How to Start a Programming Blog: A Beginners Guide (2023)

Then agree to the terms of service and click “Install”. This installs the WordPress website on your domain.

Once this step is complete, you can log in to the admin view of your website. The credentials should appear in the window once the installation is complete. Take the credentials and click “LOGIN”.

This opens the login view to your website’s administration page. The WordPress login looks like this:

Enter your login credentials in the login form and click “Login”.

When you are logged in, you will see the dashboard WordPress control. This is the admin view of your website. In this view, you can choose a theme, adjust settings, and most importantly, start writing blog posts.

By the way, you now have a website under the domain you bought just now. To view the site, simply enter the domain name in the URL bar.

Also, when you are logged in as site administrator, you can view the actual site from the dashboard by following these steps:

1. Move your mouse over the top left corner where it says your site name.
2. Click Visit Site.

This opens your website as seen by anyone who visits it. (Plus, there’s an admin toolbar because you’re logged in to the site.)

Nice, huh?

In the meantime, I could start writing blog posts. for your new blog. choose another theme for your site.

Step 4: Choose a theme

From the beginning, you should not spend too much time on design.

After generating a large audience, you can spend time or money designing your website.

At this point, the easiest way to quickly create a professional looking site is by using an -in theme. WordPress. WordPress themes are amazing and designed by real designers. In fact, they’re so good that I use them as-is on most of my sites.

To choose a theme for your site, go to your WordPress control panel (your.site.com/wp-admin) and select Appearance > Themes > Add New.

Now type something into the search bar to find great themes. The most common topics are Twenty-something topics.

For example, this is what I usually do for new blogs:

• Search for “Twenty-twenty”.

• See themes for 2020, 2021 and 2022.
• Choose one of these themes and click Install.
• After After installation is complete, click Activate.

You have now successfully activated an attractive theme on your blog.

To To see the theme in action, visit their website. Now the site looks completely different than it did when you first checked it.

It looks good already, right?

As a next step, you can customize the theme.

To do this:

1. Visit your site (with an administrator logged in).
2. Hover over the user interface elements.
3. You should see a blue edit icon appear.
4. Click the icon to make some changes.

Use this strategy to change any text or image that is not like it .

For example, you can change:

• Background Image
• Logo
• Footer Settings

Want a quick logo for your blog? I recommend checking out these AI-based logo generators. They’re great!

Also, tweak your site’s basic settings on the left side of the customization view.

In this setting, you can choose site titles, logos, favicons and more.

But remember, don’t waste too much time worrying about this configuration. You can modify these later as you start to gain traction with your blog.

Awesome! You now have a decent looking website. As your next step, you should start creating content for the site.

If you want to spend time customizing your site, feel free to check out this 1.5 hour guide. But remember to come back here because we have a lot more to cover!

Step 5: Create the important pages

Once your site looks good, it’s time to create it. a couple of important pages for the future.

These pages are About, Contact and Privacy Policy. Every website should include at least these pages.

To create these pages, you must first know how to create a new page. To create a new page, navigate to the WordPress dashboard and click Pages > Add New.

This opens a new view that looks like this:

This is the editor view of the new page.

Put the name of the page as the title.

Then add some content where it says “Type / to choose a block”.

Once your page is ready, hit publish in the top right corner.

Now, let’s see what to include in About, Contact strong> and the Privacy Policy pages.

About

The About page is one of the most visited pages on your website (after blog content) .

By specifying an about page, you can tell your story to your audience.

Here are some things you might consider sharing on your page. Page about:

1. Who are you?
2. Why does your blog exist and what is its mission?
3. How can readers engage with you?
4. Why should readers read your blog posts? ?

After all, people want to read articles written by a person, not a robot.

So you have to put a face to your blog talking about the above points.

Contact

A contact page should be clear and simple.

Ideally, a visitor should instantly see the email (or other contact method) from the page.

So all you need is to include your contact email address.

For example, my page contact is really easy.

You can also add your social media handles to the contact page.

When your audience grows, you can create a contact form and FAQ page for frequently asked questions.

Privacy Policy and Legal Pages

Last but Definite Not least, you should create legal pages.

But don’t worry, you don’t have to spend a whole day writing those pages.

