Have you ever had an awesome business idea and wanted to tell people about it? Maybe you even started that business at one point, but it had trouble getting off the ground so you gave up.

Maybe you even had something on your mind you just wanted to tell people about. You wish you had a place to put all of those thoughts, feelings and emotions. Some where they might benefit someone at least.

Or possibly you just have so much knowledge about something or a specific industry, that you feel inclined to tell people about it!

All of these are great examples of why starting a blog is a good idea. Blogs don’t have to cover one specific topic, genre, or thought process either. They can be molded to fit just about anything you want to discuss or use them for.

For those reasons, I want to write a ‘blog’ about why blogging a great idea for most people to start!

Reasons To Start Blogging

There are a few important things that I can point too that would support this idea. The idea is – that you should start a blogging as soon as possible, and you should not wait anymore. But here are the top four reasons we are going to discuss:

• Start to learn about websites
• Figure out your talents
• Build your audience
• Learn consistency

Anything you do in life is going to follow a similar pattern to these points above really. There is an initial learning phase, followed by you figuring out what you’re good at, then it is followed by some recognition, and only maintained with consistency.

Clearly, this is a normal process for just about anything you will do in life. Although, we are going to apply it to why blogging is a great idea! First thing to dive into is – learning about websites.

Start To Learn About Websites

Seriously though, if you live in the new digital age and you don’t know much about websites then you are already behind. Websites are so common, you use them every single day, and chances are you spend a bunch of time on them.

Although, besides blogging there are many reasons to start learning about websites.

First, expanding your knowledge is always a great idea. Second, websites can be used for just about anything. People use them to chat, place orders, promote their business, scam people (I don’t recommend that), they work on them as a job, push out ads, run statistics, and multiple other reasons. Personally, I think people should learn about them to expand their possibilities in the work place, and for their own personal business ideas.

Throughout your life, you are probably going to have a few business ideas you want to test out. With this knowledge about websites already in your head, you could potentially save weeks and months of effort on building an effective website to help get your idea out there to people. Really, there is a ton to learn so you might as well start now to give future self every advantage to be successful!

Figure Out Your Talents

As you start blogging, you are going to figure out certain things about yourself.

Maybe you are a talented writer and you never really knew that. Maybe you are extremely creative and can constantly come up with good engaging content for people to read and enjoy. Or you could figure out that you are a natural with web development and naturally understand the inner workings of websites.

One thing is for sure though: you will not be good at all of them.

There will be certain things that you will have to just learn over time, or possibly even seek out some help with. For myself, I am a natural at writing and coming up with content, but when it comes to fixing small issues on my site that require code, I usually need help.

Everyone will be a little bit different. Although, by figuring out what your strengths and weaknesses are, you can know where to start learning!

Build Your Audience

This is one of the things most people really forget about. Building a usable and effective audience on a certain industry or topic takes years to do properly.

It will take you between 2 to 5 years to build a strong consistent audience around your blog, and that is if you work at it. It takes people a long time to build up those popular blogs that you see online with thousands of subscribes, and the person running it has been consistent for many many years to get it there.

On average, you will probably get between 1 to 2 subscribers per 1000 to 2000 unique visits. That means for every one thousand people that visit your site, you might get one person to subscribe and give you their email. For instance, lets say you site reaches 10,000 people a month. That’s only around 5 to 10 subscribers a month which is a great start.

Although that is still only around 100 subscribes a year. In five years, that only adds up to 500 people. You can start to see why consistency and building upon your audience are incredibly important when trying to get a strong blog.

Learn To Post Consistently

Like we were just discussing, consistency is key.

Nothing in life comes to those who work really hard for a short amount of time then give up. Those who work fairly hard year over year at something will be the ones that succeed. Consistently gaining more exposure, backlinks, emails, and knowledge to become a successful blogger.

All of this knowledge and exposure can be applied to any website though. So, if you start blogging today you can skip those years of trouble later on when you want to launch your own business online. It can honestly make the difference in your business failing or succeeding in the long run.

You could start with a sprint from all your website knowledge if you start today. Or you could take your chances and just try to learn it all later. The choice is yours, but I started my journey into websites a year and a half ago.

