How to start a blog free in 2022

Welcome to this article. Today you'll learn how to start a blog free in 2022. You may not know this but it is possible to blog for free and make money from your articles but you have to use certain channels or websites which I will be taking you through in this article.

How to start a blog free and make money in 5 steps:

1. Choose a website to host your free blog

2. Choose your blog's niche

3. Start writing content

4. Monetise your free blog

5. Get free traffic to your blog

Let's get into more details:

c) Hosting on medium.com

Medium is possibly the best blogging platforms out there right now which offer free blogging. Here’s a run-through on Medium on how to start a blog on the platform and ensure you’re using it like a pro.

Medium is a wonderful content discovery platform that helps you discover the musings and thoughts of intellectuals from across the globe. Medium bills itself as a platform for people and not advertisers. Its thankfully ad-free.

Medium has two kinds of memberships – Free and Paid.

Free membership allows you to read through any number of general articles (probably 90% of Medium) and read up to 3 expert stories every month.

The paid membership costs $5 per month and here you can read any number of expert stories. Expert stories are in depth articles from bestselling authors, top journalists and the thinkers who are paid a percentage of your membership money every time their article is read.

How can I sign up?

Sign up is super easy. Just log on to Medium.com and sign in via Google or Facebook. I personally recommend that you create Medium profiles based on your Facebook or Twitter logins. All your friends who are on your list from these channels will automatically become your followers on Medium and you will get the initial momentum.

2. Choose your blog's niche

Whether it’s marketing, cooking, Crossfit exercises, vegan dogsitting, underwater parkour solo dancing – whatever crazy blog topic, there are an endless amount of things to blog about.

Here’s the problem:

Most professional bloggers will tell you to start with something that you’re passionate about because it helps you “maintain a consistent writing schedule and push through failure to succeed.”

They’ll also tell you to choose a niche at the intersection of passion, skills, and experience:

However, if you’re starting a blog to make money, this model is flawed because it’s missing one major component: the brand of you. As a blogger, you are the brand.

When choosing your niche, think about:

• What you want to teach.

• Where you may already have experience.

• Any leverage you may have in an industry.

• Where you can extract value from the market.

How to start brainstorming a niche if you’re stuck with these questions.

1. Where does this niche come from?

At this point in the process, you just need to brainstorm. Yeah, you do want to validate your ideas eventually, but let’s leave that for the next section.

For right now, don’t worry too much about feasibility and just come up with a big list of topics you think you might want to blog about.

Beyond just staring at a white wall and running through ideas in your brain, some good ways to come up with ideas are:

• Your room/house. Just look at the objects you own and see if any of them spark an idea.

• Your daily life. Same idea – think about what you do on a daily basis and see if anything pops out.

• Blogs you read.

• Magazine articles.

• Amazon, eBay, and other shopping sites (look at the popular products, categories, or your order history).

2. Are there other people who want to read about this topic?

If you’ve made it through the first question, you know there’s at least one person interested in your blog’s niche. Now, it’s time to figure out whether there are any other people who want to join in on the fun.

Thankfully, this is an easier question to answer because it’s less soul-searching and more research.

So how do you find out whether your blog niche has an audience? Go to the data…

The easiest way to start is by using the free Google Trends tool. This lets you quickly see two important data points:

• Whether or not people are actually searching for your niche

• Whether your niche is receiving increasing or decreasing interest

It’s not the deepest analysis, but it’s a great place to start and it’s really easy to use.

3. Can I make money from this niche?

If everything has gone well, you should now know:

• Whether the niche is something you can stick with.

• If other people are just as interested as you are.

Now, it’s time to figure out whether you can actually make money from this thing.

If you’re creative, it’s possible to make at least some money from pretty much any niche, as long as you have an audience.

For that reason, this is probably the least important of the three questions.

3. Start writing content

This will require you to do a little keyword research. It's not that hard. You can use free tools like the google keyword planner or the google trends.

Here’s all you need to do:

• Think of the main term(s) for your niche(s)

• Go to Google Trends

• Plug in in your term(s)

Ok, so now you have a rough idea of your niche’s popularity and momentum from Google Trends. But because Google Trends uses relative numbers (remember – the key is “trends”), it’s not the best guess of absolute numbers. That is, it doesn’t tell you exactly how many people are searching for terms in your niche right now.

