How to start a blog in Nigeria: Profitable Guide

Heres a detail guide on how to Start a profitable blog in Nigeria, and how to Make Money Blogging, Read to the end so you don’t miss anything!

Have you been searching, how to start a blog in Nigeria? How to make money from blogging? How to start a blog in Nigeria 2023? This article has all the answers for you. Read gently to the end and see how to setup your blog and earn money from it.

Blogging is one of the digital ways one can make money online, and it requires little to start a blog, when done properly you can make a fortune from the process, blogging can be fun an exciting, for the making money part you’ll actually need patience and time for your blog to turn to a money making Machine you want.

Steps to start a blog in Nigeria

Make research on your niche
Come up your with a blog name
Choose a web hosting provider
Build your blog
Stick to a publishing calendar
Monetize your blog

The List above is a quick one, now let go into details

Make research your niche

Since you are reading this article, I assume that you already have a vague idea of what you want your blog to be about. However, by experience, having this faint idea is not enough to establish a successful blog. You need a plan, and we are going to help you with it!

Strategize first

If you have not started a blog yet, the experts at eduglog strongly advise newbie bloggers to plan before acting on building the blog. Creating a strategy gives you a bird’s-eye view of what you need to do and what your goals are. It can lay down a concrete roadmap that you can follow in your blogging journey.

Moreover, it will save you time that you may waste when you do not have a plan. Trust us, we have been there before. And a lot of other bloggers will agree with us.

Here are the things you need for this blog to be successful – a niche, article ideas, monetization strategy. Let us start with the article ideas. We will discuss blog niche and monetization later in this article.

If you do not have a lot of article ideas now, you will struggle in coming up with them down the road. Additionally, perhaps a year from now, you will be out of ideas and your blog has already failed. Based on our experience, it is 100% better if you already have 20 or more article ideas.

Note: Immediately write down article ideas when the thought comes to you. Creating a new spreadsheet is ideal, but writing on scratch paper will do.

No niche yet?

The first thing you need to do before creating a blog is to brainstorm the niche you want to delve into. Before anything else, what is a niche? To put it simply, a niche is the main topic or category of your blog. Is it a personal blog, product review blog, or finance blog? There are a lot of niches out there and their markets are already saturated. Therefore, it is better if you think of a unique niche that separates you from the competition.

One trick you can apply is to combine two niches that are usually not related to each other. For example, the entertainment and cryptocurrency niches. On this website, you can discuss actors that are involved currently in cryptocurrency. Or you can list movies that mention cryptocurrency.

Note: When brainstorming a unique niche market, combine two unrelated niches to set you apart from other blogs.

Profitable Niche to start your blog in Nigeria

If you do not have a niche yet, here are the most popular niches that you might be interested in:

Finance, sales and marketing
Technology
News
Entertainment
Travel
Food and drink
Beauty and fashion
Health and fitness

Chose your blog name

Now that you already have a niche in mind, the blog’s name should be the next checkbox you should fill in your list. As a rule of thumb, you must provide a simple name for your blog. Doing so will help new visitors easily remember your website for later reading. Who knows, they may even become repeat or avid readers due to it.

Note: Your website’s name should be short and sweet. Also, it should be easy to remember and easy to read.

If you are putting up a personal website, you can also use your name or pen name as your blog’s name. However, there is one more thing you should consider when doing so – consider the domain length. For example, your name is Kalayiro Dominic. You should use kdominic.com instead of kalayirodominic.com if not yet taken.

Create a brand

In 2022 and beyond, it is necessary for a blog to be its own brand. Why? Well, in today’s internet marketing, multi-million brands only advertise and partner with reputable brands regardless of size. Moreover, the potential of your blog will be unlimited as compared to those without a brand. What else can you say besides brands that are marketable?

The domain name should be MARKETABLE

Speaking of being marketable, the domain name should be the same or similar to your blog’s name. Let us put a made-up brand as an example: The Dog Lover. In this case, the domain name you should acquire is thedoglover.com, and not the ddoglover.com (because ‘the’ is sometimes replaced with a d).

Furthermore, there are plenty of domain checkers you can choose from online. Our experts recommend that you avoid the domain with a .com instead of .tech, .xyz, .co extensions.

Note: Do not use country-specific domains unless you are targeting that market. Doing so will affect how Google and other search engines rank your website. For example, a blog with a .Ng domain will rank lower in countries like the US or Canada. However, it may do well in Nigeria.

