So you want to be a blogger but not quite sure where to start? To have a profitable business as a blogger to generate income (or perhaps you want to do it just for fun!), we will go over strategies and basic steps every professional blogger should take to create and maintain a successful blog.
1. Who will be your target audience?
Once you define who your target audience will be, implement that within your blog to cater towards that audience. The best way to build a loyal audience for any blog is to carefully and clearly define the target audience right from the beginning, and then create content to cater to that audience. This way your posts will act as if you are talking to them directly, and ensures a strong interest in your blog’s content–plus it makes promoting the blog much easier!
The target market or audience you set for your blog content can be defined using criteria such as age, hobbies, gender, marital status, area, interests, etc. Carefully designing your marketing efforts online to appeal to the audience you targeted will help set you apart from the competition and will pique the interest of users who are looking for the content you will be offering them.
2. Let your content and website set you apart
While it’s virtually impossible to blog about original topics, your continuous goal should be to develop innovative content and put a genuine unique twist on whatever topic you’re blogging about.
You’re going to be a successful blogger because you have valuable content that people want to read about and can relate to. Your blog posts can be given that unique twist just by incorporating your knowledge, voice and personality. This alone can set you apart from your competition.
Research is key to blogging. You will be researching facts and valuable information for your posts. You will be researching how other bloggers present similar topics. You will be researching how other blog sites operate. All this research will allow you to incorporate your ideas, perspective, and thoughts into each of your blog entries and will allow you to create a better website. How will you make your website more innovative and memorable?
3. Continue to add new and valuable content
To keep your audience and continue to build your following, you need to add new content to your blog on a regular basis. Remember every blog post needs to cater to your target audience, offer valuable content, and build on content previously posted in past posts.
Stay on topic and cater to the wants and needs of your target audience for your blog to be successful. Meeting their expectation and beyond every time will keep your following coming back for more.
Set a realistic goal on how often you are going to deliver new posts. Being overly ambitious could set you up for failure. So plan accordingly! You’re more likely to deliver a valuable blog post once a week rather than a few times a week.
4. Maintain a multifaceted approach to promote your blog continuously.
It will take time to build a following in the hundreds of thousands… or even millions. To achieve this level of success will typically require ongoing promotions, marketing and even paid advertising. Promoting your blog on an ongoing basis is as crucial as adding new content regularly. Even the most successful bloggers have relied on the mainstream media to generate publicity for their blog to help build their audience.
5. Transform your blog into an interactive e-community
Don’t just focus on exclusively publishing content, but build your blog into an interactive online community. Encourage your followers to post their own comments, interact with each other, share their ideas, and enhance your content by adding their own information if you find it to be valuable.
Make your blog posts easy to share on social media platforms by incorporating a “Share” button into each of your blog entries. Most blogging platforms offer a widget and plug-ins that makes it easy to integrate a “Share” button into your blog. Doing this can help you build your audience through word-of-“mouth” on Facebook, Twitter, Google+ or LinkedIn.
6. Keep your blog professional
Keep your blog’s look, overall design and content professional. Regardless of the subject or your audience, always keep a professional image and post easy-to-ready and understand content.
It is important to edit and proofread your work carefully to correct any errors. Spelling errors and grammatical mistakes in your posts will take away from your credibility and will make your blog appear amateurish.
Do you have additional ideas and comments to make a blog successful? Post them in the comments–us and other viewers want to hear from you!
