The Ultimate Blogging Guide
You must have seen enough case studies with screenshots of crazy profit numbers from blogs. Now, if the idea of creating a blog crossed your mind, that is great! But, the truth is that it takes enough time, effort, and good strategies to create a successful blog. Here is the Blogging Guide!
Some bloggers seem to start earning immediately from their blogs because they have personal brands or industry influence that helps them redirect their current audiences to grow the blog audience rapidly. This blogging guide will inform you about the ways to set up a blog, getting it ready to generate revenue and the strategies that will bring sustainable growth to it.
Finding a niche
The first step is deciding your niche. Two things will determine it:
- It should be something of your interest
- It has the potential to make money
Let us discuss the first point first. If you start a fashion blog but are not interested in knowing or researching the latest trends and styles, running that blog will be like just another job you will not enjoy. The second thing, choose a niche with money-making potential.
Choosing a lesser-known niche will make it difficult to increase your audience to make your blog appealing to sponsors and advertisers. And, if you are selling something through your blog, it’s unlikely you’ll get many buyers.
So, the idea of a less competitive niche might attract you, but the security of a large audience who enjoy your subject can only be available within the common niches. It is also helpful if you are looking to build more industry-based relationships to grow your brand faster.
Furthermore, you can take your cue from your competitors and understand what worked and what did not for them to customize your marketing strategies accordingly. So, how to find out if the niche has a good audience or competition? Simply by searching your niche in google by attaching “blog” to the end of it. Next, copy the topmost URL and paste it into a free tool like Ubersuggest. It will give you a summary of the total traffic that the blog gets. If the top result has the required number of visitors and more, you must go for it.
Setting up your blog
The next step is setting up your blog. This process will include:
- Selecting a hosting platform
- Domain name selection
- Choosing your theme and design.
WordPress.org is a good option for creating a website but make sure you are using the .org version and not WordPress.com.
Other hosting sites like Wix and Squarespace may attract you for being user-friendly, but they provide limited SEO options so, eventually, you might have to move your website to WordPress.org You will lose google ranking and your website’s traffic. Plus, the process will create a big hassle for you so it is better, to begin with, WordPress.org. So, once you have chosen WordPress.org, you will have to select a suitable hosting plan. This plan is what will make your website or blog accessible to your audience. Your website’s effectiveness and well-being are affected by the host you have selected because it influences:
- Whether your website can get hacked or not
- Your website loading speeds (essential for a good SEO)
- The downtime frequencies on your website etc.
There are various hosting options available, and you can begin by browsing these:
These hosting sites are ideal for a blog considering their security, support, and great uptime. Once you have a suitable host, you can now select your domain name and buy it through your host. But, when you choose a domain name, consider these points:
- Easy pronunciation
- Must be under 20 characters
- Must have top-level domains such as .com or .net
- Ideally, not have special characters but only letters.
- It shouldn’t be trademarked
If you need help to figure out a name, you can take the help of a domain generator. When you are sure about the domain name, you can buy it through your hosting provider. Now it is time to get your website running. The process of getting your website live varies depending upon your hosting provider. For example, if your hosting provider is Bluehost, it will set up the bare bones of your website in their platform.
But, if you don’t want to work with that hassle, you can get someone from Upwork to work it for you. You will have to give them your domain name, let them know about the hosting provider you want to use, and ask them to build it on WordPress.org. When your website is live you should make sure it includes the home page, about us page, and a blog page set up. Once you get done with that, it’s time for some content creation.
Generating blog post (content) ideas
The problem is that readers don’t just appear out of the blue, and without the audience, your blog won’t make money. The blog is as valuable as the attention it receives. So, how to bring the readers to your blog? You need to reverse that question and think about what your audience is looking for on the internet, instead of asking how to get them.
For example, if you have a travel blog, your audience is probably searching for things like:
- Best places for a vacation
- How to pack for a vacation in the mountains
- What is the best food to try in India
Because simply writing about your travel experience won’t generate as much desired traffic as answering your audience’s searched questions would. So, you must include the topics that your audience wants to know and read more about. But, How can you discover what your audience is looking for?
These the few different methods:
Forums
When people can’t get answers to their questions on Google, they ask it in forums. Another thing that you can do to make your content more relevant to your reader is to turn the question that they are asking, into a suggesting post.
