Starting a blog as a business is pretty much like opening a corner store on your local high street except that your blog's audience reach is global.

 I know this sounds confusing to someone who knows very little about starting and growing a blogging business but I am going to break it down here for you in a way you can understand and possibly inspire you to create your blog business plan this year.

And with that said, let's get started...


Starting A Traditional Business On High Street vs Starting An Online Blogging Business

Traditionally, If you were starting a brick and mortar business on the high street, there are similarities to starting a blog.

For your high street business, you would need to rent a shop where your business would trade from with your targeted audience.

 In that sense you would need to sign up a tenancy agreement for the year or more...

If you are starting a blog, you would need a web hosting provider who would host your website files that serve as your virtual real estate to facilitate business transactions. 

And for that, there are plenty of web hosting companies that can host your blog business. 

This blog you are reading is hosted by Bluehost. While there are plenty of reasons for choosing your web hosting carefully, the main reason I have always hosted my blogs over at Bluehost is simply because of their impeccable customer support and reliability.

What Is Web Hosting?

In a nutshell, think of Web hosting as your landlord who would rent you out a shop in which you can start stocking your merchandise for sale to local customers.

 Most of the web hosts you are going to use when building your business extension online are specialist companies whose entire business model is built around renting out bundled software and technologies as a service.

Web hosting providers have made it possible for anyone starting a business online share expensive technologies that would have not been possible for a startup to afford on their own.

Sounds like a cliche, but hosting a website on the internet 24/7 requires security, server purchases, software applications that handle transactions securely and many more.

Luckily for us, once the web hosting company hosts your website, all the headaches of running servers, hiring technical staff is taken care of at a fractional cost while your users can access our online merchandise by typing in your web address (domain name) in their web browser.

Simply put, every time a potential client interacts with your website via the internet connection, their computer connects to the server your website is hosted on through a secured data tunnel.

Now that we have established how the logistics of a physical location based business works in relation to an online business, let's take a look at what exactly the online business compares to the location based...

Online Business vs Location Business

Launching your business offline, means your business dealings take place only at your location when a customer physically visits your location to do the actual shopping.

While is you start an e-commerce business or a blog, your actual business dealings actually takes place at your domain address. And that makes any domain name registered for business a very very crucial part of your business assets.

What It Cost To Start A Business

Starting your business offline in comparison to starting your business online breaks down to this:

The cost of renting a shop on high street anywhere from $5K-$10K per year while domain registration is anything from $15-$25 per year.

How Do You Select a Domain Name?

One of the hardest parts of starting a blog that makes money is selecting a domain name. It feels like it’s your entire identity.

I can’t remember all the different options I came up with initially, but I do know I settled on Dataracehero.com. When you have made your domain choice, for some reason, something might not feel right and that is ok just get started.

Eventually, I started adding words to come up with a name that would stand out and landed on that one.

Building A Sales And Marketing Team For Your Business.

Every business needs to make sales happen as quickly as possible. So in a traditional offline business, you would employ a team of sales team to actually do the selling activities and fulfill the functions of the business.

How ever when you start a business online, this particular process of employing human beings as your sales team is actually replaced by use of automation tools like Sales funnels, email marketing auto-responders, sales pages built with state of the art drag and drop landing page software and online shopping carts.


Bluehost is also an approved WordPress hosting recommended by WordPress's parent company Automatic. So if you are starting a blog, I recommend Bluehost as your web host.

How I Discovered Blogging

Starting a blog and earn money online as a work from home dad it’s not something that came to me naturally. Yes, I had a passion for writing and a dream to turn my passion into a real income revenue stream my family and I COULD LIVE ON.

However, the biggest hurdle for me as with anyone starting a blog is the lack of helpful guide for starting and growing a wildly profitable blog at the time. It hasn’t been all that long when I was jumping from a blog guide to the next Youtube video trying to piece together best blogging resources I could use to launch a profitable blog.

Today when I look back, From the experience I have had, this blog makes me believe it must feel like a Godsend start a blog guide for anyone launching a blog today.

And that is why I dare you to try WordPress if you are thinking about starting a blog and make money helping people solve problems we all face on a day to day basis. Now my indoctrination into the WordPress fanatics began way back when I started blogging in November 2009. 

Then, my goal was to launch a blog as a means of connecting with a potential customer that I can market the Digital Advertising business I owned at the time. I was told blogs are good for search engine traffic, but that is all I knew about blogs.

As I continued to publish my blog and began my journey in the blogosphere I came to realize that blogs, while certainly were fantastic for search engine traffic, are even much more than a mere search engine marketing tool.

 

Am often told how obsessed I am with small scale business ideas, no wonder starting a blog that guides business owners how to navigate around complexities of running a blog as a business comes naturally to me!

Blogs are outlets for creativity. Blogs influence people. Blogs are communication devices, educational resources and sources of entertainment.

They connect people, spread ideas, foster friendships, sway political opinion and report news.
Blogs can be almost anything you want them to be, but what I came to experience as a result of blogging, is a new way of life.

