“If there is one word that can describe all profitable blogs, it must be ‘consistency.'”
You’ve probably started a blog with the idea to share your opinions and viewpoints with a larger audience group. It’s a totally legit reason, but why wouldn’t you follow in footsteps of other bloggers who also use their websites to make some serious money?
Online writers earn a lot more than you think, but the money doesn’t come overnight. If you want to leave an impression on the target audience and grow the follower base, you have to think strategically and make a long-term content creation plan.
You can find hundreds of more or less valuable blogging suggestions online, but it’s hard to cut out the noise and distinguish between good and bad tips. We decided to give you a hand here by narrowing down the options, so keep reading to learn seven ways to make your blog successful and profitable.
1. Focus on a Single Niche
If you are thinking about launching an all-around blog, we have only one message for you – don’t do it! This is a surefire way to ruin your content creation strategy because you won’t be able to craft quality articles in the long run.
The only logical solution is to focus on a single niche that you know well and have experience with. For example, you might have worked for the dissertation service, so now you can write amazing posts dedicated to high school and college students.
The point is to choose a niche where you can prove professional expertise and have enough content ideas for at least a few years. That is the foundation of success in blogging.
2. Conduct Market Research
Even if you identify your favorite niche, you should begin blogging before you do the homework and conduct market research. What makes this step so important? It is essential because you have to determine if there is enough interest in your field of work.
Let’s say you are a scientist who can write superior articles about microbiology. Your posts would be amazing, but the niche itself is not too promising and you would probably generate no more than a few dozen followers. Such a small market makes it impossible to earn money blogging.
Therefore, you should try and find a niche with enough market potential to generate thousands of readers who are willing to engage based on your expert recommendations.
3. Take Care of the Technical Aspect
Now you know that your blog has a bright future, so it’s time to take care of the technical aspect of the work. It’s a multiple-step process and we will run through it briefly:
- Pick the best name for your blog, preferably the one containing niche keywords.
- Choose the right web hosting provider that guarantees reliability.
- Install a content management system such as WordPress.
- Install a beautiful theme and tailor it so as to reflect the nature of your blog.
- Install plugins to enable SEO, contact forms, security functions, etc.
4. Choose Your Topics Wisely
We’ve come to the critical stage of every blogger’s job and that is topic selection. Namely, you need to choose your topics wisely in order to attract a substantial number of readers.
A report reveals that 80% of readers never make it past the headline. It’s a mind-boggling figure that forces you not only to write high-quality posts but also to pay special attention to the headlines. How can you deal with it?
Jake Gardner, a blogger at the best writing service, explains that headlines have to look interesting in the eyes of a typical reader: “You should adjust titles in a way that suits your target audience. Some headline solutions proved to be universal, including lists, numbers, how-to posts, and so on. But if you are not sure about the quality of a given title, you can test it using CoSchedule Headline Analyzer.”
5. Create a Content Schedule
If there is one word that can describe all profitable blogs, it must be “consistency.” Online writers who want to make money should treat their blogs as a real business, which means they have to keep publishing fresh articles week after week.
In such circumstances, creating a content schedule is a must for every blogger. First of all, it will help you to focus and meet deadlines every time. Secondly, it will make your website look highly professional and packed with new posts.
It’s enough to make a plan of work using a simple Excel table, but you can also take advantage of professional planning tools such as Google Calendar or Evernote.
6. Enrich Articles with Visual Elements
A lot of bloggers make a simple mistake of creating text-only articles. Although it seems logical (you are running a blog, after all), it can seriously undermine your monetization efforts because online readers enjoy visual content much more than plain text.
According to the study, posts that include images produce 650% higher engagement than text-only posts. This and many other stats should convince you to support the story with beautiful or informative visual content such as images, videos, animations, GIFs, illustrations, charts, and so on.
A nice combination of visual and textual content will make your blog more attractive and help you to grow the fan base post after post.
7. Monetize on Your Blog
After everything you’ve done so far to make your blog better and more appealing, it is time to think about the monetization. How can you earn money blogging? There are so many tricks and tactics to do it, but we will highlight the simplest and most popular monetization techniques only:
- Advertising: You can sell advertising space directly or automate it using Google AdSense.
- Affiliate marketing: Use it to promote niche-relevant products or services.
- Sell products: Bloggers can sell digital or physical products directly from their websites.
- Sell memberships: If your content is very valuable, you might as well sell memberships with access to premium content.
The Bottom Line
Blogging is one of the most creative things you can do in your career, but you should also approach it as a source of income. We showed you seven ways to make your blog successful and profitable – now it’s up to you to put ideas into practice and turn your blog into a genuine revenue driver!
Freelance contribution especially written for Find Your Influence by David Collins.