Choose a web hosting provider

Now, let’s proceed to the technical part of building a blog. Do not worry; we will try to explain this part in the simplest way possible. I assume that you are already aware that a website (a.k.a your blog) should be located somewhere on the internet, right? Or more specifically, it must be hosted on a remote server location. That is the reason why these web hosting companies exist – they have servers in different places in the world that host websites.

Why is it important to choose the right web hosting provider?

Since a web server somewhere in the world hosts your website, it is crucial that you pick the perfect web hosting provider from the get-go. Think of it this way – a server is a computer and if that computer is not performing well, your website does not also. Here are other reasons why you should pick the best web hosting provider:

It affects the performance of your website.

Performance is the paramount metric that tells the success potential your blog has. If you build your blog with suboptimal performance, Google’s search engine (and other search engines for that matter) will prefer other websites regardless of whether you wrote the best articles on your blog.

Most web hosting providers only offer long-term plans

Most web hosting plans are for the long term, we are talking about years here and not months. Therefore, it is a wise decision to get the best one right from the start. After all, you want this journey to be a long and fulfilling one, am I right?

It will dictate your experience through your blogging journey

A fair but advanced warning to newbie bloggers: you will encounter technical issues once in a while. Since I assume you are not that tech-savvy in terms of web development, you may have a hard time fixing some issues with your website. However, when you choose a great web hosting provider it will be not an issue (or at least lessen its gravity). A web hosting provider with equally amazing customer support is ideal!

Best Paid Web Hosting providers

1 Namecheap

Literally One of the best Web hosting platforms. eduglog is currently hosted on namecheap. One of the best things about this hosting provider is their support. Trust me their support is top notch. I remember when moving from my former host to namecheap I spent 2hours chatting with their support team after encountering an issue and yes. They’ve been so cool until all my issues are resolved. I can boldly recommend namecheap for your hosting. And assured you’ll have no issues with your host.

2 Bluehost

When it comes to web hosting, most online entrepreneurs and bloggers choose Bluehost. After all, it is one of the best web hosting providers in the space. For most starting bloggers, the basic shared hosting starting from $2.75 (around 1100naira) per month suffices. Moreover, this web hosting provider is one of the recommended web hosting providers by WordPress themselves. When you are in doubt, always choose Bluehost because you can never go wrong with it.

3 HostGator

Alternative to Bluehost, HostGator is another web hosting provider you should check out. WordPress also includes HostGator in its recommendations. Personally, one of the biggest advantages of HostGator that I see as an edge for new users is its 45-days money-back guarantee. Take note that Bluehost only offers 30 days. So, HostGator is indeed worth checking out.

4 Hostinger

If you want to get your website up and running but do not want to spend too much money, Hostinger is your choice. Hostinger offers one of the most competitively priced web hosting plans. Moreover, if you are looking for a more upscale web hosting experience, their cloud web hosting plan is worth considering.

Best Free blogging platforms

if you plan to start a blog In Nigeria and have little or no fund then well we got you covered, see procedure to set up blog with free blogging platform in Nigeria

If you do not want to shell out money and want to try out blogging first, you can accomplish it by selecting one of several FREE blogging platforms. Back in the days when I was still a student, I did not have enough money to get a web hosting plan. I looked at free blogging platforms.

At that time, only Blogger and WordPress.com were the only viable choices I had. WordPress.com (not to mistake it with WordPress.org) is an amazing blogging platform for a more professional look. On this platform, you can use elegant pre-built themes that make your blog look stunning in an instant.

However, I chose Blogger (Blogspot) because Google owns the platform which can give you an edge with Search Engine Optimization. Additionally, you can easily monetize your Blogger blog using Google’s Adsense, which you cannot do with WordPress.

Currently, there are more FREE blogging platforms other than the aforementioned ones. These include Wix, Weebly, Medium, Ghost, and Tumblr.

Stick to a publishing calendar

The main reason why most newbie bloggers fail at blogging is consistency, or the lack thereof. Like any brand in 2021, posting or publishing content should be consistent and of high quality. To force yourself into the good habit of writing and publishing consistently, it is advisable to create a publishing calendar.

A Publishing calendar creates a schedule of the articles that should be written and published. Like a newspaper outlet or magazine, it keeps you on track. To create one, you should produce a spreadsheet of article ideas with deadlines. You can use free spreadsheet software such as Google Spreadsheet or design a Trello board.