Every day I indulge in a hobby and communicate with like-minded individuals, and best of all, I get paid to do it.

How do I get paid? Well, I monetize my blog! I will break down more on the blog monetization later and show you how blogs make money, for now let me share with you all the steps you need to go through to start your blog.

If you love writing, there is no shortage of ways to monetise your passion for creating content.

Take Caitlin for example, she is an accomplished publisher who started as a freelancer, and now she also makes money running her own membership site where she trains up and coming content creators.

You too could do the same! All you need is start from where you are. 

Whether you want to start a blog and make money as a freelancer or you want to launch your blog and make money as an affiliate then scale up your business by launching your own product on the market.

 It's all here!

More and more millennials are turning to online opportunities as the entry barrier is low enough to get you started today at the cost of a Starbucks cup of coffee!

How To Choose A Niche For Your Blog?

Choosing a niche for your blog is the linchpin to cementing what your blogging goals long and short term will look like. Niche selections are based on who you want to be of service to.


Would you like to provide valuable content to a demographic niche or a topical niche market?


But before we break these two down, let's first take a look at what niche markets are and why you should care to select your niche market?


What Is A Niche Market Anyway?

A niche market is a select group of a marketable audience your blog is going to focus in creating content that directly address the problems they are actively looking for help with. 


A perfect example for a niche market in our case is that we focus on writing business guides that helps newbies how to start and grow a wildly profitable business focusing entirely on Starting affiliate marketing that scales into launching your very own product or service on the market, How to start a from being a freelancer to creating a passive income generating business, selling e-books,  online courses and audio content.

Many online gurus won’t tell you that there are actually two types of general niches that you could choose to focus your research on.

Topical Niche

The first we take a look on here is a topic niche. And if you are not well versed in how to do niche research, don’t worry we will go over that step by step.

 

Now topical niche sites are those blogs which only create content about a specific topic as opposed to the demographic niche where you blog about multiple topics.

Demographic Niche

As mentioned above, any demographically oriented niche is predominantly hyper-focused on a specific audience.

I know you are thinking, isn’t all these niche types have an audience?

Exactly! They all fall in a filtered niche audience, however, when you go down one or two levels deep, you will find that you have a super focused audience inside a niche audience.

 

Now what you will find is that more of what is taught about niche research by many online gurus will have your blog audience fall under the demographic niche.

 

This why I want you to be careful! So think of it this way, if you start your blog on a topic niche basis, then that could be a blog that’s all about Pet skin care tips.

 

And in this case, it would focus its content on subjects like how to get rid of scabs on your dog or things like that.

With that said, I believe you can see that this blog it’s all about pet skin care either that pet is a cat or dog, it could be pet dogs of any age, any breed, any gender. The only underlying key here is that your audience is one that cares for a flawless pet skin.

 

On the other hand, a demographic niche could be a blogger who targets people who are interested in let’s say ethical pet food products so you could have different topics besides just ethical pet food and talk about pet skin care, and go even wider into things like dog breeds, pet accessories or research about ethical pet grooming products, organic pet skin care remedies or how to change your pet dog’s diet so that you can have a pet free from scabs

 

My hope is that now you kind of see the difference between the topical niche blog which boils things a little bit more to a specific market audience while the demographic niche goes wider on a narrow market audience.

 

If there is a takeaway, we don’t necessarily care as much about the people who are reading it’s more about the topic that you’re blogging about.

 

And then demographic niche is where you really have a specific person in mind who is going to want to read about all of these different topics because they’re interested in this kind of general topical idea

How to set up your WordPress Blog?


To start setting up your blog, Let’s begin with the basics of getting your blog set up and we'll tackle making money later as we go on.

You Probably Are Wondering What the heck is a Domain?

A Domain Name System, or DNS is just a fancy naming system used for giving addresses to websites and web pages. It's the place readers and site visitors are going to find you and it's the grounds for where you're going to start making money online.

One easy example of domains is: Dataracehero.com


In all your time online you’ve spent countless hours on domains and may not have known it. Just by browsing the internet, you’re on a domain so you too will need to have one for yourself.



Eddie

As small scale business and content strategist getting a good hang of SEO, Email marketing, long form and data-driven business decision making is something that I take seriously. A good day at the office for me is when the little guy wins and probably that is what motivates me to get out of bed and help small online businesses to take on opportunities available online. The best way I know better is through creation of content that convert. Am a proud founder and content strategist here and am loving every minute of it!

2 Comments

Which WordPress Theme Should I Use - New Blogger · November 12, 2018 at 4:29 pm

[…] When starting your new blog, also make sure your theme’s CSS output for titles and descriptors are always used to the allowed SEO standard. These will be the first items that google search rankings will be based on long before your audience sees when discovering your blog via a search engine. […]

How To Earn Money Online - New Blogger · April 21, 2019 at 5:55 pm

[…] START A BLOG […]

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