Blogging made easy
Written by: The Simple Cash Blog
So, you want to start a blog and drive tons of traffic?
But, what should you blog about?
What are some of the most profitable niches?
Deciding on your blog niche can be a daunting task for a beginner. Anyone who is willing to start a blog will go through these thoughts.
In fact, one of the most common reasons why blogs fail is that they chose to go with the wrong niche.
Read moreGuest Blog by: Pia de los Reyes from Thezebra.com
Want to create your own business, but don’t have enough employees or funds to get started? If so, a micro business might be for you.
In contrast to a small business, a micro business has fewer than 10 employees, makes under $250,000 per year, and demands less than $50,000 in startup costs. Since micro businesses don’t have stakes in multiple markets, they’re able to specialize and become experts in a particular area. Additionally, with fewer employees to consult and pay, business decisions are easier and business costs are lower.
Interested in starting your own micro business? Keep reading to learn how in six easy steps.
Read moreThen this post with my 13 favorite profitable home business ideas is for you!
This post is for everyone who is looking for a new source of income. A source of income that cannot be affected so easily by the pandemic and that allows you to do your work from the safest place we know during this crisis; your own home!
Image by DarkmoonArt_de from Pixabay
Disclaimer: This blog post contains affiliate links. I may earn a small commission to fund my coffee drinking habit if you use these links to make a purchase. You will not be charged extra. So it’s a win for everyone! Please note that I won’t link any products I don’t believe in or don’t resonate with my blog site. Thank you!
In this post, I have listed 13 profitable home business ideas. I have selected ways that do not require a diploma but really do allow you to earn a living.
No more never-ending surveys to complete for a few cents, no get-rich-quick schemes, no transcription work for $1 per audio minute, but real work, that you can earn a nice income with, as long as you work hard for it!
You can for example start earning money with work from home jobs like affiliate marketing, content writing, or by making money with your website. There are lots of opportunities out there!
Don’t let this pandemic be a negative experience only. Give it a positive twist instead by making it a useful period of time that you can use to build an online business that you will benefit from for many years to come!
If your business is not on the internet, then your business will be out of business.
Bill Gates
More people than ever are spending their days at home right now. And what do all these people do? Exactly! Strolling the internet!
And this means more online purchases are being made, which means; more money to be earned online for you as well!
And one of those ways to earn an online income is with a blog!
There are several ways to make money from blogging, such as affiliate marketing, advertising, or selling your own products on your blog.
Suppose you blog about beauty products, such as makeup, and you promote a certain product using an affiliate link in one of your blog posts, you will receive a commission each time a reader makes a purchase after clicking your affiliate link!
To start an affiliate marketing business you can join affiliate programs of individual brands in order to get access to affiliate links, or you can sign up for an affiliate network to get access to multiple brands and products in 1 place.
Personally, I find that the most convenient, unless a brand or product is not partnering with an affiliate network and I really want to promote that brand.
My favorite affiliate networks are:
So if you’re skilled with computers and writing content, this could be a very lucrative business for you! Plus, it’s the ideal way to build on passive income streams (aka make money while sleeping!!!)
If you want to make money with a blog and affiliate marketing, you obviously need to start out by launching your own blog. Click here for my step by step guide to start a blog.
After that, you can sign up for the affiliate programs or networks that fit your niche. In my blog post about affiliate marketing and affiliate networks, I explain how to sign up for those networks and where to find them!
Please also study my blog posts for more information about optimizing your blog for the search engines (SEO), promoting your blog on Pinterest, and attracting more blog traffic.
Don’t expect to make a lot of money out of affiliate marketing right away. It can take a while before you start to see results, and some people start to earn faster than others. This is also depending on your niche, the quality of your blogs, and how you promote them.
The great part about affiliate marketing is that once it starts to work, you really do earn money while you’re sleeping! And who wouldn’t want to wake up to some fresh new dollars on your bank account?!
Also interesting to read: Why you should start blogging for your business
Choose LyricalHost and use my special She Can Blog discount code of 10%. Click on the image below for the correct link and don’t forget to use the code! :))
Would you like to delve deeper into the topic of earning money with affiliate marketing? Then I highly recommended The She Approach’s affiliate marketing course From Zero To Superhero! It’s a small investment that will pay itself back in no time!
