How to start a blog, what niche I should be blogging about. Will blog make me money… and many such questions. I loved creating this blogging FAQ after I received several questions everyday.
Hope this FAQ is helpful for you. If still missing any question, just ask filling up the question form at the end of the page.
Cheers!
1. How do I start a blog?
This question has a long answer and a fairly long process. A summary of the process is
- Decide your blogging niche.
- Choose the blogging platform
- Get your domain and hosting
- Design your blog
- Plan the content strategy
- Be consistent with blogging and make money.
2. Why should I blog?
This is the question you should ask yourself. You can start and run a blog only when you TRULY WANT to blog. You need to be driven by either or all of these:
- Money
- Fame and popularity
- Giving back to the world
- Brand/business visibility
3. How to write a blog?
You can learn and practice to write a blog by following a simple 9 steps process.
- Choose an engaging topic
- Conduct keyword research [You can flip 1st and 2nd step]
- Plan the outline and structure of the post
- Conduct the research to collect supporting data and information
- Write a clear and concise post
- Format to break it down into easy to scan sections
- Include visuals like images or videos
- Optimize your post for search engines with relevant keywords
- Edit and proofread
And your blog is ready.
https://www.sunitabiddu.com/how-to-write-a-blog/
4. What should I blog about?
Your purpose of blogging decides what you should blog about. If you’re blogging for money, write around the profitable and targeted keywords and subjects in your niche. These have to be research based topics.
If you’re blogging for hobby and passion, write about what excites you. You love cooking, gardening, gadgets, travelling; Identify knowledge gaps in your chosen niche and fill them with useful content.
5. How often should I blog?
You can decide your frequency of your blogging based upon the time and resource available with you. It is okay to blog every day and it is equally okay to blog once a week as long as you are promoting each post on your blog well.
The purpose is to get more and more readers and repeat visitors and well ranked posts even if you have fewer blogposts on your blog.
6. What type of content is good for a blog post?
Questions top the list of best performing content type. People seek blogs and google to find answers. Make your blog a great FAQ that has answer to every question about the niche you have chosen.
The next best working type of content is How-to guides and numbered lists posts.
7. How can blogging help me to express myself?
Blogging about your favorite subject lets you open up and share everything you know about that subject. When you get response [applause or criticism] in any form, it helps you explore more and express better. Your expressions get finer and more polished over time. The more you empty your head and heart, the more sorted and lighter you feel.
8. Can I blog anonymously?
Of course, you can. You can blog with an imaginary pet name. It has drawbacks though. Building trust can be an issue. Transparency is the strength when building your blog as a brand.
9. What are the basics of blogging?
The basics of blogging involve learning about blog writing formats, the right blog design practices, all the mods of blog monetization, the correct blog formatting, publishing and optimization practices, and promotion techniques.
All the well written blogging guides around – How to start a blog and make money – cover these blogging basics.
10. What is the main purpose of a blog?
The purpose can vary from person to person. It can be to share your knowledge, build an audience, establish yourself as an expert, sell products or services, or simply connect with others who share your interests.
11. What Makes a Blog Successful?
What is a successful blog? What you want to hear is – A successful blog makes money. That’s true. And a successful blog engages readers, publishes useful and valuable content regularly, and achieves the targeted goals it’s expected to meet. A successful blog has a large database of readers and subscribers, receives significant daily traffic and is popular in the niche.
12. Why is blogging better?
Blog is a channel of expression. You can express your personal life and experience or monetize your blog by expressing your expertise, skillsets and knowledge. Blogging allows you to create a community, connect with your audience, share your passions, and potentially turn your expertise into money. For shy and introvert people and professionals, blogging is one of the most efficient tools.
https://www.sunitabiddu.com/why-you-should-start-a-blog/
13. What is the best blogging platform?
WordPress is the best blogging platform among nearly 10 popular blogging platforms because of its rich and vast features and free range of plugins. It is suggested to have a private hosted blog using wordpress CMS to get the most from blogging compared to free blogs.
Read more about choosing the best blogging platform
14. How do I promote my blog?
The basic promotion begins with sharing your latest and old blogpost on your active social media networks on a regular basis. Keep growing your audience on social media and with email lists. However, my favorite method is optimizing my blog for SEO. It gives me lasting organic traffic with high intent and conversion rate with minimal efforts. Guest blogging on other niche blogs can also reach new audiences.
https://www.sunitabiddu.com/blogpost-promotion-checklist/
15. What is the difference between a blog and website?
Website is focused upon once’s offerings and services and the brand awareness. A blog aims at sharing the information first and then converting the readers into prospects and buyers.
16. What is a niche blog and how do I make one?
Every blog that focuses on one specific subject and target audience is a niche blog. Most of niche blogs are started with a money goal.
