Are you an automotive enthusiast thinking of starting a car blog? Do you want to make a living writing about cars and car technology?
Then, read on…
A car blog can be a fun hobby or a source of income, but it’s not always easy to know where to start.
To help you get started and make money from your automotive passion, here’s everything you need to know about starting an auto-related blog.
We will cover:
- How to start a car blog in 7 steps
- How to find a topic for your blog that is both interesting and profitable
- How to write compelling content in the car niche
- How to discover low-competition keywords to cover
- How to grow your car-related blog blog
But first, we need to understand what exactly is automotive blogging.
What is Automotive Blogging?
Automotive blogging is the process of writing about cars, car technology, and automotive news.
Automotive bloggers can take different approaches to writing about cars; some focus on building communities around their blogs by providing helpful advice and information to other car enthusiasts, some review new models as they come out, and others marry these two content types.
Whichever direction you choose to take, automotive blogging is a great way to earn money while talking about something that you love—and who doesn’t love cars?
Is Starting a Car Blog Right for You?
If you’re thinking about starting a car blog, there are a few questions you should ask yourself:
- Are you passionate about cars? If not, why are you even thinking about this?
- Do you have the time to devote to your blog?
- Do you have the money to invest in your blog (e.g., buying ads, hiring writers, or paying for hosting)
- Do you have the patience to grow your blog passively for 1-2 years before you can start anything substantial? (e.g., getting no views/traffic over the first few months can be frustrating and demotivating)
As you can tell, your love for these machines isn’t enough to start blogging about them. However, if you are convinced that this is for you, then the next best time to get started is right now.
7 Steps to Starting a Car Blog
- Discover the right car niche for you
- Use Keysearch to find the right keywords for your car niche blog
- Name your automotive blog
- Set up your car blog with Bluehost
- Develop your Car Blog Brand Assets
- Set up your WordPress Blog
- Start Blogging
Step 1: Discover the Right Car Niche for You
Before you can start a car blog, you need to know what kind of car niche will work best for your blogging goals.
There are different types of automotive blogs, but they all serve different purposes and cater to different audiences.
- Racing: If you’re an auto enthusiast who wants to write about racing cars, the people who drive them, and the sport in general, this is the perfect place for you.
- Car reviews: Do you enjoy writing in-depth reviews on new and old cars? If so, then this would be a good option as it allows readers who are looking at buying a new ride to get some valuable insight from an expert.
- Tutorials: If you are handy and knowledgeable about cars or maybe you’re even a mechanic, then you can focus on Car DIY topics.
- Car Accessories: You can start a blog primarily to discuss and review car accessory products.
You can explore more about car niche ideas to have an idea of what options are available for you.
Step 2: Use Keysearch to Find the Right Keywords for your Car Niche Blog
As you build your car blog, you’ll want to use a tool like Keysearch to do keyword and competitive analysis.
This tool helps you find the right keywords for your niche blog. It also gives you a competitive analysis of other blogs in the same industry so that you can see how they are currently performing with their search engine optimization (SEO).
Keywords are the words people type into search engines like Google and Bing to find the content they want. By understanding these queries, you’ll be in a better position to target your content as to be found by these searchers.
… and since the content that you will create around cars will meet the user’s intent, you will be able to engage with them and even have them take the desired action, such as joining an affiliate sales funnel.
Thus, keyword research plays an important role in determining how many people will find your blog—and how much money that could mean for YOU!
You can learn more about keyword research in this detailed SEO course on udemy
Step 3: Name your Automotive Blog
The next thing you want to think about is your blog name. You can choose to use a brand name that references what your blog is about, or use your name.
However, in the car niche, you are better with the first option.
You should spend a lot of time thinking about the name of your automotive blog. The name will have a significant impact on how people perceive your site, so it’s important that you make the right choice.
In many cases, your blog name will be your domain name, so think of availability when deciding on the name of your automotive blog.
Here are some of the creative car blog names to inspire you:
- The Car Addict
- Cars and Beyond
- Racing Machines
- The Girl Who Loves Cars
- A Girl and her car
Step 4: Set up your Car Blog with Bluehost
To start building your blog, you need to set up web hosting. There are many web hosting services to choose from, but when you’re starting out, Bluehost is the best option.
Bluehost is the most popular web hosting company in the world, so it’s no surprise that they offer an amazing WordPress hosting solution. You also get to register a domain name for free for your first year. (Save $17).
Other benefits of using Bluehost include:
- Free SSL certificate
- One-click WordPress installation on your domain
- Free CDN
- Support as and when needed
- Most affordable option without compromising on quality service provision.