If you have a blog that you use to promote products through affiliate marketing, or that you use to sell your own products/services, I strongly recommend you to promote your blog posts on Pinterest.
Pinterest is basically a visual search engine and in 2021 video content and visual search are trending! Concluding: there are lots and lots of opportunities to make money with your blog on Pinterest for the year to come!
Here are some fun statistics to give you an impression of your chances to make money on Pinterest:
Source: Pinterest
So, don’t let miss out on these opportunities! If you have a blog, or sell products online, you MUST invest in this platform!
Image by Kaboompics .com via Pexels
In the posts below I explain all about Pinterest marketing and how to leverage it for your online business:
Is there anything you’re really good at that you could offer as a service on freelance platforms Fiverr or Upwork? For example:
Fiverr and Upwork operate very differently. Depending on your preferred method of working and depending on the job you do, you should decide which platform is best for you.
On Upwork, you search for assignments that you can apply for. There is a fixed fee linked to the assignment or you can bid on it. This gives you more negotiation opportunities compared to Fiverr, although it’s better not to expect too much from that – especially in the beginning – because other freelancers are standing in line to do the same job for a lower payment. 🙁 Later on, when your statistics prove you’re a quality freelancer to work with, you can start to ask for higher payments for the jobs you do!
On Fiverr it works differently; you use Gigs to indicate what you have to offer and clients can purchase a Gig from you for a fixed price. For each Gig, you can clearly state what the client can expect from this Gig and which price they need to pay for it. You can also create different packages, so clients can choose a basic cheaper package or a more expensive premium package.
Image by Daria Shevtsova via Pexels
On Creative Market and Etsy, you can sell your self-made digital products. If you have designing skills there are a lot of products you could create and sell. For example:
This is another way to earn passive income because once your designs are finished and published online, you can sit back and relax!
Ok… let’s be honest here, you do still need to promote your products. 😉
A great design tool that you can use to create amazing digital products, is Canva! And if you want to sell your digital products in a webshop on your blog, you can use SendOwl to process the transactions! your posts, you can use SendOwl to process the transactions.
I already mentioned this option earlier in this post but I want to discuss this option in more detail here. You can offer your translating and proofreading services online as well, and you don’t need any qualifications to do so. Most importantly, you need to be fluent in 2 languages, preferably English and another language.
You can offer your services on Fiverr or Upwork, or on websites that offer translation services. For those websites, you need to take a test to prove your language skills are sufficient enough to get started.
A proofreader checks documents for spelling, grammar and writing style. As a proofreader you’ll read the text thoroughly and edit and localize it if necessary. You can find lots of proofreading jobs on Upwork, and proofreading gigs on Fiverr are popular as well!
Tip: If you translate into or from the English language, I highly recommend the DeepL Translator to translate your texts, and Grammarly to check your text for spelling and grammar mistakes!
If you want to start as a translator, you can read more tips about translating in my blog post about how to improve your English writing skills here!
As a virtual assistant, you carry out, mainly administrative, tasks for your client. The tasks you perform as a virtual assistant can be very diverse and also depend on what you have to offer.
Many small businesses struggle to manage all their activities on their own, so they are happy to hire freelancers to help them manage their social media accounts, for example.
If you are skilled with Pinterest, you can become a Pinterest VA. If you’re skilled at multiple social media platforms, you can become an all-around social media manager.
As a social media manager you will manage 1 or more social media accounts for your client and you:
A great and fun job to do, and you can make a good living with it, if you’re good and passionate about it!
Do you have an administrative background and do you have a lot of knowledge and experience with the Microsoft Office package, then you can offer VA services focused on Office tasks.
Other services you could offer as Virtual Assistant:
Check for Virtual Assistant jobs on Upwork or offer your services as a Gig on Fiverr!
Image by Andrea Piacquadio via Pexels
Do you have a lot of knowledge of a particular topic? Then it’s time to write your own e-book and to sell it online! It will take some time to write it, but once your book is ready for sale you can earn endless passive income with it and start writing your next e-book. 😉
Create the design for your e-book with design tool Canva and sell it on Amazon Kindle or on your own website.
