the door.

 

Finally, for you to achieve this goal, you’ve to juxtapose the total costs of providing solutions to solve problems for your target audience with the income accruable to you. This will help you to evaluate the profitability or otherwise of your side gig efforts. So, if a market is not viable, it doesn’t make sense to dissipate your time, energy and money to remain in that business.

 

This is why researching market viability or profitability is critical to your success.  And you can use a number of tools and apps to do this exercise including Google Keyword Planner, questions and answers sites like Quora.com, AnswerThePublic.com, BuzzSumo.com, Semrush.com, Ahrefs.com, etc.

 

Step #3: Get a Domain Name and Web Hosting

 

This is the section where you’ve to invest little money to start your own business online. You must register a domain name and buy web hosting for you to be able to build a website or create a blog. A domain name is your internet business address. It’s the URL that will take your target audience to your website, landing page, lead magnet page, and so forth.

 

It costs about $10 per year to register and/or renew a domain name and you don’t have exclusive right to a domain if you fail to renew it. In other words, you can lose a valuable domain name to cyber squatters or domain flippers if you negligently forget to renew your domain name.

 

For example, as the owner of this side hustle blog, I can lose it outright if I omit to renew it after the grace period expires and it is finally deleted from the registry. My advice for aspiring online entrepreneurs who perceive that their domain names are valuable should keep on renewing it even if they cannot continue to maintain the website or blog associated with it.

 

If you’re heavily involved in domain flipping business like me, you’ll understand why holding on to a domain name without allowing it to drop is important and profitable.

 

You can buy domain name from Namecheap from this link. They are cheap and reliable domain registrar to sign up with. Depending on the type of side business you hope to start, you can register brandable domain, keyword domain, exact match domain (EMD), product domain, services domain, to name a few.

 

On a personal level, I like to separate my domain name registrar from my web host in order to allow me manage my portfolio of domain names as a domainer.

 

As for your website hosting, you can sign up with HostGator.com from this link. HostGator web hosting is reliable, cheap and they have excellent customer support services to wit. If you’ve successfully used the link above to sign up, you can reach out to me from here and request for my premium blogging guide gratis.

 

A domain name and web hosting services are what you need to build your website for free. Self-hosted WordPress blog can be customized to build a website or create a blog.

 

Step #4: Create a WordPress Blog on Your Domain

 

With content management system (CMS) platform like WordPress.org, you don’t need to be tech savvy to build a simple website or build a blog to start a side hustle business anymore. I’ve built pockets of niche websites and blogs over time without knowing how to code, HTML and CSS.

 

If you download my blogging for money ebook, you’ll discover the secrets of how to make money blogging online. From your hosting account dashboard, you can locate Softaculous app which makes it easy to install WordPress blog on your domain.

 

But you’ve to customize and optimize your blog for on-page SEO (search engine optimization) in order to prime it and make it search engine friendly. If you want a unique look and feel of your blog, you can browse ThemeForest marketplace to download and install premium WordPress theme that will complement your side business goals.

 

For added website functionalities, you can install and activate specific plugins related to website load speed, security, optimization, backup, content gating, etc.

 

Beyond this, you can install Google Analytics and integrate Google Search Console so that you can have data and metrics to review and improve upon as your side hustle business starts growing by leaps and bounds.

 

In addition, you should not forget to create pages that are essential to your website such as about me, contact me, resources, sitemap, and the like. You can configure some of these pages to show up at the navigation menu at the top right corner of your blog.

 

Step #5: Create Content and Publish

 

The currency of the web is content. Believe it or not, the World Wide Web is driven by content. It is only natural that you should be prepared to write your first blog post and publish as soon as you’ve finished with on-page SEO of your blog website.

 

Content can be in the form of blog posts, SEO articles, videos, infographics, audio, podcast, webinar, PDF ebook, email marketing messages, just name it. And as a digital marketing expert, you should see content marketing as the major channel of driving free targeted traffic to your website.

 

In one of my subsequent blog articles, I’ll discuss in detail how to create high quality content like this text post on how to start a side hustle business and thrive online. I’ll encourage you to bookmark this side business blog for easy access in the future.

 

Step #6: Monetize Your Blog

 

It’s important to remember the common phrase that says “first things first”. For you to be able to monetize your blog, you’ve to publish enough content that will not put off your readers. I know the motivation behind starting a side hustle is to make money in the first place.

 

There are many ways to monetize your website including but not limited to affiliate product links, selling your own digital products, providing freelance services, accepting sponsored posts, selling advert spaces, integrating Google Adsense codes, and a host of other blog monetization methods.

 

You’ve to select a method that works well with your blog content.

 

Step #7:  Promote Your Blog

 

Yes, this is the section that will make or mar your side hustle business. It is wishful thinking to have the notion that the world will beat a path to your doorstep (or blog website) if you create a blog without promoting it.

 

There are broadly two (2) ways to promote your website i.e. free methods and paid methods. The best free ways of generating targeted traffic include search engine optimization, content marketing, list building, guest posting, free ebook distribution, and so on.

 

Step #8: Measure, Review and Analyze

 

At this stage, you’ve come a long way. Kudos! But as it were, not everything you’ve been doing will be spot on. You’ve to analyze variances between your expected results and actual results from your analytics and adjust where necessary for improvements.

 

For example, if you discover that how-to blog posts bring in more website traffic than listicles, you may want to focus more on writing content about how to do things.

 

The paid advertising methods you should consider will include PPC (pay per click) and banner adverts.

 

Step #9: Make Money Online

 

This is the final step as a side hustler. It’s now time for you to start smiling to the bank after all the time, efforts and money invested to make your side business stand out from the crowd. If you’ve followed and implemented everything I’ve discussed in this blog article on how to start a side hustle and thrive online, you should not find a hard time making money. 

All you’ve to do is to sit back, relax and enjoy your money or take a vacation. And if you’re a digital nomad like me you’ll be traveling the world over as a location independent entrepreneur.