Are you passionate about a hobby in your life and you want to make money with your own lifestyle blog?
Although many people associate blogging with hobbies, blogging is actually one of the fastest-growing industries in the world today.
This step-by-step tutorial will explain how to start a lifestyle blog, the best tips for content creation, and everything else you should know before you begin your blogging journey.
Ready to explore the endless lifestyle blogging possibilities?
Keep reading!
Approximately 409 million people view more than 20 billion web pages monthly and over 77% of internet users read blogs regularly, with many of these pages being lifestyle blogs.
A lifestyle blogger creates high-quality content that is often inspired by personal experience and daily activities.
Lifestyle blogs are highly personalized to the author's life stage, location, and hobbies.
These blogs can be more personal than a business website because they don't share the latest news on a topic or teach an audience.
With that said, the fundamental difference between a lifestyle blog and a personal blog is that a lifestyle blog focuses more so on your interests and activities instead of drawing an emotional connection with your audience.
The best way to describe it is to look at a lifestyle blog as reader-focused, whereas a personal blog is author-focused.
If you're like me and learn by example, here are some successful lifestyle blogs to draw some inspiration from:
Camille Styles provides readers with a unique approach to lifestyle, fashion, and home decor.
She and her team run her lifestyle blog where she shares her advice on wellness, food, design, and even some travel.
Camille is also the author of the bestselling book, "Camille Styles Entertaining."
This lifestyle blog chose a few different niches and blended them into her own simplistic and modern style using a WordPress custom theme.
The primary passive income from the lifestyle blog is book sales with additional income from product sales.
The Blond Abroad is a quirky travel and lifestyle blog that is a great place to explore potential destinations.
Here, you can read about Kiki's experiences and check out some stunning photos from all over the world.
This example was created with a WordPress custom theme and the major topics this blog focuses on are lifestyle, travel, and photography, with income streaming from product sales.
Katie Wells, who wanted to offer useful advice to anyone who wanted to lead a more healthy lifestyle, founded Wellness Mama.
This mom of 6 has successfully led a team of people who post daily content. This lifestyle blog has some tasty recipes as well as some beauty and general wellness tips and life hacks.
Katie also collaborates with a team of medical experts to make sure that all of her content she and her team share are safe and effective.
The key topics this blog covers are health, recipes, and general wellness. The primary source of income for this website is affiliate links.
In 2022, there are over 600 million blogs and 1.9 billion websites worldwide.
That is a lot of different blogs with an endless amount of niches.
So, how do you pick the right one for you?
Here are a few important questions to ask yourself before you begin:
• Who is your target audience?
• What is your area of expertise?
• Do you know what your audience wants to see?
• What niche makes the most money?
Let’s jump into some great tips for picking your lifestyle niche:
• Consider your interests and what you're passionate about. If there's an overlap between your interests and your blogging goals, then you've found your niche.
• Break down each niche and take notes for potential sub-topics and then see which one has the most subtopics that you're interested in. For example, if you picked “travel” as a niche, you may decide to choose “photography” or “food” as a subtopic.
• Check out your competition. Find topics that are currently being written about in your chosen niche and make notes to identify the subjects that inspire you the most.
Here is a list of 10 different specific niches you could potentially choose from:
Now that you’ve chosen your niche, let’s move on to the more technical side of blogging:
To pick the right blogging platform that's right for your lifestyle blog, you need to figure out how its features and capabilities align with your goals and needs as a blogger.
If your goal is to reach Google's first page in search engine results, you'll want to look for a platform with built-in SEO tools.
However, for WordPress.com, you need to pay a premium (WordPress Pro), though it does offer a built-in SEO tool. WordPress.org offers a similar feature, but you have to download the WordPress installation version.
Many website builders have a form of free web hosting with options for upgrades such as WordPress, Medium, and Ghost.
Although it may limit what you can do with customization, domain name, and plugins, it may be a good choice to begin with until you’re ready for an upgrade.