Already it has paid off as I launch my own business. I am quite happy with myself and the investment I made into the virtual world of websites.

Start Blogging

I hope you enjoyed this post on why you should start blogging today. If you read through it, then thank you for your support as well. We have a ton of useful posts on how to start a blog, things to avoid, blogging basics, and tools you might need. Make sure to check all of them out if you are interested!

If you found your way to this post, then that more than likely means that you are a blogger!

First of all, I want to say congrats on taking the daring leap to put your ideas, beliefs, and knowledge all online. It is extremely hard to write creatively, manage a website, and continue to research more ways to gain exposure.

If you do have a substantial amount of readers already on your blog, then your next plan of action might be to start making some money!

Surprisingly, this is probably the hardest part of being a blogger – monetizing your website.

Monetize A Website

In order to monetize your website, you are going to have to first decide how you want to do it. There are a ton of different ways, and not all of them will work for your audience. Therefore, you are probably going to have to try multiple ways to monetize a website before one really clicks, or before you have enough streams of income to feel good about it. Here are the 5 ways to monetize a website that we will be discussing:

• Google Ads
• Amazon Affiliate
• Branded Merch
• Partnership With Company
• Create A Course

Lets start with the most common way to monetize a website first which is the popular use of Google Ads.

Google Ads

This is the first way most bloggers will try to monetize a website.

It is not a bad way to do it, but there are some tricks and catches that you need to be aware of.

First, when you go onto the Google Ad Sense website and try to put ads onto your website, you will not be able to. That is because Google actually needs to review and approve your website before they will even let you places ads onto it.

In order to do this, you will need to place some code on the back end of your site for Google to confirm the site is yours and review the site content. You will also need to set up a Google account if you do not have one already set up.

The process should only take about a day or so, but more often than not your site will get rejected a time or two. My first time trying to sign up for Google Ads, I had to try several times before my site got approved through the system. I do not really know why this is the case, but if it is for a specific reason then they should notify you in some way.

Once you do get approved, you can go in and select the places you want Google ads to appear, restrict areas where the ads should not appear, and then set the frequency at which ads should appear.

A common question is – how many views do you need to make money off of Google Ads?

Well, this is entirely dependent on your ad types and blog topics. If I were to give a general number, I would say you need a couple thousand unique visitors a day to make upwards of $100 a day through Google ads in some cases.

Amazon Affiliate

The probably second most common way for bloggers to try and monetize a website is through Amazon Affiliate program.

Amazon Affiliate program basically allows you to pass along a custom URL for products and items you discuss on your website. These URLs will act like affiliate links, giving your a small percentage of the profits for each sell made from your links.

The percentage is pretty small and usually between 1% to 5% per item. The lowest threshold of the percentage split out for affiliate links is on technology based items like cameras or tablets and things like that.

You make the most money off of selling basic retail items like clothes or house hold products through affiliate links, but these are the most common products and also the most difficult to sell or rank for in posts.

I would think about Amazon Affiliate as more of supplemental income. If you already include products in your blog posts, then by all means throw some affiliate links in there and you might start generating some passive income from them over time.

From my experience, I would not say this is a viable way to make a sole income from blogging though.

Branded Merch

The next monetization method on the list is through creating your own branded merch.

The branded merch idea completely has to do with the identity of your website. Some people do extremely well with their sites, and gain huge following on social media channels as well. Either on your website or through these channels you will probably have an icon or image that represents your brand. Surprisingly, people will buy merch with your image or icon on it, if they like you enough and follow you closely.

Not only that, but you can also sell merch about specific topics you discuss with certain catch phrases, or symbols of that industry. For example, let’s say you have a blog about farms and farm animals. Well you might be able to sell shirts with different farm animals doing funny things with your logo on it. I know that sounds silly, but it is basically how it works. Leverage your brand and your content to sell items that people might want.

Partner With A Company

The other option is to partner with a company.

This is typically a great option for websites or blogs that like to discuss or leave reviews on specific products or services. For example, your blog could consistently discuss different sneakers. It goes in depth about the shoe creation process, the branding, the prices, it talks about the best companies, and things like that, then you might have a good website for this.

