7 Steps to Start a Blog in Nigeria and Make Money Online

There are quite a lot of opportunities on the internet, and exploring them requires the right strategy – to create a strong web presence.

Your online presence should be focused on bringing value to other online users who are seeking solutions and information on a certain subject.

One way to achieve this is to start a blog and grow your online presence through your blog. Starting a blog will help you find the right audience that aligns well with your business and goals.

For example, people who like to have passion for making different food delicacies can start a food blog, where they show their cooking skills to others while also helping them learn how to cook better meals for themselves and their families.

Succinctly, When you educate your prospects via your blog as a business owner or entrepreneur, you open up channels to make more money from it.

That’s because a blog can be a powerful marketing tool for marketing your business. The valuable information provided on your blog will attract more audience to your blog and has the potential of growing your sales and customer base.

Businesses like Shopify and veed.io has cracked the business blogging code, and they leveraged blogging as a tool to grow their businesses.

If you are targeting Nigerians as your customer, then you should create your blog designed to attract more local searchers, combining that with promoting your blog post on social media platforms.

People who like to write a lot will find blogging as rewarding, it allows them to build further their writing skills while establishing their online presence.

They can as well communicate their passions and expertise, inspire and educate others and turn that into a passive income machine as their blog starts to grow.

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What is a blog?

Blogging is a journal-style of sharing various blends of content on the internet to reach a wider audience in a niche, sector or industry.

Starting a blog can be a reliable digital strategy to build a community of followers by chronicling your expertise, experiences and standpoints.

Blogging today is not just creating a mountain of content to attract google and other search engine crawlers.

It requires creating stellar content written by great minds, covering a range of or specific genre of topics, most appropriately referred to as niches and sub-niches.

A niche blog publishes content relating to a well-defined market, industry or topic.

For example, you can start a niche blog in education, politics, pets, tech, food, wildlife, sports, personal finance, relationships, education, and so much more.

To start and grow a blog in Nigeria, you need to know and follow the right strategy in order to grow a blog that can make you some side income.

A blog, whether it forms an entire website or just a section on your existing web, is a platform for sharing content on topics that you have passion for.

Typically, blogs feature both written and visual content in an easy-to-read, article format, allowing visitors to quickly find what they need.

With over 600 million blogs in the world on different subjects and topics, from home renovation to baking to local business marketing strategies.

All with the ultimate goal of building community of readers to achieve their financial or personal goals.

There’s no perfect time to start your own blog.

What matters is the desire to learn what work and the enthusiasm to manage and promote your blog till you start getting the desired results.

Blogging can be a life changing venture, both in the pursuit of passion, and in the journey towards financial freedom.

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7 steps to start a Profitable blog in Nigeria

In this nifty blogging tutorial, we will make sure to touch all the important aspects of blogging, including selecting the right blogging platform to designing a blog site that is built elegantly for prospective audience to get valuable insights.

We are confident that this simple blog starter guide will enable you to set up your blog in 30 minutes or less.

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Step #1. Answer the “What niche” question

Defining what niche to blog in is one fundamental step every beginner blogger must take.

You will need to pick a market subset (niche) which your content revolve around. This is one secret sauce to attract tons of readers to your blog and make some earnings.

This foundational step plays the most important role in the entire blogging process because it helps you to stand out of the heated competition and cut through the noise.

A phenomenal blog is crafted to tackle in-demand topics that attracts targeted audience.

Picking a niche can be easy, and a hassle at the same time. If you find this step more confusing than it is straightforward, here are some tips that can help:

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•  What are your interests?

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When trying to come up with a niche for your blog, ask yourself these questions-what do you enjoy doing, what’s a topic you can talk on and on about without losing motion, what piques your interest?

The answers you provide to them can serve as an indication of the niche you should work on. Blogging can be an interesting journey, as well as a tasking one, making it about something you love will ensure you barely ever get tired of doing it.

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• What are you good at?

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This question has to do with expertise, what is something you think you can do better than most people? How about you blog about it. Your blog could serve as a hack to people who need help in that area. Who knows, your blog might eventually become an authority in that niche.

A general rule of thumb when picking a blog niche is to brainstorm, first, based on the audience you seek to attract, secondly, based on industry, such as Insurance, tech or finance and finally, based on a subject such as relationship, education, tech etc.

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Step #2. Find a valuable domain name

Now that you have decided on your niche, your next step is to get one of the two most important elements needed to build a blog. Domain is first and web hosting is second.

will be to find an identity that best befits your blog, a domain name. There is a heated jostle for good domain names today, and you cannot settle for something below par.

