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How to Start a Blog (and Make Money) in 22222The Ultimate Beginner's Guide to Start Blogging and Make Money in 6 Steps
This is my easy, step-by-step guide to learn how to start a blog and make money from it. For 10+ years, I’ve been blogging & making money online—this is the best way to start blogging (and soon make money from your blog) in 6 steps that’ll have you create a blog in 10 to 15 minutes.
2,167 replies to “How to Start a Blog (and Make Money) in 2025: Ultimate Beginner’s Guide to Start Blogging in 6 Steps”
Thanks Ryan. This guide was very useful. I literally started my blog yesterday thanks to you (Jan 1, 2019) and used many of the tips and tricks mentioned above.
Boom! I’m so glad to hear it, cheers to a successful first year of blogging 🍻
nice content keep it up and thanks for hosting and domain name provided
You’re welcome, Jahaarra!
Thanks for all the info Ryan. I thought this was going to be easy but your post made me think about the entire process. I am looking forward to attempting a blog with the information you posted here. I am definitely going to bookmark this page and refer back.
Good! You’re welcome, Jerry—glad I could help add some more context to this process of learning how to start a blog. It’s not too difficult to just get everything set up, optimized and running… but the real challenge is turning your blog into a true business.
No matter how you slice it (and choose to monetize), that’ll take a little bit of time and a lot of thoughtful effort. But that being said, you can definitely get there if you create strong habits around writing, regularly publishing and promoting your work. I’m on your team!
Very insightful tutorial… I just wonder! This is a very deep and clear guideline for the beginners who want to start a blog in 2019. I will definitely recommend your article to my community. As a Web Developer, I can say, I’ve read lots of articles about starting a blog but haven’t read one like yours ever before.
Thanks, Golam! I appreciate the kind words 🙏
I absolutely love this article. I have been doing a LOT of research lately, but I came back to this page. You for sure know what you are talking about and have everything simplified for beginners like me. I am grateful for your help and this page! I have a set date to start, and I am super excited to start my blogging journey! Thank you for all your expert advice and tips!
You’re so welcome, Crystal! I’m pumped you got a lot of value out of this guide—that was definitely the goal.
Stop back by with more questions once you officially start your blog and hit the ground running. I’m here! 👋
Well crystal.. I also make websites and blogs for a long time now and i have been doing it on WORDPRESS.
It is the best CMS and very easy for beginers.
Whoooo, you have covered a lot in this article. I am sure this will be helpful for beginners. Some of the tips included are fabulous and valuable. Keep up the good work mate!
Thanks, Shohib! 👌
Ryan,
First off, well done. This is a serious read and it covers the topics so well.
It does take work but if someone follows your guide success will be there. Maybe it just needs an item #11 – Perseverance. Many times the difference between success and failure is seeing it through and putting in the effort even when you’re not seeing the immediate results.
But I do have a question and perhaps you already have covered it elsewhere. The list is great and it covers all of the topics to get someone going. With mobile-first indexing I’ve been reading both from Google’s Lighthouse documents as well as on many blogs that loading speed is getting not only bigger, but crucial now. I suppose because if you’re out and about maybe you don’t have broadband but maybe it’s just that Google can demand more speed and if you want to get to the top of the heap you do that.
To have a blog make that kind of money you must have had some serious traffic. You must have had to push some content to CDNs, optimized images, things like that to get the speed up outside of a webserver with 1,000 HP 🙂
Have you written on anything along those challenges you cleared? I’m am rapidly trying to absorb it, especially because I keep finding myself on Google’s PageSpeed Insight tool and my site has a 100 on the Desktop rating from google using lighthouse but only a 58 (it was a 38 before so hey…) on Mobile. I don’t even know anything about these new image formats like JPEG2000 and all of these new things and it’s enough to give me a headache.
Perhaps even some wordpress plugins that work wonders, things like that. I’d love to hear some of the challenges I can expect to overcome when I get some real traffic.
Thanks and cheers on an extremely well-written article that will stand the test of time.