In that example, the owner of the blog might be able to reach out to a few newer sneaker companies and ask them to partner with you.

Once they partner with you, the website can become sponsored by that new brand and include them in certain posts. Lets say you write a post about the top 5 best sneakers to purchase right now. Well, you might be inclined to place them at the number one spot if they are partnered with you.

Or, you might just have an ad on the side of your blog for every post that shows their sneakers and an optional button to “purchase now”.

Typically, when partnering with another company like this you are becoming an affiliate of theirs. But in special circumstances, they will just pay you outright to post about their product, and funnel people to their page giving them massive amounts of exposure.

It all depends on how valuable your audience and reach is to that company on what they’re willing to do in the partnership.

Create A Course

The last way to monetize a website that we are going to discuss is by creating a course.

This also takes a very special website in order to do this, but in general it can be done over a multitude of things. For instance, if you have a blog about trading in the stock market, forex, cryptocurrency, or anything similar, then you might be able to make a course on how its done.

Once you make your course, you can leverage your websites audience to sell it to people. If you do it right, it can take off pretty quickly and make a lot of money for you. In addition, there is a plethora of third party platforms that will let you list your course and get even more exposure to a broader market.

These platforms will obviously want a cut of the profits, but it is in their best interest to promote your course given that it is good and people really want to take it.

Creating a course can be very tricky and take a lot of time. Not to mention you need decent video editing skills and a deep understanding of whatever you are teaching. If you are consistent and patience though, you can definitely get it done.

How To Monetize A Website

Thanks for reading our post on how to monetize a website. There are a bunch of other ways to achieve making money off of your blog, but these are a few good ways to get you started. More often than not, you will need multiple streams of income to make a blog successful, so you might as well start today on a few of them.

As you start to venture into the unknown of websites and all that they entail, you might start to wonder if there is any importance to the links and domains associated with different sites.

In short, yes there is a lot to learn and know about these links are you start your journey. For instance, your website will automatically create links for your home page, contact page, blogs you posts, and anything else you create on your site. You can actually control and manipulate these links, which you should.

We are going to dive into website links, why they are important, what a domain name is, what really lies behind that domain name, and things to avoid with links. There is a lot to learn, but if you do the research now and avoid some problems, then you will save yourself tons of time and possibly hundreds and thousands of backlinks later on.

Lets start of by reviewing website links in general.

What Is A Website Link

What is a website link? Well, it is that address that you copy and paste into the search bar on search engines that takes you directly to a website.

Every single link has several things associated with it that you might not have realized. Most links will have “https://” before them which is very important. The “http” stands for “Hypertext Transfer Protocol Hypertext Transfer Protocol” (HTTP). The additional S on the end in https stands for “Hypertext Transfer Protocol Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure” (HTTPS).

This basically tells your web browser how to open the page you are navigating to. Most websites are running HTTPS these days because Google made it a necessity. For those sites that do not run it, Google will penalize your search rankings, and you could even be enabling hackers by not adding it to your site. Therefore, it is very smart to update your site to this secure method.

The second part of a link is the domain name. Take for example the website you are on now:

“https://honolulutribe.com/“

As you can see, the second part after the security protocol is the domain name of the website you are trying to access – “Honolulutribe.com”

The “.com” is another indicator of the type of website you are opening and looking for. This is not as important to know about, but it is important to know that “.com” is the most common type of site and the one most people will naturally try to type into the web browser when searching for your site.

For those reasons, the “.com” websites can cost more than others like “.net”, “.co”, and etc.

The next part of a web link is the page of the domain that you would like to access.

Website Pages

Your website will have a bunch of pages on it over time. Especially if you are writing blogs or continually adding new sections to your business.

Each of these pages will have a unique web link assigned to them that is very important. Those web links will look something like this:

“https://honolulutribe.com/photography/“

As you can see above, the link will take you to a part of our website that shows you photography blog posts. This is a specific page we created in order to isolate specific posts for ease of people looking for them.

As you can see, every single page and blog post on your site will require a unique web link to assign to it. Luckily, wordpress and most site generators will do this automatically for you, but there is something to know. There are certain generated web links that you will want to avoid.

