Some Rules for Blogging and What You Should Do To Succeed
Blogging can make you ‘Big’ money….it really can. If you believe the same, then you’ve come to the right place. However, making money blogging requires a change of mindset—you need to start thinking less like a hobbyist and more like an entrepreneur looking to scale their blogging business.
So, you’ve been told that you can make it while you sleep but what no one has told you is that more than 90% of the people who start blogging with this mindset fail. On the other hand, those telling you that you can generate a passive income through blogging—on YouTube and other social media platforms—are the ones who have been doing it for years and making thousands of dollars from it.
So, what is it that makes these ‘experts’ different from the majority of the bloggers who fail? For starters, they begin in the right way. What does this mean? It means that they learn how to start a blog before venturing into this profit-generating business. To begin, you need to choose a domain name and get web hosting. For web hosting, I would recommend Bluehost as it is the choice of experts while WordPress can provide you with everything you need to optimize the experience for your blog visitors.
Rule#1: Market Factors—Not Your Passion—Should Determine Your Blog’s Niche
Here’s something for you to think about:
- Your passion will not make you money
- Your expertise in a particular area does not guarantee profits in blogging
- Hard work won’t necessarily get you where you want to be in blogging
Not too motivating, eh? Well, I’m not looking to demotivate you or make you quit blogging even before you begin; I’m only trying to prepare you for what may lie ahead. I want to ensure that you’re not making the same mistakes in blogging that so many others before you have made. Let me explain this with an example.
Suppose you are a subject-matter expert on Ratte potatoes. Each day, you start blogging on this rare potato type thinking that people would be very interested in the topic. You begin in the morning and keep typing in your thoughts till sunset.
You go to bed thinking that there will be hundreds of comments on your blog and an equal number of its shares on social media. You wake up the next day, quickly grab your laptop and turn it on in anticipation of something great. You navigate to your blog and find there are no comments and just one share of your blog—that too by your sibling who already knows about it.
So, why doesn’t your blog have any shares or comments? It is because no one gives two hoots about Ratte potatoes. Even if you were to get a few visitors to your blog, you’d need to convince them to buy these potatoes if you want to make money.
Anyone can be interested in learning about a new kind of potato but getting them to buy it will take some doing. 99.99% of the time, you will fail to convince your blog visitors to buy Ratte potatoes. It may seem harsh, but it is the truth. You, my friend, need to swallow this bitter bill if you have any ambitions of making money from blogging.
To put it another way, you can only make money from blogging if there is a large audience for what you’re selling through your blogs. So, before you start blogging, you need to put your passion to the side. Instead, find a niche for your blog with high demand in the market and a sizeable audience that will be interested in learning about the product and buying them.
Rule#2: Choose a Niche for Your Blog Using Your Professional Leverage
The next step is identifying the competitive advantages that you may have over others. Do this by asking yourself the following questions:
- How much professional experience do I have currently?
- Do I have any connections in the industry?
- Can I use my professional experience and connections to build a profitable blog?
- What websites sites in the industry would take me seriously if I pitch to contribute a guest post after I first start blogging?
Did you know that influencers—whether on Instagram, YouTube, or another social platform—make some serious money? Brands are willing to pay them good money because of their reach; they can influence the decisions and habits of people. This is an amazing quality—one that all successful bloggers have. You cannot make money from blogging without building influence first.
You need to prove to your target audience that you are an authority and subject-matter expert on whatever it is that you’re blogging about and that interests them. So, how can you build influence and authority? Leave your comfort zone and leverage everything at your disposal—your professional experience, connections, etc.—to get your name out there.
In addition to leveraging your existing connections, you can make new connections through outreach. What does this entail? It involves making the right connections in your niche so that you can contribute guest posts to authoritative sites.
Why is writing a guest post on authoritative sites in your niche useful? Because guest posting on trusted websites can help you generate high-quality backlinks to boost search engine optimization (SEO). By improving your SEO, high-quality backlinks will allow your blog to get a higher ranking in search engine results pages (SERPs).
You need to provide Google with something concrete to treat your blog as an authority in your niche. I say this because 3.5 billion searches are processed by search engines each day. If you’re not providing Google with something that sets your blog apart from others, it will simply skip it, resulting in a poor search engine ranking. Getting backlinks from authoritative sites in your niche will put you on a higher pedestal in front of Google compared to other sites trying to rank for the same keywords as you.