Just like writing an e-book, you can also share and sell your knowledge in the form of an online course! On platforms like Teachable (14-day free trial!) you can create and sell courses and connect them to your blog!
You can use videos, text, or worksheets for your courses and customize them to match your brand identity. Teach the way you want to teach, and build on another passive income stream! Because once your course is finished, all you have to do is promote it and the process will be automated after that!
Video content is the future, so if you’re not scared to stand in front of the camera (like me) and have something interesting to share, you can use YouTube to share your knowledge and earn an income with that. For example; beauty tutorials, blog tutorials, vlogs, walkthroughs and game reviews and any other type of educational videos do really well on YouTube.
You can earn money from the ads on YouTube that are shown during your videos to the viewers. You probably know what I’m talking about, those lovely ads that interrupt when you’re in the middle of a meditation. 😉 Gotta love them!
YouTube is a long-term project though because you first need a good amount of viewers to make a buck out of it.
Another way to earn money with YouTube is with affiliate marketing. You can promote products in your videos and leave your affiliate link in the text below your videos for your readers to click on if they want to buy the product!
Are you passionate about photography? Then selling stock photos might be the business for you! Many bloggers, businesses and social media marketers are constantly looking for new stock photos to use for their blogs and/or social media and they are willing to pay for unique stock photos that no one else has.
You can set up your own webshop and sell your photos there, separately or in the form of a monthly subscription, like these sites: Ivorymix and Pixistock. Or you can sell them separately on Creative Market.
Image by Evie Shaffer via Pexels
Are you creative and is making handcrafted products your thing? Then you can start selling your crafts on Etsy! Etsy is an online marketplace for selling handmade (digital) products, and it’s a great platform where small creative business owners can open their own shop.
Writing content for companies is big business nowadays! A lot of companies need freelancers to write content for them. Websites need a blog, and many companies don’t have the time to write content for their blogs themselves!
Is it easy for you to write a text free of spelling and grammar mistakes? Then content writing might be the right job for you!
However, keep in mind that you won’t be earning a lot of money with content writing in the beginning, because you still not to build your writing skills. After some time you can start asking more for each article you write, and earn a nice income out of it.
You can find clients to write content for on Fiverr and Upwork!
Another method to earn money from home is drop-shipping.
Dropshipping means that you run a webshop without any inventory. When a customer buys something from your site, the supplier receives a signal and sends the product directly – often from Asia – to its destination. You’re actually a mediator between the supplier and the customer, but you’ll never touch the products you’re selling.
The great part is that you don’t have to stockpile and you don’t have to take any risks. However, the downside is that it can take a very long time for packages to arrive and handling returns can be very difficult because of that.
Working from home is the new entrepreneuring. In the year 2021, there are lots of profitable home business ideas to generate an online income with; all from the safety of your home.
Being your own boss makes you independent – independent of others, the pandemic doesn’t affect you so much – and you will earn your own money!
Unfortunately, owning your own business is not all puppies and sunshine though. Being your own boss also means working incredibly hard, especially in the beginning! To get your company up and running and to make it profitable you might have to put in more hours in the beginning than you would work if you were an employer. You have to be very passionate about your work, your income is unpredictable and every day is totally different.
But if you’re in a situation where you’re without an income during this global crisis, or if you’re earning less than you’re used to, at least you know now that there are options for you.
Nowadays there are numerous jobs you can do from home, such as content writing, blogging, start an affiliate marketing business, writing e-books, creating and selling (digital) handmade products, make money as a proofreader or translator, and more!
With resourcefulness, creativity, and a dose of perseverance you will be able to achieve quite a lot!
It can be difficult to remain productive when working from the comfort of your own living room. The temptations to do something else are always lurking around.
Do you need tips to increase your productivity from home? Then this post with 18 tips to stay productive while working from home is also interesting for you!
Hopefully this post has provided you with new ideas and helped you figure out a way to make money from home that really works for you.
Do you have any comments or suggestions? Let me know in the comments below.
Don’t forget to share this post if you enjoyed it! Sharing = caring <3
Love,
Angie
You already have a WordPress hosting provider, a domain name, a WordPress theme and you have installed WordPress.
