How to Start a Blog (And Make Money on It) in 2022

Blogs are like opinions: everyone’s got one. And for good reason!

A well-designed blog full of helpful content is one of the most powerful advertising tools on the planet. It shows potential customers you’re a subject matter expert and builds your online reputation. Media Centric SaaS Companies like Hubspot who maintain active, useful blogs even end up with more traffic than the key media publications in their industries. That’s massive.

In this article, we’ll break down why blogs are such an important brand-building strategy, before diving into the technical details of how to start a blog. Then, we’ll dive into the core strategies bloggers use to monetize their blogs, so you’ll have a roadmap to turning your blog into a serious source of passive income. (Because who doesn’t dream about that!)

So let’s dive in, and take you from zero to blogging hero. Here are some shortcuts, if you’re eager to skip ahead to a specific section:

The benefits of blogging

From getting your website to rank better on search engines, to building your brand’s relationship with audiences — there are a few key reasons why every creator and company needs a blog.

Boosting your website traffic

Strategically-written blog posts are a fantastic way to increase your website traffic. Articles that are useful or engaging for a core, dedicated audience will get more shares, repeat visitors, and organic discovery. They’ll get people checking out the rest of your website, too — and buying your products and services.

10xTravel founder Bryce Conway’s guest column for the Thinkific Blog shows the traffic-boosting power of great blogs. “After 3 months of trying and failing to grow our website, it became clear that we needed to start blogging if we ever wanted to build an audience,” Conway explained. “There simply is no better way to do it.”

We won’t go deep into jargon, but this strategy is known as inbound marketing. You blog about a subject people are actually searching for, and, along the way, they’ll discover your brand. This also means you don’t have to pay for ads in order to get seen. (That’s outbound marketing!)

Conway later explains that by taking a stand on hot-button issues in his industry, he got a “huge uptick in traffic” and grew his readership to 20,000 monthly readers. Now, he works with a network of freelancers to create great content. That’s a model you can copy, regardless of your industry.

Getting discovered via social media

Blog content isn’t just good for driving traffic to your website — it can also be repurposed for social media. By doing this, you’ll build your brand’s audience and reach leads you wouldn’t find otherwise. This is better shown than explained, so we’ll dive into an example.

Suppose you sell lint rollers, and you write a blog post about strategies for removing cat hair from couches. You go in-depth, and write about every possible way to take the feline out of where you recline. (Meow.) That post and the research you put into it are your foundation.

To take it one step further, you could create a Twitter thread where you break down your hair removal strategies in under 280 characters. It’s shorter, more digestible, and gets you access to a brand-new audience. Equally, you could create an Instagram carousel that shows your top five tips for getting cat hair off couches. If you’re feeling adventurous, you could even film a TikTok showing how to lint roll like a pro.

Suddenly, that blog post isn’t just a piece of writing. It’s an entire mini content marketing campaign, with elements you can spin off to promote your brand on different social channels. The blog post itself is where you should spend the most time. But once it’s written, you’d be missing out if you didn’t spend an hour or two spinning it out for social media.

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Building your online reputation

Blogging is also an effective way to build your online reputation and establish yourself as a subject matter expert. A good online brand is valuable for solo entrepreneurs and big companies alike, and the content you create today can influence customers for years to come.

Put simply: people would rather buy from companies that help them than from anonymous corporate behemoths. Companies would rather hire consultants who give away some value up-front rather than consultants who don’t have any proof they can deliver what they promise.

Consistent, high-quality blog content is how you give away that value and prove your worth.

Generating long-term business

Another massive benefit of blogging is its ability to generate long-term business for your brand. Once you’ve created a blog article, it’s yours alone (and it exists forever). You can update and republish key articles yearly to keep them ranked highly, and people will continue discovering your brand through your blog, all on their own.

Best of all, your blog content will make first impressions for you. When a customer or client reaches out for the first time, they’ll already have a perception of you formed by reading your blog posts. You won’t have to introduce yourself — and you’ll be able to focus on solving their problems and building relationships.

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How to start a successful blog in 2022

So now that you know why blogs are so popular, let’s get into the nitty gritty details about how to start a successful blog. Because blogging has changed a lot since the early days of LiveJournal and TypePad — to be successful in 2022, you need to have a solid plan and strategy for your blog, right from the get-go.