That’s why you have to go a little deeper with keyword research (if this term is new to you, check out this beginner’s guide to keyword research).

1. Affiliate Marketing

One of the most popular methods for monetizing a blog is to leverage affiliate marketing. This is especially useful when you're just starting out and you don't have your own products or services to sell. All you have to do is develop content that will ultimately be in harmony with whatever affiliate offers you plan to push out.

For example, if you're running a fitness blog, you can easily sell affiliate health, weight loss or body building supplements. Since the content is already attracting people that are interested in fitness, selling these types of products helps you to create a near-automated stream of passive income.

2. Email Marketing

One of the most powerful methods for making money from your blog is directly through email marketing. But to be successful, you need to build your list. Whether you promote blog updates or create a lead magnet, utilize one of the more popular email marketing platforms like ConvertKit, Aweber or InfusionSoft to implement the systems necessary to begin marketing via email.

By building a strong bond and a connection with your readers, you can effectively generate a sizable amount of money through the course of marketing both your own products and services along with affiliate offers directly through email. You can expect to generate approximately $1 per subscriber per month.

3. Sell eBooks

Ebooks offer a relatively quick pathway for making money from your blog. Develop an ebook that's aligned with the content of your blog. Non-fiction ebooks are relatively simple to create, and if you're teaching a skill that many people struggle with, it's likely that the ebook will produce a healthy profit.

You can easily promote your ebook directly through your blog by creating attractive content that will draw people in, then enticing them with your ebook. You could also build a sales funnel, which is an online marketing term for an automated multi-step sales machine, and sell your ebook on autopilot.

4. Sell courses

Selling digital online courses is another way you can profit from blogging. Develop intuitive and helpful courses that add a tremendous amount of value and the rest will be smooth sailing. By putting your heart and your soul into these courses, you can simply allow them to sell on autopilot for you, another great avenue for passive income.

Courses work great when it comes to technical skills like web development, digital marketing, graphic design and so on. But they also work in formats like finances, stocks, currency investing and accounting. Find what you're really great at and do the due diligence before building your course. Then make something far better than the other courses out there in the marketplace.

5. Sell digital Products

Creating digital products is a great way to profit from your blog. You can effectively sell any type of digital information product on your blog as long as it's in harmony with your content. You can build a webinar to market your product and deliver them through a member's area or through other downloadable means.

Digital products can be a combination of videos, downloadable guides, resources, PDFs, software components, SaaS and others. Do your best to create something that helps fill a need or a void. Don't second guess yourself, as you'd be surprised at just how much money you can make by selling digital products on your blog.

It’s also always a good idea not to put all of your eggs in one basket in case one channel no longer exists or changes its algorithm. Because of this, it’s important to find more than one avenue to bring traffic to your blog that works well for you.

So without further ado, let’s get on with 4 best ways you can drive traffic to your blog. Best of all, they’re free!

2. Pinterest

Although Google should be your long-term strategy to bring traffic to your blog, you’ll want to have a shorter-term strategy to drive traffic quickly to your blog in the meantime.

This is where Pinterest comes in.

Pinterest is one of the best ways to explode your traffic in a short amount of time. On one of my other blogs, I get over 2 million monthly views on my Pinterest account and over 50,000 pageviews on my blog each month, all just from Pinterest!

3. Quora

Quora is a platform where users can ask questions and get replies from experts.

If you’re an expert on a subject, a great way to drive traffic to your blog is to answer questions in-depth that other users ask on topics that you’re knowledgeable on. Once you answer questions, you can link back to your blog post.

When you do this enough and gain a good reputation, it can be a great traffic driver for your posts!

4. Reddit

Reddit is also another great forum to show your expert knowledge and then link back to your blog posts.

There are so many subreddits on the site that there is bound to be a thread where you can reply with your knowledge and drive traffic back to your site.

Conclusion

So as you have read, it's actually possible to start a blog free and make money from it. I have personally made money from my free blog and all you need is to be determined and keep thriving to achieve your goals. Your hard work will determine how successful you will be.