How To Start A Music Blog 2022 | WordPress Music Blogging Tutorial

Unedited Transcript

[00:00:00] Hello, and welcome back to the channel today. I’m going to show you step by step how to start a successful music blog and make money. So be sure to like subscribe, bring the belt that’s video or any other video on the channel helps you out. So this is exactly what we’re going to do today. So step-by-step first, we are going to talk about what a music blog is.

[00:00:16] We will pick a niche because, as within music, there are tons of different sub-niches. After that, we are going to niche down even further. We’re going to pick a platform and get a domain name for it. I’ll explain exactly what those are in just a moment. If you want to get started, you’re going to click that first link in the description, but we’ll elaborate more in just a moment.

[00:00:35] We are going to install WordPress and a WordPress theme. I’ll explain exactly what that is in just a moment. Some crucial changes you have to make so that your blog can get discovered by Google, Yahoo, Bing, and duck. Go after that, we’re going just to start writing, and I’m going to show you how and what and where and why so that you’re comfortable.

[00:00:51] And you’re ready to go after that. I’m going to show you how to monetize it about how many blog posts. And you should start why you should begin to share on social media and beginning, and then make sure you click those links in the description so that you can get started fast. But, first, what is a music blog and music blog is simply just, you’re taking a section of the music niche and, there’s country music, there are pianos, there are guitars, there are all sorts of stuff within the music niche.

[00:01:16] And you are simply going to write blog posts that answer questions and solve a problem. That’s all that blogging is. So you are taking your niche, which is. So when you are solving problems, let’s take a look at an example of a music niche. So I’m just going to exit out of here real quick. So if we look@pitchfork.com, this is an example of a music niche.

[00:01:34] Now, this is going to be a pretty big music website or blog. And so what we’re going to do is we’re just going to take a subsection to start so that we can start building traffic. If you take a look, they’re writing on everything, and they’re talking about Nicki Minaj, they’re talking about. Aretha Franklin would be considered two different niches, one or two, depending on your thoughts and how they’re addressing the issue.

[00:01:58] But you can see here, they’re writing on a variety of topics. And what we’ll do is I’m going to recommend that you niche down. And what I mean by niching down is instead of just talking about these high-level things like they’re talking about Kanye West, they’re talking about Pitchfork music festival, take one subset of the market and talk about that substance.

[00:02:17] At first and the reason why you want to do that is so that you can start gaining traction and building a following, and then eventually you can niche up. And let me just illustrate this with a keyword research tool that I use to help me find keywords. It’s a truck. It’s a paid tool. You don’t have to use it, but it is designed to help you or show you how competitive it is.

[00:02:36] The niches and how to niche down. So what we’re going to do is we’re going to go over to keywords Explorer, and I’m simply going to type in music. Now, this is a very general term. That can mean a lot. As you can see, it is super tricky. This is the keyword difficulty is a scale between zero and 196.

[00:02:52] Can’t get much more complex than that. But what we could do is narrow the niche down to, let’s say, hip hop music. Now, this will still be pretty competitive, but there’s going to be less competition. So then just talking about music. And if we go to matching terms, you’re going to see people asking a lot of questions, and they’re looking for answers for many different things within hip hop music.

[00:03:13] Now, if we look at the keyword difficulty on this page, you’re going to see everything from green to red. Green means it’s pretty easy to rank for as a new website or blog. Yellow indicates a little bit more difficult orange. I mean, it’s almost impossible. So as you can see, there is some opportunity what we’re looking at here at 64,000 monthly searches, 16,000 keywords.

[00:03:34] So there is some opportunity. Another thing that we could take a look at, for example, let’s type in P.

[00:03:43] If we look at piano, we see that piano is super hard. And if you want to create content and piano, you’re going to find some frustration. It’s going to be hard for you. So what we could do is maybe let’s go over to matching terms again, and let’s do let’s include C-sharp. So anytime someone is talking about C-sharp and PM.

[00:04:03] We want to target those people. As you can see, when I type in C-sharp, there are 7,000 monthly searches over a thousand keywords, and the keyword difficulty is most. Mostly really easy. As you can see, if you were looking at it started in a blog, this is the way to go. This is niching down. This is going to allow you to create content and build traction much faster.

[00:04:26] And you could eventually start finishing up and talking about some of those other things. But if you want to do just 7,000 volume on a thousand keywords, you could do that as well and start gaining some traction. So that’s what I mean by if we go back over here, that’s what I mean by going on—and picking a niche and niching down.

