Having interests or hobbies that you are truly passionate about? If you’re saying yes, you should certainly consider starting a lifestyle blog and make it a way to earn.
You may have come across several such blogs while browsing. But, don’t you think the term ‘lifestyle blog’ is a bit vague?
How can you begin a lifestyle blog when you’re not even certain about what it means? And how to begin a lifestyle blog that fills your pockets?
We’ve answered everything in this guide. By the end of this guide, you’ll get a proper idea of EXACTLY how to create, design, and publish your own lifestyle blog and make money from it.
But let’s understand it first of all.
What Is A Lifestyle Blog?
As we mentioned earlier, the whole term ‘lifestyle blog’ is somewhat vague and doesn’t have any proper and clear meaning. That’s because it actually doesn’t. When you think of health or food blogs, the meaning is pretty clear. But, when we discuss a lifestyle blog, the topic is truly wider and can cover numerous niches.
So, looking for a simple definition of what a lifestyle blog actually means? Here you go:
A lifestyle blog discusses the personal interests or hobbies of a person. And, it isn’t just limited to hobbies, as a lifestyle blog can also be all about one’s habits.
For example – A blog related to living a frugal and minimal life can be simply called a lifestyle blog.
A blog describing growing your own fruits in your garden can be called a lifestyle blog as well.
Hence, a lifestyle blog can be anything related to your hobbies, interests, or habits. In a nutshell, it concerns your lifestyle. Now, after knowing what a lifestyle blog means, let’s take a gander at how you can begin your own lifestyle blog, earn an audience, and finally, money.
How To Start Your Lifestyle Blog
For those looking to start a lifestyle blog, there’s good news. It’s very easy, and creating your own lifestyle blog would consume just some minutes if you cherish and follow this guide keenly.
Just a word of warning: it’s a lengthy post. We wanted to ensure to offer you enough detail so that they don’t feel confused or uncertain while going through the steps laid out below. We can bet that it will truly help you.
There are a handful of simple steps needed to start a lifestyle blog. And here comes the first one:
[Step 1] Find your niche
The first step needed to start a blog is finalizing the idea of what you want to blog about. Undoubtedly, the blogging world is too saturated, but there’s still room for you to intelligently carve out your own niche. Think about what your passions are. What do you love to do in your spare time? In what all things are you good (or excellent)? You want to pick something about which you’re truly passionate so that creating content proves to be easy for you.
You need to stick with 1 or 2 core topics, although the term “lifestyle blog” permits for a little more flexibility. Nevertheless, try and create such a niche that isn’t very broad and is unique in a few regards. In case you decide to blog regarding home decor, what could be your unique twist here? Is it an affordable style? With a lot of DIY elements? Minimalist but still kid-friendly? If you wanna a mom blogger, what sets you apart? Do you opt to take on an approach with a lot of humor? Being an active family? A travel-loving family? Finding such unique twists to your blogging topic will give you an edge, and you can present yourself “unique” in the crowd.
After picking your niche, try to stick with it consistently. The next job is to write most of your blog posts strictly related to your niche, which should definitely offer value.
Yes, a few topics of your posts here and there that may be slightly off-topic because it’s all about your life which you might want to share. But ensure that your blog readers who visited your blog because your niche matches their interest get plenty of what exactly brought them to your blog.
[Step 2] Find your name
Before starting your blog, you’ll have to come up with a name. The two biggest tips from our side for coming up with a name are:
(A) make it easy to spell and
(B) make it easy to remember
You want something unique, catchy, and nothing too long (otherwise, it will be very tough to remember). Besides that, you also want it easy to Google it, so resist the desire to use unique spelling. And ensure the domain is available as “.com,” strictly without dashes or any other such specialty characters. It should be just your name, with no spaces, and then, “.com.”
(Just check domain availability at domain.com, and return to this guide, as it’s not over). We know those are several requirements, which might seem almost impossible with such few short domain names available these days. But spend the time to get your name just right. Later on, changing a domain or a blog name is not ideal in case you’ve built up an audience as they’ll be confused by the change.
