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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 personal finance blog. So be sure to like subscribe and ring the bell to be notified when I upload a brand new video. All right, let’s go ahead and get into it. What we’re going to do today is I’m going to reveal everything that you need to know.
[00:00:14] I’m going to show you a personal blog with examples to get painfully obviously clear. So the first thing we’re going to do is we’re going to pick a niche and talk through how you should pick a niche and why you should niche. The next step is to get web hosting, and I’m going to briefly cover what web hosting is and why you need it and how you can get a domain name for free.
[00:00:33] After that, we will talk about installing WordPress, getting a premium WordPress, and why didn’t you get a premium one and not a free one? Important changes that you absolutely need to make so that your website can be seen and heard. And you can start making some money after that. Finally, we’re going to talk about how I went.
[00:00:50] The best way to start writing so that you can attract the audience that you’re looking for. Next, we’re going to talk about different ways that you can make money, why you should share your content on social media, and how many blog posts you should write. In the very beginning, you can check out the top three links in the description.
[00:01:05] They will be the links that I refer to throughout this video. So first things first, what is a personal finance blog? A personal finance blog is simply a blog where people are searching for answers. Maybe they want to learn more. For example, 401ks or investing or budgeting, and you will write content that helps solve that question.
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[00:01:22] Now, when it comes to personal finance, it is an incredibly competitive niche. There are tons of people out there that are writing content in the personal finance space. And so what’s very important is in the very beginning, you want to pick a niche. For example, maybe you want to blog about saving, and when you decide to blog about saving, you need to niche down even further.
[00:01:44] And maybe talk about saving for teenagers or older adults. You want to niche down because niching down will be crucial to finding an audience, building an audience, and eventually making money. So let me just show you an example of a personal finance blog that I found out there.
[00:02:00] This blog making. Making sense of sense. Dotcom is a blog about personal finance. Now the interesting thing about personal finance is it can cover a wide variety of topics. As you can see here, they’re talking about how they’re making more money selling online stickers. You can talk about saving, investing, budgeting, hunting.
[00:02:19] There’s just a wide range, a wide variety of things you can get into. You could even talk about starting a blog to make money. So there’s just a wide range of topics that you can cover a state planning within the personal finance niche. And to further illustrate that point, I’m going to use this keyword research tool called AA trucks.
[00:02:38] You don’t have to use it, but I just like to show you why it’s important to pick a niche. So if we just type in like personal finance, you’re going to see it’s really competitive on a scale of zero to 100. 100 being the most difficult personal finance, though, the term is hard, difficult, and competitive.
[00:02:58] If we typed in savings or budgeting, you’re going to see it’s also competitive in heart, less competitive because it’s a subject. Personal finance. We could say personal investing, but you’re going to see these are all difficult. And what I recommend is that you go over to matching terms, and we could do like savings for let’s try those savings.
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[00:03:23] Four had inter, and you’re going to see savings for teenagers and older adults. If we are saving for college, that’s a niche in it itself. You can see the term there is pretty difficult, but if we look down here saving all my love, that’s for Whitney Houston, you can see saving for kids college. So if we go here, let me just do saving for college.
[00:03:44] We’re going to copy this. We’re going to put this up here in the search, and you’re going to see there are potentially more opportunities. You can see it there. There’s some good, some bad there, but as you can see, there are 5,600 monthly searches, but this is what you want to do. So if you want to start gaining some traction, five saving for college 5 29, if we type in 5 29, that could be an opportunity that not a lot of people are talking about, or as many people are blogging, as you can see here, 788,000 searches per month, 158,000 keywords.
[00:04:17] But this includes more than just saving for college. But as you can see there, it is. Potential if you niche down and do a little bit of research. So that is an example of blogging. Let’s go back over to. We picked a niche. We talked about niching down. So the next step is to get web hosting. Now web hosting basically means you will rent hard drive space, called a server from a company.
