How To Start A Lifestyle Blog And Make Money With It
Do you want to start a lifestyle blog? If yes, here is a detailed, step by step plan, to get you started on the right path.
Lifestyle blogs can be a great way of showcasing your content online and earn money with it while doing so. Before getting into the details of how to start a lifestyle blog, let’s find out what a lifestyle is, in the first place.
What Is A Lifestyle Blog?
A lifestyle blog is a type of blog where the author shares content related to various aspects of his/her life. Unlike other blogs, a lifestyle blog doesn’t focus on a specific niche or a market.
A lifestyle blogger may create content that revolves around things that he or she is passionate about. The lifestyle blogger may also share articles, pictures, and videos that resonate with their present status of life.
[You can read our updated article to learn how to start a blog from scratch. It is a 5000+ words article which is written keeping the beginners in mind. It has a number of screenshot images too.]
Few experts feel that a lifestyle blog is entirely different than the personal blog. But I personally feel that there may be a very thin margin that differentiates a lifestyle blog from a personal blog. That is because most lifestyle bloggers I follow also share their personal life stories on their blogs.
Moral of the story is that there is no right or wrong way of explaining what is a lifestyle blog and what should it contain or whatnot. Each lifestyle blog is unique and reflects the personality and interests of the author of the blog. No two lifestyle blogs may be the same.
My Best Lifestyle Blogs List
Here is a collection of popular lifestyle blogs on the net. This list consists of my personal favorite lifestyle blogs and is in no way a complete one. I have compiled this list to just give you an idea about how lifestyle blogs are designed, written and managed.
Cup of Jo
What started as a weekend hobby soon turned into a full-time job and a million-dollar business for Joanna Goddard. Previously the editor-in-chief of Bene, an award-winning quarterly about Italian life and style, she soon left her job to write for magazines, including Glamour and New York.
She was also managing the relationships blog for Glamour.com, back then. It was during this time, she started the ‘A Cup of Jo’ lifestyle blog. She now has a whole team of writers and content creators.
Topics Covered
Started in January 2007 this lifestyle blog is mainly aimed at women and covers the following topics.
Camille Styles
As the name suggests, this lifestyle blog is run by Camille, a lifestyle blogger from Texas. Through this lifestyle blog, she wants to inspire others to live a happy and healthy life.
She has also authored the best selling book ‘Camille Styles Entertaining’. It looks like she doesn’t blog solo anymore and has a whole team consisting of executive producer, art director, editor and more.
Topics Covered
The Blonde Salad
Chiara Ferragni, an Italian fashion blogger cum businesswoman is the creator of this very popular lifestyle and fashion blog. Forbes ranked Chiara Ferragni first on its “Top Fashion Influencers” list in September 2017.
It is a great resource of fashion and inspiration for millions of people in Italy and worldwide. She is a former law student who turned into a lifestyle blogger.
Her blog has got mentions in most major media releases like Forbes and the Guardian.
Chiara Ferragni now collaborates with major fashion houses and world-famous brands which can be credited to her success achieved with this blonde salad lifestyle blog.
Topics Covered
The main topics covered are beauty, fashion, and lifestyle.
Quint Essence Blog
This is a lifestyle blog run by Stacey Bewkes. The theme of her blog is all about living well with style and substance. After 17 years as an art director in the NewYork city, she left the corporate world and moved to Connecticut with her husband and four children.
Her continued love for design is what resulted in the creation of this lifestyle blog. In this discerning online guide, she writes about special people, places and products.
Topics Covered
Cupcakes and Cashmere
Cupcakes and Cashmere is a lifestyle blog created and managed by Emily Schuman. Emily is from Los Angeles where she lives with her husband, their daughter and her three cats☺️.
She started Cupcakes and Cashmere in March 2008 to document the things she loved. But soon it grew into a full-time business which now attracts thousands of readers from around the globe. She right now has her own line of clothing too.
Topics Covered
How To Make Money With A Lifestyle Blog?
There are many ways to generate an income online with a lifestyle blog. If you visit the blogs that we mentioned above it becomes quite obvious that the main monetization strategy of all these bloggers revolves around the following things.
