Hi Friends,
Aren’t you puzzled why there are so many blogs on the world wide web?
Just think about it, when you Google a topic or a question, about 98% of the search results that you will get are blog posts that are either professionally made or written by amateurs.
Aren’t you wondering what is their incentive for writing a blog?
What if I tell you that an amateur blogger can make somewhere between $250 to $10,0000 (sometimes even more!) a month depending on the niche they are in and how long they are on the business!
Did that make you interested to learn how to blog for profit?
Well, you are in luck because today, I will be starting a series of lessons that I will release once a week to teach you all the tips and tricks that I have learned about how to make a profitable blog.
What is a Blog?
A blog is an informal journal-like article that is often used to inform, to instruct, or to invite others to join a cause. The primary function of a blog is to build a trusting relationship between an author and readers by providing value to the lives of readers through the content the author is posting.
Some bloggers blog to share personal experiences that others can relate to and they offer valuable lessons that they have learned from their own experience from which their readers can learn from. Other authors blog to share solutions to common problems, while some write to entertain their reader.
Big companies also use a blog. They often use it to strengthen their relationship with their customers, and they do this by providing information that is related to the products they are selling and at the same time relevant to their customer’s lives.
How to Blog For Profit?
Step 1: Attract readers by posting interesting content on your blog
Our primary goal as a blogger is to create a blog post that adds value to the lives of others because of the following reasons: first, people tend to read articles that helps them. Second, we gain our reader’s trust when we add value to their lives. We want their trust because we want to build a relationship with them. Last, we cannot deny the fact that we need readers and the more of them the better because each one of them is our potential customers.
Writing a high-quality blog is just the first step. Once we have written it, we need to ensure that people see it so they can get a chance to read it. To do this, we need to take advantage of search engine optimization (SEO) and leverage the power of social media to make our contents visible. If we are able to do this, then we can increase the traffic of our blog.
Step 2: Write to a specific group of people, not to everyone
One of the few mistakes a new blogger makes is they try to write for everyone. When we try to write to everyone, we are really writing to no one. The truth is we should only need to write to people whom we think will be interested in our topic.
Here is an analogy. When you are at a party, you don’t talk about the same topic to everyone in the room since you are aware that one topic may be interesting to one person but not to the other. You need to know what topic your friend likes to talk about than you talk about that. This is the same for blogging. You choose a topic to talk about in your blog then only talk about that topic every time.
In addition to, you will need to create a customer persona. A customer persona is thinking of a person, either real or hypothetical, whom you think will read your blog. At the beginning of your blogging career, creating a customer persona is a bit tricky because you will not have any data about your readers because you have none. In this case, the best way to this is to ask your self the following questions: to what gender and age will my articles are for, what are their marital status, what type of employment do they have, what is their education, what are their problems that my article can answer, etc?
The importance of creating a customer persona is the tone of your articles will be directed towards a specific group of people. Once they read your articles, they would feel that you are talking to them directly hence the trust, relationship and loyalty to your blog will be formed.
Step 3: Write blog entries that are relevant and add value to your reader’s lives
Say, you already chose a topic to talk about in your blog and hopefully the topic is something that you are really interested in as well as a lucrative one, then what is next? Do you just write random articles about it? Of course not!
As an expert in the topic you have chosen, the articles that you will write should be able to help other people. You can tell them your own personal problem or struggle then share to them how you overcame it, curate contents relevant to your topic so your readers will have an easy time looking for the information, create “how to article” that might help your readers to empower your readers to accomplish something on their own, etc.
You can write anything about the topic that you have chosen but remember that it should always have a goal to help others.
How to Generate Traffic on Your Blog?
So you have high quality, value-filled blog entries. Does that mean you will start generating dollars? The hard reality is no! Just writing an excellent blog post will not generate money on its own.
Your next step is to make sure that people see your post. Luckily, blogging is a digital advertising tool that is heavily used by both small and big entrepreneurs so big advertisement companies like Google and your favorite social media strive to make an ecosystem designed to make any blog visible to others if specific steps are followed.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) will Help Your Blog Page Land on the First Page of Google
SEO, in a nutshell, is the use of keywords (the phrases that you time in Google search bar) in your title and in your content so Google can find your post and potentially put it in the first page of Google Results page.
I use a two-step method to ensure that the keywords I used in my title and in my content have the best chance to land me on the first page of Google.
The first step that I do is I type phrases (keywords) on Google that is related to the topic that I will post. I take notes of the results and use the keywords that best fits my content.
For example, my goal/topic for this blog is to teach you how to make an income through blogging, so I typed “how to blog_”. Google then tries to finish my phrase by suggests keywords that are commonly searched by other people. That means if I used one of the keywords suggested by Google, then the chance of getting searched by an interested person is high.
The second step that I do is to check for the average number of searches, average traffic per month and the number of competing websites for the keyword that I will about to use. In this step I used Jaxxy because it provides a really neat data that I can use.
Based on “Google Alphabet Method Technique”, the most commonly searched keyword that is related to my topic (how to make money by blogging) is “how to blog for a living” and “how to blog for profit”.
To further optimized the keywords that I will use, I typed those keywords to my Jaaxy account and learned that I can get more traffic but less competition if I use “how to blog for income”!
Jaxxy Result for “How to Blog for income”
Versus
Jaxxy Result for “How to Blog for a Living”
Get Jaaxy for free when you sign up with Wealthy Affiliate OR try Jaxxy now!
^^^ Type your keyword here ^^^
Advertise Your Blog Using Social Media
Another way of increasing traffic to your site is by leveraging Facebook and Twitter to advertise your blog to your friends then, hopefully, to their friend’s friends. Facebook made the “Share” button for a reason so try to take advantage of it. Likewise, you can also advertise your blog via Twitter then encourage your friends to retweet you blog page link!
If you are just starting, then my advice is to only use one social media. Since Facebook has the most active users, then it would be best to start a Facebook group page then grow its followers. To generate traffic to your site, all you need to do is to create an advert or an interesting post and in that post you should invite them to visit your blog by including the link of your blog to your post.
That is it, as simple as that! Now your followers on Facebook will click the link and gets redirected to your blog.
How to Turn Your Blog into Money Generating Machine?
In the following lessons on “How to Blog for Income”, I will share to you what are the ways you can do to monetize your income, but first things first!
Next week’s lesson will be on “Properly Introducing Yourself to Your readers”
SPOILER ALERT! Different ways to monetize your blog: Google AdSense, Amazon Affiliate, Affiliate Marketing.
What do you think?
There you go friends our very first lesson together. Yey! Thank you for spending time with me and I hope you are able to learn a lot from this blog!
I want to hear from you! What is the best topic that you have learned today? Do you have a burning questions that needs to be answered? What do you think I should do better to provide a higher quality material for you?
I love to hear all of those!
Leave us a comment and joined our community on Facebook!
John Greg