Things To Avoid For Your Web Links

The first thing to avoid is lengthy web links. Web links that have the generated Php title or even extra characters can really be a pain to deal with, look unprofessional, and make managing your web links a nightmare.

It is best to keep your web links simple and clean like the one you see above. Clearly, just by reading it you can tell it takes you to a photography section of blog post. Pretty simple to figure that out.

Dates In Weblinks

A huge thing to avoid is allowing dates in your web links. When I created one of my more popular blogs, the word press web link generator was adding the date into my blog posts every time I made a new one. I thought nothing of it, but over time I realized something horrible.

Google was using these dates in the web links to compare my posts to more recent posts. At the same time, posts without clear dates were being valued as newer posts over some of my older ones. While that might not seem like a huge issue, it starts to make a difference when your posts get ranked less and less on search engines and your average reader count starts to drop because of it. This is because Google is always looking for new, updated content.

Basically, people will have a harder time to organically find your older posts on the internet if you include dates in your web links.

Even worse, when you go to fix this problem and change your web links to exclude the dates, it changes every single post and page on your website. That does simplify you doing it yourself. Although, what it does not update are the backlinks on other websites across the internet.

Sadly, I had hundreds of backlinks to my older posts that now take people to blank pages on my website that say “post can not be found”. This is because I changed the weblink on those posts to exclude the date they were written, after they had already backlinked to my website.

Importance Of Backlinks

Backlinks are extremely important, and they are the hardest thing to build up over time.

Backlinks are what determine your domain authority which is how Google ranks your blog compared to others. Take for instance if you write a post about horses and you have a domain authority of 20.

That is great and Google will rank you post, but what if another website writes a similar post about horses with a domain authority of 50? Well, their post will come up first on search engines before yours does.

So, backlinks are incredibly important. Losing them is a devastation to your website’s overall health and average reader count.

Therefore, make sure your web links are primed and perfect before you make your posts, or you could risk losing vital backlinks costing you growth and organic search results.

Web Links Overview

Thanks for reading my post on web links. I hope this helps you avoid some of the mistakes I made on my first few websites. Take the time to set up your website properly in the beginning and save yourself the heartache later on of having to change it and losing all of those precious back links.

In addition, I hope this post helped shed light on what web links really are, and how to properly use them.

Thanks again for reading. If you need more information on creating websites, blogging, and getting started then check out this post here.

If you are new to blogging, you might be wondering a few important things before you dive into the unknown. Some of them might be:

How long until I have hundreds or thousands of readers on my blog?

Once I have all of these readers, can I just take a break or stop blogging?

What is it like to live in a glass house?

Sadly, I do not know what it is like to live in a glass house. But, I do know that it takes awhile to get those readers to your site. It takes months and possibly years of consistent marketing, posting, and SEO to get your blog noticed. Not only that, but it really takes a toll on your personal life, and can leave you wondering when can you take a break?

Blogging Problems

One of the biggest problems about blogging is that you really can not take an long or extended break.

For example, I had somewhere between 500 and 2,000 people visiting my two blogs a day after 9 months of working on them. Not to brag, but I was pretty happy with that. Unfortunately, I got lazy shortly after that and decided to take a month off.

Very quickly my blogging unique visits plummeted back down to between 100 to 300 people a day which really hurt my sites. You do not realize it yet, but every post you are making and publishing builds on top of each other. You need to continually blog if you are going to maximize the momentum you already have established after all of this time.

Therefore, I highly recommend that people do not take a sufficient break from their blogs. You really can not afford to if you are serious about it. Even something as small as a few weeks will effect your daily average views and take you time to build it back up.

Websites are temperamental, and building a popular one takes preparation, consistency, and talent. While I assume you are prepared and plenty talented, the consistency is usually what seperates successful blogs from normal ones.

For that reason, you should not take a break from blogging. Find a way to push through your road blocks, mental blocks, and spark that fire again if you get burned out.

Road Blocks

The biggest hindrance for some bloggers might be things that are nearly out of your control.

In early 2020, my blogs actually outgrew my hosting provider at the time. I was getting so many visits, that the provider shut down some of my sites due to their usage. Not to mention one of my blogs had become a target of a Ddos attack where people were constantly pinging my site to take it off-line.

