These days we are all looking for an online solution that allows us to work remotely and make money.

And although there are many ways to make money online, starting a blog might be the most convenient.

But don’t get this wrong. Like any business, blogging takes time and work.

That is why we have created a thorough guide to explain step by step how to make money with a blog for beginners.

In fact, we are going to tell you all you need for how to make your first $100 so you can do the same from today.

This page may content affiliate links. Click here to read our disclosure

Nobody likes a slow website.

When somebody is looking for something on the internet and find your blog, they want to see the solution to their problems fast. So even if your blog has the answer to their questions but takes ages to load, the most likely is that they are going to leave.

So if you want to start making money online you need to fix that.

A quick way to fix this: go for paid hosting.

Why?

• The number one reason: Speed. Speed is one of the top factors that has a great impact on a website. If you’re a business and your site is hosted on a shared server, which free web hosts use, you’ll be losing customers to a competitor who’s on a dedicated server or virtual private server. Investing in a paid web hosting service will pay off nicely in page load speed.
• Also, you have full control over your blog, including in its layout, search engine optimization, advertising revenue, additional functions, and more.

There is a lot of competition out there, so starting with a good hosting is a must for how to make money with a blog for beginners and for everybody.

Here in Nomads RTW we use Bluehost and it works great. Some of the reasons we recommend it are:

• You get a free domain name for life
• They provide 24/7  customer support
• You can host multiple domains and websites on your account (up to 100 WordPress sites)
• They give you unlimited space and transfer bandwidth
• The price is very competitive
• Tons of other features that other hosting plans at this price point don’t have.

So if you want to make a difference starting now, you just need to follow these steps.

This is what you do:

• Check for the best hosting platforms out there. ( We recommend Bluehost)
• Transfer your domain. This is pretty straight forward with Bluehost and they also have a customer service who can help at any time.

• Once is completed, which can take up to 5 days, you’ll start seeing some improvements in your site speed which you can double-check in GTMetrix.

If you need more details, you can check here how to start a blog with Bluehost or transfer your domain in 4 easy steps.

For us, this change to Bluehost from WordPress meant a lower bounce rate, which leads to people staying longer on our website and doubled our page sessions.

Ultimately this means that more people convert or buy from your affiliates or your products, which is the next point.

What is affiliate marketing?

Affiliate marketing is to promote other people’s products on your blog, and when someone makes a purchase, you make a commission off it.

There are so many affiliate programs out there but using all of them is not going to help you at all.

In fact, that was one of our first mistakes. We applied to all the affiliates we could, but we were forgetting about the most important part of all: Affiliates don’t sell by themselves.

So instead, just focus in a few to start with and create a content strategy.

This is one of the easiest ways on how to make money with a blog for beginners.

This is what you do:

• Check for the best affiliate programs for your niche. As we said, start only with a few of them until you get to know how they work. For starters, we would suggest joining Amazon and CJ.
• Within your chosen affiliates, think about which product or services would be the most interesting for your audience. For example, we know everybody loves good deals and useful travel gear, so we thought about linking both travel + products deals in a blog post (more on this in the next point)
• Write an extensive and informative blog post including all the information anybody could need, and include the relevant affiliates links in the post. With this idea and the previous one, we created a page for Amazon Prime Day with the best travel deals. Here, we linked our travel background with Amazon deals, which people love. All the links in this post are affiliates, which means if somebody clicks and buy something, we earn our deserved commission ;)
• Promote your content. Lastly, people need to find your content so you can start making money. You can use social media and your email list to let people know about your post. Also, you can create Facebook or Google Ads. We’ll give you some more tips on promoting your content later on.

In the end, ideally you should end up with a post like this:

Now, the more traffic you get to this post, the more money you could make. This is an example of Amazon Income last month where we only had 3300 visits:

So imagine what you could make if you drive much more traffic to this kind of post. And that is how big bloggers make a lot of money just with Amazon affiliates.

You can also check here the top 5 affiliates you could use to make money.

