Everyone and their dog have a blog nowadays. But most of them don’t make any money from their blog, it’s just a hobby for them. Perhaps, It’s merely an outlet for their thoughts, feelings, and experiences about the world.
But why is that? why their blog doesn’t make money?
Believe it or not, a lot of people don’t know how to make money with their blog, or maybe they’re not interested in making money. Or possibly they want to make money blogging, but just don’t know how to do it.
Anyway, it’s a sad fact that the majority of bloggers (81% to be exact) never make it to $100!
That’s just the reality of it, most bloggers have no idea about what they’re doing, this is could be because of many reasons such as:
- Giving up too soon
- No real interest in the topic
- No idea how to monetize the blog
- No technical skills
But the good news is that you can actually start and grow a successful blog if you know the exact ”right things” to follow.
Here are 17 valuable tips that are guaranteed to make you a better blogger:
1. Build a list
I’m sure you’ve heard this advice a million times.
Of course, everyone knows that they should build a list. But if you don’t, then you’ve to develop an email marketing strategy for your blog, because email marketing is still by far the most profitable marketing channel online. Reports have found that bloggers who use email marketing earn 447% more than those who don’t.
However, building an email list is just the first step of the process. You’ve to actually know how to make money from that email list.
How do you that?
By having an effective email marketing strategy, you need to know a lot of things such as:
- how to write compelling emails
- what to promote to your list
- how to increase your open rate and CTR
- how often should you mail your list
- what email marketing software to use
Fortunately, you’ll learn those things as time goes on. I recommend you ‘build a list’ even if you don’t know what to do with it. 2 years later, you’ll thank yourself for doing that.
2. Blog about your passion
Some bloggers only follow the money, they blog about topics they know nothing about. But you know what happens when you blog about a topic you’re not interested in?
You get bored, and you give up.
When you blog about a topic you’re very passionate about, you’ll be self-motivated, it won’t feel like work – and you’ll easily produce a lot of content. Also, (and this is very important)… you won’t give up.
If you’re not passionate about your topic, then at least research and learn about your chosen topic and try to become interested in it. Also, people have to be spending money on products and services related to the topic you’re passionate about. This is a sign that you can money with your passion.
And one more thing, people have to be already spending money on products and services related to the topic you’re passionate about. This is a sign that you can money with your passion.
3. Find a gap in the market
If you want to have a successful blog or to guarantee the success of your blog even before you launch it, you’ll have to fill a gap in your chosen market. You’ve to do some market research to find out the needs, wants and unfulfilled desires of your market. And see if you can fill those gaps.
Read other blogs in your market/niche and try to identify the content that they’re not providing to their audience. See if you have something new or more in-depth that other blogs didn’t write about.
Go to questions & answers sites as well as social media sites and see what kind of questions and problems people have. See if you’re able to offer them answers and solutions to their problems, try to find an unmet consumer need in the structure of their questions. Or if you couldn’t find any gaps in your market probably due to market saturation, try to make better content than the competition.
4. Wordpress.org
While I’m writing this, other bloggers are probably writing their content on blogging platforms that own their content. When you use a blogging platform such as Google’s Blogger or WordPress.com, you don’t really own the content, you don’t have a lot of control over your content, they can close your account at any time, sometimes you can’t even put ads on to monetize your content.
So what to do instead?
Choose WordPress.org as your blogging platform. More than 15,886,000 websites on the entire internet use WordPress.org as their preferred blogging platform. WP.org is arguably the top blogging platform in the world.
WordPress.org is self-hosted and an open source project which means you’ve full control over everything. You can customize your blog just the way you want it, you can also add plug-ins to enhance the capability and efficiency of your blog.
There is always the option to create your own HTML website, you can then create whatever functionality you want on your blog. But if you’re not a web developer or you don’t have enough money to hire a web developer/designer to do it for you, then stick to wordpress.org, it’s more newbie-friendly.
5. Be consistent
”Consistency always leads to excellence, whatever you do in life always be consistent.”
If you want to have a successful blog, you’ll need to have a posting schedule. And you have to respect that schedule. This is especially important when you already have an audience, they’ll start to know when you publish a blog post, and they’ll start to expect you to commit to that posting schedule.
Don’t make the mistake of blogging each day, and then giving up after 2 weeks. On the other hand, don’t blog too much, you’ll feel burn out. And you may give up or lose interest.
Most bloggers decide to publish a post every single week. A weekly post is a great posting schedule, you’ll have a lot of time to research, prepare and write down your article. Also, your blog will rank higher, Google loves blogs who post regularly.
6. Learn search engine optimization (SEO)
If you’re blogging to build an audience or to generate leads for your online business, then you must learn the basics of search engine optimization (SEO).
Search engine traffic is one of the highest targeted traffic sources on the web, visitors coming from search engines like Google tend to be more engaged with your content. And they’re more likely to view more than one page on your website.
You also need to make sure it is easier for search engines to index your website, you can do this by installing plugins such as Yoast SEO, and Google XML sitemap. These two plugins will automatically help search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo to better understand and index your blog.
7. Grow your presence on social media
The people that you’re trying to reach are most likely to be on one of the social media sites. You have to reach them where they hang out the most, If they’re on Facebook, go to facebook. And so on.
