Can you make money from blogging without investment?

It is the million-dollar question that most people have.

The answer to your question is yes, you can. But you should use free hosting platforms instead of paid ones. However, if you use free platforms, there will definitely be limitations. Still, you can make money from it. Let’s see what those limitations are and how to make money through blogging without investing.

Do I need any qualifications or experience to start blogging?

You can start a blog without professional experience; it doesn’t require any qualifications either. You can also start in your free time. However, it does require knowledge on a specific topic, research skills, and writing abilities.

Requirements needed for blogging

The basic requirements for professional blogging are a proper internet connection and a mobile or laptop. Besides this, you should have patience. Why do I stress the term ‘patience’? Because blogging is not a get-rich scheme. It needs consistency and patience. You may not see any income at the beginning. Over time, you can earn a steady income from this. 

Free platforms to start blogging

I’m explaining how to start blogging without any investment, right? For that, there are both paid and free hosting platforms available; you can start your journey with the free ones. You can get both a domain and hosting for free here. Some of the free platforms are 

1. Blogger
2. Wix
3. WordPress

Blogger:

Blogger is a free content management system owned by Google. On this platform, you can get free hosting and a domain. But your domain does not look professional; it appears as blogspot.com Like 

• digitalsaiofficial.blogspot.com
• Saitechreviews.blogspot.com

What do you think? Does this look professional? Obviously not. If you don’t want a Blogger domain, you can purchase a custom domain from a service like Namecheap or GoDaddy and connect it to your Blogger site. With Blogger, you can set up your own blog very quickly, and its drag-and-drop options make the whole process even faster. Additionally, the blogger also provides HTTPS security for your site.

Indexing issues in Blogger

Before starting a blog on Blogger, you should definitely understand these indexing issues. You are working very hard to write articles in Blogger, but if those articles are not indexed, your efforts are worthless. If your articles are not indexed, it means Google has not added them to its database, so they are not visible to readers. When I started blogging on Blogger at the beginning, these indexing issues irritated me every time, so I listed down the common indexing issues and also provided how to resolve them.1. Blocked by robots.txt: This issue is common on many Google Blogger websites. When Google’s bot crawls your site, it first checks your robots.txt file. So, you need to properly configure this file. If you accidentally disallow any pages in the robots.txt file, Google will not index them. You can check your robots.txt file by entering this in your browser: 

yoursite.blogspot.com/robots.txt

If you see something like this: 

User-agent: *Disallow: /

 Then your pages are blocked by your robots.txt file

How to fix this?

1. Go to your Blogger dashboard
   Click on “Settings.”
   Scroll down to Crawlers and indexing
2. If “Enable custom robots.txt” is ON, turn it OFF for now.

(The default Blogger settings are enough for most cases.)

If you want to keep it ON:

Remove the existing code and replace it with this: 

User-agent: *Disallow: /searchAllow: /Sitemap: https://yourblogname.blogspot.com/sitemap.xml

2. Mobile redirect error: You often encounter this issue in Google Search Console when submitting your site. Let me explain what this issue is and why it happens. When Googlebot crawls your site, it finds two different types of URLs for the same post. One is a mobile URL; the second is a desktop URL. When you set up your blog on Blogger, it adds “?m=1” to the end of your URL for the mobile version. For desktop, it will be without ?m=1. Simply put, mobile is:  //blogspot.com?m=1 andDesktop is    //blogspot.com. Google now uses mobile-first indexing, so it primarily crawls the mobile version, but Blogger still uses a 302 redirect between these two links. Google gets confused by this redirect or sees it as redundant, so it shows a redirect error. To resolve this issue, don’t just manually index the mobile URL; instead, ensure your theme includes a canonical tag pointing to the desktop version, so Google knows they are the same page. For more info about redirect errors, check this