While this was good in a way, it actually took my blogs off-line and disrupted not only my up-time but my daily visits and postings. It took me nearly a month to fully fix the problem, but afterward the damage was already done. I had lost over 80% of my daily visits, and I am sure Google penalized my sites for the lack of up-time.

Sad as it was, it taught me an important lesson. There are times when there is nothing you can do, but try and fix the problem as fast as you can. In these circumstances, I highly suggest to continue writing new posts on the side. Get extra content and start to expand your social media influence. While this won’t fully combat the loss of readers, it will help once your blog becomes active again.

Long story short, there are many road blocks that can hinder your progress. My advice is not to stop, but to find a work around. Make your own path if there are no paths.

Mental Blocks

Another constant struggle with writers is the challenge of continuously pushing out engaging content.

Building a blog and writing everyday is hard, but coming up with things to say or what to even write about can be a challenge in itself. While there is no magical way to do this or keep up the level of creativity it requires to build a sustainable blog, there are some tricks to consider.

I have a few personal tricks to combat this dilemma.

Mental Block Tricks

The first trick I use is to change up your scenery. Sometimes your writers block can merely be due to the area surrounding you. If you are constantly writing in the same spot, then it can feel repetitive or nuanced after awhile. Change your scenery by going to a coffee shop, sitting outside, or hell go blog on top of your car. What ever gets those creative juices flowing.

My second trick is to piecemeal a post together. This might not be fully clear, but when I start writing a post – I generally do not have the entire thing planned out. A lot of the time I just start with a generic topic and add header tags throughout the page. These tags are just points I might consider relevant. Over time, I have enough sections to start the post and it gives me a sort of road map to tie all of it together. This is more of a general writing tip, but it still helps me when I feel mentally blocked on creating engaging sentences or content on the micro level.

My third tip is a secret that you will almost never guess. Just kidding, the secret is a sort of stimulant. My poison of choice is undoubtedly coffee. Coffee is the magic which helps me work 12-16 hours a day and blog anywhere between 5,000 to 7,000 words a night. That might not sound like a lot, but… you would be wrong. That is a lot of work and writing to do as a hobby. Really though, find what stimulates you to perform. Preferably legal substances please.

Burned Out

The last part that I want to discuss is being burned out from blogging.

Really, this is not specific to blogging, because people can get burned out of anything in this life. Right? Sometimes you just have it up to here with your job, your boss, your family, maybe it’s the drive home, it could be your spouse, or maybe you just hate your cat. Be nice to fluffy.

The POINT IS, you get burned out of things. I get it. But, that is honestly no excuse. Hate me if you will, but it was your decision to build a blog. It was your decision to try and dedicate your free time to creating something you can be proud of and call your own.

Don’t give me excuses of why “you don’t feel like it.” That is sissy talk. Do you want to go back to wasting your time, or do you want to build the best damn blog anyone has ever come across and write to tens or thousands of readers every night?

The choice is obviously yours, but I suggest finding what makes you tick and gett’er done George.

Blog Your Socks Off

Thanks for reading over my tips one how to combat these blogging problems.

Really, it all comes down to your determination to be successful. Your blog is entirely dependent on how strong that is, and your willingness to keep up the work when your mind and body are telling you to take a break. Don’t do it! Keep blogging, keep writing, and eat that horse.

Thanks for reading my blog.

Becoming a blogger can be extremely challenging! There is so much to learn, so many options and usually not enough hours in the day. If you are a new blogger, I highly suggest reading part of our new blogger tutorial and start learning as much as you can! If you are not a new blogger, then you still might be able to learn a thing or two.

Once you have all the basics mastered, it’s time to start to figuring out what tools will best enable you to write your blogs. Most importantly, what tools will save you the most time and money! For those reasons here are a few tools that I personally use all of the time to find images, compress them, select keywords, and gain exposure!

Free Images

First up on the list of tools, we are going to focus on images. Although, why would you need images if you are blogging? Well, the thing is every blog post can have its own featured image! That means you are going to need a lot of images if you are going to blog daily.

There are a few important resources for images you are going to use if you are going to want high quality stuff for your blogs. The first is a well known tool called Canva.

Canva

Canva is probably the tool that is every bloggers dreams.

