Start a Money Making Blog on Ghost

Guide to Creating a Ghost CMS and Self-host with Zero Cost

Yasas Sri Wickramasinghe
8 min readOct 13, 2022

What is a Money Making Blog?

There are many great opportunities for making money online in 2022 and beyond. However, not all opportunities are created equal. To make the best choices for your money, it’s important to understand what makes a money-making blog site successful.

You can create blogs on multiple platforms, and the most popular one is Medium blogs. However, writing on a third-party platform can sometimes be tricky to reach your financial expectations. I have been a medium writer since 2019 and have quite a good reach.

However, I decided to start a blog, making money online using Ghost CMS.

Then I could boost my audience, and customize the blog as I prefer, import members from other platforms to my blog and deliver high quality content via high speed Google AMP supported posts.

Admin Dashboard of https://readclub.me Ghost CMS Powered Blog

This article gives everything you need to know making online money with a blog, how to get started for free, and tips and tricks to grow your audience.

Can I Make Money Doing a Blog?

Absolutely yes. Especially when you have your own blog, you have much more control over customizing your blog to a specific audience niche. Money blogging is an art, and you can absolutely start making money online from your own blog than making money on Medium.

Affiliate marketing by adding affiliate links to your blog posts is one way to earn an income. Another technique is by giving access exclusive content to subscribers of your blog. You can introduce some subscription models and earn from memberships. Integrating an ad network into your blog is another way to start making money online.

Now you must be wondering how to start a blog which can allow all of the above money blogging techniques without much software engineering and IT knowledge.

Of course, without spending thousands of bucks, you can start blogging today. And if you are a college student or an undergraduate,

You can create a blog, host it with a domain and also automate some audience engagement techniques such as automated emails and newsletters for absolutely free!

Do you need an evidence? If you visit my Ghost Blog(readclub.me), everything there is setup for free, including the automated signup process and newsletter.

image with a laptop and a mobile phone used as mockups to display a money making blog screenshots
Ghost CMS Powered Blog with a Responsive Theme

If you click “Sign Up”, it will ask you to provide your email address and setup an account.

a screenshot showing sign up window
Ghost CMS in-built Sign Up Flow

You will get an email to verify your Sign Up process, and then you will get the exclusive access to premium articles.

Ghost CMS Generated Sign Up Email

There is a subscription model in my blog as well. (However, these days ,I am providing premium membership for free. So you can Sign Up today and become an exclusive member at the ReadClub.) All the subscribers will receive exclusive newsletters to their email inbox through an automated process.

Ghost CMS Generated Exclusive Newsletter

Next, I’ll describe how I created this blog, including all the resources and tools I used.

How to Start Money Making Blog In 2022?

Blogging is a great way to share your thoughts and experiences with the world. It can also be a great way to make money. There are a number of ways to make money from a blog, and it all depends on what you are interested in and what you are good at.

You can sell advertising, sell e-books, or sell products and services that you provide through your blog. You can also charge for access to your blog content, or you can charge for custom content creation.

There are a number of ways to make money from a blog, and it all depends on what you are interested in and what you are good at.

Niche: Best Money Making Blog Ideas

First, find a niche that interests you and is relevant to your money blogging audience. Second, create high-quality content that will draw readers in and keep them coming back. Finally, monetize your blog through advertising and affiliate marketing related to your content. Below are the top-performing money making blog topics in making money online blogging.

  • Home and Garden
  • Lifestyle
  • Fashion
  • Travel
  • Education
  • News

However, it is important to know that you should be interested in and know your chosen niche rather than just picking the best-performing blog niche. You need to be smart enough to publish high-quality authentic content to attract and retain an audience around your blog. When you have a blog idea, now it’s time to think of a suitable domain name.

Domain: Google SEO Oriented Web URL for Money Blogging

The power of a domain name is highly underrated but it plays a main role in any money blog. Your domain name should match the niche you focus on, and this domain name will be the one that you will share on social media, such as facebook twitter linkedin youtube, to perform search engine optimization and even to promote your blog across other websites.

I personally recommend selecting and purchasing a domain name even before you start blog. There are many domain name providers out there, but if you use Namecheap, you can get a high-level domain name for a very reasonable price. And also, if you are a college student or a university student, you are eligible for a FREE Namecheap domain via GitHub Student Developer Pack.