If you’re struggling hard, try this little exercise: note down numerous words that describe your niche and then note down the related words. Use thesaurus.com in case you seek help and don’t feel afraid of putting some time into trying.
[Step 3] Set up a perfectly-hosted WordPress site
But why WordPress over anything else?
The straight answer is that it’s simple and easy to operate. No matter if you’re entirely new in the blogging world, operating WordPress, managing content, using plugins, etc., it won’t take you a decade to learn. It’s actually straightforward.
But how will you get to WordPress? Yes, a lot of folks do use free WordPress to publish blogs, but we won’t advise free hosting or anything like that. You should have control, and even more important is reliability.
It shouldn’t hurt you, especially when full control and reliability are costing you just and just $3.09 (shared hosting) and special WordPress hosting is available at just $2.99. You read that correctly, and that web hosting plan is actually managed, which means you’ll get technical support as well. Yes, 24 x 7 customer support as well.
Not just that, we do desire that your lifestyle blog earn fame, and you may need an even bigger hosting plan to run your blogging. For that, easy upgrading of plans is available.
[Step 4] Design your blog’s aesthetic
Now, after buying hosting and setting up WordPress, you need to pick a suitable theme.
WordPress gives you a range of themes to choose from. However, you can find one elsewhere online as well. ThemeForest and Etsy are amazing sources for themes.
A premium (paid) theme comes with several advantages over a free one. Apart from more customization options (generally), premium themes usually have a support team to contact directly, and they provide more regular updates.
You have to spend around $40-80 per the theme. You can customize any theme using custom CSS also. If you’re a newbie in this department, ensure picking a theme that permits enough customization through the interface, so you don’t need to touch the CSS code.
Also, for the ultimate best theme customization, you can visit AccuWebTech.com.
Apart from a theme, you’ll need to design a logo as well. You can use Photoshop and just play around with various fonts and combinations of colors. If the design is not your forte, feel free to outsource your logo design to AccuWebTech.com, and it won’t cost much.
Now, whilst we’re firm believers that your domain name and blog name shouldn’t change over the years to come, switching up your theme and logo is not an issue, as long as you aren’t getting too funky and ringing any drastic changes. Sticking with one effective logo is crucial for marketing and publicity purpose. For that, hiring professionals is a perfect decision.
[Step 5] Plan your content
Okay, now, after getting your blog up and running, start thinking about content. You can begin by compiling a list consisting of blog post ideas related to your core topics (your niche). “will this help someone” should be the first question to ask yourself when choosing blog topics.
While it’s amazing to just narrate a journal related to your life, it’s usually not that interesting to the readers. There are numerous personal blogs out there that kissed success (Love Taza, for example), but it’s certainly much easier to build a victorious blog if you’re providing readers something that’s helpful to them.
Keep in mind; most people go through blogs to directly or indirectly make their own lives better, no matter it’s home decor inspiration, researching an upcoming trip, or parenting tips. If your blog post is anyway helping them in some or another way, there are more chances of them reading the post and returning for more.
After listing down your blog post ideas, try to put them first under any of your main categories (which are your niche topics) and, later on, into subcategories. You can try to add some more ideas to each category. In case you always have numerous future blog post ideas written and saved, it’ll be easier to pick a topic and write down a full post about it. You certainly don’t need varied categories or subcategories.
[Step 6] Create your content
Now, after planning your content, you need to begin creating!
This will be an individualized process since everyone owns specific skills and a different writing style, but our main two tips are:
(A) When In doubt, better keep things short and strictly to the point
(B) Use attractive and high-quality images. Normally, people have short attention spans nowadays ( We’d blame social media) and, if you just ramble on very long, they might abandon your blog.
So keep it long enough to offer readers the vital information they want to get across, but your content also needs to be short enough and concentrated on the point to keep your reader interested until the end.
Talking about posting photos, blogs don’t need much of them. Two to three images per 1500-2000 words article are enough. But if your niche includes something visual ( fashion, home decor, etc.), your images need to be of high quality.
