Step 1: Choose The Audience You're Going To Serve
Whatever you do, you need to put your audience first. People don’t make money from niches, but they make money by helping people. Think of a topic or area that your audience may be interested in – and that’s a niche. You need to give the audience what they are looking for – you need to ‘serve’ them with the information that they want.
After that, it’s crucial that we produce consistent content for the audience that we’re passionate about helping.
How to identify my audience?
Most people are searching for one of two things…
- How to ________?
- Which _______ is best for me?
To help you identify the right audience, here are a series of questions you can ask yourself to gain clarity:
- Who are you going to help
- How are you going to help them?
- Who are you passionate about helping?
- What particular struggles have you been through in your life that you could help someone else get through in the same manner?
- What are you good at helping people with that they find difficult?
- If you could only make money after helping someone get a result, what result would you help them get?
You can start by sharing your personal experiences… like the steps you took to learn something new or how you managed to quit smoking, how you first started making $100 a day from your online store and so forth. People are always looking for inspiration or want to learn from real, ordinary people.
Don’t overthink this process. Just decide on one thing and start taking action – no dwelling.
Step 2: Create Your Blog
At this point the next couple of things you need to do are:
- Decide on your domain name
- Select the domain hosting company
- Start building your WordPress blog site
For items 1 & 2, you can refer to my training guide: How To Start An Online Business In 9 Simple Steps
Setting Up Your WordPress Website
Once you have your domain and hosting service all set up, now it’s time to dive into creating your blog with WordPress.
Watch my training video on: How To Create Your Website (This can be used for Blog or Affiliate Websites).
Now in your WordPress dashboard, we can get these settings tweaked to give you a leg up on your competition from the start…
First, on the left navigation look for the settings option and then click ‘permalinks’ from the submenu that pops up under settings.
Change the default URL to ‘Post Name’ and then click the “save changes” button at the bottom of this screen…
This will make sure that every post you publish has a clean domain URL that is descriptive for both Google and your readers…
This will help Google understand more clearly what your post is about so they can drive more targeted traffic to you once you publish.
Setting Up Your Blog's Site Map
To accomplish this you will need to install a free WordPress plugin that will build your sitemap for you and help with your overall search engine optimization strategy.
I would recommend “Yoast SEO” and although they have a paid level, you only need the free version. I think you’re going to really like this plug-in…
- Go to your WordPress Dashboard and click ‘plugins,’ then ‘add new, like this:
- Type ‘Yoast’ in the search bar, click ‘Install,’ and then click ‘activate’ (Mine says update instead of install), like this:
- Now hover over the Yoast settings and click ‘General, just like this:
- Click on ‘Features’, like shown below:
- And scroll down to XML sitemaps and click the question mark icon.
- Then click see the XML sitemap.
- Copy the URL of your sitemap
- Go to Google Search Console and click Sitemaps and paste in your sitemap URL.
- Click submit and you are all done with all the technical setup.
Now every time you write a new article, Google will search your domain and submit the new content to the search engines.
This is when you’ll start seeing your blog domain and content showing up in Google searches, and that’s what we like to see!
Step 3: Learning The WordPress Basics
WordPress may seem very confusing and daunting for first time users or beginners – but like everything else, it takes time to familiarise ourselves with any new things.
You really only need to learn a few fundamentals on WordPress in order to generate incredible results. Ultimately, all you will do is log in, publish your post, log out and be done with your work, that’s it, and then you get to move on with your day. Just learn the fundamentals and you’ll be able to have a successful blogging journey.
Here are a few areas that you might want to take note of:
Posts
Essentially… “posts” are your blog posts – all those wonderful, useful content that your audience would want and appreciate.
Writing a brand new blog post is as simple as clicking on “Add New” underneath the “Posts” tab in the WordPress Admin sidebar.
Generally, your blog posts will be organized into categories that you create that make it easier for people visiting your blog to find the content topics that interest them the most.
For example, if you run a personal development blog, your posts could be organized into categories such as:
- Mindset
- Goal Setting
- Leadership
- Meditation
- Mindfulness
Creating new, valuable blog posts is going to be the number one thing you do on your blog, and I’m going to show exactly how to create your first blog post later in this post.
