Blogging is not a vacation near the ocean with a laptop. If you saw such photos on the Internet – better not believe them. They were either staged, or this person invested a lot of time, effort and money in a personal blog.
Anyway, it’s really possible to become a successful blogger. But for this, you need to think over all the subtleties of your strategy in advance, and even better to make a forecast for your development.
We suggest starting from the beginning, so we have compiled a list of the five most important things you need to do and think through before launching your blog.
1. Find Either a Relatively Free or a Very Popular Niche
The competition among bloggers is very high. Currently, 500 million blogs have been created. This means that it will also be difficult to find a suitable niche that, among other things, should be of interest to you personally.
For example, if you are a person of a technical mindset, it is unlikely that you will be interested in blogging about crocheting.
Therefore, here you can go in two ways.
- The first is to try to find a niche that is not yet occupied. Most likely, it will be something highly specialized, and moreover, you will have to be an expert in this niche in order to provide quality content.
- The second way is a little easier. You need, on the contrary, wedge into one of the popular niches. For example, today the most popular areas for blogging are beauty, health, career, self-development, travel, psychology and relationships. With competent marketing and quality content, it’s enough to really get an active audience and loyal subscribers.
2. Draw a Portrait of Your Target Audience
Now let’s talk about your audience. You should clearly understand whose problems you are solving on your blog, and what content will find the greatest response among the audience.
Besides the fact that you can personalize the content as much as possible for your target groups, a portrait of the audience also helps to develop the best approaches to targeted advertising and advertising on social networks. But we will talk about this in one of the following paragraphs.
3. Build a Semantic Core within Your Niche
Blog advertising is definitely good, and SEO promotion is even better. SEO is a long-term investment, and the same long-term prospect. Therefore, once you have thought through and assembled the semantic core for your site, you can never return to this question.
In addition, while you are looking for key queries, you will probably come up with at least a dozen ideas for your new publications. They should be included in the content plan.
4. Make a Content Plan
So that you do not ask yourself the question of what I will write on the blog, you need to draw up a content plan.
The most reasonable option is to work out a content plan even before creating the blog itself. Such an approach will help you assess the prospects of your niche, understand whether it is interesting to you personally, and reasonably evaluate your strengths and capabilities.
Record all ideas that appear in the content plan. After that, you will be able to refine each of them, add key queries and make it more responsive to the needs of your readers.
5. Make Your Social Media Profiles Attractive
If you have already decided to share your thoughts with a large number of people, be prepared that they will want to know more about you as a person. And the best way to get an idea of a person is to see what happens in profiles on social networks.
Therefore, from the moment you decide to start your blog and position yourself as an expert in a certain niche, your social profiles should contribute to this.
Hint for the future! Integrate your blog and your social profiles so that in the future the announcement of each blog post appears on the social network automatically.
Think About How You Will Promote Your Blog
Promotion is one of the most important elements of your entire strategy. You need to clearly think ahead what channels you will use and what budget you need for each of them.
Fortunately, online promotion is relatively inexpensive if you use a competent approach.
Social Media Advertising
Start with the social network that the vast majority of your audience uses.
For example, if your audience is teenagers, then you should be in Snapchat. And then by analogy.
Targeted Advertising
Targeted ads for your blog can be easily customized using Google Ads. This tool allows you to create target groups, segment users, choose geographic coverage and gives many more other possibilities for customization.
Guest Posts
This is the most popular way to promote your blog.
Its essence is that you ask a blogger from a niche close to yours, to publish your article, and in return, you publish his article on your blog. Thus, a partial exchange of audiences occurs.
There is one more way. You can use a special service, for example, the Adsy, to find the most profitable sites for publication.
Besides the fact that you are getting a new influx of audience, you are also increasing the link base to your site.
Influencers
It would be very cool if you could contact an influencer from your or a similar niche and ask him or her to recommend your blog. In practice, this option will be the most expensive.
Contests
This is a great way to find a new audience, so include it in your strategy. This is more aimed at collecting subscribers on a social network.
However, if you already have a live audience in social media, it will be much easier to redirect it to the site of your blog.
Findings
As you can see, it’s not wise to start a blog with just one idea. With such an approach, it will soon get stuck among millions of others.
Your task is to initially perceive the blog as a business that cannot exist without a marketing strategy, plan and forecast. Therefore, think about how you will get around most of the pitfalls before you come across them in reality.
About The Author
Marie Barnes is a Marketing Communication Manager at TheAdsy. She has a lot to share on the topics of Marketing, SEO, PR, and Branding.
Stock Photo from Flamingo Images @ Shutterstock
