Starting a blog that makes money in 2021 requires a lot of hard work and research.

If you are going to cover topics that many established bloggers have covered, what chance do you stand among the fold? If you are looking to make money blogging in 2021 as a beginner what does it take?

Perhaps starting a second blog that can support you till you are able to monetize the big boss becomes the best option.

However, starting a second blog can be a little daunting when you don’t have an already established blog and you are able to hire helping hands for maintenance purpose.

The blogging niche you decide to start matters a lot. For instance, if you are going to start a blog that teaches other bloggers how to make money online, it will require a lot of hard work to have an established blog on such a topic.

The reason is that there are thousands of established blogs with probably over 1000 quality articles on that particular topic.

The highest paying blog topics have a great deal of competition, I must confess, so the best blog to start in 2021 and make a quick success is a blog that publishes articles for daily or short term consumption.

If you are aiming to cover evergreen topics, you will have to put in a lot of efforts.

Every blogging niche you decide to start has its ups and downs. If you start a blog that publishes information for daily consumption, then you will need to continue publishing every day in order to meet up with the needs of your audience.

It is very easy to get started with such blogs I must tell you. However, in a day or two, “news become old”.

Starting a blog in a niche like “making money online” an uphill battle. It’s more difficult to teach people that they can make money with their blogs without showing them the evidence that you are making money online.

Nevertheless, you can still succeed with such a blog. The good thing is that when you start to succeed with your “make money online” blog, the information you already have stacked up on your blog will keep working for many years.

This article will offer you a guide on how you can make money blogging in 2021 no matter the blogging niche you have settled for.

Quick money = more efforts

Like I said earlier, the fastest way to make money blogging in 2021, is by writing short term blog posts.

But even if you are looking to make money blogging from short term topics, you’ll find it a lot easier blogging on topics that cover areas of your strength, rather than trying to write content you don’t like but because you feel it will make money fast.

Examples of topics that cover key areas of your strength include hobbies, careers, and other areas you are knowledgeable about.

You will not need to make too much research on topics that cover areas of your strength. Below are the blog topics that are more suitable for a short term run.

One of the best blogging topic to make quick money from is a topic that focuses primarily on celebrity news.

Celebrities always give people something to write about with their non-stop social media stunts.

If you follow most celebrities on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, etc., you will always have something to blog about them. However, you will have to work very hard if you are working alone.

What you have to do to run a successful celebrity gist blog is to flood the internet with lots of articles and make good impressions early enough.

If you do that, you are certainly going to get quick visits to your blog. Reason is that, you are not creating your own fans from the scratch, you are leveraging on already made fans of those celebrities.

However, news on celebrities expire in a short while. So you will have to keep publishing steadily for the cash to keep flowing.

Coupled with having to publish blog posts frequently, there’s need for good social media interactions with real fans of those celebrities, which makes it all the more complicated if you are working alone.

The profits, however, outwit the stress by a distant. When you start reaping the dividends of your hard work, you will become even more passionate about blogging.

Other blogging topics that fit this category are; sport news and reviews, news on politics and happenings around the society, business news and trends, and gist on fashion and events.

Most of the short term blog posts depend on displaying ads from Google AdSense and other CPA advertising companies to make money online.

You can also monetize such blogs using several other methods. Like: Selling of personal stuffs, sponsored content, selling of ads spaces, etc.

10 must-follow steps to make money blogging

The mistake many new bloggers make is that they start a blog that needs long term efforts to generate something substantial but are not aware of that.

Consequently, they start to feel hard done by if their blog does not make money early enough. Some people even quit along the line and are never able to achieve their targets.

There are a lot of blogging topics that require immense hard work in order to build your own fans from the scratch.

And monetizing such blogs become more complicated. Blog topics in these categories are Personal Finance, Health and Fitness, Make money online blogs.

These type of blogs take a longer time to build your audience. However, this article is aimed at helping you make money from it this year at the shortest possible time no matter your blogging niche.

Step 1: Narrow down the topics covered by your blog

In order to quickly monetize your blog, you’ll need to narrow down your niche to target areas that people in the same niche with you have not covered already, but is still popular enough to attract a significant number of visitors.

Choose a specific niche, not the whole wide range topic. Write about lead singing or backup singing, not singing. The whole singing topic is too wide, will take you years covering.

Teach people c++, java, or Php, not programming languages as a whole. Many others have covered all the key areas in these topics with many years of hard work.

So, narrowing it down will help you cover more key areas and rank higher in the search engine if well optimized.

You could choose not to narrow down your niche to an extreme, if you want to be famous or reach a wider audience. 

However, you will need helping hands to cover such topics. Hiring freelance writers will be the best option for you if you want to cover a broader range of topic.

There’s an article on stealthsecrets about how to narrow down your niche.

Even if you are still going to cover a broader range of topic, a subtopic relating that area will still pay dividends faster.

