WordPress is probably the number one free blogging platform in today’s society. Thus thousands of bloggers around the world use WordPress to power their blogs (including me). But how can WordPress, a FREE blogging platform, earn you some significant income? Here is a step-by-step guide showing how to make money with WordPress.
1.) Select a Niche
The absolute MOST IMPORTANT element of a website/blog is the niche. Choose a specific and unique niche you feel comfortable writing about. For example, if you’re really good at web design, write about a specific part of web design such as coding. Make sure that your niche isn’t vague, because then search engines like Google and Yahoo! will NEVER find your website/blog.
Once you’ve chosen your niche, brainstorm some articles you can write. Use JuliaMono Font in Urvanov/Crayon Syntax Highlighter This will help in the long run; trust me, you don’t want to start a blog and half a year down the road you have a sever brain fart and can’t write any more articles. Make sure your niche is specific but broad enough so you can write at least 2,000 articles on it!
2.) Create Your WordPress Blog
You need to create a WordPress blog. WordPress is a free blogging platform, but you will need a website first, and the website needs to be hosted one of two ways: Free Hosting or Paid Hosting.
Free Hosting
If you’re looking for a free hosting service to host WordPress, the best solution for you would probably be WordPress.com hosting. I recommend this option because it is 100% free and from WordPress itself! The WordPress platform automatically comes with the free web hosting service from WordPress.com (as the name suggests) and you won’t have to worry about all the complications of web hosting (name servers, updates, mysql databases, etc.)! Plus, setup is a breeze and you get to choose your own domain (has to be a subdomain of WordPress.com though). Trust me, free WordPress hosting doesn’t getting any better than WordPress.com!
Another option would be finding free web hosting services and installing WordPress manually. This is not recommended because it takes a lot of hassle finding a 100% free web hosting service with a good up-time and support for WordPress. I would definitely recommend WordPress.com hosting over free web hosting.
The last and worst (in my point of view) option for free WordPress hosting is self-hosting your website. This is the MOST complicated process as you have to port forward according to your router, install a self-hosting service such as WAMP, and get a free domain from No-Ip.org (subdomain of course). The worst part about it is that your website will have absolutely NO bandwidth due to the fact that you yourself are hosting your website. I’m not even going to go in-depth with this; you can Google how to self-host WordPress because I will not waste my time explaining my least recommended method of free web hosting.
Paid Hosting
Paid Hosting allows you to have complete control over your WordPress blog (you can write whatever you want; with WordPress.com hosting you have to abide by their terms of service). Bloggers often use this to their advantage, as creating beautiful-looking templates and site design is a breeze with paid hosting. First, you’ll need to find a good web hosting service. I recommend HostGator because (in my humble opinion) they are cheap yet offer the best support and compatibility for WordPress. With HostGator, simply sign up (you get a free domain with any plan) and in your control panel you can 1-click install WordPress! Once you’ve installed WordPress, you’ll be good to go!
3.) Get a Theme, Configure WordPress Widgets, and Start Writing Stuff!
Once you’ve set up WordPress, I recommend selecting a theme. WordPress has a large variety of themes, and you can decide on which one suits your blog the best. The second step after installing WordPress is installing widgets. Widgets are special components of your WordPress blog that each have a specific function.
In my opinion, SEO, Backup, Cache, and anti-Spam are the widgets you absolutely need. Other fancy widgets are up to your discretion. After installing the widgets (you can decide which ones you need and which ones you don’t), get ready to write! Remember step one? Hopefully you can already spit out a couple of blog posts from your brainstorming!
4.) Receive Traffic
As a webmaster, I really can’t emphasize the importance of traffic. You may have the BEST article on the planet, but if your blog’s only loyal visitor is your mom, the world won’t be able to see your beautiful writing. That’s why traffic is essential to your blog’s survival.
To start out, I immediately recommend you submit your site only to the top search engines (Google, Yahoo!, Bing). As a little precaution, I urge you to not focus on submitting your site to too many search engines, because most of the time search engines should find your website automatically.
Generating some beginning traffic is pretty easy, given that you have friends and family. Use FaceBook, Twitter, and whatever other methods to let everyone know about your website. Assuming that you know more than 50 people in the world, this should be pretty easy and you should begin to have some steady traffic. Not much, but steady.