Do you want to start a money making blog? Yes! Many people
have been asking questions on how to start a money making blog, if you are
among them, your question will be answered in this article. Starting a
profitable blog is not difficult but lack of proper planning will lead you to
into a failed blog.
At this point, you must have known the topic/niche you will
blog about, your targeted audience, and your competitors.
When planning a blog that will generate income, you must have known your topic/niche. There are other things you must consider in your planning. They are:
- Set your Goals plan
- Set your branding plan
- Have a nice Content plan
- Plan your blog structure
- Set a Promotion plan
- Set your Monetization plan
- Plan your Budget
1. SET YOUR GOALS PLAN
The first thing you should do before starting a profitable
blog is to set specific goals that can be achieved. This entails that you need
to set a long term goals with short term task that can help you achieve the
goal.
Write down on a paper where you will see your blog in a year,
two years or subsequent years, set a short time goals like a daily, weekly or
monthly task that will help you achieve the long term goals. Review it
regularly.
When setting your goal plan, apply the acronym “SMART Goals”
which means Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic and time-limited.
Specific: Your goal need to be specific for example “I want
2 million page view and 200 content with at least 2000 words for each content
in a year.
Measurable: Your goal need to be measurable for example “Do
your competitors in the same niche make such page view in a year?
Achievable: Your goal need to be achievable for example “Can
a new blogger make 2million page view organically in your niche within a year?
Or do you have the resources that will help you generate such traffic in a
year?
Realistic: your goal need to be realistic for example “Can
you actually write 200 quality content having a total number of 2000 words for
each content in a year?
Time-limited: your goal should have a specific day to reach
it for example “will you achieve the goal in a year, two years and more.
When you have set this long term goal, you will now start
giving yourself a weekly task to as the number of posts you will write for the
week, the total page view you will get for the week and the social media shares
for the week. This daily, weekly or monthly tasks will help you reach your long
term goal.
NOTE: Write down your goals. Studies shows that you’re more
likely to succeed at achieving goals if you write them down.
2. SET YOUR BRANDING PLAN
Before we go further, we need to know what blog branding is.
Blog Branding simply means a name, symbol or design that help people to easily
identify your blog.
Why do we brand our blog?
By building a brand around your blog, you’re differentiating
yourself from your competition. It’s how your readers are going to recognize
your content.
It help differentiate you from your competitors and make you
viewers easily identify your content.
The question now is how do you brand your blog?
When branding your blog, you should have your targeted
audience in mind. In blog branding, the following should be where to focus:
- Your blog Name
- Your Blog template design
- Your Color palette
- Your Logo design
- Your Post scheduling
NOTE: You can hire a graphic design freelancer from sites like fiverr to do the graphic branding for you.
When setting your branding plan, you should make sure to
create branding identity between your blog and social media profiles. Branding
is what differential you from you competitors.
3. HAVE A NICE CONTENT PLAN
Before drafting your blog content plan, you need to set a
content strategy plan.
What is a content strategy plan?
A content strategy plan is the aspect of planning which
include how you will create, deliver and manage your contents to help you
produce a high-quality content which will attract your target audience.
How to create a content strategy plan?
To create a good content strategy plan, you need to write
down the type of content you want to be publishing and your targeted audience.
Then use resources like google, quora and reddit or other keyword research
tools to gather information on what people are searching for in your niche.
This is called keyword research.
After the keyword research, check its competition and search
volume. Then create content based on the best result.
When you are done with the keyword research, it’s time to
create a nice content plan.
Here is where you
will talk about how to schedule your posts.
The type of content to create.
The type of images for your articles.
How you will get emails from your visitors.
How to schedule your email contents.
The best way to get your visitors email is to offer free
digital product in exchange with their emails.
4. PLAN YOUR BLOG STRUCTURE
This is an important part of blogging, but most people
overlook it. During your blog planning process, try look at your competitors blog
to see how they designed and structured there blog. In this blog structure
planning, we will be talking about web Hosting, blog structuring, layout and
categories.
Web hosting
Before your blog become visible on the internet, you must
have a domain name and web hosting. Domain name is an alphanumeric characters
that forms part of a web address (such as example.com) while web hosting is
what connects this domain name to the internet and allow it to be viewed by
your audience.
