8 Best Practices For Blogging Monetization
Starting a blog is one of the best ways to make money online, but unlike some online money making strategies, blogging is definitely a marathon, not a sprint. Learning how to provide content that you’re ideal audience wants to read can be a very daunting feat, but it can be done.
In this article, I’m going to address some of the best practices for blogging that will help you in becoming successful in your blogging journey. Blogging can a very rewarding form making money online, but for those who are not content writers at heart, it can become a bit of a chore, but well worth it to reach your financial goals.
Picking A Niche For Your Blog
Picking a niche can be difficult for anyone starting a blog, especially considering the enormous number of blogs that are out there. Many bloggers think of their blog posts as their marketing tools, which is why they put so much time and effort into writing posts every day.
But picking a good niche for your blog is one of, if not, the most important aspect of blogging. The goal is to find a topic or niche (ni-ch) or (nee-sh) if your fancy, that not only you would find interesting, but may have some appeal to the masses. You want to find a topic that will spark the interest of other readers to give your blog a better chance of getting exposure.
In addition, you should consider what type of content you’d like to write about on your blog. Would you like to post videos? How about articles? Maybe you’d prefer to write book reviews? There’s no right or wrong answer here; just pick something that interests you and stick with it.
You want to be careful to avoid picking a topic that would be considered very obscure, like basket weaving. Although there may be some people out there who have a specific interest in basket weaving, you may not be able to get a decent amount of traffic coming to your blog being that the topic may not have that much appeal.
Vice versa, picking topics such as love and relationships, make money online, and health and wellness are highly competitive, so these niches have more than enough people who have interests, it’s just that you will be competing for those same individuals. But it can be done regardless, you will have to find ways to stand out from those other content creators.
Creating Blog Content That Resonates With Your Audience
Another important best practice in blogging is to focus on your audience.
If you’ve ever heard the expression “Content is King” you know that you’re content is what drives the whole process of getting people to come to your website and consume that content in a way that will provide some type of knowledge or entertainment aspect to your reader.Great blog posts can really impress your audience and also generate a solid following. The key to achieving this is to know your audience.
There are two different types of content, either informative or persuasive.
Informative Blog Content
Informative blog content is content that focuses on providing the reader information or knowledge on a particular subject or topic. In my opinion, informative content is one of the best ways to build authority with your readers and established YOU as an expert in that particular topic.
When readers see that you know what you’re talking about, they tend to trust your content more than other competitive bloggers in the same space. This is especially advantageous for you because it makes it easier for you to monetize your content in the future (more on that later).
When writing informative content, make sure to include graphics and visuals such as infographics and use a professional tone in your content.Plus, when writing informative content, make it easy for your readers by including links and resources at the end of each article. This helps them easily access additional information related to the topic without having to go back to where they left off.
Persuasive Blog Content
Persuasive content is content that attempts to convince the reader to do something. It usually involves using facts and statistics to support your argument. When writing persuasive content, make sure to keep your language simple and clear. Avoid using jargon and technical mumbo jumbo that you’re readers may not understand.
Persuasive content is typically used when you’re attempting to get your reader to perform a certain call to action, such as opting into an email list, purchasing a product or following you on social media.
You want to present the content in a way that is easy and enjoyable to read. This will make the reader more prone to perform the desired call to action and thus, will help you in building leads or making sales from your content.
Promote Your Blog Content On Social Media
Now that we’ve established a niche and have a good idea of what type of content we want to provide to our readers, it’s time to connect with them using social media channels. Using social media is a perfect way to get your content more exposure to other potential readers that may have not heard about you.
Using social media as a best practice for blogging is detrimental to building your community online which helps you to nurture your audience and build repoire. Furthermore, if you don’t have a large enough network already, then you should start building one now.
You’ll be surprised how much traffic you can drive to your site just by posting quality content on social media. Plus, you can always promote your articles through social media once you have a decent number of followers.