3. Alternative page with proper canonical tags

An alternative page with a proper canonical tag is not a technical error; it’s a Google notification. Let me explain simply. Google has detected that your blog has two URLs pointing to the same content. However, you correctly told Google which one is the main URL via the canonical tag. That’s why Google ignored the second URL and only indexed the main URL you specified99% of the time, the cause of this issue on Blogger is the mobile version URL. Desktop URL: mysite.blogspot.com/post.html Mobile URL: mysite.blogspot.com/post.html?m=1 When Google sees these two, it knows they are both the same post. The Blogger theme you’re using automatically inserts a code (rel=“canonical”) on the mobile page. It tells Google: “This is just the mobile version; the main page is the desktop URL. So don’t index this.” Then Google Search Console shows that the mobile link is under the alternative page with a proper canonical tag. these are the main indexing issues generally appear in Blogger.

Wix

The Wix platform is also similar to Blogger. With its drag-and-drop feature, you can easily build a complete website. In addition, it offers numerous free templates. Like Blogger, it also comes with a Wix domain. Like yourname.wixsite.com. In Wix, there are two major building platforms.

Wix Studio

It’s an advanced AI-powered platform designed for professionals and agencies. You find responsive tools here. These tools help you make your site responsive. That means your site looks a perfect fit for all sizes, like desktop, mobile, and tablet.

Wix classic:

It is a beginner-friendly builder that lets you create custom websites without coding knowledge. Here, you can launch your site quickly and easily, with full control over typography and basic animations.

Time-saving features in Wix

These are some popular time-saving features in wiv

1. Automatic image optimisation
2. Sticky drag handle
3. Mesidia management
4. Mobile editor and QR preview
5. Fast publishing
6. Third-party app integration

WordPress:

It’s a popular website builder. It offers both free and paid plans.

How to choose a profitable niche for your blog

Choosing a suitable niche for you is an important step in your blogging journey. However, don’t choose a niche just because it is in demand if you have no knowledge about it. Like your money and your life, niches such as finance, law, and legal are closely regulated by Google, which takes strict action against them because they directly impact people’s lives. These are related to people’s finances or health. Many people make decisions based on your content, so don’t provide false or imaginary information without proper knowledge or experience. Choose the topic that you are most interested in and write about it.Currently, the most in-demand niches are 

1. Personal finance
2. Health and wellness
3. Fashion
4. Lifestyle
5. Digital marketing
6. Make money online

Choose wisely. 

Create content for your blog.

There are popular AI tools that help you find blog content ideas and improve your workflow. Those are 

• Chatgpt
• Gemini
• Claude
• Ai overview
• Meta ai

Write articles on specific topics that can solve people’s problems. Before that, you need to do keyword research. Keyword research means finding the words and phrases people search for on Google. You can do keyword research through various methods. Some methods I frequently use are given below.

Through Google auto suggestions

This is a free and effective method for doing keyword research. You can get numerous ideas for your blog through Google auto-suggestions. For example, try entering a keyword like. “How to start blogging…………..” 