Note: There are also plenty of pre-made publishing calendars on the internet, so there is no reason to skip this step

Monetize your blog

When you have accomplished all the previous steps, and your blog invites thousands of users per month, only then should you monetize it. There are a lot of channels you can use to generate money from your blog. The most basic one is by displaying advertisements. Some of the best Ad Networks you should thrive to be a part of are Mediavine, Google Adsense, Media.net, PropellerAds, Infolinks, and more.

Affiliate marketing is another money-making avenue. In this method, you will urge your readers to use your affiliate links to buy something from a website. If your readers do so, you take a commission for each successful sale.

There are a lot more ways to create money through blogging. These are the most common ones.

Note: When starting, do not focus on monetization yet and continue publishing new articles. But having an idea of what your marketing strategy will be is still ideal.

Advice: Work on your articles and blogs for at least six (6) months religiously before monetizing.

How to make Money from Blogging

What are the various ways people make money from their Blogs? Whether you are blogging from Nigeria or elsewhere he’s various ways to make money Blogging

1. Link Insertion: the difference between this and sponsored post is that you are given a link to insert within an anchor text on your blog. In lay man terms, the media buyer have a link talking about fashion, and you have a blog post talking about trending fashion in 2023, a media buyer may pay you just to look for a text (anchor text) within the post say “2023 Fashion” and link that text to a website link he would provide and you are paid for that, even as high as same price for sponsored post.

Banner Advertisements placements

You can sell (pre-payment basis) banners on your blog, e.g betting brands, online stores would contact you to have their website on more eyeballs and pay you per week, per month depending on your rate.

Banner / Rich media Advertisements Networks

there are not many banner advertisements network again, the few left shows rich media widgets, unlike conventional banner which is just either a still or gif image, rich media has moving elements, forms that makes users easily interact with the ads.

The biggest network in this category is Google Adsense. They have no close competitors yet. There are other rich media networks levegaring on their platform, we call them AdX (Ad Exchange platforms) like Mediavine, Adthrive, Ezoic, OptAd360, Publift, MonetizeMore, all and many of these network requires you to have Google Adsense approved on your blog and have way more higher numbers of impressions daily.

However, Google Adsense itself is even easier to get approved and earn considerable well than many of them.

Push Notifications Ads

When users land on your website, they are asked if they want to receive notifications about this website, if they chose yes, these adnetwork can now send ads to them instead of actual notifications about your website.

it’s one of the easiest to earn a long standing income from your blog but you need a lot of traffic and building a push notification list over a long period of time prior to earning huge. Some networks you can sell this to are Monetag, and others.

Direct Link ads

This is even possible to make money even without actually owning a blog. You can have a Fanpage, just your Facebook profile or a Twitter account and you can make money there. It’s another entire new tutorial to do this which I would write in my subsequent posts, stay tuned.

Networks to get direct links are, Galaksion, Monetag, Adsterra etc.

Pop up / PopUnder:

These are intrusive type of ads, they pay very well if only you meet requirements with a high amount of traffic. These types of ads happens when you land on a website, you click a link or an element and it pops up unto another page while the ads load on current page, it also happen vice versa.
Networks to get pop ups are Galaksion, Monetag, Adsterra, PopAds, PopMyads etc

Affiliate Sales

You can make a lot of money here depending on your blog niche. I once met somone who has a sports kits review blog, he never had Adsense but he makes money from Amazon selling football shoes, jerseys etc. Depending on your niche and the amount of email list you have built overtime you can make alot of money from affiliate subscriptions.

Subscriptions

You can create a portion of your blog, or a premium version of what your users needs dearly and charge subscription fee from them or private read.

10. Partnerships: If you run a travel blog, you can easily partner with travel agents and link interested blog readers seeking to travel to the agents and earn commissions.

Sales

One time I sold videos teaching blog readers how to pass IELTS exam, with an easy pay method you can make money from this (direct sales). There are tons of education blogs out there selling past questions & Answers of various schools, polytechnic & Universities, some also sell project topics and the write up. The list of what to sell in Education sector is huge.

Blog flipping

2 weeks ago, I bought a blog with verified Adsense for N230,000, in the past I have also bought same for N350,000, some 400,000. As a matter of fact I have bought 4 blogs with verified Adsense from a single person in the last 12 months and all are still active and live.

People build and flip blogs, they create a blog, style it, write 12-20 posts, apply for Adsense, get approved, verify it and sell it off ASAP.

Conclusion

Do you have any questions to ask regarding starting a blog in Nigeria? Feel free to ask your question in the comment section below as we will do our best to answer you.