[00:04:40] That is going to present your website to the internet. So what you’re going to do is you are going to rent hard drive space from Bluehost. In this case, you will put your internet or web files on that hard drive space, and it’s going to be available for the world to see. And when you get started with the link below, and you’ll get a free domain name for the first year, and you’ll need a domain name so people can reference your site.
[00:05:02] For example, it’s called making sense of sense.com if we look at this. That’s their domain name, and that’s how people referenced their site. So if we go back here, let’s just go back to where we were, as you can see, get a domain name and web hosting. So right now, I will walk you through the steps of signing up for the blue host.
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[00:05:18] That takes less than five minutes. You’re going to sign up. You’re going to get a domain name, and then you’re going to have a WordPress. 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 click the first one on the far left, the basic plan.
[00:05:32] 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. Like you see that I do. So what I recommend is to try and find a domain name.
[00:05:46] 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 taken, you’re going to get this error where you can then go back and try different domains. Now make sure again, you want to pick one that’s related to your name. Click next. And then you’re going to see a green box that says that it’s approved.
[00:06:04] 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 check. If you don’t leave a check, you’re going to get people reaching out to you.
[00:06:21] 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. Initially, just create a simple username and password and make sure it meets the requirements.
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[00:06:41] 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. It’s straightforward and effortless.
[00:06:56] Now, one thing that I do want to note is that this part is not sped up at all. This is actually 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 actually going to start creating your WordPress website.
[00:07:15] Now, the great thing is Bluehost really 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 really takes to create a website. So blue host is going to do a little bit of work in the background for you. And we’re just going actually to click on skip this step.
[00:07:32] This first one I clicked on, I start a blog, but for the next step, just click, skip, because we know what we’re doing. And I’m actually 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. Just click, skip here and click. Skip.
[00:07:51] And then just pick the first one in the far left, make sure that you’re picking a free theme because they’ll charge you. They have both free and premium themes, which we’ll talk about in just a moment. So right now, it’s actually 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.
[00:08:06] You’ll see it in just a second. And then we can actually start looking at some basic configurations. All right. So we click log. And now we actually have a WordPress website. What may need to happen is you may need to click refresh a few times to get it to work. So now we have our website. As you can see, what I’m going to do is I’m actually going to log in and delete a few plugins because right now, it has coming soon.
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[00:08:30] 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.
[00:08:48] No, I talk a little bit about plugins later on, but plugins add additional features and functionality. We are going to deactivate the blue host as well as the 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.
[00:09:06] Now, you want to make sure that you only have. The plugins you’re using on your website, the more plugins you have, the slower your website’s going to 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.
[00:09:26] 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 actually going to start moving on to settings, which you see right here.
[00:09:43] All right. So what we’ve done is we’ve installed WordPress on our web hosting. We’ve installed a basic WordPress theme. Now I’m going to show you actually how to install a premium WordPress theme. It’s straightforward, much easier than it sounds. And we’ve made the important changes that we absolutely have to make.
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[00:09:58] For our website to be seen around the world. So right now, you have a basic, you have a free WordPress theme. Now I recommend that you go out to a website. It’s the second link in the description to get a premium WordPress theme. Now, the cool thing with premium WordPress themes, as they have additional features and functionality.
[00:10:15] They can be more useful. For example, you could have a countdown timer on your website that counts down to the next major event. Maybe your website’s about taxes. And you want to count down until April 15th, which is tax time in the United States. So here we are over on themeforest.net, and we’re just going to type in personal finance and basically what we’re doing.
[00:10:36] As we’re going to look through here and see if there’s a WordPress theme that works for our niche. What we can do is look through here. As you can see, it says finance pro. We can buy this if we want it to. If it meets our aesthetic, there are a bunch of them out here. They range from $17 up to probably 90 or 95.
[00:10:53] Look through them, find one that you’re comfortable with, and then add it to the cart. Click on this button to edit to the cart and go to the checkout and buy the theme. When you buy the theme, you are going to download a zip file. When you get that zip file on your computer, you’re going to unpack that zip file, and there’s going to be a second zip file.