There are lots of web hosts to choose from. I recommend
NameCheap for your WordPress sites as it has a cheap domain price of $8.88 per
year and a hosting plan of $0.01 per month.
I also suggest Ipage that give free domain and a hosting
plan of $1.99 per month.
After purchasing your domain and a web hosting, you will
need a content management system (CMS) which help you publish your content,
modify it or edit its template. Wordpress.org, blogger.com are examples of
(CMS).
After choosing your content management system, it’s time for
your blog structuring. This is important for your web crawler.
Blog
structuring
Blog structuring simply means how you interlink your blog
contents. Here you will think of the pages your blog will have and how to link
them to the homepage.
Pages are static piece of content that contain important
information about you blog.
The following are most common blog pages:
Homepage
About
Contact
Terms and Conditions
Privacy policy
Disclaimer
Layout
Layout is how your blog template is being designed.
Basically a blog layout contain header, footer, main content area and side bar.
Header: This is where you blog name, logo, menu and pages
are located.
Footer: This is where your copyright notice, legal pages, archives,
navigation menu, popular post and many more interesting are located.
Sidebar: This is where author bio, latest posts, search box
and in most cases social sharing button are located.
Categories
This is called label in blogger.com and categories/tags in
wordpress.com. This help you to organize your blog posts according to main
topics and sub topics.
5. SET A PROMOTION PLAN
This is where you plan on how to attract visitors to your
blog, how to keep them coming back and how to get backlink from other websites.
You can’t just assume people will see your blog post immediately you publish it
because millions of articles are being published daily. That’s why you need to
create a promotional strategy for your blog visibility.
There are many promotional channel you should consider
using. They are as follows:
Social media
Social media is one the easiest and most popular ways to
promote you blog posts. Think of the social media your targeted audience spend
most time online and learn how to promote content on the social platform and
start sharing your posts immediately.
For instance if you are creating visual and infographic
contents, your most target audience might be coming from Instagram and
Pinterest. Don’t spam the social sites to avoid getting yourself banned from
the platform.
SEO
This SEO stands for search engine optimization and its help promote your blog posts to appear on to search results and generate organic traffic to your blog. Focus on ON-page SEO as a new blogger.
ON-page SEO simply means writing quality content and using
your keyword in you post title and in the body of your post. Just know that it
take time, patient and best SEO practice to get your post rank on search
engines.
Email marketing
Once you lunch your blog, plan on how you get the emails of
your visitors. Like I said earlier the easiest way to get there emails it to
offer free product such as eBook, template, etc. in exchange for their emails.
Guest blogging
Guest blogging means writing article for a popular blog and linking back to your site. This is a great way to promote yourself as a new blogger. Just research do a research to see bloggers in your niche that accept guest bloggers.
Medium
Medium is a platform where you can also create articles. You can share your blog article to medium which has a strong domain authority and get a strong backlink. Backlink simply means external links pointing back to your website. They are very important for SEO ranking.
Once again, each
publication will have its own rules as to what articles they accept.
IMPORTANT: None of these tactics will work if you produce
poor-quality content. Firstly, focus on creating quality content.
This where you plan on how you will make money with your
blog. Basically the most common ways new bloggers make money is by displaying
ads and also joining affiliate marketing.
You can display cost per click (CPC) ads on your blog. Which
means that when someone click on the ad, you will be paid commission. Google
AdSense is the most popular CPC ad provider for new bloggers.
On the other hand, you can join affiliate marketing
platforms and promote products related to your niche. You will be paid
commission when someone buys the product through your affiliate link.
This is where you plan on the amount you are ready to spend for your blog at the beginning.
When you’re just starting as a beginner, you’ll need to
purchase a domain from sites such as Namecheap.
You may also need to purchase an email provider, but a lot
of them have free plans. You might also want to invest in a keyword research
tool, a scheduling tool for your social media posts, and maybe a premium theme.
But in the beginning, there free version can help.
How much does it cost to start a blog?
Most domains on Namecheap cost less than $10. The cheapest
web hosting plan on Ipage is just below $50 for one year. That means that you
can start your blog for less than $100.
CONCLUSION
I want to appreciate you for taking your time to read my article on how to plan a money making blog. I hope it helped? If after reading this article, you are still finding it difficult to plan your new blog, let me know in the comment box. Don’t forget to share this article with your friends.
No comments:
Post a Comment