How to Start a Blog & Make Millions From It: A Practical Guide

Blogs have evolved from being simple online thought journals written as a hobby to becoming a prominent part of the web and a full-time career. Starting a blog has never been more easy and convenient, nor the potential for generating huge revenue from it has been more practical and feasible, as it is today.

In this article, we explore the roadmap for starting a blog and outline a practical plan to use this blog for generating millions of dollars in revenue. We elaborate on high priority steps in the roadmap for starting a blog and even provide solid recommendations based on our research and experience.

We will break down the entire process every writer goes through into 3 simple phases:

1. Before You Create a Blog
2. When You’re Writing for Your Blog
3. How to Market Your Blog After Creating It

Let’s get to the details, shall we?

1.   Before You Create a Blog

A.   Decide Your Niche

We bet you are not here because you want to earn a small side income from blogging. If you want to generate a heavy income which gives you the confidence to transition into blogging full time then picking your niche can be the make or breakpoint. Deciding your niche is the first and highly crucial step in laying the foundation for your first million through blogging.

Your niche is simply what you have chosen to create a large volume of content about. An ideal niche should fall between your passion, knowledge and potential profitability.

To decide if your niche truly captures your passion and knowledge answer the following big questions:

• Am I knowledgeable about this topic above average or do I have a solid understanding of the fundamentals to build upon?
• Do I love continually learning about this?
• Will I still be in love after 60 posts and 1 year of writing and learning about it?

To decide if your niche has potential for profitability do the following:

• Browse Google trends for your niche to observe the eyeball history of your niche: this will help you understand its attention graph
• Assess the competitive scope of your niche: choose the top blogs in your niche and explore how many visitors they get and how they make money
• Chart the growth potential of your niche: how many different topics can be written on it? Keep the blog name fairly broad so you have the freedom to expand your target audience without rebranding.

B.   Buy a Highly Relevant Domain Name

Your name is through which you are known, addressed, or referred to. Similarly, your domain name is through which your business will be known, addressed, or referred to. The only difference is that you get to pick your domain name. Buying a strategically chosen domain name can boost relevancy, visibility, SEO rank and land a great first impression. Basically, a well-chosen domain name can give you a head start in the race.

To choose the golden domain name, make sure you say YES to the below yes-list:

• Is my domain name short? (strictly 2-4 words or 6-14 characters)
• Do I have a popular domain extension? (.com, .org, .net, target .countryspecific)
• Does my domain name have my niche keywords? (example – digitaltrends.com, bloggingbasics101.com, moneycontrol.com)
• Is it easy to remember?
• Is it easy to pronounce and spell?
• Does it seem unique and brandable?
• Does it avoid hyphens and numbers?

(Note: a domain name may stray from a few points above but must follow most for a successful domain name)

You can also use domain name generators to jumpstart ideation. Make sure to constantly check availability on domain registrars.

C.   Invest in Expert, Robust and Reliable Hosting

Here is an undeniable fact: if you have the vision to generate revenue accumulating in the millions through your blog, you have to persistently chase to build a strong community of readers. Over time, your community will consist of motivated, engaged and loyal members who trust you and stick with you. These slowly curated members will eventually transform and feel like an online family to you.

Essentially, the lodging, care and safety of this online family will be dependent on the hosting you choose. The hosting you choose is basically where your blog lives and breathes for its entire (hopefully rich) life. Your blog, along with all its resources and your tied community, is the tenant while the hosting company is the landlord. Having said that, there are only a few companies out there which truly understand the value of hosting a virtual family and lesser companies that can reliably back their big claims with the resources required to host, nurture and support it.

As you can decipher, choosing your next virtual property is one we don’t take lightly and you shouldn’t too. However, choosing the right host for yourself is a research- and time-intensive task. Lucky for you, we spend a lot of our time to research and identify the best companies in the market so that you don't have to. After a detailed assessment of various hosting parameters, we can confidently hand out a glowing recommendation to Kinsta.

Kinsta has taken the WordPress hosting market by storm since 2013 with their services and dedication to quality. Kinsta’s competitive edge lies in the fact that their hosting services are built upon Google Cloud’s premium network. Being a Google Cloud Platform partner unlocks a state-of-the-art infrastructure with the choice of 21 global server locations for you.

We take a look at essential hosting provider requirements to consider and 5 of the key offerings by Kinsta which fulfill them and make it a worthy investment for hosting a million-dollar blog:

a.    Speed and Staging

Kinsta offers a range of some of the latest web hosting software, including Nginx, PHP 7, LXD containers, and MariaDB. Kinsta also stores files using the advanced ZFS file system.

All Kinsta hosting plans include access to a staging site where you can test out new plugins, website customizations and code edits, before pushing them to your live site in just one click. There’s also a search-and-replace feature that’s accessible from the Kinsta dashboard for making changes to the contents of your WordPress website database.

b.    Ready for Million-Dollar Level Traffic

Google Cloud Platform enables highly scalable hardware which allows you to access resources needed to deliver a smooth user experience for your readers. Also, in the fortunate event that your website goes viral or experiences a sharp surge in traffic, automatic scaling ensures your site continues to perform steadily.

c.    Highly Secured and Backed Up

Protection is the basis of faith in a hosting company. Kinsta takes this understanding and mounts security on a pedestal. Kinsta has a proactive and vigilant approach which uses both active and passive measures to monitor attacks and malicious intent. They track for uninterrupted uptime, DDoS (distributed denial of service) attacks, software-based restrictions, SSL (secure socket layer) support, and hardware firewalls along with other list of safety features 24/7 to castle you inside a fortress of defence.