Instead, you can use this free tool to generate a Privacy Policy page for your blog.

Also, remember to keep your Privacy Page up to date. You should do this when you start using other WordPress plugins or tracking tools, such as Google Analytics or MailChimp.

Add important pages to the navigation Menu

Once you have created the important pages, you should place them in the navigation bar.

This way, your future readers will be able to find the information easily.

To do this, go to your WordPress dashboard and select Appearance > Menus. This opens the editing view of the current navigation menu.

Add the About and Contact pages to the main menu.

After completion This happened, visit the site to see that the menu now has these new pages.

The legal pages do not need to be added to the main menu. Instead, they can live in the footer menu.

To modify the footer menu, go to Appearance > Menus and select another menu.

Then repeat the actions you performed with the main menu.

Once you have completed this step, your site will have all the necessary information. You are now one step away from starting to write blog posts.

Step 6: Set Up Your Site

Before you learn how to write blog posts, you need to make some minor technical adjustments to your blog.

Change the URL structure

Keep blog post URLs simple.

To make this easier, let’s change the permalink structure of your site Web.

Warning! Do not change the permalink structure if you have written blog posts. This will change the URLs of all the pages on your website. In a sense, it will remove all your pages and re-add them with a different URL.

To change the URL structure, go to your WordPress dashboard and select Settings > Permalinks. You should now see a view similar to this:

Choose Post Name as your URL structure and save the settings.

Now your blog post URLs are the title of your blog post.

This is great because this way your URL is as short and descriptive as possible.

Awesome, now you’re ready to start writing blog posts!

Step 7: Start writing content

This is the most time consuming part of having a coding blog.

Writing the content will take 99.9% of the time.

Make sure you write content wisely so you don’t waste time and resources.

This section teaches you the technical side of writing blog posts in WordPress. You’ll also learn how to create themes that will build your audience.

Feel free to read the 20 Best AI Copywriting Software. Although I don’t use them in a programming blog, you can find some creative use cases to save time.

How to Create a Blog Post in WordPress

From Now On Go ahead, you’re not going to create new pages for your site.

Instead, you’re going to start writing blog posts.

In WordPress, a page is not the same as a post blog.

The way WordPress treats pages in some contexts is different than blog posts.

To create a blog post, go to your blog control panel. WordPress and select Posts > Add New.

This opens a blog post editor.

This editor is what you will use when writing your blog.

To learn how to format your blog posts with the editor, you should start experimenting with writing an article or two.

But what should you write about? How long does it take for the article to start getting views?

The following sections will teach you everything you need to know to build an audience and write content that ranks.

How to Write Content that ranks?

A page that doesn’t appear on the first page of Google doesn’t exist.

To rank high, you need to write the best article on the subject.

Usually this also means that the article should be the longest.

The level of content and competition is easy to see by looking at all the other pages in the top 10 search results.

When you think about it, Google and other search engines are products that try to provide the best possible response to the reader.

The more complete the article, the better the chances that you will get it. to rank high.

If you write an article that covers 50% of the topic, why would Google or any other search engine recommend it to anyone?

You guessed it, they wouldn’t.

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So make sure you write the most comprehensive article.

How to get good topics using Google’s own data?

Unfortunately, Google does not share information about the amount search term for a particular search term.

So there’s no way to tell.

But what you can do instead is use Google search to your advantage .

If you’re using Google Chrome, open incognito mode and sign in to Google.

If you’re not using Chrome, open Google so your search history doesn’t affect suggestions.

Now, in incognito mode, you can start typing something in the search box and see the suggested results.

These suggestions are best guesses of what Google slim ks you are about to search for. In other words, these topics are sought after. Therefore, suggestions are excellent candidates for articles.

To write about one of these, open the search results for that particular keyword.

Now inspect each and every one of the pages in the top 10 results. Be sure to cover all the information that is in the top 10 results. In a sense, it combines the information from all the top results pages and explains it in its own way.

In this way, you can produce an article that:

• Has something search volume
• It is well researched
• It is complete and extensive enough

If any article in the top 10 is more complete (and longer) than your article, you probably won’t get the #1 spot in the rankings.

Write content that solves a problem

Let’s face it, no one is looking for a side project that you created over the weekend.

To grow your audience, you need to write content that solves a problem.

