How to Start a Tech Blog: (And Make Money)

Technology is always changing, and new pieces of technology are always coming out to replace old ones. A lot of people like to read tech blogs every day. Since the niche keeps getting bigger every year, it’s a great idea to start a tech blog in 2020.

If you know a lot about technology and are really good at it, starting a tech blog is a great way to share your knowledge and skills with a huge number of people online.

With a tech blog, you can show people your point of view and talk about your journey or experiences with tech. You’ll also be able to connect with other tech fans and build a group of friends to whom you can recommend tech products and give advice.

This guide will tell you everything you need to know to start and make money from a tech blog. So keep reading to find out what you need to know to get started right away.

Steps on How to Start a Tech Blog:

**How to Start a Tech Blog (And Make Money)**

Before we get into the 10 steps for making your own tech blog, let’s look at some of the most important reasons why you should start one.

Review Tech Products: One of the best things about starting a tech blog for tech lovers is that you can review a lot of different tech products in your niche.

Your blog will give you a place to express your creativity and share your ideas and thoughts with the world.

Improve Your Writing Skills: The more you write and post on your blog, the better your writing skills will get, and you’ll be able to find your own style and voice.

Making money: Getting paid to do something you love is a great feeling. If you run your tech blog well enough, you could even do it full-time.

Share Your Journey and Experience: If you have a tech blog, you will get more exposure to a large audience with whom you can share your journey and experiences.

Explain Tech to Newbies: If you know a lot about certain tech topics and have experience with them, you can use your blog to explain tech to newbies.

Free conventions and events: As your blog and following grow, conventions and events that want you as a guest may offer you free travel or money.

As you can see, there are a lot of good reasons to start a tech blog. Now is the time to take that first step, whether you’ve been thinking about it for a while or it just occurred to you recently.

1. Decide what your blog is about.

Your tech blog needs to be about one thing. So, the first thing to do is decide what your tech blog will be about. Here are a few ideas to help you get started with your brainstorming.

Tech Product Reviews: Your blog’s main focus could be tech reviews, in which you tell your readers whether or not a certain piece of technology meets their needs.

Mobile Technology: You can write about mobile technology in general on your blog, or you can pick a subcategory within the “mobile” segment.

Tech Recommendations and Criticisms: You can use your blog to share tech suggestions and criticisms with your tech-loving audience.

Tech news and trends: Your blog can be about trends in many different areas, like apps, devices, games, software, tools, programming languages, online platforms, artificial intelligence, and many more.

2. Pick a tech niche.

The next thing you need to do is choose a niche. Tech is a very broad topic, and if you start a blog about “tech,” you will be competing with huge websites like Gizmodo, Futurism, TechCrunch, Mashable, etc., which will make it very hard for you to build an audience.

A “niche” for blogging is a topic or group of topics that appeal to a certain part of the market. But you shouldn’t just think of it as a subject area. It is the way you are going to do things. It’s the people you want to reach, how you’ll talk to them, and how you’ll put yourself on the market.

Although it doesn’t have to be, your tech niche can be a passion.

Choosing a niche that you’re passionate about makes it easier to stay committed to building and growing your blog, particularly in the beginning when you have to put in consistent work even before results start to show.

Types of Tech Niches

Tech Support with Common Issues: You can provide your audience with technical support for some of the most common issues in a specific tech arena, such as smartphones, PCs, laptops, etc.
Tech Repair: If you are a skilled repairman, you might dedicate your blog to teaching other people how to fix or repair tech.
Tech Company Information: Your blog could be a platform for sharing tech company information with your audience.
Mobile: If you are a phone enthusiast, you can choose this as your niche. However, mobile is still a broad topic, so you can choose a sub-niche such as smartphones or iOS.
Desktop: Your niche can be focused on desktops. For instance, you can choose to blog about Mac or review PC hardware for gamers, and so on.
Photography: Your blogging niche can be about the technology of photography, such as the different systems and types of equipment used in the production of photographs.
Videography: You can choose this as your tech niche, and within it, blog about a specific topic, such as lenses.
Audio: If you choose the audio niche, you can still drill down into the niche by choosing to blog about specific topics like headphones, monitors, etc.
Gadgets: IoT devices are among the most popular tech niches right now. And with the constant invention of new devices, you will never be short of things to write about on your blog.

Remember, you must choose a niche that is exciting enough that you will be motivated to frequently write. The niche should also be accessible enough to allow you to build an audience.

3. Choose Your Blogging Platform

When it comes to choosing a blogging platform, there are many options available to you. Some of them are free, and others cost money.

Free platforms include Blogger, Wix, and Squarespace, among many others. But, before you sign up on any of the free platforms, it’s important to note that they come with some drawbacks which may limit your ability to grow and monetize your tech blog in the future.

Drawbacks of Using Free Blogging Platforms

Limited Theme Options: Because of the lack of customization features, you will be stuck with a very basic design.
Limited Functionality: With free blogging platforms, you can’t integrate important marketing tools like email capture, eCommerce tools, etc., which limits your ability to grow your audience.
Pay to Remove Ads: You have to upgrade to a paid plan in order to remove the host branding and ads.
Very Little Technical Control: You have very little control over your own website, and if you fail to adhere to the terms of use, your sites can be taken down without notice.
Few Monetization Options: On free platforms, you can’t sell ads of your own, but the host can display their own ads on your site which may not even be relevant or match the type of content you produce.
Limited Analytics, Support, and SEO: Free blogging platforms have limited analytics and support. Also, whatever SEO work you do on your site doesn’t benefit you, but rather helps to push the host’s sites up the rankings.

The bottom line is that free hosting undermines the quality of your blog, which will make it really hard for you to get people to spend money on your tech blog.

If you want to build a great-performing blog that you can grow over time, then a self-hosted WordPress blog is your smartest option. WordPress is a publishing platform that has been around since 2003. Over the years, it has continued to grow in popularity and now powers over a third of the blogs on the Internet.

Here Are Some More Benefits of Choosing Premium WordPress

With WordPress, you have full theme customization
There are over 50,000 plugins you can use to extend your website functionality
You get loads more storage than free options, although this varies by host
You can choose whether or not to run your own ads
You have full control over your database and files
You have total control over your website monetization efforts

These are just a few of the many reasons why you should choose WordPress over free platforms.

Ultimately, the choice is yours, but if you want to build and grow a successful tech blog that you can monetize effectively, then premium WordPress is the way to go. It is the CMS of choice for anyone who is learning how to start a tech blog.

But don’t just take my word for it, check out some of these fascinating WordPress statistics so you can appreciate just how influential this software really is:

WordPress powers over 35% of the web
Over 70 million new posts are created by WordPress users each month
There are over 1.1 million new WordPress domains registered every 6 months
WordPress receives over 2,940,000 searches every month
The blogging platform has over 61.8 market share while the second most popular CMS (Joomla) only has 4.7%.

4. Decide Your Domain Name

A domain name is the name of your tech blog or website. It’s the URL or internet address where your audience can access your content.

So, for instance, if you name your blog “Tech Titans”, then your domain name might be “TechTitans.com”. It’s possible to have a domain name that is different from your blog name but it’s a good idea to use your blog name as your domain so you don’t confuse visitors to your blog.

Choosing a domain name seems like a simple enough task, but a lot of people get stuck at this stage because they are trying to come up with the “perfect” name.

Do not get stuck at this stage. Give yourself just enough time to go through the steps outlined below so you can choose a unique and memorable name for your new blog. It’s alright if you need a bit more time to think your name through, but ideally, this process should not take longer than a couple of hours.

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