Since the advent of the internet age, blogging has been one of the mainstays online. People have been writing and reading blogs en masse for decades now. Many of these people are earning consistent incomes from blogging. They are not necessarily professional writers (or even particularly good ones) but they have something interesting and relevant to say.
With a job market that will be unsteady for the foreseeable future, blogging is still a reliable way to make money. If you know how to take advantage of advertising and affiliate links, you can find success regardless of the state of the economy.
Here are some tips on how to get a lucrative blog started in 2020.
Get web hosting
The first step you will have to take is administrative and not particularly exciting. You will need to choose and pay for web hosting. Web hosting provides you with space on a server to get your website online.
Reliable web hosting is crucial if you are actually going to make money from your blog. Along with hosting, you will need to choose a content management system (CMS) which provides tools for creating an attractive website.
WordPress is the most popular CMS, and you can even get WordPress hosting if you go this route. These are the very first decisions you will have to make on the way to getting a successful blog going.
Choose a niche
A lot of people are skeptical of the success of blogging in 2020. This is in part because they assume that everything that can be said is already being said by a bigger, more established blogger. While this is a valid concern, it should not stop you from creating a blog.
In 2020, you need to go niche with your blog. With billions of people online, there is an audience for everything. If you choose a topic like “finance,” you will be in competition with a ton of established companies. However, if you choose a niche topic like family budgeting, your blog is more targeted and has far fewer competitors. Nonetheless, there is still a large audience.
Work on SEO
Search engine optimization (SEO) is the bane of many bloggers’ existence. SEO dictates how a blog needs to be written in order to rank on the search engines. In other words, it ensures that your blog is found. For some, this feels very constrictive. However, if you start blogging with a good grasp of SEO, it will simply give you a framework within which you can do your best work.
SEO has evolved over the years and is not as simple as it once was. Stuffing keywords into your blog posts is not going to get you a high ranking. Search engines today look at context, as well as the relative authority of your site. They check if you are linking to reliable websites and if reliable websites are linking back to you.
There are many blogs on best SEO practices that can help you get a good handle on the subject.
Blogging is still a good way of making money in 2020. If you follow the right guidelines, you too can work towards millions of reade
