There are countless numbers of successful bloggers out there now, making waves in their respective chosen niche. Blogging is no longer just a lifestyle; Blogging is a business now, today bloggers are successful entrepreneur and owner of gigantic Business Empire. And many bloggers today in the midst of global economy melt-down are a self-made millionaire. Previously people see bloggers as someone who sits behind a computer system and writes jargons, over the time people have changed their negative perception about bloggers.
As you read along, you may be wondering who can blog? I have good news for you anyone can blog as long as you are an expert at something. The good thing about blogging is that virtually anyone can do it, if you have passion for something, or professional in a given area and you are ready to commit few hours per week to it, then you can blog.
Maybe you have been blogging for a while but needs to take your blog to the next level and achieve a successful result, then, you may need to take these tips I am to share serious to boost the effectiveness of your blog.
Align yourself with these tips as you create your new blog or promote your existing blog. These tips may just be what your blogs need to take a new dimension and give you not only money in your bank account but also fame and recognition.
WHAT MAKES A SUCCESSFUL BLOG?
There are three major standards for measuring success in blogging, these standard has nothing to do with how beautiful your blog is, or how sweet the blog’s name sound.
These Standards are:
- REVENUE
- TRAFFIC
- EMAIL SUBSCRIBERS
- REVENUE
What makes a successful blog is the revenues generated. What you make from your blog determines the success of the blog. Since blogging is a business and one of the aims of being in business is to earn a living, how much revenue you generate from a blog determines the success rate of that blog. Once you start earning money from your blog and you are able to maintain such blog from the amount generated and how some leftover, then you can be considered to be doing well as a blogger, Though, the level of your success in blogging may depend on how much you generate from your blog. But your blog should pay your personal and business bills before you can be said to be successful.
- TRAFFIC
The second standard of success in blogging is user engagement (traffic), how many people visit the blog per month and long do they stay on the blog before leaving is a very good standard to measure the success of a blog. Because you can only earn money from the people visiting your blog, they are your customers and they are the ones to pay for the paid content on your blog or buy products from your blog.
Your blog traffic is a gateway to your success in blogging, traffics opens the doors of wealth for you in blogging. Let me put it in a simple way for you, how successful a blog depends on the amount of traffic and user engagement on the blog.
- EMAIL SUBSCRIBERS
The third standard is the number of email subscribers: one of the desires of every blogger is to grow their email lists, as it contributes to the success of the blog. How many email subscribers a blog have is a determinant of the success of your blog because your subscribers tend to be the first to buy from you when you have new products or upload new items.
But I must warn you that if you want to succeed in blogging, regardless of your niche, you need to stay off from free blogging platforms like WordPress.com and Blogger as they will affect the growth of your blog.
Basic Requirement To Start A Blog
Just before you start your blog, you must pass the following litmus test so that you won’t fail in blogging. I know you need a creative outlet to reach out to people, you love writing, you want to share your opinions with others or perhaps have interests and passion for humanity and you want to share your experience and lifestyles with them. Maybe in your own blog, you want to sell products or offer a particular service. Whatever your niche is, before you start blogging, you must sincerely answer the following questions.
- AM I PASSIONATE ABOUT SOMETHING?
Passion leads to originality, if you are passionate about something, you won’t run out of ideas, you won’t be tired no matter what and you will do everything to stand out. It takes a man with a passion to be successful in blogging, blogging is not just about writing anything on the internet, you need audiences and followers, and as you know no one will follow a man without passion. As a matter of fact, no one can do anything successfully without passion for that thing.
- AM I SKILLFUL ENOUGH IN MY FIELD?
You need to prove professionalism within your niche; you must ensure you are an authority in your chosen field. One of the best ways to do this is to use your passion, skills, and real-life experiences to show people what you know. Internet is full of so much information, what will set you apart is your skills. You need to be skillful enough in your niche to be successful in blogging.
Recipes For Success In Blogging
Having answered the above question correctly, I will walk you through these 9 Sure ways to become a successful self-made. These paths are the secrets of many successful bloggers today.