This is what most bloggers get wrong.

You shouldn’t write about topics you like. Instead, you should write about topics that people search for.

Unless you want a blog with 0 visitors, you should write about something that solves a real problem.

As a programmer, a problem could be a bug or a difficulty understanding a common topic.

A great way to find topics is by answering questions you’ve searched for in the past. The more beginner the content, the bigger the potential audience. Keep in mind that in this case, the competition is also higher.

Use simple language

You may have noticed that I don’t use fancy words or phrases.

That’s not a coincidence.

If you try to fool your readers, they’ll leave.

When you’re looking for information, you want it to be as easy to understand as possible.

Don’t use fancy words to try to sound smarter.

Write for an 8th grader instead.

This is good for you and your audience because

• You can produce content more easily.
• The audience understands the message faster.

Use short paragraphs

Today many people read articles on mobile devices.

Nothing is worse than an endless paragraph that covers the entire screen. It’s called the text wall effect. It should be avoided at all costs.

Use short chapters and short sentences. Add 3-4 sentences per chapter maximum. This way you will avoid the text wall effect that nobody likes.

Use illustrative images

Use illustrative images in your articles.

Generally speaking , you must add an image for every 150 words.

With programming articles, this usually doesn’t make sense. Instead, you should include an image as long as it can complement the content and make your topic easier to understand.

It’s pretty easy to create decent-looking illustrations with free tools like AutoDraw.

Don’t spend more than 15 minutes per illustration!

If you don’t make money from your blog, you shouldn’t spend too much on illustrations.

Here’s a sample illustration from one of my articles :

Adding internal links

Internal links make your website stronger.

A Reason technique is that Google bots and other search engine crawlers use links to discover content. If your article doesn’t link to one or more of the articles on your site, Google probably won’t find it. Therefore, there is a chance that the article will not appear on Google.

A more humane reason to network is to add value to your readers with links to articles. This makes them stay longer on your site.

But don’t overdo the interlinking! Only place links where they fit naturally.

Adding External Links

Like internal links, external links are just as important to your site.

When an article has external links, Google and other search engines can see that you back up the facts with content from other sites.

This makes your site more trustworthy and increases your chances of ranking.

With external links , you also provide value to your readers by providing them with additional resources.

Don’t go overboard with external links, either. Only link to sites that are useful to the reader and that match the content.

Example of Content That Ranks: Python Floor Splitting

Let me show you an example of what takes to rank high.

Here’s an article on the Python floor division operator (//).

If you’re someone who knows Python, the behavior of the division operator floor could be expressed in a single sentence.

“Floor division divides two numbers and rounds the result to the nearest integer.”

But if you wrote this in the article, you probably it wouldn’t be ranking, because there’s a lot more to it than that.

If you search for “Python Floor Division” on Google, my article appears at the top of the rankings.

But the length and level of detail of the article may surprise you.

The length of the article is almost 2000 words!

This is because I wrote a complete guide on the subject.

This includes floor positive and negative numbers, relation to modulus, the __floordiv__ method and much more. Also, I used some illustrative images.

If you look at the top 10 results on the topic, the content is much less informative than mine.

That’s why Google treats my article as the best article on the subject and therefore showing it in the #1 spot.

This is the kind of content you need to produce to build an audience. And yes, it takes time. Especially if you’re new to the topic.

Step 8: Promote Your Blog Posts (Optional)

To increase your traffic from Google, you don’t need to promote your programming blog. I never have.

However, if you have a few followers to begin with, it can be a nice traffic boost for your blog.

But if you don’t have thousands of followers, no you will see no significant traffic to your site.

Also, promoting on social media has little to no impact on Google rankings.

Regardless of whether or not you promote your articles , Google will eventually find them. If your article is of high quality, Google could put it at the top of the rankings. But remember, this takes months or even years.

Here are some ideas that might work for you.

Social Media

One of the ranking factors for Google is called “social signals”. This means that sharing articles on social media has a positive impact on Google rankings. If you get people to share your stories, that can be beneficial for your blog.

Every time you publish a new article, you can share it on social networks like LinkedIn, Twitter or the like.

Remember to use plenty of accurate tags. This helps people find your stories.

Also, remember to use eye-catching featured images. The featured image appears as the “thumbnail” of the article in a social media post.