Sometimes people are scared to create their own product.

But let us tell you something. This is the best way for how to start to make money with a blog for beginners.

Why? Because by creating a product you can start making money immediately with something that belongs to you. And it does not need to be complicated.

There are many different products you can create, but we are going to mention only the easiest ones which work for us:

• Ebook. Think about it as a long post. Create something people are interested in and put all your knowledge on it. You could sell it then between $5 -$30.
• Email course. You could easily create a series of emails to teach something. This does not need to be a massive course as long as you manage to do this interesting. It is also a great way to catch subscribers.
• Other ideas are webinars and online courses, but these take more time and are more complicated for beginners.

So now we have some ideas, let’s put them into action.

This what you do:

• Brainstorm content ideas. Find an interesting topic that your audience is willing to learn about and eventually even willing to pay for it. Some places where to start to find topics people are interested in are:
  • Buzzsumo. Insert your keywords ideas and see if that works.
  • Amazon Kindle. Simply insert your keywords ideas in the top bar and look for books with a lot of comments and likes. That will mean people are interested in that topic.
  • Forums. Forums like Reddit and Quora are some of the best places to find a lot of useful information. Here you can see what people are struggling about and give you many good ideas on what to create.
• Once you have an idea on what you want to write about, you just need to start writing. If you choose to write an ebook and you have a Mac, “pages” works great and is what we use. Otherwise, Google Docs is another option.
  If what you have chosen is an email course, then we suggest you invest in a good email marketing tool, but we are going to cover this later on.
• Lastly, you will need to figure out how you’re going to accept payments and deliver the product to your customers. You can do this easily through a service like Easy Digital Downloads (EDD). This is the one we use and is pretty easy to use and people can pay via Paypal also.

Once you do all this, you will need to promote your content.

In our case, we have created an ebook about traveling Vietnam by motorbike, and as we grow in traffic we are growing in sales also:

So this is something you could also do at any time and start making money.

Many bloggers claim that they make most of their money out of email marketing, and we did not know about this until we changed our provider one month ago.

The reason why email marketing is so powerful is that the people you have in your email list are already engaged people. So anytime you sent them out an email about a blog post with your favorites affiliate products or your own products, they are more likely to buy.

You don’t need a big email list. You just need engaged people in your list.

This might be the foundation on how to make money with a blog for beginners, so needs to be done properly.

So how do you do all that?

This is what you do:

• First, you want to have a great email marketing tool. One where you can create Opt-in form to catch subscribers, send email automation, is easy to use and have a great customer service. We have used 3 so far and the last month we changed to Converkit, and we are already seeing the difference. Their service is affordable, easy to use and you can try it for free. So we would recommend you give it a try and see by yourself.
• Then you will need to create an opt-in form to catch subscribers. Converkit has many opt-in form templates you can choose from directly integrated with the message system. Which makes it extra easy to set up, use and start converting subscribers easily.
  • Ideally, the opt-in form would be something related to the final product you want to sell. So for example, if I sell a photography course, my opt-in form would be a “photography cheat sheet” or a “5 days photography challenge email course”.  That way, if people sign up, I know they will be interested in the photography course I want to sell them.
• Once you have your Opt-in form offer and people sign, make sure you send them something valuable. It could be that free email course we mentioned, a printable or something else that only subscribers has access to. You need to let them know how valuable they are to you so they open your emails and keep the interest.
• Lastly, after providing them with some free and valuable stuff, you can send them the relevant product you have for them and see those numbers rolling. After you have nurtured them with valuable info and they have opened your emails and trust you, they will be more willing to buy from you.

How to create an email sequence

This is an example of a Converkit sequence we are creating now with a new photography bundle we have:

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is one of the most important things for bloggers.

SEO is the process of increasing the quality and quantity of website traffic by increasing visibility of a website or a web page to users of a web search engine. Which means, this is how people are going to find you on Google.

Basic SEO is not as hard as people might think, and it plays a big role in how to make money with a blog for beginners and for advanced users.