It may also be harder to monetize and boost traffic on a free blogging platform.
Here is a list of some of the best blogging platforms:
• Wix
• Medium
• Ghost
• Weebly
Let’s move on to some great hosting services:
A web hosting provider offers more than just data storage for your blog. It's a core part of a blog's functionality.
Hosts mainly offer data storage on hardware called web services that allow for easy maintenance and access by online users.
It would be best to know what your website's needs are before choosing a hosting service.
Here is a list of some of the most commonly used web hosts:
• Hostinger: Most reliable web host overall
• Bluehost: Best web host for beginner bloggers
• Dreamhost: Most affordable for a month-to-month plan
• Hostgator: Best for simplistic websites
• GreenGeeks: Eco-friendly hosting
• SiteGround: Best speed and security for WordPress users
Remember to confirm the subscription period for any hosting contracts you sign up for and check for server reliability.
Another important aspect is to check for any uptime guarantees. You may also want to research refund policies or any other guarantees.
Additionally, make sure you completely understand the plan you're being offered and what your upgrade options are.
You may also want to verify any host's primary features.
When it comes to a domain name, less is often more. Length and simplicity are something to consider when deciding what your blog name should be.
You want it to be easily remembered and spelled.
Here are a few other helpful tips for picking out a domain name:
• Stick with a .com
• Use your target keywords
• Make sure that your domain is memorable and easy to spell
• Avoid hyphens and doubled letters
• Keep your domain short and simple
• Stay unique
Hosting plans vary, but buying a new domain generally costs between $10 and $20 a year. However, you may also be able to obtain a free domain name with the purchase of a yearly subscription to most web hosts.
A plugin is a piece of software that is placed on your website. Plugins can add new functionality or boost pre-existing features that are already on your site.
This allows you to create any kind of website you want. You can enjoy the freedom to do so with thousands of available plugins you can choose from.
Keep in mind that plugins are used most commonly on WordPress blogs and can be searched for in your WordPress dashboard, but you can also use some of them on other platforms.
Let’s explore some useful plugins for lifestyle blogs:
Yoast SEO
Yoast SEO can help you with optimizing your website and posts for keywords and phrases.
Yoast can be pricey, but there is a downloadable free plugin from the website you can import into your WordPress site.
It can also recognize related keywords, synonyms, and different forms of your key phrases.
This allows you to write more naturally and makes it easier to improve your content for audiences and search engines alike.
WordPress Editorial Calendar
WordPress Editorial Calendar is super useful.
This plugin gives you the options to see when your posts are scheduled to post in a Calendar view.
You can easily drag and drop them to move things around and give you the options for quickly editing your standard post list to new dates.
This also helps to avoid mistakes with publishing dates.
NoFollow For External Link
For SEO reasons, many websites will request that you put a nofollow link in your outbound links.
It's also best for affiliate links. Google may penalize you for using too many outbound links or linking to low-ranking websites.
This plugin tells Google not to notice that you're linking to this website.
There's actually a lot more technical jargon to this, but for many lifestyle bloggers, this plugin is highly recommended. It's also much easier than manually adding a nofollow link.
There are many other plugins that are useful, so make sure you shop around when adding the best plugins for your lifestyle blog.
Themes are another term that is thrown around fairly often.
They can be used on many blogging platforms. But, because WordPress powers over 42.8% of the internet, WordPress themes are the most commonly referred to.
Most themes function in similar ways. Although, it would be best to keep in mind that different themes can affect different technical parts of your blog, such as mobile-friendliness.
Themes affect the entire design of your website, whereas templates only affect the layout of a single page.
Here are a few tips for picking your theme:
• Decide the features you want ahead of time
• Don't choose a bloated theme
• Choose a responsive theme
• Decide what colors you want
• Considering using a premium theme
• Consider your font colors and sizes
• Test your theme thoroughly
Themes are a great way to begin designing your blog in customizable ways.