By doing this, people who read and like your content will share it with others and hopefully start a viral spread of your content which is what you want when creating and promoting content.
Build out profiles with a logo (not necessary, but helps to build brand awareness) to your blog to so that people easily recognize your content when they see it online and want to run to read your latest post.
Trust me, social media can be a very useful asset if used properly to get your content, name or brand exposure to the masses in a matter of days. If there is ever a best practice of blogging to take away from this article, please practice this when possible.
One way to plan your blog is to read through your blog posts and find one that you really enjoy. Before you know it, you’ll find that your blog will build an audience if you can put out quality content consistently using social media.
Write and Publish Blog Content Often
This is where some bloggers loose focus. When creating a blog, you want to ensure that you’re providing content on a regular basis to help you in building your site authority and readership base.
When I first started out, this was a major issue for me. I didn’t consider myself as a “writing scholar”, in fact, writing was never a strong subject of mine in school. So writing on a consistent basis proved nearly impossible for me.
But, as to write more and more content, writing becomes somewhat easier. I say “somewhat” because the true issue I had was finding topics to write content about in my niche. Once I knew the topic that I wanted to write about, it was smooth sailing from their. Plus, you can always use social media to find content ideas that others are finding either informative or persuasive, whichever direction you want your content to go.
When I first started out, I utilized a site called Buzzsumo to find content ideas that people were sharing on social media platforms such as Facebook and Pinterest. This site gives really great ideas on topic suggestions to consider when trying to find content to write about.
Another amazing site is AnswerthePublic.com, this will give even more really good search terms that you can use for brainstorming ideas for your blog content. Keeps the writing juices flowing with everlasting blog topic ideas that you can use to provide BETTER content than the original creator.
In conclusion, you need to write and publish content often. It doesn’t necessarily mean that you need to write every day, but at least try to write something every week. This will give you a steady stream of fresh content that you can use to market your website and gain traction.
Monetizing Your Blog Content
And now the moment you’ve been waiting for.
You might say, Greg all that stuff you talked about before is great and all, but let’s get down to what you’re really here for.
And that’s how to monetize your blog content.
Great! I’m glad you asked because learning how to properly monetize your blog is yet again, one of the most import best practices in blogging to ensure you reap the rewards of your hard work and further incentivize you in making even more content for your readers.
There are many ways to monetize your blog content to make a substantial amount of income online. There are many bloggers online who are making anywhere from $1,000 to $50,000 or more per month through blog content.Moreover, there are many different types of monetization methods available to you.
Some of these include:
Affiliate Marketing
This has to be one of my favorite ways to monetize content. Using affiliate marketing allows you the ability to find multiple niche related products and software that can earn you a good amount of money online.
Affiliate marketing is a type of performance-based marketing in which an individual earns commissions based on sales they refer to a particular merchant. In other words, affiliates earn commission when someone purchases a product after clicking
Now the key to using affiliate marketing or any other monetization strategy goes back to step 1, finding the right niche for your blog content. As mentioned earlier, finding affiliate products with an obsure niche such as basket weaving can prove to be challenging for most people. Although, one can create their own info product for basket weaving, you’d be hard pressed to find an affiliate product to promote in that niche.
You really want to find affiliate products that are closely related to your blog content. This is especially important when providing persuasive content to your readers. The focus on the article should be on getting the reader to opt into an email list or purchase your product.
Monetizing your blog content, especially persuasive content, needs to take almost a psychological approach to the mindset of your reader. This is typically called “pre-framing” or “pre-selling” to your reader. You’re trying to get your readers into the mindset that they actually want or need the product that you’re trying to pitch to them.
You want to sale them the solution to their problem. This typically works with almost any form of monetization strategy that you decide to go with.
Using Ads For Monetization
Another good best practices for blogging when it comes to monetization is utilizing ads.
Many creators don’t even realize the income potential of using ad platforms such as Google Adsense to make money, but if you’re generating a good amount of traffic to your blog content, you could make a really good amount of money by letting Google place niche related ads on your website.