Thanks so much, John! And for a super thoughtful comment. You’re right about #11 needing to be perseverance too 🙏
Yeah, page load speed is definitely an increasingly important factor in ranking well—but I’ll say that it’s not as important when you’re just getting started with your blog. After crossing around 100,000 monthly readers, I had to migrate my site’s hosting over to Kinsta (https://kinsta.com/?kaid=ZSBZJKNNNPLS) which has been both lightning fast and ridiculously affordable for me. Plus their support team is super quick & flexible. Today, my site gets around 250,000 to 300,000 monthly readers for context.
I haven’t written anything in-depth yet about optimizing for page load speed, but getting super premium WordPress hosting (once you can justify the expense and offset it by income from your site/having enough readers) is by far the biggest bang for your buck in load speed gains. That being said, I’ve got a few WordPress plugins that help immensely, so check out…
Ajax Load More and Ajax Load More: Comments (adds a button to “load more” buttons to things like your comments section of posts, rather than default trying to load what for me is often hundreds of comments every time a post loads)
Autoptimize
Cache External Scripts
NIX Gravatar Cache
Smush (automatically optimizes/reduces image file sizes during upload)
Lazy Load (allows for loading images as you scroll to them in a post, rather than automatically loading all images in an article upon every new session)
Those are the basics I use today! I also have a developer friend who helps me out with testing new things, making custom updates/enhancements here and there, so I’ll do a more in-depth post with him (perhaps an interview) talking in more detail soon!
My biggest advice to you at this stage though—is to focus only on what matters most right now… if you’re not yet getting thousands of readers to your blog, then spending a ton of time, effort, money on optimizing for page load speed is solving for the wrong problem. Think of it like triage—go for solving the most crucial issue first, and then eventually it’ll naturally make more sense to invest in page load speed improvements.
Hi! I am about to start a blog and I have learned so much from reading your article. Is it okay to reference the readers on my blog to your site? I wanted to ask permission since you give so much good advice. I’ve done so much research my brain hurts, but in general, you have it simply put here. This article makes it easy for new bloggers like myself to start. I want to give you credit of how I learned to start and from where. I am so happy I found your site!
Yes, absolutely! As far as best practices… whenever you find an article on a website that you want to reference (and link to) from a post on your own blog, it’s 100% ok to mention that article and link to it.
When you’re doing research to compile an article for your own blog, and you come across another (helpful) piece of content out there on the Internet and you incorporate a quote, idea, research, or piece of information from that article into your own… it’s your responsibility to appropriately cite where that idea/quote/research/information came from with a simple mention like, “Source: [Title of Article by Author Name]” and also include the link to that article you pulled from. If you can hyperlink the article title to the URL of the article, then that’s perfect procedure.
Thank you for your helpful information! I was just taking notes from this article. I am about to sign up for your class, too. I want to make sure I have everything put together before I start.
Woo! Awesome, let me know if you have any other questions as you keep moving forward 🙏
This guide is mind blowing, i am writing this comment after settling my own website based on guideline you have given in this amazing piece of art.
I want to thank you a lot,this was the first post google suggested to me while i searched for How to start a blog.I got answers for my all questions.
The most challenging part was to finding Hosting account, I have gone through other review website but ultimately purchased Bluehost, afterall it was suggested by you
Really Amazing and once again very thankful for starting my Blogging journey.Hope to get more content on KeyWord Research.
Woo! I’m so glad you found this guide, Kirtish. Any more questions you have as you keep moving along, please let me know here in the comments.
Regarding keyword research: What exactly would be most helpful for you in terms of this subject? Maybe a step-by-step tutorial on how to do keyword research to find good blog post ideas? Or something else?
Hi, Congratulations on such an in-depth post! It must have taken a long time to write.
I’d like to ask you about advertising. Do you still have adverts on your site? (I can’t see any so they must be subtle.)
It always seems that advertising is the least effective way of making money from blogging. I wonder why high profile bloggers such as yourself continue with advertising as a revenue stream?
Love to hear your thoughts.
