If blogging is your passion and you want to start generating income from it, you are at the right place. Let me remind you Rome wasn’t built in a day.
Your blog will take some time before you see results coming out of it. It all depends on how much of your time and effort you are ready to put in.
If you are a full time blogger as opposed to part time, you will find the process a bit less exhaustive.
Consider your blog as your business. To grow a business, you must have a plan in place, a product that you are convinced about and a customer base to sell.
Now you might be thinking how to take the first steps. So let’s just dive into the pool.
1) Choose a Topic of your Interest
Your blog will require daily care. You will be spending hours writing content. So, you should be passionate and head over heels in love with the topic you blog about.
Look at it this way, do you see yourself blogging about the same topic daily for years and still find happiness in it?
I won’t tell you how many posts daily, weekly or monthly are required because it depends on what topic you choose for your blog.
Most bloggers have seen that 4-5 posts a day have worked for them while many say that 1 great, SEO friendly post a week is enough. You will gradually learn on your own what works for your blog and what doesn’t.
Define a tone for your blog. Depending on the theme and the audience it caters to, you should set a tone of voice for it. If it’s a corporate blog then your voice should be strictly formal. If it is a leisurely blog then you can take the liberty of going from informal to slang.
We mostly tend to overlook the obvious points so I had to bring these to your notice today. They will build a base for your future activities.
2) Produce Content that Provides Value
For your blog to start generating income you should have visitors and to attract visitors, you should have value adding content. Make sure your audience sees enough value in the content that they come back for more every time.
Regular visitors are just as important as unique visitors. Take effort to understand your audience by watching which articles get most views and which don’t.
Based on that alter your content marketing plan. Put out posts that interest your audience so that when they come, they get 2 more people with them.
On a monthly basis examine the audience that visits your blog. Keep yourself up to date with the statistics. This will help you decide what type of articles you should write.
3) Use your Blog to Brand your Product/Service
Now that you have valuable content and your audience looks up to you as a thought leader of the industry, you can start talking about your product. Your blog is a great medium to brand your product.
Dedicate a small space on the blog to display the product or write a few articles a month that talk about the product.
You can write on how the product is, how it will benefit an individual or a company, how one can use it in different ways, etc. You can also put out some press releases, testimonials, case studies, etc.
4) Advertising
Advertising is essential because it not only helps you gain new visitors but also helps you keep in touch with the old ones. Not everyone out of the 1000 or 10,000 visitors you get will buy. So we have to keep reminding the non-buyers what great a product they missed out on.
There are numerous mediums to advertise on; now you have to decide which ones to go with as per your budget and the presence of your target audience. Following are the few things that you can do to advertise your blog.
Social Media
You cannot expect people to find you out on their own. You will have to reach out to them. And, what better way than social media!
As soon as you publish an article on your blog, share it on your social networking platforms. Ask people for their opinion on the post you’ve written. Ask them if there is any topic they’d want you to blog on. Do a poll to find out what type of articles they like better. Ask them to tag their friends if they relate with what you’ve written.
Make your pages as engaging as possible and keep them lively. This will build interest in your audience and they will want more of you and your blog.
Paid Advertising
Paid advertising is a must to get new people to notice you. On platforms like Facebook whose organic reach has fallen down; it becomes imperative to lean towards paid advertising. You can start with a small budget and gradually increase as you see the results.
Google Search and Display ads are beneficial if you want to drive users to avail an offer or subscribe to your blog. You will need to do this at some point in time as it is important to build a subscribers list so that you can go back and mail them.
Remarketing is a part of paid advertising. But I am dedicating an entire point to this because I want you to understand the importance of this activity.
Remarketing in simple words will haunt with your ads all those people who have visited your blog/landing page but did not subscribe or take the action they were supposed to.
Your ads will follow them wherever they go on the internet. Whatever site they open, they will see your ad. This increases the likelihood of them coming back and taking that action.
Remarketing is important because you have spent dollars of effort to have them click on your ad, now you can’t let them slide away without becoming your customer. Remarketing helps you stay up on their mind no matter where they loiter around on the web.
Email Marketing
By the time you reach this point, you will have a long list of subscribers because of the advertising you did. So, your next step is to say hi to all those subscribers.
Your first email should always have a non-sales approach. Send minimum 4 mails a week to your subscribers, out of which let 1 or 2 be sales focused. If all your mails are roll around sales, your subscribers might lose interest in them. So be careful.
Conclusion
Content marketing is a booming industry and a lot of potential is seen in the market. You can make a lot of money blogging, but it requires equal amount of discipline and patience. Just stick around and try as many different tactics as you can to reach your goal.
Start with talking about your product/services, invest to grow your mailing list, advertise your blog, become a guest writer on other blogs, ask famous bloggers to guest write for you, do some freelance blogging to get people to notice you.
You could also give away something for free, like an e-book or a pdf on ‘how to’. Do a webinar or a podcast to get in touch with your audience on one to one basis.
There are a lot of things you can do to start earning from your blog. But everything should be a step by step planned process. If you do ten things together, you might not end up doing one thing better.
Finally, just have fun with what you do and you’ll be halfway through.
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