For example: if your audience is searching “What are the things you should pack for a vacation in the mountains?” your clog post could be “10 things to do when you are vacationing in the mountains.”
Competitor analysis
Another thing you can try is analyzing the strategies of your competitors. It is the simplest way to know what kind of blogs are driving traffic on your competitors’ websites. The key is to go for the smaller blogs in your niche first. Going for the strategies of bigger blogs might not work for you considering the level of competition.
By “smaller competitors” what we mean is the competitors in your niche with less than 5000 visits in a month and domain authority, less than 20. Later in the blog, we will show you how you can check out monthly visitors on a website and the domain authority score. Bigger competitors can be easily found on the top of search results but how to find out your smaller competitors?
Simply, niche down your search. For example, if your blog is about pets you can search for something specific like “best dog food brands”. Now you can check out what are their most successful blog posts.
Keyword Research
After this, if you get stuck and can’t think of any more keywords, you can always use tools like Ahrefs. Type a generic keyword of your niche then click on “having same terms”. Adjust your keyword filter to be 0-15 to ensure you don’t create content using too difficult keywords.
Narrowing down your topics
If you did keyword research during the ideation phase, you can skip this part. But, if have used ideas from competitor analysis and the forum answers, you must now narrow down your topics to ensure you include low-difficulty keywords.
Again, this can be done through keyword research tools. Planning your content outline and writing the post. Once you’ve decided on your several blog post ideas, it is now time to write the content.
Creating search engine optimized blogs
Your google ranking will decide your blog’s success so look at the competition on your blog’s title before preparing the content. And, specifically, you should look for the layout, word count, and design of the competitive website.
For example, if you see the top results have a content word count of around 2000 words and are in a list-based layout, your content must fall under a similar structure. But, if the results majorly have images and a few hundred words, you shouldn’t prepare an unnecessarily long blog post. In such cases, writing a very long blog post can harm your rankings.
You don’t want your rankings to drop. Once you get the idea about what your users are looking for, you now have to think about serving it better than your competitors.
The following is a checklist for that:
Improve your load time
If the load time of your page is slow, your readers will leave (bounce) and that suggests to google that your website was unsatisfactory. You can use tools like PageSpeed Insights to check your page’s load time and hire someone to improve its speed. You should make sure that the load time is fast on desktop and mobile phones because Google’s mobile-first indexing policy judges websites based on their mobile-friendliness.
Improve scannability
If your blog’s main idea is pushed way down on your blog post, it will provide a poor user experience, and your audience will bounce. Poor user experience will eventually affect your ranking. Apart from this, if you have big text, break it up into bullets, sub-points, headings, and paragraph spacing to improve its readability.
Provide more depth (when relevant )
A great way to outrank your keyword competitors is by filling in the gaps that your competitors might have missed. For example, if you are writing a blog on the ways to improve your health, you can include the most effective yoga asanas if nobody else has included them in their blog post. Make sure you don’t unnecessarily include the in-depth information. Include it only if it provides value to your readers.
Include expert quotes
Adding quotes from eminent experts is another effective way to improve your post. After you have decided on a topic and have determined the best strategy to create the best blog post, it’s time to write it.
Promoting your blog posts
It is initially difficult to reach your desired readers because Google ranks posts from high-authority websites. Even after extensive keyword research, there is still a possibility of your blog not getting immediate success. Therefore, spend more time promoting your blog posts. Here are some ways to do that:
Leverage Influencers
If you have mentioned or quoted influencers, let them know when it gets published so they could reshare and give you an audience. And when Google sees your increasing website traffic, it will raise your website’s ranking. You can reach out to anyone with influence in your industry and ask them for a quote, and they’re most likely to reshare that post.
Paid Advertising
While you’ve spent so much of your valuable time in creating the content you might as well spent some more time and money on paid advertising. You can either use social media or Google Adwords to advertise your content.
Link Building
Links suggest to Google that the website receiving the links is authoritative enough because other websites are sending or redirecting their traffic to it.
But it has its drawbacks as well. While getting the backlink from other authoritative websites can get you a higher ranking, getting it from low-quality websites can lower it. Therefore, only build links from authoritative or high-quality websites.
Are you ready to start your blog?
If you have decided upon building your blog, now is a perfect time. Even if you have limited time to spend on building your blog you must give it because it is a great way to have a second income with minimal effort.
You may not see results overnight but, gradually, it will show profitable results.