Everyone is on social media nowadays, it’s one of the best online marketing tools for reaching your audience and boosting your traffic.
In order to improve your blog’s traffic and exposure with social media, you need to have a proven social media marketing strategy. There are a lot of social media sites out there, they’re everywhere. If you focus
There are a lot of social media sites out there, they’re everywhere. Don’t focus on all of them, you’ll get distracted and they’ll take a lot of your valuable time. Instead, you should only focus on the ones that are most likely to have your target audience. (e.g. if you’ve a ”fitness blog”, then it’s better to only focus on Instagram, YouTube and possibly Snapchat.)
8. Focus on one blog
Blogging experts usually have more than one blog, this doesn’t mean you should so the same. Why? Because they probably had only one blog when they first started their blogging career.
If you’re just getting started, it’s preferable to focus on just one blog. This way you’ll be putting all your efforts into this one blog. Thus, your chances of success will increase.
Choose a topic that you know a lot about, and start a blog about that topic. And focus only on that ”one blog’‘ until you find success. As a wise person once said: ”If you chase two rabbits, both will escape.”
9. Learn marketing
Why should bloggers learn marketing? – you may wonder.
Bloggers typically don’t know much about marketing. blogging is their profession after all and not marketing. However, I really believe that top bloggers are also knowledgeable about marketing. I’m sure that at some point in their blogging career they asked themselves these questions:
- how can I increase traffic to my blog?
- how can I make my blog SEO-friendly?
- how can I engage my audience?
- how can I get them to sign-up for my newsletter?
I think you would agree with me when I say that the answers to the above questions will dramatically increase your blogging success.
10. Improve user experience (UX)
A lot of things happen when you work on improving your blog’s user experience…
- visitors will spend more time on your site
- you’ll rank higher on search engines
- your website’s conversion rate will increase
User experience (UX) refers to the feelings and attitudes of your target customers towards your products, services, blog or other marketing material.
You should make it easier for your readers to navigate your site, don’t put up a lot of annoying ads on your blog, choose a theme that focuses on user experience, and make sure the content is easily readable.
11. Invest in paid traffic
Just like I said before, bloggers are not marketers. They prefer to get traffic to their blog using organic free methods.
Of course, free traffic works and often times it is more targeted than paid advertising. But there’s one problem with it…
It’s very slow and hard to scale.
If you are really serious about growing your blog and making money blogging then you should definitely consider investing in running paid promotions to get people to read your content or sign-up to your mailing list.
12. Be a guest blogger
When you’re just starting out, you’ve no audience, your blog is like an empty classroom. So it doesn’t make sense to just keep writing while you already know that not a lot of people won’t find your content.
Guest blogging is one of the best (and free) content marketing tools to boost traffic and leads to your website. As well as positioning yourself as an expert on your chosen topic.
Find other blogs in your niche market, and offer to write content for their audience in exchange for a link back to your site.
13. Improve your writing
There’s no way around it, if you want to become a highly successful blogger, you’ll need to learn how to write in a way that makes people interested in your content, and hungry for more.
This doesn’t mean that you should learn how to write like a college professor (unless that’s your target market), to reach a bigger audience you’ll have to simplify your writing and make it readable for everyone.
14. Network with other bloggers
Networking is the best way to build relationships with other professionals. It can bring a lot of benefits to you such as getting them to link back to you, and help you in other ways.
In every market that you’re trying to enter, there are tons of other bloggers who are already creating content similar to yours. Ask them out for a cup of coffee and try to build a relationship with them.
But if you’re awkward in social situations and you always prefer to sit in the corner alone observing other people while scared of embarrassing yourself. Then you don’t have to worry about any of that on the world wide web.
A simple cold email is more than enough to get other bloggers interested in you and your blog.
15. Listen to your audience
Every blogger reaches a point in their blogging career where they get that dreaded ”writer’s block”. They get stuck there, and they don’t know what to write about.
Luckily, if you listen to your audience’s needs; you’ll never run out of content ideas. When you constantly get feedback from your blog’s readers, you’ll always have something to write about.
But what should you do if you’re just starting out?
It’s simple, just go to similar blogs in your niche and see what their audience wants.
16. Don’t be afraid to sell
A lot of people feel awkward when they’re trying to sell something, they view ”selling” as something bad or immoral. And they just can’t be themselves anymore.
But it doesn’t have to be that way. If you really trust in your product or services and you believe it can achieve good results and help solve your customer’s problem. Then there’s nothing wrong with selling.
In fact, by selling you’re actually making a favor to them. Why? Because you’re not hiding the solution to their problem from them. You’re making them a favor.
Don’t be afraid to put up ads on your blog, or ask your readers to buy something from you.
17. Track your results and optimize
Lastly, after doing all of the above – you have to see what works for you and what doesn’t and optimize accordingly.
You’ll have to find your own methods and way of doing things, If Instagram works for everybody – perhaps, it may not work for you. You never know.
Experiment with new traffic sources, new blogging strategies and other marketing methods and see what works best for your market.
Conclusion
Blogging is one of the best content marketing strategies online, companies in 2017 are starting to put more effort, money, and resources into developing their blogging strategy, it’s no longer just a ”hobby”.
Moreover, Blogging can be a great way to start your day and feeling more productive. So go out there and share your thoughts and knowledge with the world.