The more eye-catching the featured image, the more likely someone is to click on the article. Also, readers are more likely to share an article with a great featured image.

Forums

Forums like Stack Overflow, Quora, or Reddit are lifesavers. When it comes to finding information in an applicable format, these forum responses are very helpful.

One way to promote your blog is by answering forum questions and linking to a relevant post.

For example, let’s say you’ve written an entire article on “Index Out of Bounds in Python”. To get some publicity, head over to a forum like Stack Overflow and search for threads on the subject. Please leave your helpful response and provide a link to the full article.

Note, however, that the most popular questions are answered exhaustively. Even if your answer is great, there’s a chance no one will ever read it.

Also, the click-through rate from a reply to a blog post is small.

Guest Posts

One way to make your voice heard is by sharing your thoughts on another platform.

Many coding blogs accept guest posts.

A guest’s idea To publish is to propose a topic, write an article, and publish it on another domain.

An easy way to find guest posting opportunities is to:

1. Open Google.
2. Search for “Guest Post Schedule” or similar.
3. Open promising-looking pages.
4. Request and submit an article to the platform.

Don’t forget to add backlinks to your blog where it fits naturally. In this way you strengthen your blog in the eyes of Google. Google likes your blog to have other referring domains (in the same niche).

Step 9: Monetize your coding blog

If you don’t mind monetizing your coding blog , that’s absolutely fine.

But usually one of the reasons to start a blog is to generate extra income.

But don’t even consider monetization before you hit 50 000 – 100,000 monthly visits.

After you hit those numbers, you can start thinking about the monetization game. At this point, it’s enough to know what options you have.

Ads

The easiest way to monetize a blog is by displaying ads on your site.

Instead Instead of using ad networks like Google AdSense, you should use a more sophisticated, higher-paying ad network like Newor Media.

Newor Media uses headline bidding algorithms to optimize ads and revenue for its audience. However, you need at least 30,000 page views per month to be eligible to join.

How much can you earn from ads on a programming blog?

It should be possible for a programming blog to earn around $0.01 – $0.005 per visitor with ads.

So, for example, a programming blog with 100,000 monthly visits should be able to do around $500 – $1000 from ads.

But it depends on many factors, such as:

• The ad network being used
• The quality of the content
• The number of ads
• The source of the traffic
• The duration of the content

And more.

So don’t be surprised if you earn less than $0.01/visit.

However, since this income is completely passive, every penny counts!

Also, remember that showing ads is a way to make money with a coding blog.

Let’s talk s of other ways to make money from your coding blog.

Freelance Gigs

When you have a large audience, you can promote your own skills.

If you have tens or hundreds of thousands of visitors each month, you can only imagine how many new business owners there are.

These people may need help to:

• Create software
• Create a website
• Write technical content

And more.

As a programmer and blogger, you can offer these skills to your audience.

Plus, you don’t need to sell yourself because the content speaks for itself same.

Sponsorships

Another option to make money with a programming blog is by doing paid collaborations.

When you have a large audience, companies in the programming space software developer may want to do a sponsored post on your site.

A sponsored post means that you or the company in question write an article about your product or service. You then post it to your site for a fee.

Another option is to place a custom banner ad from a sponsor on your blog posts.

Again, before anyone to approach you with sponsorship in mind, you need to have a large audience.

Get a Job

Similar to how you can promote your freelance skills, you can showcase them To get a job. .

As a coding blogger, you can look for work as:

• Software Developer
• Technical Writer

If you have a large audience, recruiters and new founders are likely to approach you.

Affiliate Marketing (with caution)

This list wouldn’t be complete without mentioning the affiliate marketing .

As you may have heard, affiliate marketing is generally the best way to make money from a blog. Usually, the passive income stream from affiliate marketing is much higher than from displaying ads.

But be careful! Affiliate marketing does not work well in blog programming.

Affiliate marketing means placing affiliate links on a blog. If someone makes a purchase through one of your affiliate links, you earn a commission, which is typically 5-50%.

For example, if you put an affiliate link to a $50 book ,00 with a commission of 25%. rate, every time someone clicks the link and makes a purchase, you get $12.50.

As a coding blogger, you could promote coding courses and boot camps to your audience.