However, all this will only happen after an authoritative website accepts you as a guest post contributor. It can be difficult when you first start blogging and it is right to ask: “Why would anyone want me to contribute a guest post to their site?” They would want this if you can leverage your background appropriately. This first step in this process is improving your content skills.
Rule#3: The Best Content Is King
Content is king, but only if that content is adding value to someone’s life. All content that you find online is not useful or valuable to the people it’s targeting. So, how can you produce valuable content for your audience? Most blogging ‘101s’ will tell you to be entertaining, original, and helpful in your approach to get results, but does that work?
It doesn’t, and the following are some reasons why:
- What you may think is useful to your target audience may not interest them at all
- The content framework you’re using is not reliable or proven to work
- The blog you wrote is good, but there are hundreds of others on the topic that are better
While none of the above is your fault and you cannot be blamed for any of it, you don’t know—or have never been told—what it takes to be a successful blogger. Simply writing stuff that you believe is interesting and then publishing it will get you nowhere. Yes, words have power but solely relying on them is not enough to make money from blogging.
Think Out-of-the-Box
You need to think out-of-the-box to write content that your target audience will find interesting and have never read before. Coming up with original content and one that can garner a huge audience will take some doing. Perhaps, knowing the three levels of content creation would make the task a tad bit easier for you. The three levels of content creation include the following:
- Knowing the trending/popular topics in your niche and writing exclusively about them
- Mastering the proven content frameworks for increasing the popularity of your blog (how to post, list post, etc.)
- Publishing content that provides more value to the target audience than any other post on that topic
Learn From the Best
I searched the entire webspace to learn how to blog before I started this blog. The biggest lesson I learned from this research process was that “to be the best, you have learned from the best”. So, what did I do? I invested time and money in courses from ‘the very best’ to build my blogging and marketing skills.
Rule#4 Build a Community of Loyalists
Blogging is like any other business. The more value you offer to your customers (readers in your case), the more chance you have of making money and profits. You need to build a community of loyalists and then profit from it. This may sound greedy, but you cannot hope to make good money—or any money at all—without first building an engaged online community for your blog.
When you’re first starting with blogging, make sure to build real, tangible connections instead of just focusing your efforts on driving more and more traffic to your blog/website. In the end, building connections and leveraging them to expand your community of loyalists is what will get you those sales that have helped many bloggers to make hundreds or thousands of dollars to date.
Your blog will benefit tremendously from an engaged online community whether it is a Twitter community, followers on your Facebook group, a forum on your website, an email list, or others. Without this community, you have very little chance of making money blogging. The online community will help you make money while benefiting themselves from your blogs. In this end, it is a win-win for both you and your audience.
Build Real Connections
You must build real connections with your online community/readers. Don’t make them feel like they follow a blog written by a highly-advanced AI bot. No, that’s what they’ll start to think if they get no response to their comments whether it is on your blog or social media pages.
Not only do you need to respond to those comments with a reply or a like, but you also need to find out about their preferences, what made them read your blog, how they found you, and what motivates them to keep returning to your blog/site for more.
You need to treat your readers as the humans that they are and not revenue-generating machines. A little investment of time in building a connection/relationship with your readers through email, chat, or another medium will go a long way in helping you build a profitable blog.
Final Word
Blogging is all about how well you engage with your community and build relationships with them. Do this right, and there will be no stopping you. An engaged online community of loyalists will not only provide you with a support system, but they will also help you make new connections. The more satisfied people you have in your community, the more new connections you can expect to make through it.
Also, some of your readers may have the products that they want to be promoted. If they see you as an authority in your niche, they may pay you to promote their products. Or maybe you have ardent readers of your blogs who are social media influencers themselves and won’t hesitate to promote your blog to thousands of people that follow them.
The point is that you should never take relationships with your readers for granted. Don’t treat it as a side job because it is not. Instead, it is an integral part of your blogging business. Why do I say this? I say this because the more intimately you know your audience, the better you can cater to them. The more value your readers get from your blog, the more likely they are to support to. Their support can go a long way in ensuring your success as a blogger.