[00:04:44] The next step is to pick a platform. In this case, we will use web hosting and then get a domain name for free. Now a domain name is how people are going to refer to your website. If we go back over to pitchfork.com, this is their domain. When people talk about your site or look for your location on the internet, they think of pitchfork.com and are, let me go back over here, and for the platform again, we’re going to use web hosting.

[00:05:10] And basically, what web hosting is you are renting. Hard drive or server space from a third party so that your internet files can store them. You need to have a web hosting provider. So people from around the world can access your website. So you’re going to click the first link in the description to get that setup.

[00:05:28], the next four minutes, I’m going to show you how to set everything up fast so that you can get up and running. So right now, watch the. Four minutes and then click the link in the description to get up and to run. When you click that link, you’ll be taken to this website, where you’ll go ahead and click get started.

[00:05:43] I recommend clicking the first one on the far left, the basic plan. If you’re just getting started with a website, as you can see, there are several options, but click that click select, and then move on here. You’re going to create a domain name. If you have one in mind, you’re going to type it in here.

[00:05:56] Like you see that I do. What I recommend is to try and find a domain name. It’s going to be related to your niche. Now, what I do is type in a domain name that I know is already taken. When it’s accepted, you’re going to get this error. What you can then do is go back and try different domains. Now make sure again, you want to pick one that’s related to you.

[00:06:14] Click next. And then you’re going to see a green box that says that it’s approved. The next step is simply to go through and enter your contact information. Make sure that you, when you scroll down here and make sure that you leave all of the settings on but again, entering your contact information, the settings right here, where it says domain privacy, leave all of this checked.

[00:06:33] If you don’t leave a check, you’re going to get people reaching out to you. Spamming you, emailing you, trying to get you to sign up for. Web hosting. So what I’m going to do is I’m going to go ahead and sign up and then jump back to you once I sign on. So I moved to the next step. All right. So I’ve signed up, and I’m going to go ahead and set up my website.

[00:06:51] Initially, just create a simple username and password. Make sure it meets the requirements. And then move on, make sure that you write it down to write it down in a safe spot so that you have it. And you remember it because it can be a pain to go ahead and get everything back. You will have to enter in some vital information, but just make sure to write it down.

[00:07:09] It’s straightforward and effortless. Now, one thing that I do want to note is that this part is not sped up. This is real-time. And you can see that you’ll go from absolutely nothing to a complete website in less than probably 10 minutes. And once you click submit, you’re going to move on to the next step, where you get to log in. So here is where you’re going to start creating your WordPress website.

[00:07:31] Now, the great thing is Bluehost does everything for you. And it’s straightforward. So again, I’m not speeding us up at all, and I want you to see what it takes to create a web. So Bluehost is going to do a little bit of work in the background for you. And we’re just going to click on skip this step.

[00:07:47] This first one I clicked on. I started a blog, but just click, skip because we know what we’re doing for the next step. And I’m going to tell you what to do so that we can get up and running. So click get started right here on the left-hand side, and then move on. So there’s a quick skip hire, and click skip here.

[00:08:06] And then just pick the first one in the far left, make sure that you’re choosing a free theme because they’ll charge you. They have both free and premium articles, which we’ll talk about in just a moment. So right now, it’s creating your WordPress website in just a few moments. You’re going to click on log in to WordPress on the right-hand side there.

[00:08:21] You’ll see it in just a second. And then, we can start looking at some basic configurations. All right. So we click. And now we have a WordPress website. So what may need to happen is you may need to click refresh a few times to get it to work. But now we have our website. So as you can see, what I’m going to do is I’m going to log in and delete a few plugins because right now, it has coming soon.

[00:08:45] And so if someone tried to get to your website at this moment, it’s going to say coming soon to them, even though we can see it, this is what your WordPress website looks like, but for everyone else outside of your network, it’s going to say coming soon. So what we’re going to do is we’re going to go down to plugins eventually, and we’re going to delete some of the plugins that we don’t need.

[00:09:04] Now, I will talk about plugins later on, but plugins add additional features and functionality. So wee is going to deactivate the blue host as well. Other plugins that are already activated, and then we can go through and make the necessary changes, which I’ll cover in just a moment. So we’re going to deactivate them and then delete them.

[00:09:21] Now, you want to make sure that you only have the plugins that you’re using on your website. The more plugins you have, the slower your website will respond and function, and you’re going to lose out on ranking. So make sure you have a lean setup, very few plugins, and then move on. As you can see right now, I simply believe some stuff you don’t need.