Did it ever! This post is (so far) the culmination of 30-40 hours of writing time. And I’d say I add about 3-5 hours of updates, FAQs, new sections, case studies, examples and more in-depth material every month or two 😊
I DO have advertisements on my site—just not on this exact post. I’ve chosen not to host ads on this post (and only include affiliate links as a channel for monetizing this post) because ads can be a bit distracting from the content, and I often don’t turn them onto my most trafficked/helpful posts for that reason—as long as there’s another monetization strategy at work somewhere. You can check out ads both within the content and in the sidebar of this post though: https://staging.ryrob.com/make-money-online/
Traditional blog ads aren’t much of a revenue source for me (usually less than $1,000/mo). Some networks like MediaVine could generate more with the traffic I get, but that’s a decent shift from my current business model…
Right now if I’m being honest, I’d say I have some ads on my blog mainly for the reasons that (1) it’s some marginal incremental revenue and I’m a big fan of diversification, plus (2) it’s still a legacy holdover from where I started… when $1,000/mo in extra income from my blog was an insanely huge win. During 2018, I started really taking serious an adjustment to incorporate new revenue sources (affiliates & courses primarily), so now that those numbers have grown quite a bit, ad revenue looks small in comparison.
But I know that for most bloggers, an extra $1,000/mo is still huge! So I plan to keep my blog advertisements rolling forward for at least the foreseeable future so that I’m tracking how much ad revenue you can generate from higher levels of readership… plus it’s good incremental revenue and helps me stay at least a little more diversified.
Hey Ryan,
You had done fab work, I always want to start a personal blog but with a busy work schedule not able to make it live. How you are able to write such lengthy blogs, many times I tried to write long blogs for my company but not able to do. can you please tell me your mantra for content curation and presentation.
Great question! And I’m sorry to say there’s no magic answer to it. I know what works well for me, and the most success I’ve seen with students in my courses (in terms of becoming stronger writers) comes from doing one fairly simple thing…
And that’s creating a regular writing HABIT. That means finding at least a day or two each week (the more often, the better) when you can sit down for uninterrupted blocks of time—ideally at least a couple hours or more—to focus on just writing. Don’t put undue pressure on yourself to produce a specific end result or number of words… the purpose is to just create a habit of sitting down to write. If you can do this consistently (you’ll also benefit from reading the work of more experienced/skilled writers) and you have the hunger to improve in your writing abilities, then you will improve over time. But it takes time, practice, experimentation, and in my experience, a lot of feedback from your readers along the way to shape your style and get truly great at producing long-form content.
Dear Ryan:
Thank you for a real-time real easy explanation of blogging for us non-techy people out there looking to brand ourselves and become more entrepreneurial. I am in healthcare (previously a sales career) and made a career change at 43 (yikes) as I needed a change and Physical Therapy can be pretty nifty when you help someone walk again, become more functional and be able to live their life versus endure it. I am seeing some serious changes in my industry resulting in massive reductions in insurance reimbursement while the cost of doing business continues to increase and continually defending your license results in some superhero-like efforts. The concept of blogging, sharing experiences and best practices appears to be an excellent way to maintain sanity through “productive storytelling” but also share methods of overcoming practice patterns that no longer work in real time. I look forward to learning more from you and starting to develop articles that hopefully will result in some passive income(s). Thank you and I look forward to getting in gear!
It sounds to me like you’re definitely getting into learning how to start a blog for the right reasons! 👏
I love this, Shirley. Keep us posted on your progress as you get everything up and running—I bet there are some great communities/online forums where you’ll be able to find/interact with people who could benefit from your experience here too. That’ll be a good starting point for getting some early readers/people to help.
Hi Ryan,
You have done a great job. I believe that It will be a great help to many new bloggers out there.
Keep up the good work.
And have a good weekend.
Rgerads,
Robin
Thank you very much, Robin! 🎉
Ryan, I cannot explain you how helpful and motivating this guide is. Super work, thank you from the bottom of my heart.