Your domain name serves as your blog’s unique identity on the internet.

Below are some tips to pick a valuable domain name for your blog:

• As a beginner, stick with the .com extension
• Domain name must accurately reflect and align with your niche
• It should have a unique and global appeal
• Avoid the use of hyphens or numbers, this will affect memorability and also make your blog look less credible
• If you intend to expand your blog to accommodate other niches in the future, then you should consider keeping your domain name more open.
• Ensure you do not violate trademarks
• Make it brandable
• Not more than 12 to 15 characters
• 2 to 3 words domain are best e.g. Face”Book.

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Step #3. Find a reliable web hosting partner

Once you have brainstormed and decided on your choice of domain name for your blog, the next step is to register the domain name. We recommend that you register your domain name with the same hosting company as a beginner this way you can save money and time too.

While your domain name is your primary identity, your hosting provider will give you a rented space to host your websites so users can access your site globally. When deciding on a hosting provider, consider factors like server performance, scalability, customer support, etc.

Which is we recommend ThriveHost for your hosting and domain registraton needs.

ThriveHost Nigeria is a web hosting provider of repute with rock-solid web servers in Nigeria, UK and USA. They prioritse security for their clients and offer important features such as malware scanner, free SSL, SSD storage and other features you need to grow a successful blog.

They offer different pocket-friendly hosting plans, all you had to do is select a plan that best meets the requirements of your blog, and process your oder.

As a beginner who is just learning the ropes, you can opt for shared hosting which is cheaper and offer same ultra-fast cloud hosting solution.

We have published a video on how to order a plan on ThriveHost as well as preapre the web hosting environment for your blog.

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Step #4. Set up & design your blog

Once you have secured the two most important elements in steps 2 and 3 above from ThriveHost. The next thing is to setup your blog and have designed.

Now, there are several wen hosting platforms that supports blogging, but we recommend you go with the most popular onw which is WordPress. WordPress is currently a Content Managrement Solution and Web platform of choice for over 60 million blogs and 474 million websites globally, according to Google.

A blog is a type of website. To create your blog, you can easily install, a fresh copy of WordPress through the ThriveHosts control panel.

There’s a video showing you how to do that in simple steps.

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Designing your WordPress Blog

Once your WP has been installed on your server, and now you have your administrative login details, its time to design your blog site. The easy way to design your blog is using ready-made templates and themes. The WordPress.org theme repositiory has over 12,390 free themes that you can pick from.

There are other premim wordpress themes on platforns like Themeforest and Monster template, that you can buy and add, but if you’re on a budget, you’d do just well with free themes like Astra, Zakra, OceanWP, Blocksy, Kadence etc.

To add any of these themes, simply login to your WordPress sites, navigate to Appearance, click on Themes, click on ‘add new’, on the next screen search for any of the above theme by their name, install and activate.

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Step #5. Create Quality Content

Now that your blog is all set up, it is void and not looking how a blog should without content, next step is to populate it with quality contents. To achieve this, you will need to come up with a content strategy that will allow you to create the kind of content your audience yearns for.

You can incorporate the following steps into your content creation strategy:

• Set goals you want to achieve with your content
• Understand what your audience wants
• Draft an editorial calendar, this helps you to maintain consistency
• Create content that defies time, and can remain relevant to readers over a long period.
• Carry out keyword research using tools like SEMrush, AHREFS, etc.
• Utilize visual elements in your content.

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Step #6. Promote Your Blog

Once your content is all set up, it’s important to promote your blog, allowing you to reach a wider audience. You can promote your blog using:

• SEO (on-page and off-page)
  Social media outreaches
• Email marketing
• Guest posts
• Blogger collaborations

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Step #7. Monetizing your blog

Now, to one of the most important aspects of blogging, monetization. Very important because, whether the purpose of your blog is to make money or not, you are still going to need the revenue to maintain and run your blog.

There are various ways of monetizing a blog, and it is advisable to engage in as many as allowed for your niche, that way, streams of income are diversified. Monetization methods in blogging include:

• Affiliate Marketing
• Display ads networks such as Google AdSense, Adsterra, Monetag, etc.
• Selling direct ad slots to local businesses
• Sponsored posts
• Offering premium memberships and subscription based content
• Selling digital products such as e-books and coursewares.

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Finally…

Blogging in Nigeria can be difficult due to the fact that the foundational knowledge required to delve into it is not being taught in our colleges. This article makes it less complicated for the newbies, as we touch on the steps to creating a blog in Nigeria, and monetizing it.