How to Start and Make Money with a Blog in 2016

Blogging is one of the easiest ways to get started with a website or online business. I'm sure you've heard of blogging before, and if you haven't actually tried it or looked into what it's all about, you might think it's just a platform or outlet for others to share stories, write about their hobbies or waste time ranking about what's bothering them in life. This is what blogging used to be known for, but it's actually developed into so much more over the past several years.

In short, "blogging" is the concept of "adding new material to or regularly update a blog/site.". However, I like to consider blogging as a form of easily creating content through the WordPress platform. If you are new to blogging, this is all you really know, and best of all, there's really only three steps you need to follow to get started with a blog.

1 - Come up with a topic for your site
2 - Setup a domain name and hosting
3 - Install WordPress and publish content

Those three simple steps are all it takes to get started with a blog of your own. However, it would be a huge mistake to not talk about the true potential that lies within blogging if you are attempting to make money online, establish yourself as an expert or even bring awareness to anything you might be passionate about. Huge businesses and brands around the world are using blogging to connect with their audiences, increase engagement and ROI across the board. Using these same techniques, you start can a successful blog of your own.

How to Successfully Make Money Blogging in 2016

Now that you have an idea about how blogging works, let's cover how you can start making money with this powerful method of content creation. As with all forms of content and business models in the world today, you need to provide value to your audience, know what they want and have a form of monetization built in as well.

Using the 9-step process provided by the "Start to Business - Make Money Blogging" infographic on Blogging.org, you should pre-plan, create and monetize your site in the following process.

(source: http://blogging.org/blog/how-to-make-money-blogging/)

1. Research a topic for your blog that you can build a business around
2. Niche down your topic once again so you know who your exact audience is
3. Create an editorial calendar and write down your main topics of interest
4. Register your domain name and hosting to get your site live
5. Download and install WordPress as your content management solution
6. Start publishing high-quality content to your site that provides real value
7. Build out social profiles and fan pages for your new site
8. Incorporate a mailing list with your site to send out future updates to your audience
9. Monetize your site through affiliate marketing, paid ads and product services

When following this process, there are many key factors you will need to remember. One of the most important being that there are over a billion sites on the internet today and you will be competing against all of them. It's also important to realize that the internet rapidly changes in a short amount of time. What worked a few years or months ago, may not work today. For what's working right now in terms of blog monetization, I highly recommend you read this article on HuffingtonPost at http://www.huffingtonpost.com/businesscollective/how-to-make-money-blogg....

Finally, to effectively grow your audience and rank in the search results, not only will you need great content, but you will also need to gain backlinks to your site as well. This should be done through social media, guest blogging and content marketing outreach. Follow these steps and you will quickly find yourself engaged in the world of blogging and hopefully making some decent money in the process!