If you haven’t completed all these steps, yet, please, start with the following tutorials before you proceed with this post:
>> How to start a blog in 9 simple steps <<
>> The 15 best WordPress themes for bloggers <<
It’s almost time to start writing your blog posts, but before you start I suggest you to change some of the default WordPress settings and to create a few standard pages. I know WordPress can be quite overwhelming at first, but believe me, you’ll get used to it!
Since WordPress is new to you and it would take a lot of time for you to figure it all out on your own, I have compiled a list of some essential basic WordPress settings for you, that are important to set up before you get started.
Disclaimer: This blog post contains affiliate links. I may earn a small commission to fund my coffee drinking habit if you use these links to make a purchase. You will not be charged extra. So it’s a win for everyone! Please note that I won’t link any products I don’t believe in or don’t resonate with my blog site. Thank you!
Before explaining how to change permalinks, allow me to first explain to you what a permalink actually is. A permalink is the part of your URL that is pointing to a specific blog post. It’s the part that comes after the domain name, for example, https://she-can-blog.com/how-to-start-a-successful-blog-in-2020/
(By the way, I really regret this permalink. I didn’t create it correctly and now I can’t change it anymore 🙁 Can you guess the mistake I made? You can find the answer later in this post!
By default, the publication date of posts is included in the permalinks in WordPress.
This is what a default permalink with the publication date looks like https://she-can-blog.com/2020/09/10/je-eigen-blog-starten-in-2020
Or, they look like this: https://she-can-blog.com/?p=123
Not so pretty, right? You don’t want your links to look like this, you want them to be as short and concise as possible, it’s easier to remember for your readers and it’s better for the SEO of your website. Aside from that, it just gives a more professional look to your blog.
You can only set up your permalinks once, right at the start of your blog. After that, the structure of all your URLs will remain the same forever (permalinks -> permanent links). That’s why it’s important that you do this correctly.
By the way, you cán change the permalinks later, but it’s something you should avoid. By changing the links later, you will break all the old links you ever posted on social media. When someone clicks on an old social media post, they won’t be able to find that page! To prevent that, you’ll need to use redirects, which search engines aren’t too fond of. Too many redirects van result in lower rankings in the search engines.
Another reason why a publication date is impractical to add to your permalinks:
As I already pointed out earlier in this post, I regret adding “2020” to the permalink of one of my blog posts. Why? Because when it’s 2021, 2020 isn’t relevant to readers any more. They’ll want to read posts with the most recent updates. Even if I update the content of my post to the 2021 changes, the URL still has “2020” in it. 🙁
That’s all!
Google Analytics is one of my favorite – slightly addictive – free tools for my blog! You can use Google Analytics to track how many visitors you are receiving, where they’re coming from, how much time they spend on your site, how many pages they visit, how they got to your blog, and much more.
Analytics gives you truly invaluable information, and it’s absolutely for free! And with all this free data, you can keep track of the growth of your blog! You can see if you’re driving more traffic to your blog, which posts are popular, and which aren’t.
The Title and the Tagline are the first words your visitors will see. They also appear on the browser tab of a web page. So, it’s important to write a proper title and tagline, because they help you to establish your brand identity and it’s important for your website’s SEO.
You enter your brand name in the Title field, and the tagline is basically your slogan. Write down what it is you do, and what you stand for, so all your visitors instantly know what they can expect from you and your blog.
To edit your title and tagline:
These are my title and tagline:
See these icons in the tabs of the websites you opened? Those are favicons. This is mine:
Many bloggers forget to add a Favicon, but I strongly recommend you to create one right away! It helps with the branding of your website and it’s useful for website visitors who like to have many different tabs opened at the same time. I have to admit it, I’m on them 😉 Do it for us, it’s so much easier to recognize your website in the chaos of our opened tabs! I’d be forever grateful. 😉
To set up a Favicon, you will, of course, need one first! You can easily create one with the free version of Canva.
Favicon ready?
There is one checkbox in your WordPress settings that blocks your entire website from the search engines if it’s marked. You obviously want to avoid that, because, without the search engines, you don’t have any organic visitors. Therefore, verify if this checkbox is ticked off, and you’re not blocking your website’s visibility.