But here is the problem with this strategy.

When someone is looking for answers related to programming, they are likely to:

• Take a programming exercise in a programming course .
• Working on a work computer.

Promoting a programming course to someone who is already in a course makes no sense.

Also, someone who is working has already taken a bunch of courses in the past. Even if they wanted to buy the course, they wouldn’t do it on a work computer.

This also makes logical sense.If someone is looking for “How to solve the IndexOutOfBounds error”, they’re not looking to buy a damn course!

For affiliate marketing to be effective, you need to take a different approach. So much so that I would no longer call it a programming blog. Instead of writing programming tutorials, you should be targeting a “hot” audience that is looking for a product.

For example, a great affiliate article topic would be “10 Best Python Courses” where each course is an affiliate link to a third party course.

But the problem is that a theme like this is highly competitive. To rank high, you need to write 5000 word articles about courses you haven’t even taken yourself.

This is really boring, to say the least.

Paid Content

If you have a large enough reader base, you may want to consider placing exclusive content behind a paywall.

But remember, paid content has Google ranking implications.

In addition, you should have built a loyal audience that returns to your blog to read your articles.

In that sense, paid content is a monetization strategy, but it shouldn’t use it before you have a large audience.

E-books and programming courses

If you like to write a lot, you might consider publishing an e-book or programming course and promote it on your site .

But before you mess around with this, you need to be 100% sure that your audience will buy your product.

A One way to test how well your audience converts is to promote someone else’s book (affiliate marketing) and see how it works on your site.

This requires a large and loyal audience, so this one doesn’t it should be your first monetization strategy.

Also, if you’re not sure if your audience wants that book, there’s a chance you’ll be wasting a great deal of time.

Selling merch

Selling programming merchandise is one of the ways to earn extra money on a programming blog.

For example, you can sell t-shirts with programming quotes or something funny.

You can also sell notebooks, stickers, coffee mugs, etc.

And no, you don’t need to create or store these physical products yourself.

Instead, there are companies with which can be associated. These companies then create and ship those products on your behalf.

Of course, these companies keep a portion of your profits, but it’s still a better option than creating/stocking the products yourself.

Before you can sell merchandise to your blog audience, you need to have many repeat users and a large audience.

Donations

One of the easy methods to set up ways to make money from your blog is by accepting donations.

For example, you can embed a PayPal donation form on your blog in a matter of minutes.

However, people don’t donate to get rich. Instead, they make donations to help keep your blog running.

Therefore, you should clearly state that a donation is spent solely on producing more valuable content.

Donations also require you to have a large audience of people who frequently read and benefit from the articles.

Now you understand monetization from a coding blog.

Hopefully, too You learned why it doesn’t make sense to implement monetization strategies before you have a large audience.

With the information you’ve learned, you should be able to create a successful blog.

However, there is still much to cover These include:

1. Plugins that save lives.
2. How long does it take to build an audience?
3. How to keep track of your audience statistics .

And other burning questions related to programming blogs.

So while you might want to stop reading here, I highly recommend you keep reading!

How long does it take to rank on Google?

It takes a frustrating time to rank on Google and there’s nothing you can do about it.

Usually , a beginner can expect it to take months to rank on Google.

Also, if you choose topics that are too competitive, you may never rank. And even if you choose less competitive topics, it will take you months or even a year to rank on Google.

Some search engines can rank your content faster. However, since 92% of searches come from Google, it is the most important source of traffic.

Here is a screenshot of my own blog’s performance for the first 6 months.

As you can see, the visits skyrocketed about 5 months after I started my blog. Before that, I produced a ton of content with virtually no results.

Be patient!

How to track visitors

Understanding your audience is important.

As a beginning blogger, you are interested in developing:

• The number of Google search impressions.
• The number of visitors.
• The number of page views.

You should check these metrics at least once or twice a month to get an idea of ​​your page’s performance.

• To get an insightful overview of your website traffic, set up Google Analytics on your page.
• To track Google performance, in particular, set up Google Search Console.

You can use Google Analytics to generate comprehensive reports on your audience. Audience data includes other search engines such as Bing, Yahoo, Duckduckgo, or Baidu.

For example, you can see the location of the audience. You can see trends, user behavior on the site, bounce rates, and much more.