17. How do I choose a niche?
If it is you who will prepare content for the blog, consider your interests and expertise first as the deciding factor. Research popular and profitable niches that you can write about. Choose a topic specific enough to attract a dedicated audience, but broad enough to offer content variety.
https://www.sunitabiddu.com/how-to-find-the-most-profitable-blogging-niche/
18. Is business blogging different from niche blogging?
No, they are not different. You can have a business blog around a specific niche. For example, pregnancy is a niche and a doctor can run a business and consulting blog around this niche blog.
19. How can I build backlinks to my blog?
You can build backlinks by contributing to related blogs as a guest contributor. A one off backlink building can be done with some high quality directory submissions. However, the best way is to earn backlinks. When you write great content, people link back to you. That’s what makes your blog gets backlinks effortlessly.
20. How do I improve my blog writing abilities?
Practice. Practice writing as much as you can. Writing can only be improved by writing more and regularly. Your 1st post and your 10th post will have a significant difference if you’re promoting your posts, sharing them across and getting people’s feedback. It helps you improve everytime.
21. How do I improve the quality of my blog?
Readers come to your blog for reading and receiving the answers to their questions and needs. As long as your blog is serving this purpose, your blog is of a good quality already. Ask yourself these questions and take actions based upon the answers you receive.
- Is my blog sharing useful, latest and practical information?
- Is my blog easy to navigate?
- Is my blog presentable at the first sight?
- Is my blog smart device friendly?
- Does my blog load fast on all devices?
22. Should I hire a blogging coach?
When you want to save time, effort and energy and want faster returns on your efforts, hiring a blog coach can make the whole blogging journey easy and fun. If you have given yourself good time in years to learn blogging, following advise of top bloggers and their free guides can work well.
23. What does it take for a blog to be successful?
Consistency, patience for 1 year, focused and high quality useful content and aggressive daily promotions.
24. Just want to blog about my passionate topic. Would it work out?
Following your passion subject can indeed work if the niche is profitable and in demand. Research about the niche and see the scope. If you do not find it profitable, avoid starting a passion blog unless the only purpose to express yourself and expect no money.
25. How can I bring traffic to my website?
First best method to bring traffic is to optimize every post on your blog for targeted keywords. The next best method is to keep social network active and use it to promote your blog. You can use pinterest marketing and bloggers’ tribes and communities for promotion.
Read this post on how to promote your blog
26. What important SEO aspects should I learn for blogging?
Learning basic SEO that covers keyword research, on page optimization, image optimization is enough. As a blogger, your main job is to write and promote your blog. Over time, you can delegate the SEO task to those who do it best.
27. What are some free tools that a blogger can use?
The mst have tools every blogger should use are Grammarly, hemingwayapp, Evernote, Buffer, Hubspot, smallseotools kit and keywordtool.io.
You can find more blogging tools in this post
28. How long does it take to make income from blogging?
The income and how soon it happens depends upon the niche of your blog and how much traffic your blog receives. Your blog needs to be receiving minimum 2500 Unique Visitors every month to start making money. It can take 3 to 12 months.
29. How much money can I make from my blog?
Unlimited. There is no limit to what you can make from blogging once your blog starts working for you. You can create a network of multiple blogs that ake money. That’s how you amplify blogging.
30. Is blogging a serious business?
Very serious, when you take it seriously.
31. How do you decide which niche is good and relevant for you?
The niche you can write about for at least 2 years without feeling monotonous and the niche that’s profitable is good and relevant for you.
Read this post to know more about choosing a profitable niche
32. How quickly can you make money using Adsense?
Money from adsense is not dependent upon time but traffic. It can take longer than it is hyped. You need to massive traffic to your blog to make decent amount of money from adsense. It can be 10k per month of traffic to make adsense work. When you reach this traffic, you start getting money from adsense.
33. Is selling ads on my blog the best way to earn money?
It is one of the best and easiest ways to make money, especially when you a monthly traffic range of 500-1500
34. What are the best ways to make money from blogs?
How to make money blogging? How bloggers get paid? These are the most common blogging questions. There are many ways to monetize your blog. Selling your services and products, Display ads such as adsense and infolinks, Affiliate marketing, sponsored content are to start with.
35. How can YouTube be used to attract traffic to my blog?
Youtube works like any other social network to send traffic. Create videos on popular and in-demand topics and people come to your blog. It’s a demanding and not very popular ways of getting traffic to the blog. Alternatively, YouTube itself can make good money when you’re creating consistent content.
36. How can I increase my blog subscribers?
People subscribe to the blog in exchange to useful information and giveaways.
Read this post to find ways to increase your blog subscribers
37. How do I network with other bloggers?
Identify top 15-20 blogs in your industry and start engaging on their blogposts and social media posts with comments and interactions. This is the simplest and yet best way to network with other bloggers.
38. Is blog commenting a good way to bring traffic?
Expecting traffic from comments will be a wrong presumption. People hardly spend time reading posts, leave the comments aside unless they are too good and useful. You can build good relationships with bloggers with comments and some backlinks.
39. How do I stay safe from hacking?
Stay away from unsafe and old and outdated plugins. Keep updating your blog’s plugins and versions regularly, at least once in 5 months. Add malware protection plugins and get regular automatic backup from your bloghost.
