How to Start a Legal Blog (and Turn it into Your Career)

Your Burning Blogging Questions Answered (part 2)

How to Start a Legal Blog (and Turn it into Your Career)

Hey and welcome to another episode of the Free and Fearless podcast. It’s great to have you here and today I’m gonna answer more of your most burning questions about blogging.

If you didn’t listen to the first part, you might want to check out episode 4 first, and then come to this one.

If you did listen to it, great because today the questions I’ll share are related to other topics such as blog traffic, monetization and selling.

Here’s the whole episode:

Get Updates: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | RSS | More

Show Notes:

  • [1:20] What to do when your #1 struggle as a blogger is consistently putting out content and seeing traffic grow
  • [5:56] You’ve been blogging for 7 months but don’t see progress? Here’s what to do
  • [7:53] Can you grow your blog (and get to 6 figures) without doing videos or podcasts?
  • [12:36] How to come up with new ideas for blog posts according to keyword research?
  • [13:55] Is it too early to create a course?

Mentioned:

Transcript

 “My #1 struggle with my blog is consistently putting out content and seeing traffic grow.”

Many people are quite productive with getting new content out there but then wonder why traffic isn’t coming. It’s important to spend as much time promoting the content as you do creating new one.

Pinterest, for example, is a great source of traffic for bloggers and even with a few short posts (but on good topics) you can get traffic. If you’re utilizing Pinterest, there’s a lot to learn about it. But optimizing your profile and boards as well as creating beautiful Pins (5-6 for each blog post) is a must.

How many posts do you currently have?

Because many people have plenty of content and wait till they have more to monetize. But you can monetize from day 1, especially with affiliate marketing. Because once that traffic comes, you’d want to make sure there are already affiliate links to the article you brought people to. 

Struggling with self-esteem

Another reader told me: “I worry and feel that I can’t be like others. If I want to make money online or start any business, I feel like many people have also done this and are already earning a lot. But for me it’s just the beginning, so how can I keep going? Also, I start  alone and that’s another problem for me.”

And if you’re dealing with something similar, listen up:

This is how everyone starts.

That’s how I did it – no one in my surroundings was doing something similar, English isn’t even my native language, and I had no experience with blogging or any idea how it leads to making money.

It’s all a learning process but with all the tutorials and tools available online (most of which free), we all have the chance to do it.

Don’t compare yourself to others either. It’s unrealistic to look at where you are now (not earning online) and where other bloggers are (earning a lot online), because it took them years to get there. But you have the same potential and qualities to learn, test, start a website and grow the traffic and income of an online business.

As for starting yourself, that’s all you need. I don’t have any help from anyone, there’s no designer, or writer or marketer doing things for me. I educated myself on these topics and learned from other bloggers, and so can you.

Also read: Should You Blog in English if It’s Not Your Native Language (& Why I Do It)

One of my course students struggled with discipline.

She also had 85 articles published already and had been blogging for 11 months. So she also asked about my content creation process and how I managed to publish so many blog posts in the first years of my business.

Here’s what I told here:

The more time you invest in your blog and the more you see results, the more disciplined you’ll become as the blog will be your priority.

As for the articles, many of them are guest posts so over the years I was writing less and less of my own content.

Before that though, I was getting up earlier (or creativity just hit in the evening and I was writing a lot then).

It helps to create a lot of content all the time as it helps you form the habit of writing blog posts. This will be practical once you have your own publishing schedule and don’t need to invest hours in each article but know you can get it out there in 40 minutes, and edit and prepare it for publishing for 20 more.

It will also come in handy when you accept sponsored posts and have to write content for brands.

In addition, writer’s block will never be an issue again. It’s what happened to be. The fact that I was reading a lot also helped. Thanks to that (reading content in my niches, of course) I generated many new topics for blog content every week.

“I’m confused about my blogging carrier.”

Another reader said: “I’m confused about my blogging carrier. I’ve been blogging for 7 months now but am not seeing progress. I’m really frustrated. My website speed is not good. My blog contains 21 blog posts and none of them are ranking on the 1st page of Google. What do I do?”

Now, to someone like that I’d immediately suggesting investing in a course cause obviously they are not in the right mindset, and haven’t covered the basics of generating blog traffic and monetizing strategically and growing your audience and creating content. 

The advice I gave in this case was this:

How many hours per week are you investing in your blog? 

There is a lot to learn. Also, you’ve published only 21 posts in 7 months. You need a lot of content to make Google take you seriously and these posts need to be interlinked well.

You can’t simply have a blog, work on it in the beginning, publish some content and wait for it to rank.

While you’re working on SEO you should also be utilizing Pinterest. It’s a great chance to get quick traffic with a new blog and when you don’t have much content.

I checked your site. It’s nice that the posts are long but you also need to constantly create new content (meaning, a few posts a week) and promote it heavily.

Your site might be slow for many reasons.

I was once using a bad hosting provider and my site wasn’t fast. I then switched to WPX Hosting and everything changed! Yes, it costs more, but there’s a reason why. I’m not going for cheap web hosts since then and will never do it again.

Also, you only need to use the right plugins. Some of the ones you have might be slowing down your site.

There are plenty of free tools online to check your site speed and see the exact problems, then go fix them. Start with Pingdom.

“It is possible to start a successful blog without video or podcasts?”

The next topic I get asked about a lot is video and audio content and monetization of the different types of content.

So a reader asked me this:

‘Hi Lidiya, I just saw one of your posts where you share that you stay away from video. Do you believe it’s possible to start a successful personal development blog without being in front of video or doing podcasts?

My goal was to start blogging, maybe putting up a picture of myself and explaining about my background and then really hard on my material and what I can offer people. I really don’t feel comfortable being in front of video at all, and would rather avoid having any videos of me online if that’s possible.

But I see a lot of people saying you really need video as a means of making your blog take off, connecting with people and getting views. So what do you think?’

No, you don’t need video. Maybe you’