Define Your Niche (Blog Topic)
It is unethical in blogging to mix topics or covers a broad range of topics except you’re running a media or news blog. You can’t be an expert in technology and still be writing about medicine in your blog. It is totally unprofessional. It’s crucial to define your niche before you start blogging, you can choose to narrow your blog to a niche from a particular broad niche. For instance, instead of blogging about sports in general, you can start blogging about football. That will make things easier for you and you will be able to cover many things in football.
If you need help in choosing your blog niche, this post is for how to find your blog niche. Once you have defined your blog niche, you can set up your blog. Learn the simple and easiest way to set up a blog here
Now that you have decided to be successful in blogging, Congratulations!
Wondering what bloggers actually do all day apart from writing. Here are some daily tasks they complete with every passion in them.
- Answer emails
- Searching for partnership
- Schedule and promote posts on social media
- Write posts
- Research for post
- Design graphic images for posts
- Track blog finances
- Prepare Newsletters
- Track the traffic rate on your blog
Honestly, it takes dedication and passion to be a successful blogger.
Are you nervous? Don’t be! You can do it perfectly.
Define Your Audience
If your blog is about the sanitary pad, you should target women from age 13 to 45, because only women within that range use sanitary pads the most. Having a clear understanding of your target audience will enable you creates content and products you feel would be of profit to them and that would also guarantee success for you. The best way to know your audience is to know where they hang out online. There are many forums online that can help you hang out with your target audiences. Creating a Facebook Page or join an existing one you feel has your audience is a better idea.
Constantly Publishing Compelling Content
You need to be creative and stay in touch with new developments in your niches, as you will need to be constantly thinking, researching, and writing new content for your blog. The more you update your blog with new content and information the better for your blog. Before you can reach the milestone of a successful blogger, your rich posts and content need to stay in touch with your audience, you need to be constantly dishing out rich information to attract new visitors to your blog.
You don’t have to publish new content on a daily basis if you decide to publish once a week, you need to be consistent with the timing that will keep your audience expectant every week. When people know you with consistent quality content, they’ll be dying to come back every week.
Create Content Marketing Strategies
The secret of every great blogger is the ability to blend blogging and digital marketing together. If you are good at writing and don’t have a good marketing strategy no one read your post. No one is going to read your blog if your content is poor; likewise, no one is going to read your blog if they never come across it.
You need to promote your content if people must read it, especially if you are just starting. Remember no one knows you yet. Now that you understand that, once you publish a post you must promote it on social media platforms, Facebook groups, and other online forums. All you need is to have accounts on a variety of social media platforms, but you must understand which platforms your target audience uses most, not all your audiences are on Facebook. For Instance, if your blog is about women’s products, you may need to consider Pinterest most.
Let your content be on a wide range of social media platforms so as to have many audiences. Remember to create more content constantly and reach more viewers using your digital marketing strategy.
Read this post to Learn which social medial platform is good for your business.
Ready To Give Away Valuable Content For Free
If your purpose of blogging is to make money alone, then you won’t make headway at all. The first thing you need is to focus on building great content, having an appealing design, adding values to life, and increasing your traffic. What I am saying, in general, is that your number one goal with all of the content you’ve created should be value. The more valuable your contents are the more traffic you drive to your blog. Remember this, if you are not adding values to people’s lives, no one will follow you.
You don’t have to always charge people for your valuable information; don’t be afraid to give away your valuable information for free sometimes. If you really want followers that will turn you into a successful blogger, the kind you are dreaming of, then you need to deliver most of the quality content for free without even asking them to subscribe to your email list. After all, what you need to transform you into a millionaire in blogging is the number of the audience following you. The people you offer your quality content to for free will not turn you down when you have paid products. On your blog learn to give your readers valuable and quality ebooks, videos, and courses for free. Build people first before you think of building an email list.
Although, it doesn’t sound like a good business idea. Given away well-structured and valuable content out for free? Yes! For free because you really need to build a good reputation for your brand before thinking of money. See the contents you’re given out for free as a medium of exchange for what you need in building a better brand reputation online. Most times, everything is not about money. And before money comes, you need to give something out. Remember, if you don’t breathe out, you can’t breathe in.