But don’t worry, because we are going to tell you the two only tools you need to change your SEO game and make it work:

• Yoast SEO.  Is a free WordPress plug-in which will help you to improve your SEO as you write.
• Keysearch. Is a powerful and useful keywords research tool which help you finding the right keywords and much more.

This is what you do:

• First, start by installing Yoast SEO plugin in your WordPress site. This plug-in wil help you to improve your SEO copy as you write your posts. The good thing is that you don’t need to know much since this plug-in will cover all the SEO basics for you.
• Second, you need to find a topic for your post with good search volume and easy to rank for in Google. For this, we suggest you use long-tail keywords (three or four keywords phrases which are very specific ) and Keysearch. Keysearch is the most affordable and complete keyword research tool. Without a tool like this, there is no way you can even start implementing SEO. You can see here how it works
• Once you have your keyword is time to write a 900+ words and SEO rich post. It is important to create quality over quantity.
• Once all is written,  fill out the Yoast SEO information which you can find at the bottom of the post

• Lastly, make sure you follow all Yoast suggestions in “SEO analysis” tab until you have a green dot, which means is SEO ready.

With only those 2 tools, we can guarantee you’ll improve your SEO overall. However, to see results with SEO takes time, so be patient.

One of the easiest way to promote your content is using social media.

It does not matter how good your posts are if you cannot take it to your readers.

So you always need a strategy on how to promote your content. Social media makes this easier.

However, is a mistake to try to cover all the different social media websites. Instead, choose the one which brings you more traffic and master it.

We have seen many people driving most of their traffic from Reddit or Facebook, and as long as it works, it is great.

In our case, we have focused our effort in one, using 2 different tools.

• Pinterest
  1. Tailwind
  2. Canva

We’ll tell you now how to make money with a blog for beginners using these tools together with Pinterest.

Let’s dive in on how we do it and how you can also do it.

This is what you do:

• First, sign up to Pinterest and create a business account. That way you can check your analytics later on.
• Create at least 20 boards related to your niche and write a keyword-rich description on each board.. You should also add at least 10 pins to each board before adding yours so Pinterest now what are these boards about.
• Then, sign up to Tailwind. Tailwind is a tool which will save you time in posting to Pinterest (and Instagram) You can start a free trial, so you can see if it works for you or not before committing, so don’t worry.
• Create a great pin using Canva. Don’t forget to add a compelling  and readable title.
• Upload this pin to your blog post as an image. Write a rich description for the pin, using the keywords you want to rank for, which you are also using in your post.
• Download Tailwind Chrome extension
• Now, hover over your pin image in your blog post, and click on the Tailwind icon to schedule it. Something like this should appear:
  
• Add the pin only to the most relevant boards. That means you should start scheduling to the boards that better matches the pin and its content.
• Once you have added the boards click in green button at the bottom to schedule it.
  

Repeat the process for all your blog posts.

The best thing about Tailwind and the reason why we use it is that we can plan the content and bring traffic for the whole week just by sitting one hour a week. So it is a real time saver.

What we also love is that you set it to post it at the best time, so you don’t need to do manual pinning all the time.

There are some other tips on how to make money with a blog for beginners.

But from what we have seen, the tips we have shared before, are the ones which have worked better for us.

Nonetheless, another tips about making money with a blog are:

• Google Adsense. Bear in mind you need a lot of traffic to make a decent amount.
• Online Surveys. There are many people which make money by taking paid surveys.
• Freelance Writing. There also serveral platforms you can use to write as a freelancer. The one we have tried and know that works is Upwork.

We have been blogging for a year now but only in our spare time since we both work full time.

Last month, we invested a lot more time and resources than before to see how it would change.

The result, we doubled our traffic, tripled our email list and started to make some money by implementing each of the tips up there.

You just need to be patient and consistent. And if you follow each of the tips aboce, we are sure you will soon see results as well!

Let us know in the comments below if you already use any of them and which one did you find the most useful.