1. Pick your niche

Before you start your blog, you need to pick the core area you’re going to focus your content on. That’s your niche.

Finding the right niche is especially important if your blog is tied to your business. If you pick a hyper-competitive niche — like American news or music news — the established players in your space will crowd you out. Their websites have a history of attracting readers, and Google knows to send their posts right to the top. As a new blogger in an overly competitive niche, you’ll most likely just get lost in the noise.

On the flipside, if you pick an overly specific niche, nobody will ever find you. Sure, you might be the biggest fish in a small pond — but if nobody’s fishing there, then you shouldn’t expect to see much business impact.

Imagine you’re a tailor who loves making quilted replicas of album covers from the 1960s and 1970s. Sure, there might be a small audience who wants to see your Trout Mask Replica quilt. But if you’re trying to attract new customers for your business, you might want to blog about sewing. It’s a broader niche, and there’s more people searching for it.

Luckily, there are a few steps you can take to find a profitable niche — one that’s not too crowded and one that people are searching for. Here’s how you do it:

Think about your passions, skills, and business

Your search for a blog niche should start with some serious self-reflection. Ask yourself the following three questions—and jot down some bullet notes, while you’re at it:

What do you love to do — and what could you talk about for hours?

What skills or life experience could you teach or share with others?

Within the niche you’re interested in, what angles haven’t been covered to death yet?

Most of the time, your business or real-life passions will be the niche you want your blog to focus on. These are areas where you’re already a subject-matter expert.

Caring about your niche is absolutely crucial, because it’ll take time to build your blog audience. If you’re not interested in your blog niche, you’ll run into an existential crisis and abandon it before hitting the one year mark. (And that won’t feel good — believe me.)

Check Google Trends to see how popular your niche is

Now that you’ve got a niche, you’ll want to do some very basic research to learn what topics people are searching for within your niche. This part’s way easier, and doesn’t require as much soul-searching.

Start by going to Google Trends — the best free way to measure search volumes (a.k.a. how many times people search for a phrase in Google every month). Then, think of some core keywords related to your niche. If your niche is photography, try phrases like “learning photography,” “best cameras for beginners,” and even just “photography.” Enter these terms into Google Trends, and you’ll get a view of the search volumes over time.

And that’s it, really. What the Google Trends research process does is it tells you which pathways people are taking to reach your niche online. It can uncover trends within your niche too, and point to whether your niche is growing or shrinking.

This stage can help you gut-check whether your niche is the right one. And if you’re worried that your niche is too overcrowded for you to stand out, then stick around — that’s a problem you can solve.

Drill down to find a sub-niche you can own

Your blog niche might be something that’s already really popular, like photography, personal finance, or healthy eating. But if you ask yourself which areas within the niche still haven’t been saturated, you can carve out a healthy sub-niche that you can own.

For example: if you’re a photographer, you could drill down from the overcrowded niche of photography to the sub-niche of studio photography. Let someone else write about long-exposure landscape shots. You can concentrate on lighting, staging indoor photoshoots, and must-have studio gear.

This way, you’ll come across as a master of a specific trade. (Which is gonna help your business stand out, too. And isn’t that the whole point?)

2. Choose a blog name

Once you’ve picked your niche (or sub-niche!), it’s time to choose a name for your blog. This is the name that people will search for and remember, so it’s important to choose something simple, memorable, and true to your brand.

When picking your name, you’ll want to think about your target audience, the subjects you’ll be writing about, and what your voice as a writer sounds like.

With that background in mind, you’re ready to pick names. Here are a few different naming strategies you can use for your new blog:

Use your own name

If you’re a consultant, solo entrepreneur, or a course creator, consider going with the name your parents gave you. This puts you front and center, and will make your blog feel extra-personal. (Plus, it’s a great way to build your personal brand.)

Creative director Nathan Allebach uses his last name as the title of his blog and his communications firm. This strategy has helped people who’ve read about his work with Steak-Umm discover his company and become new clients.

On the flipside, this naming strategy may not work for teams, or for industry-focused blogs. And if you have a common name like John Smith, you may have trouble ranking on Google. (But hey, that’s what middle names are for, right?)