Every time someone comes to your blog and clicks on one of those Adsense ads, you will get paid a commission.
Although Google Adsense is a great ads platform to start with, they are also have one of the lowest commission for each click (which is usually based on the niche of your blog). The more popular the niche, the more commissions per click Google tends to pay.
But, if you’ve really stepped your content game up and are driving an insane amount of traffic to your website, there are other higher paying commission ad platforms out there such as Ezoic and AdThrive.
Both of these platforms you will have to apply to get accepted into their program, but well worth it if you meet their minimum monthly traffic requirement.
Sponsorships
Using sponsored ads on your blog can be another really great way to monetize your content.
Sponsorships work much like ad platforms except you can set the price on how much you want to charge someone for placing a promotion for their product or service on your site.
I’ve never tried this form of monetization, but I have every intention of planning on it in the near future.
It’s basically another form of “influencer marketing” where the vendor or product owner wants to utilize your traffic to build exposure. This can be an amazing monetization strategy because you determine how much you want to charge and it’s up to the product owner to decide if they want to pay you for that exposure.
Amazon Affiliates
Using Amazon as a monetization strategy can be very useful and profitable if your persuasive content is referencing a physical product. The Amazon affiliate program allows content creators to promote their vast selection of eCommerce products to solve an issue the reader may be facing.
When it comes to creating content for selling physical products, you want to focus on how the reader perceives the value of that product.
Using this program is really great for beginner bloggers because it doesn’t take much convincing for readers to purchase from a well know brand such as Amazon. Over the years, Amazon has drastically lowered their commissions percentage which have discouraged some content creators from using their program, but still a viable monetization strategy nonetheless.
YouTube Ads
Another very important best practices for blogging is utilizing the power of video marketing. Video platforms such as Youtube offer a really great opportunity to get your content viewed instead of read. Moreover, YouTube offers a really easy way to create videos and monetize them through advertising. You can either use Google AdSense or create your own custom ads.
The reason why I say this is because you’ll be able to target your audience better than ever before.
For example, let’s say you run a fitness channel and you want to sell yourself a gym membership. Instead of just posting a link to a page on your website, you can actually embed your video directly onto your webpage so people can get a visual of your gym, where it’s located, and what type of fitness programs you offer.
Depending on the niche you decide to provide content on your blog, using video marketing may be a better way to get your content exposure. Certain aspects of your niche that require “how-to” tutorials may resonate better with your audience as a video as opposed to text content.
If done the right way, you can effectively promote your content using Youtube as a traffic source and watch your leads and sales skyrocket.
Social Media Monetization
It’s tough to make money from blogging. If you’re not a celebrity with a huge following, it can be nearly impossible to make a living from blogging. In fact, only one blogger, Tut Tut, made more than one million through blogging in 2015.
In order to make money from your blog, you need to put in a lot of time. To make a really substantial amount of money from advertising, you need a huge social media following.
If you don’t have a huge following, worry not. Blogging can still be a great way to make money from your site. You can use social media to your benefit to help promote your blog content to make even more money.
As mentioned earlier, having social media subscribers on platforms such as Facebook, Instagram and Pinterest (which is also referred to as a search engine) could greatly increase the amount of traffic to your content.
Not only that, but utilizing paid advertising on these platforms can get your content exposure to individuals that you couldn’t reach organically.
Typically, when using Facebook, paid advertising may be your best bet when it comes to gaining more exposure. As far as organically, I would recommend you start your own Facebook group and build up your group member following and then promote your products while giving value.
Blog Content Analytics & Keyword Strategy
The web is an amazing thing. One could argue that data, no matter what the shape or size, is the key to success. This is true whether you are swimming in data or drowning in it.
The internet can be an overwhelming place to navigate; but by using the right tools, the process can be lessened. Content analytics and keyword research are two of the most important best practices for blogging.