When it comes to topics like fitness, finance, or relationship advice. Consider specific but broadly applicable topics such as managing money as a newly employed, or a marriage counselling blog, handling divorce, etc.

Step 2: Research on other blogs with similar topics

Use search engines to view a list of post related to any post you have in mind to write on, so that you’ll have an idea of how much competition here is on that topic and what it takes to beat off that competition.

Study the high ranking blog posts, get ideas from their writeup (but do not copy their writeup). Originality is of essence.

If you discover a blog post that has already covered that particular post you intend to write on, try to change a few keywords or add a few keywords in order to come up with a quality that beats theirs.

But trust me, search engines will not immediately place your post above theirs just because you beat the quality of the dominant post. It will take some time, but it will eventually.

Step 3: Choose a good hosting service

If you want to make money blogging in 2021, choosing a good host for your blog is of essence.

There are a lot of free web hosting services out there with free sub-domains. However, they come with a lot of limitations.

They restrict the number of third party affiliate programs you are able to participate in. And affiliate programs are good options for people who are new and don’t have products of their own to sell.

A self-hosted blog is the best way to make money online. You don’t have any form of limitations whatsoever, you can promote as much affiliate products as you want, and without anyone to question what you do.

I have a full guide on how to start a self hosted WordPress blog.

If you don’t have enough money to start a self-hosted blog, the blogging platform I recommend you start a free blog with is on blogger.

Reason you must choose blogger as your free blogging platform is that, Blogger is owned by Google, and Google also happens to own AdSense.

This makes it easier for them to accept your AdSense application if you meet up with their requirements.

Step 4: Make your blog beautiful

Your blog needs a good design to attract visitors, though it’s not the most important thing, the blog content matters more.

But a blog with a good design will give most visitors good picture memories of your blog on their mind.

They might forget a lengthy and boring writeup (like mine). But they’ll never forget the designs of your blog if it looks appealing.

There are a lot of free design plugins to help you get the most out of your blog if you blog on WordPress.

Most of these design plugin come with drag and drop features to enable easy customization

Step 5: Make your blog posts search engine friendly

Like I said, there are probably thousands of bloggers who have covered all the key areas in the topic you intend to write on. 

So whatever post you come up with, search for the blog post that sits on top of the search results on that topic, make sure your articles possess more quality and quantity. That’s the only way you stand a chance.

Do proper Keyword research. Research on the recent search queries, make a list of the most frequent, and write a blog post that includes all those search queries.

A useful plugin that can help you with this is the WordPress SEO plugin by Yoast. You can Set up a custom SEO title, meta description, image alt attributes using the Yoast SEO plugin. You can also set up SEO friendly permalinks.

Step 6: Promote your blog

This is the hard part for most new bloggers. They don’t know the right time to promote their blogs.

Promoting your blog should be what comes to your mind next once you have enough quality articles.

Enough articles with proper internal links that will keep your audience engaged. The number one place to promote your blog for free is on social platforms, with your friends, on your fan pages, etc.

Some people are still not sure their articles are enough to start a social media campaign.

My take is, if you have around 5-10 quality articles, then you must begin promotion as soon as possible while still working on new articles.

Step 7: Register with AdSense

The best option for your new blog if you don’t have products of your own to sell is to promote affiliate products or display banner ads on your blog.

I advise you to display ads on your blog for a start. The reason is that displaying ads on your blog does not require any product review, the only thing that is required is getting approval from Google AdSense or whichever advertising company you choose.

It’s a lot harder to monetize from affiliate marketing if you are inexperienced.

You may also need to spend sometimes, because some products require that you have tested it yourself and able to offer a good review on that product.

This complicates the whole process of affiliate marketing if you don’t have enough money to buy such products.

Step 8: Sell your own products

What beats promotion of affiliate products or displaying of ads is sale of your own products. It’s difficult to get sales for a start, but it will turn out to be the best option as soon as you start making sales.

The best products to sell are products that correspond with the needs of your fans. If you sell products outside their needs, there’s every possibility that you will make few or no sales.

Step 9: reinvest small amounts of profits made

Most new bloggers who start making money from sales or adverts fail to reinvest a few portion of the profits made back into their business.

They believe the effort put in is enough for the sustenance of their business. It’s quite true that the effort put in is enough for the sustenance of your business, how about making quick progress?

In order to make quick progress, you must leverage on cheap advertising platforms that can help you increase your visits and sales.

Make use of Facebook ads, become an advertiser on Google AdSense. Promoting blog posts on those advertising services are cheaper than the promotion of products. So it’s not as expensive as you imagine.

Step 10: Consider Guest posting

Guest posting is another good opportunity for you to make money blogging.

I strongly recommend guest posting. After starting your blog and writing a lot of quality articles, those articles will serve as your portfolio.

You could write to other big blogging companies in the same or related niche as you and offer to guest post.

Many companies will actually pay you for guest posting on their website if they know you will deliver a quality writeup.

You may even get contacted by other bloggers as soon as people realize your quality. Major reason you need to write quality blog posts.