[00:11:10] What we’re going to do is we’re going to go back to our back office here, and we are going to upload that theme into our WordPress website. And to do that, we’re going to go to a peer. Click on themes. When we click on themes, we’re going to click on, add new, and then we’re going to click on upload theme.
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[00:11:25] Now that we have this, we will drag and drop our new zip file. So the zip within is it, we are going to drag and drop that right into here, or we can click on choose file, invite it manually. Once you find it, click on install now and then activate. And then you’re going to have a brand new theme just to show this is a WordPress theme that are tons of different themes out there.
[00:11:45] I recommend that you go out and get yourself a premium theme so that you look a little bit more professional and official. No, we’re going to start writing. The biggest question that I always get is how do I start writing, and how long should my blog posts be? And the answer to that really depends on what your competitors are doing.
[00:12:01] And how long does it take to answer the question? So what we’re going to do is we’re going to click on posts, and we’re going to click on ads. No, let’s go into a little bit more detail when it comes to writing. You should only write as long as you need to solve the problem or answer the question. If you can answer a question in a thousand words, that’s how long it should take.
[00:12:20] There’s no benefit to writing a 10,000-word ebook to answer a simple question. If it takes a thousand words, answer it with a thousand words, one way to figure out exactly how long your blog posts should be is to look at the top 10 rankings. For example, we wanted to write about making a thousand dollars a month selling stuff.
[00:12:37] What we could do as we can take a look and see what our competition is doing, we’re going to scroll all the way down here. This is probably about 2,500 words. We right. Click, and we see, okay, this is only 1979. So what we could do is we could write a 2,500-word blog post, basically highlighting and writing the same thing.
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[00:12:56] And when it comes to writing blog posts, I get a big question: What do I write? How do I write it? And what I’d like to do is I’d like to do a simple 10-minute brainstorming session. I’ll do that. What, when, where, why and how, and what I do during this brainstorming session is I simply write down questions related to our topic or heading, for example, let’s go over to our keywords here, and maybe we are writing about the 5 29 college savings plan.
[00:13:24] So I’m going to copy this. This is the keyword that we are trying to target to get in front of people and give them information. We would answer questions, spend about 10 minutes or so. And we’d say, who needs a 5 29 college savings plan, then? What is a 5 29 college savings plan?
[00:13:49] And I like to spend 10 minutes just simply going through and answering these questions because the goal of our blog, as I mentioned in the beginning, It’s simple to solve someone’s problem. Someone’s coming to the internet because they want to learn more about the 5 29 savings plan. And we are here to answer the question and what I’d like to do again, spend about 10 minutes answering these questions.
[00:14:07] And then what I’ll do is I like to the ones that I’m going to keep, I’m going to turn these into subheadings. This is our heading, this is a Hone here, and this is the title of our blog posts. This is a subheading that we are simply going to answer the question. So what is a 5 29 savings plan? We’ll say a 5 29 savings plan, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, whatever it is.
[00:14:29] And I’d like to do that. It’ll help you write better. And it’ll help you write longer, and it’ll help you answer the question. Now, it’s essential when you are writing a blog. This is our keyword. And so we want this at the beginning of our title, the reason why we want it at the beginning of our title so that it can show up for our post page.
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[00:14:50] For example, if we click over here to making sense of center, If we look at this, their website is making sense of sense.com forward slash, and they’ve got some other stuff. And then it says how to sell stickers on Etsy. They are targeting how to sell stickers on Etsy. That’s a keyword. They don’t have it here, but you want your keyword to be your title in most cases.
[00:15:13] For search engine optimization. Now, since this website’s a little bit larger, with over 300,000 monthly readers, they can afford to write how they want to and still get grace from Google and the other search engines. But what we’re going to do is we are going to make sure that our keyword is at the front here.
[00:15:31] And then maybe we can say everything you need. To know, and people will see that and say, okay, this website has everything we need to know. You’re going to answer all the questions. And then you’re going to click publish. Once you click publish, your website will be available to the world. And once we have.
