This is a guest post by Zac Johnson from ZacJohnson.com.
One of the biggest problems I see with people who are just starting their blog or have big plans to get rich from blogging, is that they don’t create a strategic plan before they get started. The biggest misconception about blogging is that it’s easy to make money and build an established site of your own.
Anyone can buy a domain, choose a web host and throw up a WordPress driven site. Anyone can also start writing great content and posting once or twice a week. Even after a few months and having written 20-30 original articles, you are still basically without a business model and plan. Blogging is one of the slowest forms of making money online and if you don’t have a plan in place, you may never end up making money at all.
This is where your planning comes into play. You have to think about what you are going to do with your blog before you even get started. That is what we are going to discuss in the article and hopefully set you on the right path.
Blogging for Passion… or Profit?
Yes yes… everyone says you need to be passionate about what you are blogging and writing about, but the truth is, most of the time the money will never follow. You can write all day about how much you love sports or television shows, but these are two extremely hard niches to convert traffic in. If you are a die hard coupon fanatic and love updating your blog with the latest coupons, then this is a niche that you can make good money in fast.
No matter your passion or niche, you need to be realistic and think about how you can monetize the traffic you are blogging for.
How to Convert Traffic Once You Get It
If you build it, they will come. In some cases this is true, but once they do come… what are you going to do with them. The days of throwing Google Adsense on your site and making a few pennies per click and losing visitors to your site are still here… but they shouldn’t be.
People are smarter now and they know how to monetize their traffic better. Focus on better monetization practices while also offering value to your blog readers. Link specific products on Amazon.com if discussed on your site, earn commissions through affiliate programs and even sell your own direct advertising… but don’t rely on pennies from Google Adsense to pay your bills.
Focus Your Content on the Reader’s End Goal
Writing for the search engines will only get you so far. Instead you should be focusing on writing for your readers and keeping them engaged once they get to your site. As mentioned earlier, if you were to run a coupon site, then you would want to tell your site visitors where to download and print the latest and greatest coupons. You could then redirect them through an affiliate link an earn a commission on each download.
It doesn’t matter what niche or focus your blog is in, as long as you are providing the users with what they are looking for. This doesn’t mean you need to have sales page content, but just enough useful and direct information about what they put in the search engines to get to your page in the first place.
There are three reasons why people use the internet; research, to buy something or to be entertained. If your blog is helping them with their research they are more likely to buy. Likewise, if someone stumbles across your site while they are in a buying mode, it’s even more likely that you can convert them into a provider reader or customer.
Putting Everything Together
The process of turning a fresh WordPress blog into a business is quite the task, but it’s much easier when you have an idea where you would like to be down the road. Don’t be afraid to try different ideas and even outsource your content writing to find new writing styles and increase your ability to get fresh content out there faster.
No blogs become an instant success over night, or even in their first few weeks!
Stick with it and you might just have one of those successful blogs that inspires others to start a blog of their own.
It’s so true that at time we starts our blog we forget to think what is going to be our end??? I have seen this phase with many of my friends who did blogging but in last that got issues with and after that they decided to shut it down…
Hello Zac
Google Adsense is not reliable. They often disable account without any information. To get proper income from blogging we have to work on multiple directions but for all this a lot of patience is required.
Zyac, I completely agree with you. At first, I created many blogs without any plan or strategy, spend hours and hours, the result was futile because there wasn’t a plan. Great article, every new blogger must read this
I completely agree, blogging is a really slow way to make any type of money. First you need amazing content, content that will attract people to your blog. Then you need to build a loyal audience, people who actually bookmark your blog, visit regularly and even recommend or link to your blog. It also depends on how original your content is, 99% of blogs are simply rehashing stuff that has already been said.
Very difficult to be successful, you do need some type of a plan and maybe a little bit of luck.
Since I have started my new blog. It was very much important for me to know the facts and points you have mentioned above. I always had it mind of thinking to write for the readers and not bots and found it to be of great relief that my point was not too much radical to get on the success train. Thanks for writing such a wonderful post Zac.
Nice one, Zac there is no point that I can disagree with. Planning and goal set up need to start long before actually blogging have start and everybody need to find the reason for blogging with asking the right questions.
Hi Zac,
you mention very important problem – blog monetization. A lot of bloggers have huge traffic and even engaged readers – but they can’t monetize it. So if we blog not only for pleasure, we should have the plan, how we want to monetize it…
Thanks for sharing,
Chris
Well yes, creating a strategic plan before getting started is very important, so that everything is clear and well settled to process and agreed blogging is one of the slowest ways of making money online, but having a clear plan will help a lot to get going. Thanks Zac for this wonderful and interesting post 🙂
You are talking about passion and how to make money from your blogging. Think that passion is important, no one wants to read just ads. But even if you got passion it can be really crap if you dont have knowledge. You got to show something that mathers to people that is the majour key.
Very insightful post. It is important for all writers to know their purpose. A purpose is like having a good, strong thesis sentence on an analytical paper–without it, your whole paper is lost and pointless.