In Google Search Console, you can see how your pages are performing in Google search results.

Unlike Google Analytics, Google Search Console focuses solely on Google traffic reports.

For example, you can see which pages are indexed and how well they are performing.

Both Google Analytics how Google Search Console helps you understand your traffic and trends.

In the first few months, there won’t be much activity. However, after about 6 months, you should see a “hockey stick effect” like the one on the screenshot above.

I recommend setting both up right away.

Here they are Great guides on how to do it:

• How to set up Google Analytics on a WordPress site
• How to set up Google Search Console on a WordPress site WordPress

Also, feel free to search for more comprehensive guides on these tools. When you have a large audience, there are a lot of stats you might find useful.

Block your own visits from Analytics!

Remember to use a plugin or block your own visits from showing up. in Google Analytics.

If you visit your site daily, you’re biasing analytics to suggest you have daily traffic even though you don’t.

If you use Google Chrome, you can use the Block extension Yourself from the Analytics. When you have installed the extension, click on the extensions icon and add your site there:

Now go to your site and look at the extension icon. The icon should display a red cancel icon showing that you are blocking the current site.

What about SEO?

SEO or search engine optimization is one of the buzzwords in the space of blogs.

Refers to a set of actions used to increase the chances of a website or blog post ranking higher on Google.

But it turns out you don’t have to worry about these things.

Google’s main goal is to automatically find the best article for a search query.

As you can imagine, Google is good enough on this, so you don’t need your help. All you need to do is write the best article on a topic. Google takes care of the rest.

What I’m trying to say is that you shouldn’t listen to SEO advice, especially in the beginning. It’s misleading and shifts your focus to things that don’t matter.

But why is everyone talking about SEO?

Because it’s an easy way to make money for people who talk about SEO. SEO. he. SEO tools are very expensive, around $1,000.00 per month. They have great affiliate programs that people like to promote and get paid for.

The reality is, you don’t need to focus on SEO because you’re not writing for robots. You’re writing for humans.

I was stuck on growing my blog until I got rid of all the SEO advice and focused on writing articles.

Domain Authority

One of the only useful terms with SEO associations is Domain Authority (DA).

This is a measure of how “trustworthy” and “authoritative” a website is in the eyes of Google.

Domain authority (or domain rating) is a term that is thrown around everywhere in the blogging space.

Google trusts more mature websites with a large audience, lots of content, and countless referring domains than new sites with no audience and no content.

A site with high domain authority is called an authority site. An authority site has a high voice in Google search results.

Sites like w3schools.com, programiz.com or geeksforgeeks.org they have tons of content, millions of monthly hits, and a ton of websites linking to their sites.

These are examples of authority sites in the blog programming space.

If you want to beat one of these sites in Google results, you should write a 10x better guide .

Useful WordPress Plugins for Programming Bloggers

As you may know, WordPress has useful plugins called plugins.

Most of the great plugins are free to install.

To install a WordPress plugin, go to your WordPress dashboard and go to Plugins > Add New.

This opens the store view of WordPress plugins.

You can use the top right search bar to search for a specific plugin.

To use a plugin, click Install Now . After installation is complete, click Activate.

Each plugin you install behaves differently. You can view the plugin’s manual pages (by clicking the plugin in the previous view) to learn how to use it.

Usually a new plugin creates a new dashboard entry in the left sidebar or in the settings section.

Fortunately, the best WordPress plugins are easy to use.

A word of warning: only use plugins with excellent ratings that are updated frequently! Also, don’t over-install plugins as they tend to slow down your website.

Here are a bunch of useful WordPress plugins you can use.

Enlighter – Embed Code Snippets In Your Articles

To create a successful programming blog, you need to be able to display code on your site.

Showing code does not mean copying and pasting code into the text as-is. Instead, you need a syntax highlighter to make your code look good. Also, the code should be something that a reader can easily copy to their clipboard to run the script themselves.

To display the code, you need a plugin like Enlighter.

This The plugin knows the syntax of all common programming languages.

You can easily put code in your articles no matter what programming language you are using.

You can install the Enlighter plugin via from WordPress plugin store:

Now, to use this in your blog posts, all you need to do is click the plus icon in the blog post editor:

This opens a code block where you can type or, preferably, copy and paste some example code.