Pages
Pages have the same editor as post and they are used for:
- About Me Page (where you give your reader a brief insight on who you are why you’ve set up your blog)
- Contact Page (where you can have a phone number, email address or perhaps a contact form, where your readers can contact you)
- Legal Pages (for example: refund policy, privacy policy, disclaimers, etc)
Once, you’ve created these pages, there’s no real reason to create another page.
Comments
This is where you will see all of the comments people write on your blog posts. You can respond to them, create conversations, and even delete them if you feel the comment is inappropriate for your blog. View them via ‘Comments’ section in the WordPress Admin sidebar.
Appearance
The appearance section of your WordPress blog admin is where you can change your theme and customize different elements of your theme. Your customization level depends on which theme you choose. This is where you can create and edit menus, sidebars, and other widgets inside of the appearance section.
For instance, when you want to add social media links to your blog sidebar, you can do it via widgets.
Or if you want to monetize your blog you can put a banner ad on the side of your blog to earn a commission through affiliate links.
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Plugins
These are important. A plugin is essentially an add-on that you can install to extend the capabilities of your blog theme.
There are literally thousands of both free and paid plugins that can help you:
- Boost your SEO ranking
- Add opt-in boxes to your blog posts
- Add social icons to your blog
- Increase your blog security
Plus so much more…. When you go into the plugin section, it’s very easy to get carried away and excited by all the possibilities.
Keep it simple, by just installing the things you really need because more plugins you have installed the more chances of your site slowing down. So, keep it to the minimum.
Settings
The settings section of your WordPress blog admin is where you can edit and add:
- Site tagline
- Admin User Name & Email address
- Time zone and date settings
- Homepage and blog display settings
- Comment settings
- And much more…
These settings will become more and more important as you build your blog.
Step 4: Write Your First Blog Post & Page
Time to get started with your first blog and page. These are the things that you’ll need:
1. Your logo:
This is for your branding (If you need any help with graphics design work – you can always get a freelancer from Fiverr to help you) ==>
NOTE: You don’t have to have your logo ready to start with your first blog. You can add your logo at a later time.
2. Content:
As a recommendation, start your blog off with an ‘About’ page that tells your audience a little bit about you or what your objectives are for the blog site. Do a search for other blog sites within your niche area and see what the bloggers write in their ‘About’ page. Remember – you need to be your own writer and editor (check and re-check what you have written).
Next is your ‘Contact’ page which includes information where your visitors can contact you. Remember to explore the use of contact form plugin.
Have A Strategy For Your Blog
You are at the learning stage and therefore don’t try to make everything perfect.
What you need to keep writing useful content . Your target is to write up to 100 posts, preferably each is more than 1000 words. Remember not to overwhelm yourself – make a realistic plan to achieve this goal over a period of time.
There are also softwares/plugins and tools that help you to generate content for your site (refer here for product reviews). However, for a start, it is best that you generate your own blog posts/content.
Step 5: Building Your Blog To Convert
Building Trust
Once you have a reasonable amount of content in your blog site, you can now start your monetising plan. These days you need to have a blog sales funnel (more below).
One thing you must know is that you cannot expect your visitors to buy anything from you immediately. They need to trust you, you need to keep helping them – you must build a relationship with them.
Through your blog, you will get:
- Organic traffic from Google is WAY more valuable than paid traffic. And you’re never getting organic traffic straight to a sales funnel… This requires a blog.
- Most of your visitors who reach your sales funnel are not ready to purchase today but
- By giving your visitors helpful content and information, they are more likely to subscribe to your email list (where you can then start your email marketing and offer relevant products to them for sale).
Blog Sales Funnel
It’s about turning your visitors into your email subscribers by giving away something that can help solve their problem at a deeper, more detailed level. This normally comes in a form of free ebook, checklist, video guide, template, etc. and has to be of real value to your visitors.
By giving offering something that can help them for free, this helps to build trust in you. Then at a later stage, you can start selling relevant products to them and start earning commissions.
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