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People assume it’s easy to turn a blog into a business. But it’s not quite as simple as writing and posting a few affiliate links or placing ads. There is so much more that you need to understand.
Incorporate Yourself or Your Brand
If you plan on making money from your blog, you need to incorporate yourself or your brand. As a business rather than a blog, you insulate yourself against specific liabilities. Additionally, it makes it much easier to distinguish which taxes you owe each year, which is required if you earn a living from your blog. However, there are many options for forming a limited company related to blogging you need to consider. These include things like GDPR compliance, registering a domain name and opening a business bank account.
SEO Can Help Turn a Blog into a Business
You might have heard of SEO but not know what it is. SEO is a way of telling search engines what your content is about. You do this in various ways through your content, site structure and code. On-page SEO is the most relevant because it relates to what users see and read. And you have direct control over it. It includes things like post titles, keywords in your content and headings. Google looks at these to determine where your content should be after searching. This is known as organic (unpaid) traffic and can bring in more business if done correctly.
Make Sure You Have Investment Money
It’s possible to begin a blog for free or with very little money. However, modern site builders don’t offer much when you use their free versions. Features such as speed boosts, SSL and eCommerce are locked behind paywalls. Additionally, your hosting provider will be limited in terms of bandwidth and speed. Therefore, you won’t get the best traffic coming to your blog. As it becomes necessary to pay for premium features at some point. So you will need some money to invest in your site. It also helps to use tools like Grammarly to increase your content quality.
Focus on a Specific Niche
As a blogger, you (hopefully) know what a niche is. If you don’t, a niche is the subject of your site. But it helps to focus on something that’s a smaller component of a broader term. For example, you cannot possibly hope to compete with an established superhero site. However, you could carve a niche blog that focuses on black or ethnic minority superheroes from Marvel. It’s part of a very popular Google search term yet focuses on a trendy part of a larger whole. You are likely to rank for content around it since most superhero blogs focus on all the others.
Monetize Using a Variety of Methods
The number of blogs grows at a rate of around 12% per year. This means there are many, many opportunities for making money if you have something to offer because you can monetize your blog. Some of the best monetization options are easy to use and include the following:
- Affiliate links: links on which you earn a commission for a successful sale.
- Paid ads: clickable ads for which you are paid for placing in your content.
- Sponsored posts: you get paid for writing about something specific.
- Premium content: offer created content, such as free ebooks, to paying subscribers.
- Paid reviews: get paid for writing honest reviews about niche-related products.
Any of these work really well. However, you should first make sure you have substantial traffic and an established web authority. Especially for links and ads. You should also be careful about how many you place since too many will hurt your SEO score and Google SERPs ranking.
Use Specific Methods of Lead Generation
Blogging for business relies on selling things. You can appeal directly to readers using a call to action and ads. However, other strategies can boost your business. Inbound lead generation is when you funnel potential customers to a specific product or page. As a blog, you have a unique opportunity to include sales leads in your carefully crafted content with ads that don’t look like ads. You can strategically place links to product pages within your content as natural-looking text. But make sure it fits with the content you are writing about for the best results.
Offer Something Your Competitors Don’t
Blogging is competitive, and there will be others. SEO can help you immensely, such as getting you on the first page of Google. But it can only do so much. So you need an angle to make someone click on your content rather than the other ten on the same page. One trick is to use structured data in your posts. Structured data offers extra information, such as rich snippets. Rich snippets can show a user a review rating, display FAQs or state what’s needed for a recipe. The extra information offers more to a reader and helps your post stand out in SERPs.
Understand it Takes Time to Turn a Blog into a Business
Blogging offers no get-rich-quick schemes, and you should be wary of anyone claiming you can make money fast. Sure, you can get lucky by hitting something at the right time. But it rarely happens. It takes time to carefully craft a blog and curate the content. Especially if you are new to it. You will make mistakes, learn as you go and spend time on content and SEO. And for the most part, you will rely on organic traffic for most of your business. Organic traffic takes time to come through. In fact, you likely won’t make money for 6 months to a year with a new blog.
Dedicate Your Time to Quality Content
While it takes time for organic traffic on your blog to generate an income, it works to your benefit. The more traffic you have, the higher the chances of a sale. So it’s worth taking the time to craft high-quality content before even thinking about money. Steady traffic has a high potential to convert. But it takes a long time to establish yourself and maintain that traffic. In that time, you can focus on blog writing best practices, learning SEO, and establishing your niche. Then you can focus on developing quality content that adds value to the time of your readers.
Summary
You can make a profit from your blog by developing quality content in the first place. Then you can monetize with boosted organic traffic, niche establishment and paid ads, links, and reviews.