Pick up a thesaurus

If your blog is focused on a particular field or industry, using your own name might pigeon-hole you. Instead, you might want to use a broader title that reflects the sort of content you’re blogging about.

This can be tricky, though — so grab your nearest thesaurus (or Thesaurus.com). You’re going to take some of those industry keywords you thought of earlier, plug them in, and look for synonyms or related words that you could use as a starting point for your blog title.

For example: a name like The Camera Blog feels generic, so take the term “camera” and enter that into your online thesaurus. You’ll find related terms like “lens,” “mirror” and “35mm” — and suddenly it already sounds much more exciting.

You can easily flip these into a new title that fits your blog — something like Lens Tracker, 35mm Mayhem, or Mirrorless Magic. Anyone searching for photography will recognize what your blog is is about, and you won’t vanish into the abyss of badly-named blogs.

Use a blog name generator

Another good strategy for naming your blog is plugging some keywords into a blog naming generator. Pick a few terms that are related to your industry, and let a naming tool like BlogTyrant’s do the hard work. (This name generator can even check which domain names are available.)

There’s no better proof of the power of name generators than future EGOT winner Childish Gambino. He got his stage name from a Wu-Tang Clan name generator in the 2000s, and is still rocking with it a decade later. (It’s still online. Plug in “Donald Glover” here, if you’re curious.)

The point is: there’s no shame in letting a robot help you brainstorm. So long as you get a good, original name, it won’t ever matter how you got it.

3. Set up your blog hosting

Before you build your blog, you’ll need to set up hosting. In layman’s terms, this means buying your domain name, or the web address your blog audience will search to read your articles.

Make sure to choose a reputable host. If you go with a bottom-of-the-barrel, extra-cheap hosting provider, your blog may see performance issues, such as lag time while loading. You might not notice this, but Google’s search algorithm definitely will — which means you’ll risk not showing up in search results.

But hosting isn’t that expensive. In fact, many hosting providers will only cost you a couple coffees per month, and they’ll keep your blog up and running around the clock.

Our top five hosting company recommendations are (in no particular order):

4. Build your blog in a CMS

Now that you own your own domain name, you’re ready to build your blog out in a Content Management System, also known as a CMS.

CMS platforms let you build your own website without having to code. Your CMS is where you’ll go to create new pages, publish articles, and update old content in the future. If you’re a blogger, picking a CMS is like picking a significant other — so choose carefully.

The most common CMS system is WordPress, an open-source classic used by brands of all sizes. There are many great ones out there, though. Here are our top picks to get you started:

5. Create and publish content

Once you’ve got your CMS set up, your next step is creating and publishing content. Content creation is a topic in and of itself, and we could write you a whole book (or cry you a river) about the strategy that goes into choosing what to write.

We’ve already got a comprehensive guide to writing blog posts that’ll get you going. But at the core, you’ll always want to ask yourself these key questions:

Who is my target audience?
What interests them — and what problems do they have?
What can I teach them?

This approach will stop you from veering outside your niche, creating off-brand content, and from writing about topics that someone else has already covered. And it’ll help you find interesting, hidden stories to bring to life for your audience. Happy writing, my friends!

6. Promote your blog

Now that you’ve got some content out there, the next step is promoting it.

The first strategy we’d recommend is repurposing blog content for your social media channels. Turn a long-form article into a carousel post on Instagram, or a deep dive thread on Twitter. Fire up your iPhone and film a TikTok that breaks down the main points of your article, and then direct people to your website for the full story.

This kills two birds with one stone. It solves the “what do I post on Instagram” conundrum, and it drives people back to your original blog post.

Besides content repurposing, we also recommend making your blog searchable. This involves a little bit of SEO research, but it’s a rabbit hole that’s really worth going down. You just have to do some keyword research, find high-ranking terms, and weave them into your article.

This tells Google that your article solves questions that people are searching for, and it’ll take your organic traffic to the next level.

How to make money blogging: 4 strategies

By this point, you’ve got your blog up and running. Congrats! People are finding your content and it seems like they’re really enjoying the articles you’re putting up.

So how do you actually monetize all of this content?

It’s important to understand how content creators make money:

When you sell your content, you earn money directly from users. For instance, when content is behind a paywall, or structured into an online course, you’re selling your product.
When you’re selling awareness to an audience, you’re working with a third party to fulfill their marketing needs. Think of the “word from our sponsors” part of your favorite podcast, or the links in your favorite recipe blog that lead to Amazon products. These are examples of selling your audience.

