Before you make money, you will need to spend a little money to set up your blog. Hosting generally costs around £50 per year, and you will have to add another £10 a year for your domain registration. Be careful about that one, you want an easy domain name people will remember, probably a .com or .co.uk, although .travel could do for a travel site, and .me is pretty cool for a personal site. Still, people tend to always type .com at the end, so you may want to buy that as well, and reconsider being the .me site if the .com is already taken.
Regarding how to choose a blogging niche, Scottish Friendly has a few blogging tips to avoid common mistakes. For example, if you can’t write more than 10 posts about one topic, you may want to choose another one. Also, you should study your competition, if the niche is already crowded, like for example general money advice, you can look into more specific niches, such as family finance, finances for young adults, for students, for single mums… Just think about what makes you special and stand out of the crowd. The Savvy Scot is a UK blog and there aren’t many of them, so we try to find topics that will resonate with UK readers. And while there are lots of posts about how to save money around, there aren’t many about setting financial goals, getting better with your finances so you can buy a house, or other big ticket items, so we do a bit of that as well.
Going back to having a site as an extra source of income, how much you can make will mostly depend on how many hours you put in. At the beginning, when no one knows you, it will be lots of hours for a ridiculously small income, that will make you feel crazy not to take a minimum wage part time night job instead. But if you manage to stick to it, down the road you can expect to make much more than at your part time job, for less hours worked. That is IF you can make it through the long hours for little return at first. And it gets lonely. So don’t be afraid to reach out to other bloggers for tips, support, and also to guest post on their blogs and gain exposure to their readership. That is very important, because if you blog in the dark, all your efforts will be for nothing.
Finally, I would recommend you don’t do it for the money in the first place. Just think of it as a hobby that may or may not give you money one day. If you start with money in mind, you will get obsessed with your stats and visitors instead of just enjoying the ride. So pick a niche you like, start writing, make friends, and the rest should come easily.
This post was written in collaboration with Scottish Friendly