40. Can I transfer my blog from current host to another?
There are many good online tutorials to do that. I believe in saving time and hassle and leave to an expert. Some of the hosting companies offer this service for free or for a nominal charge.
41. Can I shift from free to paid platforms as I grow without losing content and search visibility?
Yes, you can do it easily. Hire a good developer to that for you. It’s doable within 24-48 hours without losing anything.
42. What if my site gets hacked?
Backup is useful in such case. Always make sure your blog hosting plan has auto regular backups. Your blog can be restored within 5 minutes even if it is hacked.
43. What is a bounce rate and how does it impact my blog?
When a blog visitor leaves your blog from the same page she entered without surfing a second or more pages, it’s bounce. The lesser time spent on the blog, means poor blog performance.
Read this post to know more about bounce rate and how does it impact a site
44. How should I choose a reliable blog hosting company?
There are a few criteria to choose a good blog hosting service, such as uptime, cost, customer support, backups and space. A good hosting with all these essential features can range from $60 – 120 per year for one blog.
45. What are the best wordpress plugins for bloggers?
There is a set of 5 essential wordpress plugins I suggest.
Read this post for the best wordpress plugins references and ideas
46. How to get more comments on my blog?
Write useful posts and topics. Never stop promoting your posts. Promote your posts multiple times at different intervals.
47. What does it take for a blog to be successful?
Consistency, patience for 1 year, focused and high-quality useful content and aggressive daily promotions.
48. How to get more comments on my blog?
Write useful posts and topics. Never stop promoting your posts. Promote your posts multiple times at different intervals.
49. What makes a blog successful?
Consistency, latest, accurate, quality and focused useful content, easy writing style, regular non stop promotions, interactions with readers and comments.
50. How many blogs can I host on one server?
That depends upon your blog hosting plan. Plans can allow one blog to unlimited blogs.
51. I do not have good designing skills. How can I design a blog?
Unless blogging is your full time career and only income source, outsource designing to a designer. Think of saving your time first, that you can invest in writing.
52. I am not a good writer. How can I still blog?
You can do video blogging or podcasting instead. Or you can record your ideas and thoughts and delegate it to a writer to write for you.
53. Is blogging good for SEO?
Definitely good. Well-written and informative blog posts optimized and targeted on high search volume terms and written on in-demand topics rank higher, eventually driving organic traffic to your blog and website.
54. How do I rank my blog?
Ranking needs you to keep 4 essential elements in mind.
- Keyword Research
- Choice of great topic
- Minimum 500 words great and useful content optimized with the targeted keywords
- Published correctly
- Indexed and promoted well by building backlinkshttps://www.sunitabiddu.com/blog-seo-checklist/
55. How do I find the right keywords for my blog?
Keyword research is the first thing and foundation to a successful blog. The easiest is to follow a step by step basic keyword research tutorial and prepare the keyword list of at least 100 keywords and topics around them. Many bloggers use Google suggestions and keyword planner as and when they write just before they start writing. It can be time-consuming and tiring.
Read this article to follow the keyword research process
56. Should I use paid or free templates?
It’s okay to start with free templates. There are many free and feature-rich templates available. Once your blog starts performing well with good rankings and readerbase, go with a paid theme. If you have money to invest, start with a paid template right in the beginning.
57. What should the design of my blog look like?
Design and aesthetics depend upon your niche and your readers. The best designs are simplest and with a great amount of white space.
Read this article for the best blog design
58. How much money do I need to start blogging?
Great question. Minimum $100 for the first year. Best is to have $100 per month and for pro blogging, $1200 in the first year and $500 per year from the second year onward.
Read this post to know actual cost of starting and running a blog
59. What is the best hosting for self-starter bloggers?
Mochahost is the most affordable blog hosting service with all essential features for new and startup blogs.
60. What can I sell on my blog?
Anything and everything. From service, products, consulting, information, whatever you want and have to sell.
61. Niche I love or Niche that makes money – what should I choose and why?
Niche that maks money unless your love for the niche is too strong to last for lifetime without any expectations in return.
62. Is Blogging Dead?
Is blogging dead? Absolutely not. From my experience of nearly 20 years now, I can say blogging is immortal. As long as we have the audience, businesses, the need to position our business and brand as the authority, blogging will remain as one of the potential marketing tool and channels of expression. Next time you hear or have questions like – Is blogging still popular? What is the future of blogging? Is blogging in demand? – remember this answer.
63. Can we have a career in blogging in 2024?
Blogging a great full-time career. You can run your own money-making blog or offer a service of blog management for people who need help. Bloggers can make $1000-10000 at ease with writing, blog management services and with affiliate marketing.
Sunita Biddu is a digital business coach and power blogging mentor helping coaches and small business owners. She helps with building a strong and profitable online presence and reputation that creates a self-sustaining business. Sunita writes on this blog once a week about easy-to-use guides and articles about business, coaching, social media and blogging. You can grab some of her free resources and ebooks from the resources section.