Adsense and Other Advertisements
Adsense is by far the easiest way of earning money online. This is a revenue-sharing program run by Google where content publishers can make money by serving text, images, video, or interactive media advertisements. This is a very simple and free way to start earning some money from your lifestyle blog.
There are also other Adsense alternatives like Media.net, PropellerAds etc, but Adsense is still the most popular revenue-sharing program on the net.
Affiliate Marketing
Most of the lifestyle bloggers online make a big chunk of their money via affiliate marketing. Affiliate marketing is a business model where one can make money by selling other people’s stuff online.
Most of the lifestyle bloggers mentioned above are making money with affiliate marketing by promoting stuff like fashion accessories, clothes, travel gear, kitchen items, etc.
This is a better way of making money from your blog than placing advertisements on the blog because the affiliate commissions you get by selling an item can be much higher than the ad revenue you get with the same amount of traffic.
Sponsored Posts
This is a method where you earn money online by creating sponsored content for your blog/website. Here the sponsorer will pay you a specific amount of money for a single article or a series of articles about their brand, or a brand mention in your article.
But the main drawback of this method is that you won’t get any sponsors in the beginning stages of your blogging career. Only when your blog starts gaining popularity and your site traffic increases, you will start getting sponsorship requests.
I am sure most of the popular lifestyle bloggers are earning four to five figures every month by writing sponsored posts on their blogs.
Selling Your Own Products/Services
This is the best method of earning money from your blog. The money you make from this method can be really huge. One another advantage of this monetization method is that you get to keep all your readers/subscribers to yourself.
Meaning, you don’t need to refer your readers to other websites/products, thereby eliminating the chances of losing them forever.
Blog Post Ideas To Kick Start A Lifestyle Blog
Although lifestyle blogs needn’t focus on a specific topic or a niche, we have given here some lifestyle blog post ideas to help you kickstart your blogging journey.
The posts or articles a blogger writes for his/her lifestyle blog may range from travel articles to cooking tutorials, fashion, restaurant reviews, daily routine updates, tips for mom bloggers, taking care of kids, home decor, gardening, shopping tips and more.
Lifestyle Blog Post Ideas
How To Start A Lifestyle Blog Easily
To start a lifestyle blog we will need the following things.
Domain Name
The domain name is the name of your future blog. It is the address or the URL of your blog using which your readers can access your blog from anywhere in the world.
Here is a detailed step by step guide that shows you how to choose and register a domain name as a beginner blogger.
Web Hosting
A web hosting service provides you with powerful computer servers where your website with all its files will be stored. These files stored on web hosting are available to people around the globe 24×7. Web hosting is like a big computer that never shuts down.
If we want to start any kind of blog or website online, having web hosting is a must. These types of blogs are called self-hosted blogs.
There is also another option to host your blog on free blogging platforms like Blogspot. But I personally don’t recommend it and I suggest you stay away from any kind of free web hosting solutions.
Because in such cases, you won’t be having any control over the files/content you create and your service provider can completely delete your website/blog without warning you or giving you any kind of clarifications.
So it is always better to create a self-hosted blog. Not all web hosting is costly either. You can read this to learn about the web hosting providers I personally use and recommend.
Content Management System
The content management system I use on my blogs is WordPress. A content management system or a CMS can be defined as a software application or a collection of related programs that can be used to create and managed digital content which in our case is the blog.
The thought of using a CMS like WordPress may seem daunting and too technical if you are a newbie blogger. But actually it isn’t. Nowadays, most web hosting providers give you the option of installing CMS on your blog with ‘one-click’.
What Next?
Now, once the domain, web hosting, and CMS are sorted out, its time to build our lifestyle blog.
In this article, we have explained in detail how to start a WordPress blog on SiteGround from scratch (BTW SiteGround is the web hosting provider I recommend for the beginner bloggers). Its a newbie-friendly article and everything has been explained step by step.
If you are planning to host your website on HostGator here is the article that shows how to start a WordPress blog on HostGator.