Combined with this are automatic daily WordPress website backups which are kept for a minimum of 14 days on the entry-level plans, and longer on the higher plans. Restoring backups is easy, with the option of deploying them to your live site or the test environment.

As well as daily backups, you can upgrade to six-hour and hourly backups for an extra monthly fee. You can also manually create complete website backups at the touch of a button, as and when needed. You also have the option of downloading these backups for safekeeping.

if you are moving your existing WordPress site from any host to Kinsta, you don’t have to worry about migrating your site. Just sign up for an account, use the migration form from your Kinsta dashboard, and their migration team will schedule a time and migrate your site for you. There will be zero downtime with this migration, and they will even test your site before making it live. This way you are sure that everything works as intended after moving your WordPress site to Kinsta.

This is certainly a time-saver, as handling migration yourself could take a lot of time + hassles. Even if you enjoy such tech challenges, having someone more knowledgeable taking care of it saves a lot of time and offers mental peace.

d.     Expertise with Expert Support

Having a team of experts is one of the luxuries of investing in a premium service. Kinsta is renowned for their support team and this claim is backed by thousands of their glowing testimonials by customers.

Kinsta's support team is composed entirely of veteran WordPress developers and Linux hosting engineers. With an acceptance rate of less than 1% of applicants, Kinsta eliminates the series of level 1 and level 2 reps and offers the best experts on every call.

Kinsta offers 24/7 support via the Intercom widget, a live chat and ticket solution. They also have an automatically stored chat history and window. While chatting every query is replied to within 3 minutes and the answers are knowledgeable and resourceful.

On top of this Kinsta maintains a blog and a handy knowledge base, with tips, articles and a glossary of tech terms.

e.    Easy Management

Managing the different features of your hosting account usually requires technical know-how and understanding of technical terminology. This will make your hosting account management an operational overhead. Overhead leads to the loss of time which could be spent on improving your blog.

Kinsta has therefore aimed to distill the complications into a simple to use and easy to navigate custom dashboard. My Kinsta Dashboard allows you to perform tasks such as creating new WordPress websites, updating any plugins you’ve installed on your site and managing your backups.

You can also monitor resource usage stats to gauge how much of your plan allocation you’ve consumed, and also view website visitor analytics through the dashboard.

2.   When You’re Writing for Your Blog

A.   Focus on Delivering Value

Authenticity is defined as being credible, reliable and trustworthy. This is the reason why authentic blogs are highly sought after. Being knowledgeable, resourceful and genuine in your writing is communicated to the audience.

If your perspective and approach are aligned at delivering value to a reader, you will start drawing attention and appreciation. Value begets value.

B.   Think in SEO

The blogging world revolves around SEO and optimizing your content to its maximum potential for climbing Google search rankings.

Familiarising yourself with key SEO concepts like keywords, backlinks, indexing, SERP features, etc will help you in boosting the relevancy of your content as well as position you for fast-tracked growth.

3.   How to Market Your Blog After Creating It

We spoke about how to create and write a blog part, now let's focus on the millionaire part. Once you have your blog set in place, you can switch it into high gear and go full speed with your marketing.

In this section, we outline widely used and proven marketing strategies you could employ to build a huge base of followers and consistently grow your sales. One of the best ways to decrease your risk is to invest in a marketing platform which does all the heavy lifting for you. We recommend GetResponse. Let’s see how it can accelerate your business.

A.   Email Marketing

Email marketing is a long proven method of marketing. It is known for high followup resale value and continuous brand communication. However, with customers' noisy inbox, you need to send emails which appeal and stand out to your customers. An effective email has impressive design mixed with impactful content. GetResponse is an advanced marketing toolkit which can help you write such emails.

GetResponse provides you with a suite of email marketing tools specially designed to deliver tailor-made offers to your contacts when they’re most active.

GetResponse provides you with two key features for emails:

• Personalized Content

Targeted and personalized communication helps you increase email engagement rates. Use the information you gather at signup, purchase, or throughout the subscription lifecycle to display custom and dynamic content in your emails.

Dynamic content is known as “smart HTML” and allows you to show different images, CTAs, and wording, depending on your customers’ preferences and actions.

• Creative Email Templates Library

GetResponse takes care of the design end by opening access to their hundreds of expertly designed and fully-customizable email templates along with more than 5,000 licensed images from Shutterstock. This allows you to deploy professional looking campaigns in just a few clicks.

B.   Conducting Webinars

Webinars are a great way to interact and engage. You can have your webinar up and running in no time with GetResponse. Promote and sell your skills with online face to face webinars with your audience.

You can also analyze feedback and reports for future optimization

C.   Automated Marketing

You can choose to automate your marketing. Automation helps you to take the guesswork out with workflow templates built for you. You can set the rules and visualize your automated customer journey.

You can reach the right people, precisely when they want to be reached. Automating your sales and marketing,with powerful eCommerce tools can help you automatically recommend products,  track and rate customer actions and overall turn your website traffic into sales.

Final Thoughts

The possibility of generating huge revenue through blogging as a full-time career is now a  possibility, more than it ever was. It has been proven through multiple bloggers who exist and run successful blogs today. Mixing impactful content with a detailed and strong marketing strategy can surely position you as a millionaire blog.