A WordPress theme usually comes with a navigation menu that appears at the top of your page. To design the navigation menu you first need pages and categories.
But first let me start with a short explanation of what menus, pages, and categories are and how you use them. By the menu I mean the navigation menu you always see at the top of a website, and your home button, your categories, About me page, Contact page, and Legal pages will be attached to it.
First, you need to create a few basic pages, but before you start, it might come in handy to understand the difference between Pages and Posts. Posts are created for your blog posts, they show the publication date of the post and appear on your Blog page. They also have a comment section below every post.
Pages don’t show a publication date and don’t have a comment section. They’re intended for static content, in other words, content that doesn’t change, such as About Me, Privacy Statement, and Contact pages.
How to create pages:
Categories are used to divide the main topic of your blog into sub-topics and to organize your navigation menu. You are required to classify each post into a category. If you do this consistently, it will also have a positive effect on the SEO of your website. It’s helping the search engines to understand your website better.
How to create Categories:
Also, change or delete the “Uncategorized” category here. When you don’t give a category to your posts WordPress will automatically put them into the Uncategorized category, which is not helping your SEO.
If you’re worried you might forget to set your categories sometime, you can also assign a different category to be the default category:
Now that you’ve created the categories and pages for your blog, you can attach them to the navigation menu:
Widgets are blocks of content that you can place in the sidebar or footer of your website. You can place anything you want in the widget section: your recent posts, your Pinterest or Instagram feed, ads, the tag cloud, your blog archive, a short About me, and much more!
Widgets are really easy to set up:
Tip: Create images in Canva to direct your visitors to other blog posts. Like I did, with a widget directing to my Pinterest Profile Checklist. You can see it in the sidebar! It’s a great way of displaying your other posts!
You can also see an ad for Grammarly in my sidebar. I added this by using one of the banners that Grammarly made available in their affiliate program for their affiliates. Just add the affiliate link to it! (To do this you need to use the Image widget by the way!)
For some widgets, you may need extra code, images, or a link which I will explain in more detail in one of my future posts. 😉 For now, for a more detailed explanation about Widgets, I refer you to this post on Individualobligation.com.
Do you want to change the language of your WordPress dashboard to another language?
As a non-native English speaker, I still chose to keep English as the language for my WordPress language. I read and watch a lot of WordPress tutorials, and most of them are in English anyway. Changing the language of my dashboard would just confuse me.
Check if the time zone is set correctly. If you want to publish your posts automatically at a specific time in the future, you will want WordPress to publish your posts according to the time zone you’re in.
WordPress uses your homepage as the page where your blogs appear by default. If you want another page as your homepage, this is how to change it:
I use a landing page as my homepage, and I don’t want to display my blog posts there. That’s why I have chosen for a Static Page here.
My homepage settings look like this:
If you want to display your blog posts on your homepage, you don’t need to change anything here.
The legal pages of your blog are just as important to your blog as the content itself. You need to add legal pages to your site to inform your visitors about the way you collect, and use their data, to inform your readers you’re promoting affiliate links, to inform about the cookies on your website, and last but definitely not least, to legally protect yourself from lawsuits.
I’m not a legal advisor, but I felt this subject is too important to skip when it comes to setting up your blog. That’s why I want to refer you to Amira’s Legal Bundle with all the templates you need. Amira is a lawyer and created a full website full of legal templates and information about the legal part of blogging.
There is one more setting you shouldn’t forget after you created your Privacy Policy page:
A Gravatar is your profile picture. It is visible when you respond to comments, as well as when you leave a comment on other people’s blogs. You can use your own photo (which I recommend!) or your logo.
You have now properly configured the most important basic WordPress settings so that you don’t need to worry about them later on. Now that your settings are configured, you will also want to install a few plugins. For example, a plugin to protect your blog against hackers, to make a backup, to set up an anti-spam filter, and to optimize your images. Proceed here for my basic package of free plugins that I recommend to every blogger!
Do you know other important WordPress settings, that I haven’t mentioned here? Let me know! Leave a comment in the comment section below.
And don’t forget to share this post with other bloggers on social media! Sharing is caring! <3
X Angie