Always pick an easy-to-remember, relevant and short domain name for your blog.

Blog: Best Content Management System (CMS) for Making Money Blog

It’s setup time! You need to configure Ghost CMS. There are two options for you. Either you can use Ghost Pro (Hosting is not required from yourend) or use the Ghost Self-hosting option. I recommend the second option because it is much more cheap and even it can be free if you are a college or university student.

Ghost is a state-of-the-art content management service similar to WordPress, but according to my experience, Ghost is way more fast and easy to set up. You do not need to spend days to get this up and running. And also Ghost provides amazing themes to select.

Ghost itself is free, and you need to use a hosting space to self-host it. Therefore, let’s see how to host Ghost CMS on our own hosting space.

Hosting: Best Blog Hosting Sites for Making Money Blog

There are a number of different blog hosting sites out there, each with its own set of features and advantages. It’s important to choose the right one for your blog, based on your specific needs.

I recommend you try DigitalOcean because it includes Ghost inbuilt as a template and is very easy to deploy Ghost. And most importantly, you can create a DigitalOcean via the below link, so you will receive $200 absolutely free to use for up to 60 days.

DigitalOcean Offer

Click Here to Redeem the $200 DigitalOcean Offer

After creating an account on DigitalOcean, use the 1-click Ghost Setup Droplet on Digital Ocean. You will find all the further details in the above resource. You can pick the lowest DigitalOcean server as you are getting started, and later you can increase the CPU and RAM of your server as you are making money.

Below you can see that I have selected the lowest allowed server configuration for my Ghost blog site, costing only $6 per month. Since I have $200 as free credit because I signed up for DigitalOcean via the coupon link, I did not need to spend at least a single dollar up to two months.

My Server Specifications for Running Ghost CMS Blog

The DigitalOcean server with the lowest specification can handle the Ghost website pretty efficiently. The below picture shows the CPU usage so far.

Resource Usage of My Blog

As you can see, my CPU usage is approximately 2% for most of the time. However, my Ghost blog performs blazing fast even with this lowest-spec server. Below is the Google PageSpeed Insights report of my money making blog.

Performance Statistics of My Blog
Performance Statistics of My Blog

When you have your hosting ready, and your blog is up and running, you can focus on publishing high-quality content on your blog. You can get some inspiration from similar top-performing blogs in your niche. Below are some general examples for top money making blog sites

Best Money Making Blog Sites

There are many great money making blog sites that will help you make a lot of money. Some of the best include:

1. Daily Dot (https://www.dailydot.com/)

2. Mashable (https://mashable.com/)

3. ENGADGET (https://www.engadget.com/)

4. Tech Crunch (https://techcrunch.com/)

5. Timothy Sykes (https://www.timothysykes.com/)

How to Make a Lot of Money Blogging?

Once you have your own blog, you have so much freedom. However, remember to be consistent with your content creation. That is the 1st secret to money blogging. Then you can add affiliate links, share your blog posts on social media, use affiliate marketing, use amazon kindle direct publishing, integrate facebook instant articles and get third-party ads from an ad network such as Google AdSense or Ezoic.

However, as you are just getting started with blogging, I recommend you to publish at least 10, 20 great content first and build an audience first. You can even accept guest posts to your blog. Guest posting link building is a great technique to enhance your audience. Facebook twitter linkedin and youtube are another set of opportunities for you to grow.

Focus money making second, first build a great blog and then you will be thankful to yourself for your hard work. It will definitely pay off.

Conclusion: Now it is Your Turn to Earn Money from Blog

In this complete guide, I showed you how to start a money making blog using Ghost CMS and DigitalOcean, together with a domain with Namecheap for absolutely free (if you are a college or university student) or for the lowest possible cost. And I presented the complete workflow of making a money blog starting from the topic research to publishing great content.

I wish you all the very best with your blogging journey, and I can’t wait to hear about your success. Do not forget to subscribe to my blog and keep in touch with it.

I hope to bring my next article focusing on keyword research, Automation of content writing with AI, Integration of Google Search Console to your blog and more on making online passive income.

Happy writing!

Start your own blog with $200 free with this link

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Yasas Sri Wickramasinghe
Yasas Sri Wickramasinghe

Written by Yasas Sri Wickramasinghe

Doctoral Student — PhD | Lecturer | Lead Software Engineer | https://readclub.me

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