Here are some proven strategies used by bloggers on how to make money blogging.

1. Place ads on your blog

Enabling Google AdSense (Google’s advertising toolkit) on your blog is a great way to turn the clicks your blog is earning into cold, hard direct deposits to your bank account.

How does it work? You make your blog available to Google’s network of advertisers and allow ads to be displayed on your site. Ad impressions and clicks then add up to a monthly AdSense payout.

AdSense is free to join, the eligibility requirements are low, and your advertising income can scale as your blog does, too.

There’s a number of types of AdSense ads, including:

Image ads: Graphic ads that come in a variety of sizes.
Text ads: Text-only ads that can display either one or multiple offers.
Rich media ads: HTML, video, and flash ads.
GIF ads: Animated image ads.

This means that if you find a certain ad type is distracting from your blog content, you can swap it out for something more discreet. And if you want to rack up the big bucks by selling lots of advertising space, there are ads that’ll let you do that too.

2. Join an affiliate network

Affiliate marketing is a sure-fire way to monetize your blog. You provide affiliate links to products, and every time a customer that started on your blog makes a purchase, you get a tasty commission fee.

You’ll want to advertise products that your audience is actually interested in. The audience that reads your home cooking blog probably doesn’t want to buy moisturizer… but they’d definitely be interested in crockpot recommendations. Pick the right products, and you’ll be turning affiliate ads for cast iron cookware into gold.

We know from experience that there is a lot of confusing information out there about affiliate networks. Because we care, we’ve pulled together a shortlist of eight reputable affiliate programs that you can join today:

And hey, if you’re blogging for an audience that uses SaaS tools — be sure to check out our article on 44 of the best SaaS affiliate programs. There’s a lot of money to be made if you play your cards right.

3. Write sponsored posts

Sponsored posts are another great way to turn blog traffic into passive income — especially once you’ve got a dedicated audience. In exchange for a per-post fee, you’ll blend advertising for a company’s product into your blog posts.

This is win-win. For you, the benefit is money. For your sponsor, it’s a trustworthy, third-party piece of content that promotes their product (without it looking like soulless product placement).

Sponsored posts can actually take a variety of forms, including:

Posts written by a sponsor that you publish
Posts written by you about a sponsor’s product
Links to a sponsor’s website and/or product pages
A list that includes positive coverage of a sponsor’s product
A product announcement that gives a limited-time discount to blog readers

It’s important to mention that in most cases, you’ll be approached to write sponsored content. You don’t want to chase sponsors, and in fact, that can make you look desperate. Just focus on creating quality content that stands out in your niche, and in time, they’ll come to you.

4. Sell online courses

Offering online courses is the fastest and most scalable way to drive revenue from your blog. Blog articles are a great way to introduce people to your company or personal brand, but assembling your expertise into easy-to-digest courses is even more valuable. (And, it can be quite lucrative!)

On average, Google AdSense pays $18 for 1,000 views. That’s not bad at all, and you should be advertising. But if you sell a course for $50, converting just two blog visitors into students will earn you more than you’d get from 5,000 blog views. (That $50 number isn’t arbitrary — it’s the minimum price that we recommend to Thinkific course creators in our article on course pricing strategy.)

What’s more, once you’ve created a course, it’s done. You might need to update course content from time to time, but it’s still a finished asset that you can send your blog audience to forever. And if your blog becomes a go-to within your niche, your bank account could skyrocket. (No, really—we’ve seen it happen many times.)

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For more inspiration, check out our guide to successfully creating an online course.

So, what’s next?

Now that you know how to start your own blog, you’re probably looking for ways to turn your platform into a cash cow. And like we said: the fastest, most effective way to monetize your blog and build passive income is to start creating courses.

That’s where Thinkific comes in. We make it easy to drive revenue from your blog by repurposing content as self-guided online courses and membership sites. Our easy-to-use course design platform helps coaches, educators, and digital content creators build engaging, custom eLearning experiences and grow sustainable online businesses.

Try Thinkific for free and get the course creation, marketing, and selling tools you need to take your business up a notch. (No tech skills required!)