How To Start A News Blog And Make Money

Unedited Transcript

[00:00:00] Hello. And welcome back to the channel today. I’m going to show you step-by-step how to build a news blog. We’re going to cover everything that you need to know to create a successful news blog. We’re going to talk about what a news blog is. I’m going to show you a few examples. I will show you how to pick a niche and what that means, why you need to niche down, and how to do it relatively quickly.

[00:00:19] Next, we’re going to pick a platform and get a domain name. You can click the first link in the description to get that stuff. You can get a domain name for free when you click the first link in the report. After that, we will show you how to install WordPress, how to install a WordPress theme and why that’s important, and the critical changes you need to make to find success.

[00:00:40] And then, of course, start writing after that, we are going to talk about different ways you can make. Y you need to share it on social media and beginning. And then how many blog posts you need to write to start finding traction. So make sure you click the first link in the description to begin your news blog today.

[00:00:56] So let’s go ahead and get right into it. What is a news blog and news blog is simply you’re going to write on trending and essential topics. It can be any variety of niches or categories. And let me just get out of here real quick and show you what I mean. All right. So if I drag this over, this is an example of a news blog.

[00:01:12] There are writing on trending topics. And they are writing a lot on trending topics in a variety of niches. So we’re talking about word world news politics. Finance and these are all different niches or categories. So if we look at the top, here again, this is the Huff Post or Huffington post.com. And if we look you see, it says news, politics, entertainment, life, personal shopping video.

[00:01:36] These are all different categories. If we click on the news, there are going to be subcategories. So if we look at this, they’re talking about native American voting rights. They’re talking about Colorado. And if you scroll down the world news, Taliban, they’re talking about all sorts of stuff, and these are different niches or subcategories.

[00:01:54] What I recommend you do when you first get started with your news blog is because no one knows what it is. I recommend that you pick a niche. And one of the ways that you can select a niche is if you go over to a website like cnn.com. I need to take a look. They have niches and sub-niches. So if we’re looking at this, you can see us world politics, business opinion, health, entertainment, style, travel, sports videos.

[00:02:17] We could pick, let’s say politics or let’s pick world, let’s pick world. So within the world, there are different categories, as you can see. They have Africa, the Americas, Asia, Australia, China, Europe, India, the middle east, and United Kingdom. So if we click on Africa, we can see that they are writing content exclusively on Africa and all things Africa.

[00:02:39] And so if you are to get started with your news blog today, I recommend that your niche down here because if you start writing on higher-level topics, you’re going to be competing with. The CNN and the Huffington Post and the Fox news, and it’s going to be difficult. So when I talk about picking a niche and niching down, this is what I’m talking about, going down and talking about different things within Africa or United States politics.

[00:03:01] You can even talk about state politics. So you could start there, and then niche in as your website gets more significant, you can niche up and start talking about more competitive things. Okay. The next step is you want to pick a platform and a domain name. Now, what a forum is its simple web hosting.

[00:03:15] And basically, what web hosting is you are renting hard drive space from a third party. In this case, blue host, you are renting space to put your internet files. You’re going to put your website, your WordPress website, there. You’re going to put any images or videos. You’re going to put it right on your web hosting platform, and they’re going to manage it all for you so that you can just focus on writing.

[00:03:35] When you click the first link in the description, you’re going to get a domain name for free. Now a domain name is basically how people are going to refer to you. So, for example, if we go over to cnn.com, that’s their domain name. Huffpost.com is their domain name. And you’ll get it for free for one year. So you want to make sure that you’re picking a domain name that is relevant to you.

[00:03:54] Or niche. If you are creating a news network, you can call it whatever your news network name is. And you can go over to the first link in the description and see if it’s taken or not. But what we’re going to do right now is I’m going to walk you through the steps step-by-step, but I’m going to show you step-by-step how to set up your web hosting and domain name and four minutes.

[00:04:11] So, at this point, I’m going to show you how to set up. And then we’re going to move on to the next step. When you click that link, you’ll be taken to this website, where you’ll go ahead and click get started. What I recommend is to connect 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.

[00:04:29] You’re going to create a domain name. If you have one in mind, you’re going to type it in here. 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 where you can then go back and try different domains.

[00:04:47] Now make sure again, you want to pick one that’s related to yours. 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 scenes right here, where it says domain privacy, go all of this check.

[00:05:10] 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 and move to the next step. All right. So I’ve signed up, and I’m going to go ahead and set up my website.