These two aspects of blogging are things bloggers should never overlook.
Content Analytics
The simplest way to measure how successful your blog content is doing, is to know how many visitors you are getting, how many visitors are reading your posts, what pages they are reading, and for how long.
When you publish a new post, you want to want to have a clear picture of these specific metrics to better understand which pieces of content people are showing interest in and which ones they’re not.
As a content creator, you really need to fully understand how extremely powerful content analytics can be as this is truly one of the best practices for blogging to keep your content fresh and engaging with your readers.
Keyword Research
One of the most important aspects of blogging, which can also be one of the most overlooked, is keyword research. This research will help to inform your blog post’s content, delivering better results in terms of traffic, targeted traffic, and ranking in Google.
Keyword research involves researching what people are searching for online. It involves having a handle on what people are looking to find when they are searching for blog posts on popular blogging platforms like Blogger or WordPress. It’s important to understand what people are looking for in order to rank in Google.
By incorporating valuable keywords into your content allows the major search engines to better understand exactly what your content is about, which helps them determine what content to serve up to the user when they happen to type that particular keyword, or something similar in the search field.
Keyword research is one of the first steps in what is known as “SEO” or search engine optimization. Nailing down a good niche related keyword, that has some volume, meaning users are actually searching for that specific keyword term or phrase gives your content a better chance of being viewed on the first page of the SERPs (search engine results pages).
The further down you are on the first page of Google, the lower amount of visitors or traffic a blog will typically see.
Competition is another factor when it comes to search engine optimization. This goes back to analyzing your competition when conducting keyword research. You don’t want to go after keywords or phrases that are highly competitive. Generally, the broader the keyword, the more competition you will tend to have.
Don’t waste your time on those keyword, but try to find similar keyword that you can use with some volume to give you a better chance of ranking on the first page.
There are several blog articles here on my site that discuss the importance of SEO and how important it can be to drive organic traffic to your site.
Email Marketing
Email marketing is a time honored marketing tactic that has been proven to produce the best results for businesses. Why does it work? It’s immediate, interactive, and even provides a response that cannot be done with any other form of marketing.
Email marketing is about more than just sending out emails on a whim. It’s about actively seeking out new and potential customers and establishing a relationship with them. This can be done through automated emails and/or personalized emails. Automated emails are sent out on a specific schedule or event and personalized emails are sent out on an as-needed basis.
There are some exclusive benefits to email marketing as well. Email is affordable and can easily be tracked to see if it is successful.
This is crucial to your success in an attempt to monetize your content. Studies have shown that customers usually don’t purchase an offer on initial viewing and you want a way to follow up with your potential customer without having to deal with purchasing more paid ads or “hoping” that the individual will return to view your offer and eventually purchase.
This is the wrong way of making money online, as email marketing allows you to conduct follow up for “FREE”. I say “FREE” in a sense due to the fact that you will still need to pay for a good autoresponder service such as GetResponse, but the amount of money you would spend with the autoresponder will be a small expense compared to how much you could potentially make when using email broadcasts or sequences to follow up with subscribers with your offer.
Conclusion
Blogging is a huge part for any business, or anyone really. With blogging you can establish yourself as an expert and show customers that you know what you’re doing and more importantly, what your talking about.
Blogging can also create a feeling of community and attract customers to come and be part of the conversation. I think one of the biggest best practices for blogging is to be polite and professional. For example, you can never be sure who is going to be reading your posts and if the tone of your posts is too harsh, you will lose potential customers.
Being polite and professional means being trustworthy. Customers are more inclined to trust a company when the tone of their social media platforms is professional.
In addition, you should always strive to provide value to your readers. If you do this, you’ll build relationships with your audience and you’ll get more traffic.
In conclusion, blogging is a great way to market your business, brand, products, services, etc. You can use blogs to communicate with your customers, gain followers, increase sales, and establish yourself as an authority figure.
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