Include Photos And Videos In Your Blog
Content writing is the major aspect of blogging, but people tend to understand you better with photos and videos. Learn to create high-quality photos and use them within your content for better understanding and demonstration of what you are talking about. There are many tools online to create high-quality photos or better still get a digital camera and be creative enough as to what photos go with a particular post. Quality pictures will not only make your content look nice, but will also give your audience a clear picture of what the post is all about.
Apart from using quality pictures in your posts, you should also consider videos. Videos are a unique way of passing information to your audience; you should understand that some of your readers don’t have time reading but they at least will watch your videos. There’s a study that says humans understand better with images and videos, whenever you write a post on how-to-do certain things, try to illustrate better with images and screenshots for better understanding. It will also enable your readers to practice on their own and become pro.
Your blog should have a YouTube channel and should be linked to your blog, videos help you disseminate information better to your audience than just writing the post. You can create videos about a particular skill, trade, lessons, and how-to-dos, you may not be good at it, but keep doing it. You will become an expert soon. I make use of Active Presenter in creating any onscreen videos for my clients and audience. Active Presenter is a powerful learning authoring software, that enables you to record onscreen, annotate, edit screencast videos and create interactive eLearning contents in HTML5, and it’s very easy to set up and use. You can make use of such a tool to communicate your ideas in video format to your audience.
Build An Email List
Email subscribers are the second most important thing in blogging after traffic. The number of subscribers you have in your list may determine how much revenue you generate in blogging because most times your subscribers turn out to be the first set of people who will buy your products or patronize your brand.
An email list is a list of names and email addresses of people who gave you permission to send them updates and promotions from your blog via email. Email lists play important and crucial roles in your website traffic and the way you generate revenue. As a matter of fact, your email list is one greatest way of monetizing your blog because whenever you launch a new online course, eBook, offer new services, or promotional offer, your subscriber will be the first to know and 70% will buy your product first.
Most successful bloggers made more money through their email marketing than what they made through any other means. Your real success in blogging lies in the number of email subscribers you have.
So, be sure to build a unique email list to gain access to a pool of potential customers.
Connect With Other Blogs
Once you’ve walked through the first seven pathways successfully, it’s time to launch out and connect with other blogs in your niche. Launch out and create opportunities to write for other blogs within your niche. Having your post appears as a guest post on bigger authorities platforms within your niches will not only drive traffic back to your blog but will also make your name known by relevant people within your niche. That might even make your blog go viral beyond your imagination.
Having your author bio attached to your guest post on higher authority platforms is a good marketing strategy to brand you as a blogger and make your blog go viral because you are sure many people will follow you back to your website and there’s a chance they will sign up to your email list to keep in touch with you.
Create Something To Sell
Like I said earlier, blogging is a business and the measurement for success in your blog is how much you earn from the blog and how much traffic you generate. On your blog you need to create stuff to sell, it does not necessarily need to be your own product, but you need to start selling something on your blog to generate revenue. You can start with affiliate marketing until you start creating your own products such as ebooks, videos, and other digital contents
Selling digital content on your website will allow you to plan what to write about and linking the paid products around your post will be easier. You can offer a quality product for free to get people to subscribe to your mailing list, while you advertise your paid products to them through email and put the link in the freebies.
Final Thoughts
I want you to know that the best way to become successful in blogging is to start blogging from today. The good thing about blogging is that you can start doing it at a very low level before moving to a higher scale. All you need is a computer, an internet connection and a small amount of money to buy a domain name and hosting plan. You can start blogging for as low N10, 000 in Nigeria. I hope you found this information useful. And to all beginners who dream about generating an income from blogging, I want you to assure you that you can do it!! Get inspired! If you can dream it, you can become it. Although, being a full-time blogger requires dedication and hard work, but it will pay you at the end.
So, what are you still waiting for? Get started today and fulfil that dream of selling your ideas to people online.
Great content and very insightful too
Thanks.