There is almost an unlimited number of stock photos on this site that are free! All you have to do is create a free account and search for the photos you need. They have content on just about anything and everything you could want. Not only that, but you can select the size of the photo you want to download it as, make edits, or even overlay the photo with texts and effects! There are so many tools at your disposal for free.

Some of the photos on the site do cost something, but the price is only $1 which means those photos are a steal! The best part is you can always choose the free photos if you didn’t want to pay for the ones that cost. So seriously, if you are not already using Canva then you are missing out!

Unsplash

Although if price is truly an issue then you need to go and check out Unsplash.

Unsplshed is a platform where people can post their photos for free and anyone can use them. Really anyone that goes on this site can download any of the photos and use them how ever they need. That is for personal use or commercial use these photos are yours to do with as you please.

It is really a great platform for anyone that is on a budget and needs to get photos for free. I would start your image search on Canva, and then if you can’t find what you need, then use Unsplash as a back up. Remember though, even if you find a photo on Unsplash that is almost perfect, you can throw it into Canva afterward to edit it and get it to the right size for your post! These tools work wonderfully together.

Compressor

Another great tool is an online compressor. You see, images can be very large in size and take up a lot of space.

If you are not careful you can seriously slow the page load speed of your site by uploading images that are too large. It is probably a good idea to keep any image you upload to a smaller size then 150 kb. With a compressor, you can easily upload any image and compress it to the size you need. be careful though, because as you compress an image you also comprise the quality on how it appears. Therefore, you want to do it just enough to decrease the size significantly, but not enough where the image looks blurry.

For most images I use anywhere between 80%-90% image quality and the A compression method selection on the compressor tool. This usually gets my image to a decent file size and allows me to upload it. By doing this for every photo on my site, it allows my site to run much smoother and consistently faster than competitors. You should be doing this to every photo or image before you upload it to your site.

I keep an image folder and a “compressed images” folder inside my main folder for my site on my desktop. Then I always pull images from the compressed images folder to make sure I upload the proper file while publishing my blogs. It would be smart to go ahead and get used to this to make sure you are not accidentally putting large images on your site and slowing it down!

Keyword Selection

If you know anything about websites, then you know something about SEO and keywords. You see, keywords are what your site ranks for when people search things in Google. Each header you put on your blogs is something your site typically ranks for in Google somewhere.

That is why choosing your blog titles and your section titles are vitally important. Although, it is extremely hard to know which keywords to rank for and how to phrase them. That means you need a tool to help you with it! I have just the tool, and it is easy to use and best of all it is free as well! That tool is called Ubersuggest.

Ubersuggest

This is an amazing tool because it solves several problems. First, it allows you to search keywords and their ranking difficulty levels. In addition, it will suggest other keywords that you could target that are even easier to rank for. Other than that, you can search website rankings, back links, keywords other websites rank for, and other amazing features. It really is a tool that just gives you so much knowledge for free. It is an easy choice to say, you need to be using it.

To focus in, you want to type your keyword into the Ubersuggest search bar. Once you do that, it will tell your the traffic for this search word flowing through Google, the difficulty score for ranking for that keyword, the paid difficulty score, and the cost per click. If you look to the far left, you will see a menu that allows you to choose “keyword ideas”. You are going to want to click that and view all the similar keywords you should be targeting that go along with your main keyword.

With this tool, you can focus in on some longer-tail keywords to maximize your posts exposure and gain more traffic organically! Speaking of organic traffic, lets head to our last tool you should be using, Social Media.

Social Media

The last tool you should be using as a blogger or website owner is social media.

Not one in particular either, but all of them. There are a ton of useful platforms that you should be utilizing and posting on to gain more followers. Really, you should have an account on most of them and be posting links and excerpts from your blogs on them to attract discussion.

This is easier said then done, but if you do this daily after every single post you will see the benefit of doing so after some time. It takes a while to build your social following, but you can gain just as much traffic through these channels are you will through organic reach on Google.

Tools For Bloggers

Thanks for reading out top tools for bloggers and trying to further your blogging and website career! There are a ton of free tools to use online, and these are only a few that I personally use daily. Make sure to keep researching and never stop growing!