How to Blog For Success and Make Lots Of Money
If you are planning to make blogging as a full-time career, and want to make big money out of it, I’m here to teach you – How to Blog successfully.
There are 1000s of new blogs spring-up everyday in blogosphere. Even, there are 1000s of old blogs (but not so mature) die everyday due to various reasons.
While blogging, there is a clear-cut line between success and failure, which consist of – Passion, Hard work and Creativity. If you think you have all these 3 ingredients within you, then I’ll tell you the tricks of the trade – how to blog better for money and fame.
1. Set up your blog
- Niche: Choose your niche or passion for the subject matter of your blog carefully. Lots of bloggers fail because they choose wrong niche at the beginning.
Again, changing niche is not so easy. It’s like changing your entire business model. There are instances, bloggers had paid great price for changing their initial niche, with loss of subscribers, traffic and ranking in search engines. So, don’t follow the trend blindly, instead, choose your passion, the thing you like to do every day without getting bored, for months and years together.
- Domain Name: Name your blog wisely, because you will be recognized or associated with this name in future and will be for lifelong.
Don’t buy a domain name in impulse. Have a great brainstorming session. Take some time to think about your niche, keywords and business model around it. It may take days, and even weeks long.
Finally, your blog’s domain name should be short, catchy, easy to remember and closely resembles your niche or subject matter. Either go forHostGator.com or GoDaddy.com to register your domain name, as these web-hosting service providers are reliable with a great after sales customer service.
- Platform: Choose your platform smartly. Blogging platform is like your stage, where you have to perform everyday. And the UI (User Interface) or Admin Console is the green room, where you have to rehearse and work hard everyday.
Although there are plenty of blogging platforms available like Blogger,WordPress.com, WordPress.org, TypePad, Drupal etc., I personally like and advice you to go for WordPress, the best blogging platform with cutting edge technology.
Checkout this WordPress Hosting Review to know more.
2. Publish content regularly
Your contents are your products. Make great content, polish them and decorate them for your readers to consume. It’s the content what makes a blog great.
Feed your blog with fresh and unique content regularly. If possible everyday. Lots of blogs die because they are not fed properly on a regular basis.
Both, your readers and search engine bots visit your blog for content. Give them sufficient reasons to visit and follow your blog. If you really want to make big bucks out of your blog, then publish at least one article everyday.
Content creation: Do a good keyword research around your subject matter. You can take the help of Google Trends for it. Then write down at least 50 to 100 keywords, which are in great demand. Your keywords should be a mixture of both long-tail and head-terms.
Then craft your blog post with one keyword in mind. Try to give a different angle to the article. I mean, your post should be unique and different from other bloggers who have already published about the topic.
To get content creation idea you should visit other bloggers’ blogs on a regular basis. You should be a voracious reader of others’ blog posts to be a great content creator and a successful blogger. You can try Quora and Redditto get some new idea to create content about your subject matter.
3. Set up your Social Media Profile
Social signal plays an important role in higher ranking of content in Google search. Even Yahoo! and Bing also incorporated this in their search engine ranking algorithms.
There is no need to be active on 100s of Social Networking Sites. Its time consuming and distracting. Set your social profile on Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and Pinterest. These are the leaders in social media at present time.
You may also consider joining social media news sites like StumbleUpon and Digg.com for traffic and publicity.
You should also verify your Google Authorship Markup which display the author’s image alongside the URL in SERP. It greatly improve your blog’s CTR (click through rate).
4. Set up GWT (Google Webmaster Tools)
Google offers free tools, data and diagnostic aids to make your website or blog search engine friendly. Along with Google Webmaster Tools, you should also join Bing Webmaster Tools for better visibility in Bing search engine.
By using GWT you can geo-target your blog to a specific country, you can remove your blog’s site links on search results, crawl errors and statistics, index status, your robots.txt file, and even any malware on your blog.
You can know about the search queries or keywords people are using to find your blog. Inbound links to your blog and internal link analysis.
You can submit your sitemap in GWT for faster indexation. If you want to remove few of your URLs in Google search due to some reasons, then GWT is the right tool for you.
What else? You can improve your HTML structure, like duplicate title tag, meta description etc by using this amazing free tool.
5. Set up Google Analytics
Google Analytics is a must have tool for all bloggers. You have to know your efforts and strategies are going on right direction or not to be a successful blogger.
Google Analytics provides you the source of traffic to your blog (Country, Search engines etc.), what instruments they are using (Desktop, Smartphone etc.), the browsers, and most importantly – how the web-readers are interacting with your blog.
Watching your blog readers in real-time is a sheer fun!
You can gather a lots of intelligence about your blog and blog posts / pages using Google Analytics. You can know about the entry page, exit page, staying time and bounce rate etc.
6. Set up Google AdSense
When it comes to CPC (Cost-per-click) and CPM (Cost-per-impression) advertising, Google AdSense is the best. There are bloggers who earn 1000s of dollars per month by displaying Google AdSense ads only.
It shares the maximum possible revenue with you, compared to other AdSense like services. If you have busy blog and receive plenty of search engine traffic then AdSense is the best option for you to earn revenue.
AdSense pays every month, when your earning reaches US$ 100. It offers options like cheque, Electronic Funds Transfer, and Western Union Quick Cash for convenience.
Warning for novice bloggers: Never click on your AdSense ads, even for testing. Google has a great tracking system of fraudulent ad clicks. This is the single reason why most novice bloggers get banned by Google AdSense.
Few bloggers become smart and click on their own AdSense ads after removing cookies from the browser every time. Google easily detects this type of tricks and impose ban as soon as possible. It’s very difficult to get the ban lift or get another AdSense account, if you are banned by Google.
You just can’t cheat Google’s top source of income by applying fraudulent tricks.
Finally, basic knowledge about SEO, hard work and consistency matter a lot for successful blogging. You aim should be to make a recognition for yourself, drive plenty of traffic from search engines and social media, and in the process earn huge bucks.