Starting from just $2.95/month, you can have your car blog up and running in no time.
Step 5: Develop your Car Blog Brand Assets
Once you have a good idea of what your car blog will be about, take the time to design your brand.
The first step is to create a logo and color scheme for your new automotive blog.
You can use Canva or Adobe Photoshop to design these assets, but if you don’t have any experience in graphic design, then I recommend using a site like Fiverr that connects freelancers with clients who need their help on a variety of projects.
Here are a few providers to try:
a) Fiverr Logo Design
b) Fiverr Elementor Website Design Services
c) Branding Style Guides
The next step is deciding which fonts are best suited for your automotive automotive blog. Fonts are very important because they impact how people perceive the overall look and feel of the website.
As a general rule of thumb, stick to 2 fonts, one for headings and one for body text.
Step 6: Set up your WordPress Blog
After you’ve signed up on Bluehost, you can install WordPress on your domain with just one click, following these steps:
- Login to your Bluehost account
- Navigate to the Websites section
- Here, click on Install WordPress and choose your domain
WordPress will be installed on the selected domain, and you’re ready to start designing your car blog.
Once you have your WordPress blog installed, log in to your WordPress and start building your blog.
First, find a relevant WordPress theme that suits your car blog. If you have a premium WordPress theme in mind, then you can purchase, download, and upload it to your WordPress blog.
Using a premium theme is recommended if you want something more professional looking, and that’s constantly being developed.
After installing the theme of choice, install a page builder plugin like Elementor as well as some other plugins like RankMath SEO for on-page optimization, etcetera… The list goes on forever but these are some of my faves at this point 🙂
Don’t want to build it yourself?
You can hire a WordPress designer from freelance marketplaces like Fiverr and Upwork to develop the blog design at an affordable price.
Step 7: Start Blogging
Your car niche blog is good to go. You can now start writing and publishing blog posts.
To succeed as an automotive blogger, you need to churn out high-quality engaging, and informative content that is discoverable on the web.
Thus, before writing any content, take time to do keyword research, to discover less competitive topics that can help you rank quickly. Again, Keysearch can help!
Start off targetting long tail keywords with the competition of less than 0.3, and search volume, not above 200.
Also, make sure that the queries you target have domains with very low Domain Authority ranking showing up on the first pages of SERPs.
To make your content crisp, I recommend using Grammarly to help you proofread your work to remove all the fluff like sentence fragments and unnecessary filler words.
How to Grow a Car-related Blog
a) Keyword Research
The first thing you should do is focus on keyword research to find low-competition topics to cover on your car-related blog.
You can use tools like Ahrefs or SEMrush for deeper keyword analysis. However, if you are just starting, these tools can be quite expensive. In that case, I recommend using Keysearch, a more affordable option.
b) Hire Freelance Writers
To scale your car blog, you need to publish content regularly. This is hard to achieve without some form of help.
You can hire writers who specialize in writing about cars to write content for your automotive blog so that you don’t have to do it all yourself because there are only so many hours in a day!
Hire Automotive Writers on Fiverr:
c) Purchase an AI Writing Tool
Besides hiring content creators, another way to help you produce automotive content faster is leveraging AI content generators.
These tools can help you create full blog posts in under an hour, as long as you know how to direct them accordingly.
One such tool is Jasper AI, formerly Jarvis AI. Use our link below to try this tool for free for five days during which you may create up to 10,000 words of content.
You can also use Jasper to create content for the other pages of your website, besides blog posts. (Home, About Us, Services, Category, etc.)
d) Scale with Social Media
Social media can be a great tool to create buzz for your blog by posting trendy car topics, photos, and videos that elicit emotions amongst car lovers.
e) Guest blogging
Next up: Use guest blogging to improve your Domain Authority (DA). This will help get more organic search traffic from Google in the long run. While there are many other ways of building links, guest posting is the most effective especially when no one knows you yet.
Best Auto Blogs to Inspire Your Next Creation
The Truth About Automotive Blogging
Starting a car blog is easy, but growing it into a profitable venture isn’t.
It takes time, effort, and patience to build an audience and make money blogging. You can’t expect to make $1,000 per month over the next few months of blogging.
You need to build credibility as a writer by publishing great content regularly over several months before anyone will take you seriously.
That’s why it’s essential you understand that this is a long-term investment and not a get-rich-quick scheme.
However, if you follow the strategies outlined in this guide, you should be able to build a profitable car blog within a year or two.
