A guide to blogging for a side income.

In general, when starting a side income blog, you will find search engines like Google favour updated content, as it shows your site is active and providing accurate information to readers, building trust.

When spending time making a post and it can benefit from an update, I think it’s likely a good move and a positive return on investment (ROI) to give it an update, as the resources used to make it will be better utilised doing so than creating another post. It also expands on a topic and provides accurate information to your audience, improving your authority on a topic.

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Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) considerations are important when starting a side income blog and can be broken down into off page, on page and technical SEO, but it’s also important to look at the big picture to be successful blogging, including creating quality content. A measure of success in blogging can be measured by traffic, including organic traffic.

Off page SEO includes strategies that occur outside of your blog. An example is backlinks from other sites, with the number of backlinks your blog has and their quality, being a ranking factor for appearing…

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When starting a side income blog, there are some tips to take into account to make your blog posts more appealing, but it’s a good idea to make sure the foundations for your blog have been set up first.

To set your blog up, you will first need to register or acquire a domain name, get webhosting and then WordPress is recommended, so it can be downloaded from WordPress.org and installed on your webhost.

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Repurposing blog content involves reworking content you have created on your blog into a different angle or changing it into other forms, such as infographics/video/podcasts etc and then posting it onto social media platforms, such as Facebook and Twitter, usually in a shorter form than the original, or as well as on your blog.

Repurposing content for your side income blog can be done for an increased reach, an SEO advantage and to make the most of your knowledge on a topic by creating more content on more platforms, gaining more views, while using less effort.

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Introduction

Search engines are capable of crawling and searching websites, but an important step when starting a side income blog, is submitting XML sitemaps to search engines for search engine optimisation (SEO) purposes.

Sitemaps structure pages and posts from within a website in an organised hierarchy and can be created in XML or HTML.

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Internal links are links from posts and pages to other posts and pages internally within the same site.

Internal links and backlinks are similar in that they are both beneficial for Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), as search engines crawl both, but are different in that backlinks are from external or different websites, whereas internal links are from within the same website.

It’s recommended to use a few internal links for each article you make on your blog.

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Introduction

When starting a side income blog and choosing a blogging platform, there are a few leading options.

A self-hosted WordPress site, also often referred to as a WordPress.org site, is a free and open-source content management system (CMS). About 45% of websites on the internet use WordPress.org and it is recommended.

Another option for blogging that is free is using a WordPress.com site…

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Introduction

When starting a side income blog, a WordPress self-hosted site or otherwise called a wordpress.org site, is the recommended blogging platform to use.

By following these guidelines for securing your WordPress blog, it will help protect your site from being maliciously attacked and give you peace of mind that your blog is secure.

Secure Access…

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What is Website Page Speed?

Page Speed is how long it takes for a website to load when a user accesses it through a browser.

To check your website’s speed for all devices, you can use Google PageSpeed Insights.

Website speed is an important factor to consider when running a website or blog, but it’s even better to consider it before starting…

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Introduction

Social media, SEO (search engine optimisation), online communities and guest blogging are all ways to promote your blog.

Diversification is however important when exploring these avenues, so that you are not relying on one avenue to maintain traffic to your blog.

Also, your priority should be on creating quality content. Doing this will help your blog withstand search engine algorithm changes and…

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Introduction

Monetising your blog is a great way to reward creating quality content on your blog, especially over a long period after establishing good traffic and receiving a reward for your work can be a boost for moral.

There are various methods to start earning from your blog.

Affiliate Links

Affiliate links are when you partner with a website that has a product…

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Install WordPress Locally

Setting up a local server environment and then installing WordPress is a good way to develop your blog on your computer before going live and avoiding many iterations of it being uploaded to your web host and published on the internet.

Install XAMPP

XAMPP is a local server environment with PHP, MySQL and Apache components supported. When installed, it will allow you to imitate…

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What is an AI Chatbot

AI (artificial intelligence) chatbots learn from human inputs through machine learning and are able to take text from a prompt on a website and provide a vast amount of knowledge on many topics or provide accurately depicting images.

Chatting to an AI chatbot, such as ChatGPT is intuitive to use, as simply writing what’s on your mind can provide a wealth of information.

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What is a Domain Name?

A domain name is what is put in a browser to access a website on the internet.

The Importance of a Good Domain Name

Acquiring a good domain name to take ownership of the rights to that domain is a very important step when starting a blog or website. Choosing the right domain for your brand or content being offered on your site offers a good first impression, aids in credibility and has…

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