Do you have a lot to say about a particular topic? Have you thought about creating a blog? A blog is a website created by writers to educate or inform an audience of a particular topic or a group of related topics. I use the term writer loosely in this article, you do not have to be a professional writer to start a blog. The Dark Phx is a blog that focuses on entertaining and informing the black people, who live in Phoenix and the surrounding areas, of the local resources available, the local black-owned businesses, and the events that guarantee a high concentration of black people, for example.
In addition to the reward of providing an audience with useful and valuable information, writers, who start and maintain blogs, can benefit substantially if they choose to monetize their website. If you are an entrepreneur, like myself, starting a blog to produce income is kind of the point. The move views you can bring to your site and the more viewers you can keep on your site the more money you can expect to make.
How Do I Get Started?
Pick Your Niche!
The most important step to consider when starting a blog is to pick out your niche or topic of concentration. Blogging in today’s age is highly saturated and competitive, in order to stand out it is best to specialize the subject matter of the website. The blog should cater to a specific audience, which will in turn make it much easier to produce the valuable and highly sought after content. Think about what subject(s) you are knowledgeable about or the subject(s) that you can talk about everyday.
What are you passionate about?
What does your target audience want to hear about?
What unique value can you provide to your audience?
Do not be afraid to take it back to grade school with the brainstorming of ideas for your blog. Put the subject of interest in a bubble on a sheet of paper and create extended bubbles to represent different pieces of information about that subject that you could write about. Keep extending until the ideas stop flowing. If you’re unsatisfied with how much you can come up with try creating another bubble chart for another subject of interest. This method can help you determine a niche or group of topics you could cover in your blog.
Create Pre-Made Content
Another important step to complete when you are a beginner blogger is to create a catalog of content. Build up a catalog of blog content that can be prescheduled for later dates. You may create some trending content at the time certain topics are trending, but for the most part there is some timeless content you can create. Nobody really talks about this step in blogging, I find it to be very important. Especially, if you are someone, who would like to save time in one area to afford yourself more time in another area. Multitasking is a myth and attempting to multitask only leads to mistakes or overlooked details.
As a business owner in any new business, you can expect to do everything for the business until you can afford to hire help. If you are anything like most Americans, who are juggling other responsibilities and a business, you can understand how important it is to save time and energy. As a new blogger, you are in charge of building your platform, creating and updating content, managing social media presence, marketing, and so much more.
Timeless content, is content that will be relevant and/or useful to the audience no matter the time it is published. If you create a make up blog for beginners, for example, you may pre-create blogs that describe and teach readers how to use common make up products and tools, you may include written make up look tutorials, and you may also talk about common problems or unique hacks.
Taking this step, allows you to pre schedule content to be published after your website is live. The amount of time you will save on creating new content is completely dependent on the amount of content you can create. This saved time can be used for other important areas of your blog like reaching your audience and collaborations with relative companies.
Market Yourself
If you build it, they will come… eventually. You can choose to wait on your readers to come out of thin air but, you should know that you could be waiting forever. You will need to take the initiative to market yourself and the blog to your target audience. Place yourself out in front of as many people as possible and not only grab their attention, but keep it. There are a number of ways to reach people; search engine optimization (seo), advertisements, social media engagement, word of mouth, and partner collaborations.
It is imperative, as an entrepreneur, to know how to sell yourself or your ideas in order to be successful long term. Nobody ever taught me how to sell myself, it’s something I had to pick up over time through trial and error. In fact, it’s still in progress. Like anything else though, there’s Google and YouTube to the rescue. With a simple search for “how to sell products” or “skills salesmen must have”, you can be on your way to salesmen of the year in no time.
New Content Should be Continuous
As previously mentioned, you’ll want to create batch content for the blog. Prescheduled content is great, but new content must never stop. People like “new” news, “new” information, and “new” everything else. A great way to keep readers returning back to you website, is to offer new content consistently. After while, your audience begins to expect new content continuously and they will check you, if you get off schedule.
This is where those topics that just so happen to be trending at the moment come in handy. Mixing trendy content and timeless content creates a great balance on the website and can lead to some serious organic website traffic with the right SEO work. It is always better to have more than enough content to work with rather than not enough.
Make Business Connections
Another great way to increase your website traffic is to collaborate with companies that add value to your audience. When you collaborate with other companies you get the opportunity to win over some of their fans and in the hopes of adding them to your growing audience. Using the make up for beginniners blog again, for example, some valuable connections might be local make up vendors, beauty gurus, and modeling agencies. Any connection that further encourages not just any reader, but your target audience readers to seek more information from your blog is a great connection to build.
Building connections within the industry can become a great source of income, especially, if done correctly. To recruit sponsors or encourage sponsored content, it would be wise to invest in a media kit. The purpose of a media kit is to showcase your online presence, to give companies an idea of what type of reach they can expect when working with you as an influencer, and to provide your rates.
Keep Your Social Media Consistent
In this era, it seems as though the way to be a somebody is to make it big through social media. Having social media accounts is not a mandatory step as a blogger. If you choose to build a social media presence for the benefit of your blog, it would be important to maintain consistency.
To find the posting schedule that works best for your specific content and audience, it could take some trial and error. Pay close attention to the outcome of posts, content used, and the engagement of your audience. You could listen to the words of other bloggers, who swear by certain media platforms to increase their audience. (i.e. Pinterest, LinkedIn, and Facebook.) There is an abundance of videos on YouTube of experienced bloggers that provide tips and suggestions to help beginner bloggers.
Conclusion
Starting a blog can be a great income source for anyone looking to make some money. It’s simple to start and maintain, to special skills required. We went over 6 points that can help you be successful in blogging:
Pick a niche.
Create pre-made content.
Market Yourself.
Build business connections.
Never stop creating new content.
Maintain a consistent social media presence.
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