So, thinking about starting your own blog the following year?

To be honest, blogging is ‘writing to sell’. Previously, blogging was associated with a personal weblog, when anyone would share experiences about their day or travel experience. Hence from web-log came the word “blog”.

Blogging can be a pleasurable experience whether you want to be creative, communicative or professional with it. A blog is a great medium for conveying your innovative ideas to the world.

However, it is good to remember, that the internet is a huge space, and every minute, about a million of blogs, are getting published via different media, approximately. A huge amount of data gets created on the web daily, which is largely beyond our attention span.

You don’t just want to write something and let it rot on a web page; when you are investing your time and effort along with sentiments into something, you want the world to know about it, receive it, accept it and share it with others too, right? Well, you may also be a bit more adventurous and want to make good money out of blogging.

There are a few things you would like to keep in mind before jumping for your new project in 2018.

1. What’s Your Niche?

Choosing a profitable niche for your blog is very important. What it means is, you have to understand and decide on the ‘market’, or target audience for whom you want to write. Your niche can be specific industries, ethnic groups, age group, or a particular section of the society. For e.g. you may want to address ‘Travellers’ through your blog; in that case, your content ideas should cover tourism places, easy carrying options, challenges faced during a tour, images of unique attraction spots from across the world etc. You have to have a plan, to have a proper niche. For that, some research is required. Look up the Google to search for your own interests, first. See, which are the subjects that are trending in the current scenario. After all, blogging can be an excellent tool for marketing whatever you want.