Designing your blog is an important aspect of creating any website. It’s also a lot of hard work. You also need to consider what rules and guidelines you will use for your content creation.
Having guides helps you establish the colors you work with, the type of images you will use, and the tone you'll write with.
All of this type of information should be kept in one document, so you and your team members have a reference.
Your blogging style guide should be a miniaturized version of your brand which embodies all the style and design rules for your blog.
Additionally, here are some tips for designing your lifestyle blog:
• Keep your website design simple and user-friendly
• Use contrasting colors (check out the color wheel if you aren't sure)
• Embrace white space
• Keep your design goal driven
• Research the right brand colors and remember that colors can provoke emotion (for example, the human eye sees yellow first and the color red is associated with power and anger)
• Create rules for editing and images
• Pick the right fonts and font sizes
• Create rules around tone and language
• Organize your content in a content schedule such as Asana or ClickUp
Landing pages and other core pages are vital for your lifestyle blog.
There are many components that make a successful landing page.
In fact, 9 out of 10 customers trust reviews and testimonials on a landing page and 77% of landing pages are home pages.
Let's jump into some of the most important core pages to create for your lifestyle blog:
Your homepage is the most important part of your website. It is often one of the first pages a visitor sees.
A good practice for creating great homepages is to keep them simple and easy to navigate.
This will lessen your bounce rate and keep your audience engaged for longer.
It is also a good practice to include high-quality images, but make sure that they are optimized for fast page speed.
Additionally, having optimized call-to-action buttons such as "sign up here" or "click here for our free ebook!" is a great method for turning visitors into long-term readers.
Here are a few tips for creating a great homepage:
• Create a catchy headline that tells readers exactly what your site is about
• Supporting images
• Provide a one-click call-to-action
• Social proof
• Navigation
• Content
Other core pages include:
• About page
• Products or service pages
• Contact page
• Blog pages
With that said, let’s move on to SEO for lifestyle blogging and other ways to boost brand awareness and content creation:
72% of marketing experts believe that relevancy is the key to a successful SEO campaign.
By creating content that is easily found on search engines, you can end up not only saving time and money, but making money through organic traffic, conversions, and sales.
Here are some basic SEO-friendly tips you can begin using right now:
• Write a good page title
• Link building (both internal and external)
• Use target keywords with a high search volume and low competition
• Keyword research
• Stay consistent with your workflow
• Metadata is super important (example: alt-text, meta descriptions, etc)
A page title is vital to your website content. It should include a target keyword as close to the beginning of the title as possible.
You may also want to keep it under 66 characters in total so that it won't get cropped out by search engines.
Links are vital to the growth of your search rank. There are three fundamental ways to incorporate link-building into your blog content.
It would be best to use anchor text with your keyword, get other websites to link back to you, and link pre-existing content to new content.
Keyword research is extremely important when creating content for your lifestyle blog. Keywords need to be placed in certain parts of your content, such as:
• The page title and headline
• In the URL
• In the body of your article
• In your site's metadata
The average length of a blog post is around 2,164, additionally, long-form blog posts generate 9x more leads than short-form ones.
Do you have a plan for developing content for your new blog? Do you know if you will be outsourcing your written content?
If you don’t know the answers to these questions, you should, especially if you plan to become a full-time, successful lifestyle blogger.
In fact, the top three goals most bloggers want to achieve through content marketing are brand awareness, building trust and credibility, and educating audiences.
Here are some blogging tips for content strategy building:
• Know your goals and what you want from your blog
• Learn your audience by conducting research
• Run a content audit on any pre-existing posts
• Choose a content management system
• Have goals for blog topics and content creation
• Check out your competition and the keywords they are ranking on
• Brainstorm blog post ideas
• Publish and manage your content
There are many ways to come up with a successful content marketing plan. You can use mind-mapping apps to help you design your strategy, create spreadsheets, and perform research on your strategy.