[00:15:51] Oh, you’ve started writing the next step. If we jump over here is think about different ways to make money. There are tons of ways to make money with your website. The first one is simply just placing ads. Now, this website doesn’t appear to have ads, but you can go out and work with a website called Google AdSense.
[00:16:08] I have it right here, and you can get approved. Everyone gets approved to place ads on your blog and website. Now I do want to caution you and let you know that Google AdSense will pay you pennies on the dollar. Once you start getting significant traffic, 1,005,000, 10,000 pagers per month, you can move to other ad networks like egoic media, vine, media.net ad thrive.
[00:16:32] There’s a ton of them out there, and they’ll pay you significantly more, but this is a great place to start eight. You can see how ads work. B. You can start collecting some money and see it doesn’t matter. That’s just one way to make money. Another way is with affiliate marketing, and affiliate marketing is simply just recommending or selling other people’s products and services.
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[00:16:51] Now, if we come back to this one, they may have affiliate links. If we scroll through, if they have links to, let’s say, Amazon or links that are relevant, maybe they have links to Ken’s. CAMBA has an affiliate program. If they have links out to even Etsy, they have an affiliate program as well.
[00:17:08] They get paid a commission. If someone clicks on those links and buys, now there are tons of affiliate programs out there. It is vitally important that the affiliate programs that you joined. As you can see here to this post may contain affiliate links. You must include affiliate links and affiliate programs that are relevant to your niche.
[00:17:28] For example, if we’re talking about personal finance and we’re talking about the 5 29 college savings plan, you want to find affiliate programs that are related to that maybe there’s a credit union or a loan or something like that. That is going to be really. Don’t include links to basket weaving because no one will click and buy, or a tiny percent will click and buy.
[00:17:48] So you want to make sure that you are making sure that you are finding affiliate programs that are related. Now, what I recommend that you do if you want to learn more about it. The third link in the description leads to a free course where you learn everything you need to know about affiliate marketing.
[00:18:03] You can also sell your own digital and physical products. So, for example, we scroll through here. I’m sure they have different products that they’re actually selling on their own. And the great thing about selling your own physical or digital products is you keep 100% of the profits. So selling your own digital and physical products is actually really easy, but it’s outside the scope of this video, but there are tons of ways that you can make it.
[00:18:23] With your blog. After that, we are going to share on social media. Now, in the beginning, it’ll be vitally important for you to share your content on social media. Then the number one reason why you want to share your content on social media is Google doesn’t trust you just yet. And so you want to get your content out there to relevant places, people interested in your content so that they can.
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[00:18:44] And potentially promote it for you. For example, you can go out there and promote it and read it on subreddits and Facebook groups. You can start your own Facebook group, Instagram tic-tac LinkedIn. Pinterest is a great place for blogs. You name it. You could promote it there and start seeing traffic.
[00:18:59] Now, eventually, Google will notice that you are bringing your own traffic, and they’re going to be more readily willing to test your content versus the more established content out there. And then the final question that I get all the time. How many blog posts should I write now? In my opinion, you should write 50 blog posts before you determine if your website was a success or a failure.
[00:19:20] Now, the reason why I say 50 is simply because your first couple of blog posts aren’t going to be very good. And by the time you get to the 50th blog post eight, you tell Google that you’re serious B you’re going to be much better, right? And see, you are going to have 50 pieces of content within a niche.
[00:19:36] That’s going to give you 50 opportunities to rank and start getting traffic leads and sales. So I recommend that you write every day for 50 days or every other day for 100 days and get 50 pieces on the internet. So that it can be evaluated, hopefully, this video helps you. I’ll be sure to check out the three links in the description.
[00:19:53] The first one is to your web hosting and your freedom name. The second one is to theme for so that you can get a premium WordPress theme. And then the third one is a free affiliate marketing program. So if this video helped you out, be sure to like subscribe and ring the bell so that you’re notified when I upload my next video.
[00:20:08] Thanks for watching. And we’ll see.
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