2. Planning A Good Content- Your blog sells with your content, and that needs to be outstanding. Make sure your write-up is informative, entertaining, and vivid (i.e. use images, infographics and links to other sources) so that your readers can identify with it. As we have said earlier, the internet is flooding with data, in order to grab your buyer’s attention, you need to make your blog an eye-catcher so that they feel compelled to read it and also share it. Your blogs need to be well-formatted and error free.
3. Learn the Basics of HTML- Your blogs need to look great. Though HTML and CSS knowledge is no longer required for everyone to customize themes and plugins, it is always useful to have some idea of the language, you will be able to change the appearance of your articles or fix errors in your blog with simplicity.
4. Learn the Basics of Search Engine Optimization- Search engines will help you bring traffic to your content. You need to use it proficiently, to make sure your content is properly circulated.
5. Grow Your Contacts- Your blog will run on public demands; you have to have buyers in order to sell your product. It is thus important to socialize and make the necessary alliances with the big names in your niche (I mean bloggers) through Twitter, Facebook, and other social media so that you can understand your competition, the requirements (as you need to make your blog better than theirs) and the success rate. This will also help your blog to circulate through the right channels. You need to make your alliances before you start your blog.
6. Personal Branding is Important- Even before you plan your content; you need to plan on the personal branding. Your blog should reflect the person behind it. Your blog should have an identity of its own; decide on how you want to make it unique. For e.g. a food blog which gives a weekly digest in the form of a 2-minute video, where the blogger herself shares an innovative recipe in quick and simple steps, will bring back audience to that blog, just for that weekly video. That is the specialty of the blog. The personal branding can also come through the first-person narrative of your content. It will convey to the reader, that you are telling your own story, and that is the uniqueness of your blog. It depends; you need to decide on it, the best way possible.
7. Careful of Your Security Systems- When you write and circulate your blog, threats on your system security will increase. You should consolidate your software and internet securities to avoid hacking, unwanted virus intrusion, and uninterrupted blogging.
8. Need to be Careful about Plagiarism- You need to have awareness about copyright issues before you start writing something for your blog. In order to protect your content and images from thieves on the internet, and also to ensure that you do not land up doing content theft on some other material, you have to learn about the copyright issue. You need to adapt to the technique of writing while avoiding plagiarism. Of course, while you are providing data or information in your blog, you have to read through and refer to several articles and books. Use the correct tools and techniques of referencing your content. Use a plagiarism detector software, to check your content through it, before you hit the publish button.
9. Making a Marketing Plan- You need to strategize a marketing plan for your blog. Paying for clicks and traffic on social media or search engines can be a good marketing plan if you have a business/product to sell through your blog. Twitter, Reddit, LinkedIn, and Facebook have a lot of options for portraying advertisements on the sidebar or displaying related contents when a person clicks on a similar idea. This can be a good return on investment in your initial days.
10. Build a Good E-Mail List- Gathering the reader’s information, i.e. the reader’s email is a good way to promote your blog. You need to build a fan-following for your blog, and the best way to hold your readers and also attract new readers would be by taking their e-mail information so that you can send them updates regarding your blog, which will bring them back. You may have to offer something so that the readers opt to sign in to your blog (as we often tend to skip that step ourselves). There are several services like Awebber and GetResponse for collecting e-mails. You need to look up the right one for yourself, along with the ‘best return gift option’ for the reader, and these have to be planned in advance.
11. Integrating Yourself in the Social Media- If you are not a social media person, it is high time you learn to become one before you be a blogger. As we have already discussed, a blog needs to be promoted properly, in order to sell what you want to sell. Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn are the best places, these days, through which you can spread awareness about your writing. Most blogging platforms have their sharing plugins. However, you have to be on social media before you share through it. Start creating free accounts on these websites; new ones are coming out each day which gives serves as social sharing websites. Research on them. Practice using them regularly (but don’t make it an addiction) View through Facebook pages which are related to your niche, so that you can separately post your blog link there, which will be further shared by followers of those pages. It’s a chain reaction which goes on.
12. Integrate Affiliate Marketing- If you are planning for something really big, you need to develop these skills before being a blogger. Affiliate marketing is a performance-based marketing, where the business owner rewards affiliates, for each customer brought into it. Start your basic training on this.
13. Blog Sponsorship- Knowing about blog sponsorship will help you to get proper support for running your blog. Companies are often interested to finance the potentially good blogs in their niche, however, it requires you to be prominent and dominant in your niche. So that you can be functional in an effective way and sort out your strategies, you need to know about the many ways blog sponsorship can be attained.
14. Planning for Bringing Money from the Blog- Integrating specific types of advertisements into your blog is essential for drawing revenue from it. CPC ads (Cost -per -click) pay you for each click on them. Similarly, CPM (cost per thousand ) ads can bring a heavy income from your blog if you are able to draw a large traffic. These are easy to set-up on the web page. You can also directly contact businesses for advertising them through your blog, to earn more, but that takes time.
15. Sponsored Posts- As you grow as a blogger, you will want to popularize your blog more and earn more from it. You need to know about sponsored posts, where an advertiser pays you for posting something on their side. In that case, you just provide your page, and content is theirs; or you may be asked to write mentioning the advertisers; you get your money and add your personal branding to it. What you need to learn, is how to add your personal touch to a foreign content. Also, beware, that the sponsored contents you post should not damage the reputation of your blog. Research on the advertisers before accepting their sponsorship.
16. Bring in More Writers- Similar to making alliances with renowned bloggers, you need to bring in more authors to your blog, to make the process interesting, add a wider view of ideas, improve the chain of circulation and of course increase the popularity of your blog.
17. Blogging is Not Free- When you have decided on all the above aspects of blogging you need to decide on your blogging platform; remember, you cannot be doing free blogging forever. WordPress.com, Tumblr, Blogger Medium etc. are free blogging platforms which work well, but you don’t own them; there are certain limitations to what you can do and what you can’t. Select your platform carefully, keeping in mind what best works for your product. If you opt to use WordPress, instead of making it self-hosted, choose a host like BlueHost to host your blog which will provide a unique domain name, high-quality reliable hosting, free site builder and unique features like ‘One-click WordPress Install and 24/7 support’.
18. Learn the Art of Teaching- In order to generate more revenue from your blog, you can help other businesses with your skill and expertise in blogging. You need to develop the art of teaching. You can provide training and consultancy services to companies and businesses, but you have to prepare yourself to do it the right way. Make a list of such small and mediocre companies related to your niche, which you can approach in this regard, by looking up Google who might be interested to take your services.

Last but not the least, remember, blogging takes time and effort. Be patient as you write and post. Popularity and returns take time, and you have to wait for the right moment to boom.

 

Sources

 

https://www.huffingtonpost.com/tomas-laurinavicius/10-things-you-need-to-kno_13_b_10521250.html

https://www.blogtyrant.com/start-a-blog-2014/

https://problogger.com/make-money-blogging/

https://www.stephenesketzis.com/interviews/little-known-secrets-successful-blogger-jamie-spencer/

https://amylynnandrews.com/how-to-make-money-blogging/

https://www.tipsandtricks-hq.com/how-do-i-start-a-blog-and-make-money-online-483

http://www.writersdigest.com/online-editor/the-12-dos-and-donts-of-writing-a-blog