A successful blog business requires hard work, dedication, and a lot of time. It’s not always something that becomes an overnight success, and if you want to make money from it, it’s not going to be a quick money maker. Blogs are becoming very successful and lucrative to many who wish to make money from home or at least a bit of extra money on the side. With social media the way it is and how it’s growing, you’ve got the opportunity to make something really successful if you’re willing to work for it. So here are seven things to make a blog business successful and that pretty much anyone can do so long as you are serious about it as a business.
Start Pitching Regularly
When you want to start making money from your blog, you first need to consider pitching. Pitching is where you write to companies, brands and those who work with businesses in order to see if you can get paid for providing relevant content on your blog. A lot of businesses look to do this because it can help promote traffic to their own websites, who might be lacking in numbers. Each blog that they work with is going to help to benefit them in some way, and so it’s good that you’re getting ahead of the game by pitching to them first. A lot of PR companies and marketing businesses will have a number of clients that they work with on a regular basis, and part of that campaign might be to do blogger or influencer outreach.
To start off with, do a cold email to every PR or marketing company that pops up on a google search and offers the blogger outreach service. There’s a high chance that they’re going to work with bloggers and have a blogger database of some description. Simply ask them if you can be added onto that. It might be that you need to also create a media kit, and there are plenty of examples online to use. This should be a one to two page document that outlines what your blog is about, the statistics and other useful information like your rates and brands you’ve worked with before. The pitching part comes when you go to brands directly, or companies who you know represent a brand you’d like to work with. Offer them something that will be useful for them and get creative.
Create Good Content
Good content is necessary to take your blog to the next level. A lot of bloggers will create quite generic content and perhaps not post as consistently as those who have managed to be very successful. Think about the content you’re producing at the moment and the level of quality. Everything from the photos you provide with said content and the tone you write in is all important. Check that all blog posts are grammatically correct and that they’re all useful in being something that your reader can benefit from. When creating content, you need to think of your audience and who they are. It’s worth doing some research into the type of stuff they enjoy engaging with and what’s been most successful in the past. It’s all relevant in making sure that what you create is the very best of the best.
Engage With Your Readers
When engaging with your readers, it’s really important that you are creating a conversation. If they’re commenting on your blog posts, for example, they might be complimenting you or asking you a question about the content. Ignoring them isn’t going to allow that relationship between you and the reader to grow any more beyond that initial response. It’s important to make time to get back to those who’ve taken the time to comment, as well as read the content too. Figure out ways that you can implement this into your routine so that you are making time to get back to them as often as you can. The more you can engage with them, the likelier it will be that they start commenting more frequently. This can all be good for your engagement and traffic in general. It also points out to any brands or companies that may want to work with you, that you care about interacting with those readers.
Make Use Of Call To Actions
Call to actions are a great way to help engage with your audience more but to also get them on board for things that you want them to do, such as sign up to your email newsletter. A call to action can be a question you ask at the bottom of your content or in the form of a pop-up ad or banner. It all depends on what you’re trying to achieve. With a comment at the bottom of your blog post, it can hopefully generate some additional interaction from your readers. By asking them a question, it’s going to entice them to want to respond and go further than simply reading the content. If you’re trying to generate more readers of your email newsletter, then having a pop-up, asking them to join the gang, or be part of a tribe is a great way to get them to sign up. You could also offer them freebies in return for signing up.
Outsource Additional Help
Outsourcing is a great way to make your working day go further, especially when a blog business usually just involves yourself. It’s important to make use of other professionals who can perhaps help really expand your business even more than what you’re capable of doing. Whether you’re needing to find the right IT Support partner to help with technical issues or you want someone who can focus on creating better engagement on your website. There are lots of individuals and companies out there who will be able to offer their services without you needing to hire someone part-time or on a contract basis.
The most important thing when it comes to outsourcing is that they align with your beliefs, and that you’re not just working with someone because they’re cheap! When it comes to promotion and PR, there are plenty of sustainable marketing companies that can help you to realise your vision without compromising your integrity! Help is beneficial when you are on your own, but don’t be swayed exclusively by the price tag!
Automate Your Promotional Content
Automating your promotional content can end up saving you a lot of time as a growing blogger. Promotion is very important as it can help to continue expanding your reach and to hopefully engage with more readers. Automation works by using a certain software or platform to schedule in content ahead of time. This can essentially be a way of cheating time in order for you to focus on other things that need to get done. Automating the content itself can take a little time, but even if you dedicated a couple of hours to it, you could get days worth of content scheduled in and ticking over without you needing to monitor it.
Work On Your SEO
Finally, work on the SEO of your website. There’s a lot of things that you can be doing behind the scenes to make sure all of your content on the blog is getting maximum exposure. Think about broken links that might need fixing or compressing images to quicken up the page loading screens. Each blog post is going to contribute to the overall success of your blog, so make sure every one of them is tailored to perform the best on the search engines.
Making a blog successful is going to take some time, so be prepared to work hard on all the elements that are needed in order for it to be as fruitful as any business has the potential to be. Work hard on creating good content, reach out for opportunities, and save your time with automation.