By default, the Enlighter plugin uses generic highlighting for your code .

To highlight a specific programming language, you can select the language as follows:

In the article, the code looks like this:

You can also customize the Code Enlighter theme.

To do this, go to your WordPress dashboard, select Enlighter > Appearance and choose a theme.

For more customization, you can set the Appearance in Customize Theme and then go to make customizations in Enligh ter > Theme Customizer

Google Site Kit

To connect your website with Google Analytics and Google Search Console, use the Google Site Kit plugin.

This plugin creates a nice visual dashboard of your WordPress analytics. You can use this dashboard to take a quick look at the most relevant metrics for your site.

UpdraftPlus: Backup/Restore

With WordPress, there is always a risk of your site going down.

Therefore, you should keep a backup of your site so you don’t lose all your work.

As a beginner, I managed to mess up my theme/accidentally delete content on a couple of occasions.

Luckily, I had backups.

For frequent and automatic backups, use the UpdraftPlus plugin. You can find it in the WordPress plugin store.

Once you’ve activated the plugin, setup is easy. Just run the setup wizard and you should be good to go.

Remember to set a frequent interval for backups, like once a week.

Yoast – Apply SEO best practices in Your Articles

Disclaimer: You don’t need to use an SEO plugin or know what SEO is to write content and build an audience.

If you’re an SEO fanatic, you can use a plugin like Yoast to enforce SEO on your articles.

This tool comes with a bunch of SEO warnings and errors that you may consider fixing.

However, sometimes fixing these errors leads to robot-like content.You should take warnings and errors with a grain of salt.

Also, you don’t need a plugin like Yoast to rank high on Google.

Yoast also allows you to customize the URL Slug, meta title and meta description. These appear on the Google results page, so you may want to choose those. Though Google usually does a great job of choosing them automatically.

Blog Scheduling FAQs

Here are some burning questions you may have when it comes to blog scheduling.

Do you need to be an expert to start a programming blog?

Absolutely not!

It doesn’t matter if you are an expert or not. If you’ve just learned something, feel free to write an article about it to teach others. Remember, if you’re not an expert, don’t pretend to be!

Dishonesty is something you don’t want to incorporate with blogging. People will notice if you’re honest or not.

How long does it take to build an audience of 100,000 views/month?

It took me 6 months to write 8 hours. one day. So it’s a full-time job, but you can definitely do it too!

But this assumes you do a lot of keyword research and always write better articles than the top 10 search results.

If you don’t take them into account, it will take a lot longer.

To take home, at best, a full-time work period of 6 months may be enough to get your blog. going. But if you don’t work smart or only spend 1-2 hours a day, it will take years.

How much money can you make from a programming blog?

I’m getting full income with my programming blog. But it took me about a year of full-time work to build a big enough audience to earn ad revenue.

I like to tell people not to start a coding blog to make money! There are many “easier” niches to make money from.

But if you’re passionate about coding and want to help the community that has given you so much, I’m sure a coding blog is one. One of the best options for a side hustle.

Most programming blogs are community-driven, non-profit sites whose goal is to make life easier for a software developer.

Your programming blog should be a useful and free resource for a software developer looking for information on the Internet.

But don’t falsely believe that your programming blog could not make money either!

You can implement monetization strategies in a programming blog. Just don’t expect significant results with less than 100,000 monthly visits.

Remember, the sky is the limit. All the big sites like GeeksForGeeks, StackOverflow, and Quora started small.

Maybe your coding blog is just a blog at first, but then you expand into a full-fledged business. For example, you can launch eBooks and courses. You can also do affiliate marketing with coding related products.

So yes, you can make money with a coding blog, but you need to have hundreds of thousands of readers, good monetization strategies, and a lot of time to write/update content.

How to make affiliate marketing work on a programming blog?

On the internet, everyone says that affiliate marketing is a way easy to earn money. But this gives you the false feeling that it’s also a quick way to make money.

While there’s absolutely nothing overly complex about affiliate marketing, it takes a long time to learn and implement. This is partly because search engines take months or even a year to rank your affiliate content. The trial and error phase is long and requires patience.

Unfortunately, a programming blog is a different animal when it comes to affiliate marketing.