Now that you know how to create a content plan, let’s move on to how to promote your blog once it’s created:
The first part of starting and designing your blog is the most fun and exciting.
After putting a lot of time, effort, and hard work into your creation process and researching your target market, you then need to begin promoting your blog.
Here are a few tips for doing so:
• Repurpose pre-existing content and turn it into videos, audio, infographics, etc
• Focus on link-building
• Answer relevant questions on Quora
• Post on subreddits
• Flip posts to Flipboard
• Reach out to other influencers in your niche
Content repurposing is re-imagining your content into other mediums, such as turning a blog post into a video. In fact, 19% of bloggers are now including videos in their typical posts.
This can be done and can offer different things to different audiences on different platforms. Doing this can expand your viewership.
Once you begin creating content, you can then start building organic inbound links.
If you want to rank on Google, then you need to invest in a link-building strategy.
Building links to your website is one of the best ways to ensure a long-term SEO strategy for your website.
Additionally, using other forms of social media platforms like Reddit and Quora can help expand your audience from different parts of the internet.
Here are a few other ways to promote your content:
Sharing blog posts is one of the number one ways to promote your content. You'll need to take the time to begin creating a strong social media presence.
Try creating a social media content calendar as well as a blog post schedule. With a variety of engaging posts, you can expect to drive some organic traffic to relevant blog posts.
Use images to go with your social media posts. In fact, articles with images get 94% more views as opposed to those with no visuals.
As a bonus tip, add social media widgets to your blogging website for easy following.
Email is one of the most powerful blog promotion tools. Not only can you use it to cultivate your readers, but you can also use it to connect you to industry experts and guest writers.
First, you'll need to build an email list.
You can do this with plugins like MailChimp.
Additionally, once your email list is complete, you can then begin writing out a weekly newsletter to send out to your audience.
Within that newsletter, use a call-to-action to instruct your readers to visit your blog.
Is it possible to make money as a lifestyle blogger?
New bloggers may have a hard time making money at first, but with the right tools, type of content, and knowledge, anyone can make money blogging.
In fact, according to SEMRush the average monetization income of a lifestyle blogger is over $5,000, however, some blogs are known to make much more!
With that said, here are the best ways to monetize your lifestyle blog:
You can sell things like merch, stickers, t-shirts, etc. But there are other ways to offer services, such as coaching or providing freelance services.
Coaching is a great way to monetize a lifestyle blog. You can give your readers access to your expertise and help them solve a problem.
If you are an expert in your niche, such as finance, fashion, or writing. You can create a call-to-action for your audience to buy your services.
Affiliate marketing is sharing a product or service on social media or blog content that earns a commission each time someone makes a purchase through your unique link associated with their recommendations.
Here are a few tips for affiliate marketing:
• Understand the market demand for your product link
• Analyze any competition
• Research different affiliate programs
• Pick your affiliate marketing methods
• Create and publish high-quality content
Another great way to make money on a blog is to sell digital products such as graphic designs, logo designs, images, or ebooks.
Selling digital products is becoming more and more popular and can turn a side hustle into full-time passive income.
Here are some ideas to get you started:
• Create artwork, music, or written content that can be sold digitally
• Build an online store such as Unsplash
• Use an app to make selling digital products easy
• Market your digital products using your blog
• Offer licenses to your digital assets
• Offer membership deals via platforms like Patreon or Kofi
• Offer digital templates or tools
Another great way to monetize your lifestyle blog is to create ad space on your website. The highest paying ads appear on your blog and you get paid per click or view.
For example, if you have 1000 visitors and your click-through rate is 1%, that means you have 1 click per 100 readers and 10 clicks per 1000. That would mean you would gain $17 per 1000 visitors.
Blogging can be a lot of hard work, but with the right guidance, tools, and understanding of how blogging works, you can create, design, and write great content that makes you passive income.
If all of this information is way too much to take in or you aren’t sure where to begin, consider booking a call with one of our experts for advice and consolation.