You can get a variety of ideas from this. But try to write for long-tail keywords rather than short, highly competitive ones. If you write on broad keywords, you’re competing with high-authority blogs; you can’t beat them, so try to focus on long-tail keywords. You can also find relevant keywords through the “People Also Asked” section in the Google search engine results page. Google Keyword Planner: Google Keyword Planner is an excellent free tool for your keyword research, and I personally use it for my blog as well. You can find numerous keywords for your blog here. The next step is to create a Google Ads account, which you can do for free. Google included the Keyword Planner option directly in the Google Ads account. One important thing I wanted to mention is that you might encounter an issue when setting up your Google Ads account: Google may ask you to create a campaign for your website. Then you should ignore this and create an ad account without creating a campaign. After setting up the account, select “Keyword Planner” under “Tools and Settings,” and then choose the “Discover new keywords” option. Now, enter the main words related to your blog topic and set the location to “USA” or whatever location you are targeting and the language to “French” or “English” as needed. Then click the “Get Results” button. Google will then show you hundreds of keyword ideas. You can see “Average Monthly Searches” and “Competition.” Choose keywords with 1k-10k monthly searches and “Low” or “Medium” competition; your new blog will have a better chance of ranking quickly. Also, using keywords with higher “top of page bid” rates can increase your income from AdSense. Save all these keywords in an Excel sheet and use them naturally in your blog title, description, and content for good results. Quora and Reddit Keyword research on Quora: Before doing research on Quora, type your topic into the search bar. In the results that appear, click the “Questions” tab, and you’ll see all the questions people are asking about that topic. The questions people ask are your “long-tail keywords.” Specifically, if you choose questions with the most followers or those that have recently received the most views and write blog posts about them, you can get good traffic. Also, checking the “Related Questions” section will give you more ideas. Keyword Research via Reddit: On Reddit, you should start your research by joining a subreddit related to your topic. By checking the “Top” or “Hot” posts, you can see what people are discussing the most. Especially by looking at the comments section, you’ll understand the actual vocabulary users are using. By using free tools like Keyworddit and entering any subreddit’s name, you can easily find the keywords most frequently used there, along with their search volumes. By using the keywords you find through these two platforms, your content will answer the questions people are asking, so Google will like it too. you can check my article about how to create content that attracts your target audience

Free traffic methods

How can you get initial traffic to your site? For this, you do not need to wait for organic traffic, which is free traffic coming from Google. Without the need for organic traffic, you can use social media to get traffic to your site. Some popular social media platforms you can use for your blog traffic are 

1. Pinterest:
2. Instagram:
3. Facebook
4. Quora answers

This traffic is called social traffic.

Monetisation of your blog

The most important part of our blog is: How does money come? Some popular ways are 

1. Display ads
2. Affiliate marketing
3. Sell digital products
4. Sponsorship posts
5. Sell your own courses.

Display Ads This is the most popular method for bloggers to make money. There are some popular ad networks, such as Google AdSense, Ezoic, Mediavine, and Raptive. If you register with these networks, ads will appear on your blog. You get paid when someone sees or clicks on those ads. For this, you have good traffic to your blog.

Affiliate Marketing:

You can make money by referring to other companies’ products or services in your blog. If anyone purchases through your link, you earn a commission. For example, items on Amazon or hosting plans, and you write about them on your blog and provide links. If someone buys the product through your link, you earn a commission. This is a great way to make a lot of money with low traffic.

Sell Digital Products:

You can turn the knowledge you have into e-books, checklists, or templates and sell them directly through your blog. The benefit is that once you create the product, you can sell it as many times as you want. You don’t have to pay anyone commissions; all the profit is yours.

Sponsored Posts:

When your blog becomes popular on a specific topic, some companies will contact you to write an article about their brand or product. They will pay you an upfront fee for writing such a post. These deals will increase as your blog’s authority grows.

Sell Your Own Courses:

If you have a thorough understanding of a subject, you can create and sell it as a video course. For example, if you’re an expert in blogging or digital marketing, you can charge your readers a fee to teach them that skill. In the long run, this will build your brand image. You can sell your course on a popular platform like Udemy. When someone purchases your course, you get royalties 

Challenges of a free blog

If your URL ends in .blogspot.com, it doesn’t look like a professional website. This can make brands hesitant to offer you sponsorships. On a free platform. If they change their rules or delete your account for any reason, there’s nothing you can do. Plus, you have less freedom to customize the site’s features as you wish. Google doesn’t rank free domains as quickly, which slows traffic and growth.

The right time to invest is when your blog starts getting 1,000-2,000 visitors per month, or when you decide to turn blogging into a serious career.

1. Custom Domain: Buying a domain like .com or .in gives your blog an identity. This should be your first priority.

2. Hosting: When you want to switch from Blogger to WordPress, getting good hosting increases site speed and control.

3. Premium Theme: You should use a clean premium theme to look attractive at first glance and be mobile-friendly.

4. Email Marketing Tool: You can collect your readers’ emails and send them updates when you post new content to maintain a steady stream of traffic.