[00:09:41] If you want to, you could keep them, but obviously, you don’t need this other stuff if you’re just getting started. What’s more important is the themes that we’re going to talk about in just a moment, as well as getting writing. So I’m just going to go ahead and delete those, deactivate them. And then we’re going to start moving on to settings, which you see right here.

[00:09:58] All right. So at this point, you should have WordPress installed, and you should have a basic theme. Now, what we’re going to do now is we are going to establish a premium WordPress theme. Now, you want a premium WordPress theme simply so that you get additional features and functionality.

[00:10:12] If we look@pitchfork.com, this is a WordPress theme. A theme changes the way websites look and feel. And then, you can also get plugins. That’s a different soil for another day, but plugins add additional functionality. So if we look at this is probably a plugin, the way that this looks, the way that this is orange, that’s probably a plugin, but overall you want your website to look in, feel more.

[00:10:36] More custom the website theme added when we first got started with an elementary grade, plain. And you probably want to go with something a little bit more custom. Now you don’t have to in the beginning if you’re strapped for cash, but I recommend that you go over to themeforest.net, and you can find it.

[00:10:52] Hundreds, if not thousands of different themes, what you can do is simply type in music there hit enter, and you’re going to find a bunch of WordPress themes that you can buy, download, and install written to your insult written to your website. So what you want to do, I just typed in music, and you’re going to find a theme that you like.

[00:11:08] The cool thing is you can open these up and look at different templates and get a feel for it. If you like it and what you’re going to do, if you want it, for example, you’re going to add it to the cart right here. You’re going to check. And then you’re going to buy it. When you purchase it, you’re going to download a zip drive.

[00:11:23] And then once you get that zip drive on your computer, you’re going to unpack that zip drive. So when you unpack that zip drive, you’re going to have another zip drive. So a zip with a zip. And what you’re going to do is you’re going to go over to your website, and you are going to install a WordPress theme, and I’m going to show you how to do that right now.

[00:11:39] All right. So this is the back office of my word. Website yours should look similar. It might have fewer menu items, but it seems the same, what we’re going to do as we’re going to go over to appearance. We’re going to go to themes. We’re going to click on add. And then, after that, we are going to click on the upload theme.

[00:11:58] You can either drag and drop the theme. You just unzipped it here, or you can click on choose file. You are going to install it and then activate it. And it’s going to change the way your website looks. And then, you can move on to the next step, which is starting to ripe. Now, when you want to write, you’re going to click on post.

[00:12:17] And before, I showed you that you needed to change your website to post name, and I’m going to show you why that’s important right now. So now, if we go back over to pitchfork.com, we will click on let’s click on this. Nicki Minaj. If we look up here, you can see the title of this blog. Post is Nicki Minaj and husband, Kenny petty, facing a lawsuit.

[00:12:42] That is the title of their blog posts as well. This is exactly what we want because people are going to the internet, and they’re typing in this exact sentence and phrase, and we want to, and I apologize for the words that came up there. What we want to do is we want to create our content so that it’s discoverable via Google search and Yahoo and duck go.

[00:13:04] And so what we’re going to do is we’re going to go back over to our keywords. We are going to highlight this because this is going to be our post title. I’m going to copy this. I’m going to go back over to my website. I’m going to click on, add new, to add a new post, and I’m going to paste this in. So we’re going to paste this in just like this, and we’re going to capitalize that.

[00:13:25] And then we can start writing. Now what will happen is when we post, this will show up at the end of our website. So it would be web hosting, rewind.com Fords. C sharp M piano court. And what we’re going to do is simply write, answering the question, and the biggest questions that I always get is what should I write and how long should I write it?

[00:13:45] And the length of your blog posts depends on what the question is. If you can answer the question, a thousand words, your blog post should only be a thousand words. Often. The post may be a little bit longer, a little bit shorter. Your blog posts should only be as long as it needs to be. Also, look at the competition.

[00:14:05] What is your competition doing? What are they writing? How long, whoops, what’s happening there? How long are they? Are there block posts? What helps me write in that to help me with the brainstorming session is I simply just will do who, what, when, where, why, and how, and I’ll take 10 minutes before I start writing my blog posts, and I’ll just go through, and I’ll answer these questions.

