First thing first, If you want to start a professional blog with a plan to make money online, honestly you shouldn’t start. Because this is the main reason why 99.99% bloggers start and give up if they don’t see any result. But if you want to start a blog because you have something unique to share that will help others, you will differently make money.
This is very simple and step by step guide to explain how should you start and manage a blog with a solid foundation, that will make money online for sure.
Note: These are the collection of best articles published on openthrive that will help you start a successful blog.
Step 1: Start a Professional Blog with a solid plan
Starting a blog is not a rocket science but taking it to the next level from the day first is really hard. But if you have a solid plan for what is next, no one can stop you. Maybe your next question maybe: “How can I make a solid plan for a blog that I have not launched yet?” right?
Pro Tip:
Extremely Important Things To Do Before You Start a Blog.
Step 2: Set Up The Professional Blog
Now as you have a crystal vision and plan to start your blogging journey, it’s time to set up an industry standard professional blog. Creating a blog is not a big issue, it’s just a five minutes process using any web hosting service.
But if you want to start as a professional blogger, your blog should be SEO optimised with a great design.
Pro Tip:
Create Professional and SEO Optimised Blog.
Step 3: Create Useful Content Regularly
Blogging without content is just like a car without an engine. Can you imagine the performance of world’s most advanced car without an engine? In the same way, you can’t get anything from your blog without content. In short content creation is the oxygen of starting and running a professional blog.
So, start with a strong content strategy to streamline the content creation process for a long time. Create a content calendar, set the frequency of posting and create high-quality content that people would love to share. The simple way is to create a content calendar.
Pro Tip:
Simple Way To Write Blog Post Quickly and Regularly
Step 4: Promote Your Blog
As your blog is completely new, people won’t find it until you help them. It will take weeks or even months to appear organically through SEO, link building etc. So, Start spreading through smart and non-conventional channels like:
- Start With Social media marketing.
- Offline Marketing: Tell your friends, family and also request them to tell others.
- On the way or in a coffee shop: Don’t hesitate to ask strangers to give their feedback and suggestions.
- Send a formal email to all your contacts and ask them to forward to all of their contacts.
- Join the local groups and request them to give their combined feedback.
- Your college friends and office: These people maybe the most loyal for you, ask them to let other knows.
- Print a card and sticker and give them for free.
- Join the online community and forum to post valuable comments. If possible, mention your blog appropriately.
- Join Facebook group and post it there.
- Join Google plus community.
- Quora is a very nice place to write your blog post’s snippet as answers
Pro Tips:
- 10 Ways To Build Blog Traffic Channels Without Flattering Google
- Simple and Quick Ways Drive Traffic To Your Blog
Step 5: Build Your Own Loyal Audience
A successful blog has its own community of readers who come again, share and recommend to others. According to Problogger Founder, building the community of your blog is the foundation of the steady growth of your blog. So, returning visitors are always more important than people who come and never come back.
This can be possible only if you share high-quality content. Whenever people will get stuck, they will come to your blog to find the solution. Apart from this, capture email addresses, ask them to follow on social media and so on.
Step 6: Connect With Other Bloggers
Whether you are a newbie doing it for years, connecting with other bloggers will add a lot of value to your blogging experiences. It helps you explore out of the box to understand how others are doing the same thing, how they are solving problems you usually get stuck with, how they interact with their audience and so on.
It also helps you to explore the community of your fellow bloggers directly. There are many ways to connect with them. Start from the online community, forum, twitter or other social networks, then find the way to meet them personally.
Ask questions, comment on their blog, share their contents, mention their blogs in your posts and ask them to do the same for you too.
Step 7: Write guest posts
So far you have created a professional blog that is warming to get tons of traffic, but it’s time to look out of the box. No matter how big your website, there are always something out there to explore and make it bigger than right now. Guest blogging is one of the top strategies to come out of the box and explore a big opportunity to expand your blog’s readership.
It gives you the direct access to the new audience who can be your next readers. Maybe most of them don’t know who are you and what is your blog, a great and insightful guest post will encourage to know more about you are your blog. So, by writing a guest post you get a chance to find new readers in very short time.
Apart from finding new audiences and readers, it also link your blog to them, that is extreamly important for SEO in long term.
So, even if you are not serious about exploring and finding new readers, do this at least for link building and hence for SEO.
Step 8: Track, Measure & Grow Your Blog
Finally, you are your own boss, so it would be a little bit hard to manage and go with the same energy every day. As being your own boss, no one will push you up to finish the deadline, no one is going to ask when are you going to publish the next blog post? This is the hardest part of blogging journey that every blogger faces.
So, for the exponential growth of your blog build your own daily routine. Make daily, weekly, monthly and even yearly targets and follow every day. There are lots of tools and apps that you can use for this.
Pro Tip: 13
To track the past, current and future growth of your blog fix certain metrics and parameters. It depends on your preference and of course the purpose of starting a blog, but most common maybe:
- No of unique visitors: Total number of people who visited your blog.
- Page views: Number of time unique visitors loads your website.
- Social followers: Also Separately for Twitter, facebook and all other that you will be using.
- Email signups: Number of people who signup for future interactions.
- Comments: Comments on blog posts.
- Blog posts published: How many time you publish the content.
- Time (Hours Spent): Total time spent by you.
- Total Cost: Cost of running the blog.
- Total Revenue: How much money you are making from your blog.
- Net Profit: Total revenue – Total Cost
Measuring these on weekly basis will help you a lot to remain on track, will always push you up to go ahead and do the next.
Step 9: Be consistent and focused
Being consistent and focused is the most challenging job for a professional blogger. It either can break you or take you to the next level. Blogging is an unconventional way to make money online, but most of the time it’s not easier than a 9 to 5 job honestly. That’s why many people give up blogging because they can’t maintain the focused consistency.
So, if you want to create and grow a successful professional blog, don’t take a single break until you feel you have got what you wanted to achieve through your blog.
Step 10: Monetise Your Blog
Once your blog starts getting consistent traffic, then plan to monetise it. Based on the nature of traffic and audience, select the most suitable way to make money online through your blog.
There are numbers of ways you can convert those traffic into real cash, here are few that work actually.
- Display Ads
- Affiliate Marketing
- Selling Service
- Selling your own digital products
- Sell your own physical products
- Sell online courses
Conclusion: How to Start a Blog!
Congratulations again, you have the fresh new blog. The bottom line is, starting a blog is not rocket science, anybody can do it. But getting benefits is almost is impossible until and unless you can do it regularly every day.
So, if you want to start a professional blog, go create it, share some great content, market it and ask new people to come and join the journey every day. Finally do everything again and again daily.
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