[00:05:27] Initially, just create a simple username and password and ensure 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. So you will have to enter in some vital information, but just make sure that you write it down.

[00:05:45] 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.

[00:06:07] Now, the great thing is Bluehost does everything for you. And it’s straightforward. So again, I’m not speeding this 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.

[00:06:23] 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 a quick skip here and click skip.

[00:06:42] 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 login to WordPress on the right-hand side there.

[00:06:57] You’ll see it in just a second. And then, we can start looking at some basic configurations. All right. So we click log. And now we have a WordPress website. What may need to happen is you may need to click refresh a few times to get it to work, but. So now we have our website. 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.

[00:07:22] 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. So 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.

[00:07:40] Now, I talk about plugins later on, but plugins add additional features and functionality. So we are 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.

[00:07:58] 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.

[00:08:17] 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 is all right. So at this point, we have WordPress installed. We have a basic WordPress theme right now. I want to show you how to install a premium WordPress theme. Now I like installing premium WordPress themes simply because they add additional features and functionality. And if we go back over to huffpost.com, what we’re going to see here is a word.

[00:08:51] I think, as you can see here, this is a WordPress lead. There are thousands of different themes out there. A premium WordPress theme is going to give you additional features and functionality. It’s going to change the look and feel. As I mentioned, this is a WordPress theme. Now you can find different articles at ThemeForest.

[00:09:07] So we’re going to just type in theme, forest style. And when you go here, you’re going to see there are tons of different themes. What we can do is we can look for a news-based theme. So I just typed news, and you’re going to see, there are tons of options. There’s a newspaper. There’s just go through and take a look and find one that you feel comfortable with.

[00:09:24] The second link in the description will take you right over to ThemeForest what you’re going to do. Look through here. Find a WordPress theme that you like, add it to the cart right here, and then purchase the theme. When you buy the theme, you’re going to be able to download a zip drive. Then, you’re going to download that zip drive to your computer.

[00:09:40] You’re going to unpack that zip drive, and that zip drive will lead to another zip drive. So zip within a zip, you’re going to take that zip drive, and you’re going to install it onto your WordPress website. And let’s take a look at how to do that. So we’re simply going to go over to. Go back here.

[00:09:56] We are going to go to appearance. We’re going to go to themes, and we are going to click on edit. Then we will click on upload theme, and then we’re either going to drag and drop that theme that we just downloaded. So the zip within the zip, we’re going to drag it and drop it right here. Or we can click on choose file and find it in our downloads folder.

[00:10:16] Once you add it, you’re going to activate them, and it’s going to change the way your website looks. As we have that basic theme and we just change it. And so we’re going to make sure we make it look a little bit better. Now, the next step is to start writing directly to begin writing simply, you’re going to go over to posts, and you’re going to click on add new post.

[00:10:34] And before, if you recall, I had, you changed the post title from just the plain one to the post name. And this is where the benefits of it are going to pay off. So the reason why we do this is to optimize our pages for search engines. This is called search engine optimization. So when people are looking up different things on the internet, they just type in the keyword.

[00:10:57] And we want our webpage to show up near the top if we go over to. Huffington post or huffpost.com. And we click on this, excuse me. You can see that they have their title. The same as their post names. So this is actually what we’re going to do too, they don’t do a great job of it, but since our website’s a little bit larger, they can do what they want a smaller website.

[00:11:20] We got to play by the rules. And so this, these are the rules you’re going to give you: Pedro title, your posted title. So we could say we’ll say like ten things you didn’t know about X they’ll say and make sure you want to spell these words. Make sure that you capitalize them. And when we create our actual post, this is going to show up, it’s going to be web hosting, rewind.com forward slash ten things you didn’t know about X that is going to be the name of our posts, and we’re doing this so that we can get discovered organically within the search engines.

[00:11:58] And so the question that always pops up is how long should my blog posts be and how do I start writing? And the answer to both of those is it. How long should your blog posts be? It should be as long as it needs to be to answer the question. Now, frequently people will feel like they have to write 4,000-word blog posts, but if you can answer the question directly and briefly in 1000 or 2000 words, that’s how long it needs to be.

[00:12:25] Take a look at your competitors that are writing in the same space. Make sure your blog post is about that size. It can be a little bit more. It can be a little bit less. So we’ll make sure it’s within that realm. And for me, the way that I’d like to get started is with a brainstorming session. So what I’ll do is sit down and say, I’ll type in who, what, when, where, why.