What’s crucial is learning some photography basics. Ensure that you click only in good light, and most importantly, click something that’s not just sensible but truly relevant. Learn how to edit your photos in such a style that your readers find appealing. Editing is undoubtedly a highly personalized process, and there’s never a “right” and “wrong” way to do photo editing.
Content generation is tough sometimes, and if not written correctly, your content may actually backfire, and your success may go far away from you. However, if you feel ready to spend a bit, a professional writer (with 8+ years experience) at AccuWebTech can nail the job.
[Step 7] Find your first readers
The very first thing to consider in SEO is your blog content. If your blog doesn’t show up in any (Google) searches, people aren’t going to find your blog.
Discuss SEO, the first thing worth mentioning is the optimization of your title. And not just to let Google find you; having the perfect title helps potential readers figure out whether or not they’ll commit to reading your post.
Your title should convey exactly what your post is all about just in the 1-2 seconds the reader takes to read the title.
Don’t leave your title too Vague. “Spanish home design” can’t attract, but something like “Top 10 tips for adding Spanish style to your home” is truly attractive.
Next, it’s time to focus on quality content. Great content is a must as if it’s absent, then no matter if you get readers to visit a blog once, chances are minimal that they become your regular readers. In short, your content needs to be worth it. It’s better to post just once a month but having that post fantastic rather than producing 10 mediocre posts in the same timeframe.
[Step 8] Utilize social media channels
With conducting several ways of bringing the first few readers to your blog in step 7, the best strategy for you is actually social media. You should start an Insta (or a Facebook) profile and give some dedicated time to it everyday. After you get some engagement and followers in your social media account, you can start sharing your blogs over there, with catchy two-liner descriptions and attractive pics.
Now, that’s not the thing to do once. It’s compulsory that whenever you publish something, don’t forget to share it on social media. It will definitely and definitely make at least some people visit your new blogs if you’ve gathered targetted followers on your social accounts. Some even prefer youTube, and certainly, you can do as well, but it’s a bit long game.
[Step 9] Growing your audience
Now, you’ve already put much effort, and you’re close to your ultimate target (if you’re looking to turn it into a business), which is a growing audience. That’s why you started a blog, right.
Now, let’s attract more and more eyes to your blogs. But how?
First of all, realize the fact it does take time. Yes, hard work as well, but the right technique actually makes it easy. You keep on publishing, and if your topics are right, the audience will keep on coming.
But you’ll need SEO efforts for that thrust, and getting professional help for the same isn’t a bad investment, as ultimately, you’re getting a return.
[Step 10] Coming up with new content
After getting involved in blogging for a little while, and getting the initial readers in, and getting the SEO perfectly done besides all other strategies, you’ll have to look at your content calendar. If you continuously create content which brings joy and knowledge to your readers, it will keep the content going.
We explained it briefly in the previous step, but considering the hassle of finding ideas to write upon in the future, listening to your readers is a must. Read and respond to your social media comments, e-mails, and also DMs to figure out the interest of your audience. Or, better yet, simply ask them what they desire to see more of.
You should also analyze your blog’s metrics through Google Analytics and find out what’s performing well right off the bat and what’s performing well over time. You’ll come to know what isn’t performing well at all so that you can make favorable changes.
Check out your traffic sources for individual posts to figure out where posts perform the best.
See your audience is located in which region to figure out the perfect times to post. Check out how much time people are spending on your posts to figure out where you need some betterment. In short, you’d love to track and bring more and more betterment for attaining more success.
Let’s conclude
The bottom word is that the whole process of publishing your lifestyle blog and making it successful isn’t as difficult if you follow the correct steps, but simultaneously, it isn’t that simple, as it needs effort.
After getting into it, you’ll actually love it if you are ambitious. You’ll interact with the fold of matching thoughts and hobbies, and you can also earn pretty well. Most importantly, it will sharpen your skills and increase your knowledge.
