How to Start a Successful Lifestyle Blog (and Make Money) in 6 Steps

If you want to embark on a journey of blogging for fortune and fame, then learning how to start a lifestyle blog should be your first stop. With your interesting life and activities, a lifestyle blog is a great way to get pole position and get more traffic.

A lifestyle blog has highly visual content with a broad focus on a variety of topics, all brought together around the blogger and a specific hook. Your hook can be anything from beauty to the environment, but it needs to bring it all together to link content based on your interests, life, and worldview.

🤔 Decide on your hook

What about your life will attract readers? What are you skilled and passionate about?

📛 Think of a name that is available as a domain

What is a catchy and catchy name for your blog? Can you get it as a domain name?

💻 Decide on a host and install WordPress

How do you find a good host? What is the best platform to start a lifestyle blog?

🎨 Choose a theme to control the look of your site

How much control do you need over your theme? What are the essentials for any lifestyle blog?

🔌 Install plugins for additional functionality

How can you gain an SEO advantage? How to make it easy for readers to share posts? And how can you speed up your website when you have so many images?

💰 Monetize your blog

How to make money with a lifestyle blog?

1. Decide on your hook

Before you can start thinking about the technical aspects of starting a lifestyle blog, you need to decide what you want your lifestyle blog to cover. If your life is what separates the lifestyle blog from other blogs, then the hook helps separate it from a personal blog.

In terms of advertising, the hook has three valuable aspects. It will help you…

1. Find an audience.
2. Keep your momentum and motivation to continue your lifestyle blog.
3. Develop a content strategy and editorial calendar.

We know that a lifestyle blog is essentially about your daily activities and life. But what will appeal to readers about your life? And how do you like it? It starts with two questions:

1. What are your interests?
2. What are your skills?

Once you have a good list of your interests and skills, think of 3-4 blog niches you can cover (these can also form the basis of building your categories and content strategy). You will see a pattern emerge revealing your hook.

2. Get a domain name that fits your lifestyle blog

One of the most neglected steps when starting a lifestyle blog is finding your domain name. With a good domain name, you make it easy for people to remember your blog and share it with their friends.

Finding the perfect name can be a challenge, but it becomes a lot easier when you:

• Make a list of keywords, ideas, and seed words. Sit down and create a mind map, use a thesaurus, think of your nickname to create a list of start words.
• Keep the name between 6 and 14 letters – not too long.
• Make speaking and spelling easier, avoiding words with multiple spellings.
• No hyphens. No numbers. Both can be confusing and appear as spam.
• Include the subject in the name instead of stuffing a keyword in it.
• Be unique and brandable.
• Be memorable and catchy.

Once you have a good word list, I recommend using a domain name generator such as domain wheel for two reasons:

1. It can come up with clever, creative suggestions based on your keyword, which you can then use to further refine the name.
2. It offers you suggestions available for purchase and links you to hosting providers so you can buy your domain name.

3. Decide on your platform and host

As you learn this far on how to start a lifestyle blog, it’s important to carefully consider your platform and hosting options. There is no shortage of either and you can also find free blogging sites for your lifestyle blog.

However, if you plan to monetize your blog and you want the flexibility to tweak your blog as needed, we recommend WordPress.

Other options, like Squarespace, can also give you a bundled hosting, domain, and editing experience, but at a slightly higher price and without the dedicated community.

With WordPress, you have two options – either the .com or the .org approach. There are some subtle differences between the two, but mostly it boils down to the fact that .org is self-hosted and cheaper overall. Self-hosted WordPress is also the best option for total freedom.

Luckily, getting started with self-hosted WordPress is fairly easy, as most major hosting companies offer a simple one-click solution for installing WordPress. We recommend WordPress because it’s highly customizable and has the most community support of any major website builder.

Some quick tips for choosing the best host for your new WordPress site:

• Make sure your host can support you as your site grows and pay close attention to price jumps between plans.
• Look for reviews on their support team because fast and timely support with WordPress skills is essential to keep your site running. Check their documentation and blog to see how much WordPress-centric advice they offer.
• Reputation is a good guide, and while everyone struggles from time to time, consistently bad reviews are a sign you should run.

➡️ For beginners, We recommend SiteGround Because:

• They automatically install WordPress on your account. No need to do it by hand.
• They will also sell you a domain name during setup. This means you can take care of everything in one go instead of buying a domain from one company and hosting it from another.

4. Choose a topic

The design of your WordPress site controls how it looks to visitors.

When you first thought about how to start a lifestyle blog, you might not have realized how much time it would take you to come up with the design of your dreams. with 11,000 themes on ThemeForest alone Choosing the perfect WordPress theme can be time-consuming. The following tips can make things a lot easier for you.

• Go for a photography theme like Benson, Hestia, or any theme with layouts that favor images.
• Check out the blog page to see what types of layouts are on offer and how easy it is to switch between them.
• A list layout delivers your posts in their published order.
• A grid-based layout arranges content as blocks on the page and puts more focus on images.
• Controlling the number of columns helps you organize your content to emphasize the featured image.
• You’d also like to be able to place categories in different areas, e.g. B. below or above the headline to draw attention to it.
• A sticky menu can help your readers easily navigate the site.

With all these considerations, I will recommend Hestia to others. It’s a good option for a lifestyle blog as it gives you the freedom to switch between list and grid layouts.

You even have the option to choose the number of columns in the grid, which allows you to display images in different sizes. You can also see in these images that Hestia has an option for a brickwork style to apply to your blog page.

5. Essential non-obvious plugins

WordPress plugins help you add new features to your lifestyle blog.

If you know anything about blogging, then you’ve heard that you 100% absolutely need it Yoast SEO as part of a good SEO toolkit. However, if you want to build a successful lifestyle blog, you need to focus on social media to generate traffic. Social media sharing and word of mouth will also help you build your audience, as will targeted keywords.

For social media sharing, go with Orbit Fox. Orbit Fox is our free plugin that gives you access to simple social sharing buttons on your posts.

Did I mention pictures? Images are one of the most important elements of your lifestyle blog. If you’re trying to make your lifestyle stand out, you need to be able to show it to your users.

When considering how to start a lifestyle blog, you need to keep in mind that images will make your site heavy. Image optimization is an essential aspect. For a total solution, use Optimole as it gives you the most image optimization options.

Apart from that, it also makes sense to add some page plugins that will further improve your options when integrating your website with platforms like Instagram and Facebook. Two ideas:

6. Monetize

Above all, the final and most exciting step in your lifestyle blog journey is turning it into hard cash. The good news is that there is more than one way to monetize your blog. In fact, there are at least 17 great ways to make money from lifestyle blogs, but here are 4 of the best:

1. Affiliate marketing is high on the list as your lifestyle blog is a natural way to promote products and services.
2. Sponsored posts are a strong contender if you have a large enough audience. You can create an advertising page and also sign up to networks like Tap Influence.
3. Sell ​​advertising space on your website. AdSense is easy to integrate into your website and requires little to no maintenance.
4. Create your own merch and sell it with WooCommerce.

Wrap up

Once you’ve found the lifestyle you’re passionate about promoting, you can start sharing it with the world.

* This post contains affiliate links, which means we receive a small fee if you click on any of the product links and then purchase the product. Don’t worry, you’ll still pay the standard amount, so you won’t incur any costs.