You’re welcome, Subhadeep. Thanks for stopping by, and I’m glad this helped you along your blogging journey 😊
These tips are worth considering for a newbie. Starting a blog is extremely easy, but maintaining it and updating it on regular basis is pretty hard than we can imagine. Based on the competition today, it’s even harder. However, your tips are well explained and easy to follow.
🙏🙏🙏
These steps you gave makes it easy for a newbie to start a successful blog that will make them quit their 5-9 jobs. The infographics are now saved on my PC and synchronize across my devices. Can I use it on my website?
Glad to hear it, Adekunle! Thanks for stopping by.
And yes, of course you can share my infographics on your website—just be sure to cite this article (and link to it) as the source for where you originally discovered the infographic. <3
Ryan,
First and foremost, in the interest of being completely transparent, I am old and feel like I am aging rapidly. I would like to thank you for all your advice. You have compiled everything needed to become a blogger. I want to thank you for confirming that I am antiquated. I have researched blogging on and off for at least 5 years and I think your guides are amazingly well written and full of knowledge you have gained from getting into the trenches of it all.
I understand that you are very honest about income stream and sources available to help a new blogger be successful. I have read posts and you,r responses and I must say I am truly impressed with how quick you respond, to everyone . You respond with such enthusiasm and passion. I feel that what you have done is a tremendous undertaking that is quite impressive .
I was compelled to leave a message after reading everything you have compiled along with reading comments and your responses. I wish I knew what to ask you that would make me feel like I could persevere and take on all the challenges that I fear from lack of understanding the functionality of it all. I know if I could truly put into words all of my fears and doubts I have am certain you would have the answers or direct me to the resources. I find myself speechless.
This has been a dream, of mine for so long that I thought I should put it on my bucket list to ensure that I would do it sooner than later, I just realized my bucket has a hole in it,!
Congratulations on a job well done, for the humanity you show to everyone. I wish you nothing but the best and thank you for taking the time to read this comment.
Thank you so much, Debra! It’s such a pleasure to connect with you and I really appreciate your kind words.
The best advice I can give you today really is to just start… and to begin very slowly… think of learning to start a blog as beginning a slow hike up to the top of a tall mountain. It’s not realistic to sprint all the way up the mountain (unless you’re a world-class athlete 😂), so the journey needs to be taken one small step at a time. And that’s actually a blessing… you’ll learn SO much at each twist and turn along the way.
I know you can make this happen. It’ll take time. It’ll take continuous effort. It’ll take the persistence to push through setbacks and failures. But if you can adopt the mindset shift of… “Hey, ok… I’m GOING to do this. It’s just a matter of following Ryan’s steps along the way and adapting the little things to my own unique situations…” then I can promise you’ll make progress with your blog, Debra.
Let’s do this! And remember, I’m right here anytime you have a question. ❤️
Hi! I’m following this post to help start my blog and I am a little confused right now. Not sure if you would know where I went wrong or what to do, but I don’t think it would hurt to ask.
I just signed up for BlueHost and it took me to WordPress, but I am pretty sure it is automatically on wordpress.com not wordpress.org. You had suggested the .org so I would like to try that out but I’m not sure how to get there. I was never prompted.
Thank you!
Hey Kirsten! If you signed up through Bluehost, then it’ll by default be a WordPress.org setup that you’ll be going through—which is the right choice as it’s way more flexible/customizable for the future and you’ll own your own domain.
Hello! Boss, I really love your work! I will be applying the strategies you outlined in this article to my site that just went down some days ago.
Great to hear, Michael! Pumped you chose to start a blog.
Really really exhaustive post Ryan,
This can probably take anyone who’s starting out off the ground for sure.
I’d like to know, Do you have a community of bloggers on Facebook that I can join?
Thanks, expecting your reply.
Great question, Aleaji! I do have a Facebook group, but right now it only comes along with membership in my paid course, Built to Blog (https://ryrob.teachable.com/p/built-to-blog). I’d love to do a free/open Facebook group one day soon, but right now I’m prioritizing my time with the students in my paid course.