It’s very, very hard to sell something to a developer who’s rushing by looking for a quick answer to a question. How many times have you bought something from a programming tutorial?

To get readers to click on your affiliate links, you need to build a loyal audience that trusts your reviews and opinions.

Another way to make affiliate marketing work is to target a “hot” audience of software developers. In other words, you should target readers who are about to buy something.

For example, “Best Python Programming Courses in 2022” is a great (albeit competitive) topic for an article.

If you think about it, when someone searches for “the best coding courses”, they are ready to make a purchase. But don’t be fooled here! Even though visitors are already primed and ready to make a purchase, conversion rates are still surprisingly low.

Traditionally, you can achieve conversion rates of 0.5-2% with this content type.

Example. Let’s say you get a 10% commission on a $50.00 coding course and your “Best Coding Course” article gets 10,000 views per month. In this case, you could do something between:

• Worst Case Scenario : 0.005 x 10,000 x $50.00 x 0.1 = $250
• Best Case: 0.01 x 10,000 x $50,00 x 0.1 = $1,000

This would be a great additional income item. But remember, there is a lot of competition. To rank for something like “Best Python Courses”, the search engines have to trust you.

In other words, you have to have a lot of content and traffic around the programming niche. If you only post an article with links to Python courses, Google and other search engines won’t rank it.

What is organic traffic?

Organic traffic refers to traffic from search engines.

To get organic traffic, all you need is a blog post that ranks highly in Google and other search engines.

It is often considered the best kind of traffic you can get. This is because it is free and can last for years.

Many companies also blog. The reason for this is to drive organic visitors to your business page. A portion of this traffic will then convert to paying customers.

The strategies taught in this guide generate organic traffic over time.

Do I need to do backlink outreach?

Absolutely not!

Building backlinks by asking for them means you are gaming the system. Google will also find your page with no backlinks.

I haven’t created any backlinks on my blog with nearly 200,000 visitors per month.

Over time, you’re going to receive backlinks naturally. This means that people link to your articles because they are really useful. Not because you’ve paid or asked for them.

Backlink outreach is also time consuming. You need to send thousands of emails to get a handful of links.

Use this time to write more articles.

Is SEO really useful?

Is it It takes forever to rank on Google. A new site with a ton of content may still not see traffic in 6 months. This leads to frustration. Lacking patience, bloggers want to build an audience quickly.

This is where useless SEO advice comes in.

Online SEO “experts” try to sell you expensive tools . and courses to build your audience. They convince you with their own statistics. After reading an SEO guide or two, you’re under the impression that your site lacks an audience due to poor SEO practices.

But the truth is, Google takes time to rank your content no matter what. do.

It is normal to have 50 quality articles with no traffic for the first few months. Keep working and you will see the results!

Worrying about SEO is useless. Instead, you should focus on writing content that solves a problem better than anyone else.

Also, if you implement state-of-the-art SEO strategies on your blog, you risk ruining your entire business. What if Google changes the algorithm overnight? All your strategies and content become stale and you might drop the rankings in a day. That’s not something you want. Remember to build your blog naturally. Forget about keywords or other search engine optimization. Write for humans, not robots!

Conclusion

Today you learned how to start a successful coding blog.

In short, write content that answers the questions that people search for.

To get started, you can use a blogging platform like Medium.com. Or you can buy a domain and hosting plan and build your own website.

Beginner bloggers can get overwhelmed with useless SEO tips.

Remember, as a beginner:

• Don’t pay for SEO services or tools.
• Don’t beg for backlinks.
• Don’t spam social media.

In general, don’t do any “tricks” to gain an audience. Google will find your pages eventually. All you need to focus on is writing. Nothing else matters.

Don’t spend time on design, logo, or the like before you’ve built an audience.

Remember to keep learning. Read other blog guides, listen to podcasts, and watch Youtube videos.

• I got all my tips from IncomeSchool. I highly recommend watching his free videos. They’re not trying to sell you useless tools or advice.

Thanks for reading.

Happy blogging!

Give me feedback

Hi buddy!

I want to make this resource as useful as possible!

If there was any part that was not clear, if there was a mistake or something to the contrary, let me know.

You can contact me at artturi@codingem.com.

Read also

How to start a Blog

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