How to Start a Lifestyle Blog (And Earn Money Through It)

Starting a lifestyle blog can be a fun way of expanding and sharing your everyday life with thousands of people all around the world. An interesting characteristic of lifestyle blogs is that they can cover a lot of different topics - all the way from fashion advice to gardening tips - and you are not restricted by conforming into just a single niche (yet hold that thought).

In this article we’ll go through some of the most important steps in order to get started with your own lifestyle blog.

Before you start your blog

While the best advice usually is to “just get started with writing content”, it is important that you make some initial thoughts about how you want to approach lifestyle blogging, as this can have an effect on how you should structure, style and market your blog.

Some of the points to go through before starting your lifestyle blog are:

• Pick a niche. As previously mentioned, a lifestyle blog can encompass a lot of different topics, but you may want to narrow down the focus on your blog in order to appeal to a more specific audience while still retaining the “lifestyle” aspect of your blog. It could for example be a blog related to staying healthy by providing guides on different exercises but also including various healthy recipes and wellness tips. A good way to apply more niche blog content is by incorporating your own hobbies and passions in your content.
• Research other lifestyle blogs. Get inspiration from the thousands of other lifestyle blogs that exist on the internet in order to confirm what you yourself enjoy in a blog and which things you would rather than include in a blog. This can help you shape a better vision of which direction you can take your blog in and provide yourself with lifestyle post ideas that you can use on your own blog.
• Imagine your target audience. Making some initial thoughts of who is gonna read the content on your blog can also have an influence on how you should approach blogging. Trying to appeal to a wide audience through your lifestyle blog can seem like a beneficial idea but may make it more difficult to connect deeper with your visitors.

These are points that are good to take up with yourself briefly before going head-first into your blogging adventure in order to not get overwhelmed by decisions once you’re setting up your blog and writing content. But keep in mind that these things should not block you for months from getting started on your blog and that it is possible to experiment and find your direction through trial and error as well.

Select a blogging platform

Step two of getting started with your lifestyle blog is to actually create your blog. This usually involves using a blogging software that can either be supplied by a managed host or you can download the software and install it on your own host. If you want to read more about these terms and what the differences are, you can read our article on how to start a blog in 2023, which includes in-depth explanations on the different ways you can get a blog live on the internet.

Picking a blogging software

Some of the most common platforms and software for blogging are:

• WordPress
• Blogger
• Wix
• Wasabee (food blogging)

Picking a mature and well-developed platform for your blogging (both self-hosted or managed) can be a good idea, since they often come with a large ecosystem of plugins, extensions and communities that make it easier to customize and style your blog to your likings.

Finding a hosting platform

As previously mentioned, some blogging software offer their own managed hosting which might also come with additional features such as automatic backups, integrated plugins and customer support. While convenient, the drawback of using these services are often that they are more expensive than if you managed your own hosting.

In the case of hosting your own blogging software, you need to find a good and reliable hosting provider. Here it is extra important to pick a provider that has good customer reviews and has proven to be reliable as you do not want outages and unstable services to hinder traffic to your blog. I will not list any hosting providers in this article as I will let it be up to you to do your due research in order to pick the right provider for you.

Pick a website domain

In order for people to be able to find your blog on the internet you need an easy to remember and intuitive site domain (this assumes you already have a name in mind for your blog). It is a good idea to acquire a domain that is the closest as possible to the name of your blog, as users will often only remember the name of your blog and search for that when trying to find your blog again. It is also recommended to get a domain that uses a common extension like .com or .net, as using uncommon extensions can make it harder to memorize your domain and there can be a chance that unknowing people might confuse your site with a malicious one.

Some hosting platforms offer their own service for buying and acquiring a domain for your blog, else you can use a service such as Namecheap or Google Domains for registering your domain.

Build your blog

For most people, one of the most exciting parts of starting up a blog is to create the frontend for your blog. This involves finding a starter theme or template that resonates with the style and design that you are going with.

Designing your lifestyle blog

Most blogging software has ways of modifying and rearranging different sections in themes in order to accommodate the requirements of your blog, for example through drag-and-drop editors and page builders.

When building your blog it’s a good idea to create a consistent image of your brand through the use of colors, images and typography.

Building your blog can also include installing various plugins for stuff like blog posts commenting, translating to multiple languages and adding additional pages such as a contact form, about me page or any other custom page.

Optimize your blog for search engines

Building your blog also includes making sure that it is optimized for search engines such as Google in order to rank higher and get visibility in search engine results. This includes taking care of on-page SEO such as providing a title and meta description for the different pages in your blog and making sure that your page speed is acceptable. One tool to test for these things when optimizing your blog is PageSpeed insights which can give a good insights on how your pages perform on both speed, accessibility and SEO. There are various plugins that can help with optimizing your blog for search engines but be careful not to overload your website with plugins and extensions as they can end up having a negative impact on your blog ranking by making your website slow and sluggish.

Start writing

Now to the most important step of having a blog; writing content. The earlier you get started with writing the better, both in order to get picked up by search engines quicker but also to get the ball rolling when it comes to writing posts for your blog.

Have a publishing schedule

While you should still care about delivering quality in the early stages of your blog, it is also important to keep a steady stream of content in order to make yourself noticed by people and search engines. The more you write, the better you will also get at overcoming writer’s block and getting new ideas for blog posts.

A good way to consistently deliver content is to set up a publishing schedule for yourself that you can follow. This can also help you plan out what kind of content you want to post in the future.

Include keywords

When writing blog posts for your newly created blog, it can be a good idea to do a short keyword analysis in order to cover words that may perform well on search engines in order to make your articles rank higher on Google. Keywords can both include short 3-4 word sentences or long-tail keywords that each can vary in difficulty and competition.

Mix up your content

It’s a good idea to experiment with different formats and topics for your lifestyle blog in order to widen your audience. Like previously mentioned, it is still good to keep a certain scope for your blog post, but say you for example run a lifestyle blog for traveling - though your main scope for your blog is traveling, you can experiment with including lifestyle blogging topics such as different cuisines all over the world, wildlife photography in exotic countries or ratings of experiences in different countries. It’s a good skill for a lifestyle blogger to be able to explore and play around with different topics.

Monetize your blog

Lifestyle blogging is one of the most popular ways of blogging, which means that there are opportunities to monetize your blog in order to start generating revenue through your blog. It is very important to note that monetizing your blog should not be your main focus when starting out, as there is really no way of earning money on a blog that has zero to a few visitors. In order to make money with your lifestyle blog, you should have established yourself and have a steady stream of visitors to your blog.

A lifestyle blogger can earn money through various monetization techniques:

Do affiliate marketing

Recommending various services or products to your visitors on behalf of a third-party company can be a very lucrative way of earning money on your blog. A lot of companies offer affiliate programs where they pay a commission for each customer they gain through you promoting their product.

When doing affiliate marketing, it is important that you pick services or products that are still related to the content that you provide and that you might use yourself, else visitors can end up being confused and start distrusting you and your content.

Advertisements

One of the most common ways that people monetize their blog is through advertisements that are displayed throughout the website. While being a good way to earn money through your blog, the drawback of showing advertisements on your blog is that they can make your pages look cluttered and noisy.