[00:14:29] Who am I, who has the problem? What type of questions do they have about a C-sharp? How do I help them solve the problem? So if you can go through and answer these questions, it’ll make your life much easier. And then you can turn these who, what, when, where, why, how into subheadings of your posts. And for example, if we could say, maybe we have a question about how to learn.

[00:14:54] C sharp M faster. Maybe that’s a question that you discovered people are asking. So we’re going to turn this into a subheading, just like this H two. And then, we’re going to answer the question in the following paragraphs, which will help us aid. It’s going to help us rank. It’s going to help solve the customer’s problem.

[00:15:13] Once you have answered the blog posts, you are simply going to click publish, and it’s going to. So let’s jump back over to our slide deck here real quick. We made the changes we started writing. Now the next step is simply to figure out different ways to make money. And there are a ton of ways to make money with your website.

[00:15:29] The first and probably most straightforward way is simply with running paid ads. Now, if we scroll down here on the right-hand side, these are paid ads or were paid ads. This is a paid ad at the top. Suppose I go back over here. We can see, there are a few paid ads on a few different places on this site. Now you can get started with Google ads since this is an ad right here.

[00:15:49] Google AdSense is an ad network that Google manages. So you’re going to go to Google AdSense right here and. You can add this to your website almost immediately. Now the problem with Google AdSense is they’re going to pay you pennies on the dollar, like half a penny on a dollar. And so if you’re looking just to make some money, you can throw this on your site, and they’ll do all the configuration for you automatically.

[00:16:13] Eventually, once your website starts to get bigger, like one thousand five thousand ten thousand page views per month, you are going to want to upgrade your ad company. For example, you can use. Media.net. You can use AdThrive. You can use Zoe. These are all going to pay a little bit more, but they’re more premium services as well.

[00:16:30] So you can make money with Google AdSense. Another thing that you can do is you can make money with affiliate marketing. Now affiliate marketing is simply recommending or selling other people’s products and services. Now the cool thing with affiliate marketing is there are tons of options. You could be an affiliate for the guitar center.

[00:16:45] What you’d want to do is you can just type in like guitar center. Affiliate program, and you can recommend guitars, pianos, all sorts of stuff. Another thing you can do is you can be an affiliate for music sheets. If you look at this website, I think it’s music notes.net. Let’s get this word spelled suitable music sheets, affiliate program.

[00:17:06] And you’re going to see sheet music plus.com. They have an affiliate program. So if you are creating content for the piano niche and want to promote different music sheets, there’s an opportunity for you as well. So you can put ads on your website. So you can do it for the marketing.

[00:17:23] I have a course in the description. I think it’s the third link. That’ll take you to a free. Affiliate marketing course that you can learn. Step-by-step is all about affiliate marketing. You can also sell your physical and digital products. Maybe you make harmonica is you could sell those. Perhaps you have a unique blueprint for teaching people to go from zero to expert in the piano.

[00:17:46] If maybe you have a training course, you can do that as well. There are several ways to make money. So the next step is to share in social media and basically. Why do you want to share on social media is Google, Yahoo, Bing, DuckDuckGo. They’re not going to know of your website right away. And so to help force the issue to help get your websites seen by people faster, you want to share it on relevant Reddit groups, sub-Reddit, Facebook groups.

[00:18:09] You can even start your own Facebook group. If you have a YouTube channel, you can share it there. There are several places that you can share it. Twitter, Instagram. There are several places that you can share. And you want to make sure that you’re sharing it in the beginning so that it can help it grow faster.

[00:18:22] If you just wait on Google, it can take too long after that. About how many blog posts should you write? In my opinion, you should write at least 50 blog posts to determine if your website was a success or a failure. 50 is a good number because it gives Google and the other search engines a lot of dates.

[00:18:41] To see how your website compares to other people. Now it’s essential that in the very beginning that you should not expect. Don’t expect the world expect a trickle. And if you keep adding onto that trickle by adding on blog posts, it will eventually turn into a stream and then a raging river. So you must give yourself 50 blog posts you will write every day for 50 days or write every other day for a hundred days.

[00:19:06] And then you can determine yours. No, we have covered just about everything that you need. Make sure that you click the first link in the description to get wet posting in the free domain name. The second link in the description is going to get you that premium WordPress theme. The third link in the description will help you with affiliate marketing teachable for that marketing step-by-step.

[00:19:27] So if this video helped you out, be sure to like subscribe, ring the bell so that you’re notified when I upload another video. Thanks for watching. And we’ll see you.