[00:12:45] And how, and I’ll just go through and make questions based on the keywords. So if we’re trying to create content about the Taliban, for example, we’ll say who did, who is the Taliban who are comprised of the Taliban? What do they want, what are their needs? Why are they doing what they’re doing?

[00:13:03] And when we do that, we can make each one of those posts. Each too. So, for example, we’ll say, how was the Taliban TA? I’m going to spell this wrong, but TA, we’ll just call it to tab for now. I apologize. I don’t mean to offend anyone, but how was the tab formed? And we’re going to put a question mark, and because people are probably wondering this, we’re going to make this in each tube, and I’m simply going to answer the question.

[00:13:29] Based on the age, too, I’m going to fill it out and make sure that I answer it briefly and then move on. But this will help you write faster because you are spending time upfront thinking about what you want to write. And then just writing it out. Now, I like to use a plugin called Grammarly.

[00:13:44] This is that grammar. They right here, there is a free and premium version. It’s going to help you with your grammar, spelling, punctuation. It’s the squiggly line that you find in Microsoft word, but it’s for websites. Grammarly. And one way that you can find topics to write on a little bit quicker is if you go over to a website called Google trends, so we’re going to go to trends, it’s trends.google.com, and you can go here, and you can find topics that people are talking about up to the minute.

[00:14:11] So we’re going to click on trending searches, and this is exactly what people are talking about. So yesterday, unfortunately, there was another earthquake in Haiti, and people are talking about Chicago bears 49ers, as you can. These are things that people were talking about yesterday. If we look at real-time searches, we can see people are talking about this up to the minute, which will help you write faster and write relevant topics.

[00:14:34] Because when you’re in the news niche, you’re going to need a lot of content, and you will need relevant topics up to the minute information. And we’ll probably also help. If you follow several people on Twitter that break news, that’ll help you as well. And what you will want to do.

[00:14:50] Let’s go back over to our slide deck here. So we are. We’ve made the changes we’ve started writing. The next thing we want to do is talk about different ways to make money. Now, there are several ways to make money with your website. One thing that you can do, if we go back over to the Huffington Post or Huff post, they have ads.

[00:15:08] They have ads right on their website. This right here, this ad outreach, this is an ad. So if someone were to click on this link, the Huff post would make money from it. That’s just one way. Another thing you can do is you can be an affiliate for relevant products and services. Affiliate marketing is simply recommending or selling other people’s products.

[00:15:26] When someone clicks on your affiliate link and makes a purchase, you earn a commission. And I have a course on affiliate marketing. If you click the third link in the prescription, you’ll learn, step-by-step, all about affiliate marketing, but you can sell your digital products. Maybe you’ve written a book or an ebook regarding whatever it is that you are websites about.

[00:15:46] You can sell your ebook right from your website. You can sell physical products. Maybe you have a t-shirt that you want to sell. You can sell it right from there as well, but there are several ways to make a pretty good living, simply from your news, blog, or website. All right. So let’s go back over to our slide.

[00:16:01] The next thing you want to do is share it on social media. The reason why you want to share it on social media is initially Google, Bing, Yahoo duck, go. They’re not going to pick up your blog initially. And so you want to start getting traffic relatively fast. And what I recommend that you do is find relevant places on the internet and share.

[00:16:19] You can share it in Reddit or subreddits. You can create a Facebook group for news or join other Facebook groups shared on Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn. Find relevant places in share them there. That’s going to help you grow a little bit faster. It’s going to get the engine going now, the question with the correct rate.

[00:16:36] How many blog posts should I write now? Because you’re in the news niche, you’re going to have to register many posts daily. So you should be writing two or three posts per day. So depending on the subnet you choose, write two or three blog posts per day to get up and run.

[00:16:49] The more blog posts you write, the more opportunities you give yourself. And because news is changing every 30 seconds, it feels like you’re going to need a lot of relevant content. Ideally, I tell people to write 50 blog posts to see if they’re starting to get. For the news niche, you might have to write for 50 days straight.

[00:17:09] If you have to write three blog posts for 50 days straight, that is something that you’re going to need to consider, but you’re going to write a lot, and you’re going to continue to write a lot unless you hire people to help you out. And then finally, make sure that you check out the links in the description to help you get up and running.

[00:17:23] If you liked this video, go ahead and subscribe and ring the bell. So that you’re notified when I upload my next video. Thanks for watching. And we’ll see.