It’s no secret that blogging can be your source of passive income. Pro bloggers can make over $100,000/month. However, there are lots to prepare to get the six-digit monthly.
If you’re wondering how you can transform your blogging hobby into a side hustle, keep on reading. This article will show you the seven steps you must take to turn your blog into a business.
1. Have A Professional Website
If you want to monetize your blog, make sure you’ve polished your website into looking more professional. For that, you ought to have a reflective domain name and excellent website design.
To get the perfect blog name, play around with your niche’s keywords. However, keep in mind that you don’t keyword-stuff your domain as it’ll make it generic.
For website design, make your site easy to navigate. The most convenient way to do that is to display your menu bar on the top of your homepage. That’s where users automatically look for the feature.
Additionally, make sure your website has a fast loading speed. In this case, choosing the right hosting provider is crucial, as your speed optimization efforts won’t pay if the problem is server-side.
2. Create A Brand Identity
Building a brand identity means establishing a company persona that distinguishes it from the others in the industry. The critical factors determining how your brand is perceived include logo, website design, and tagline.
Your logo should be reflective. Meaning, people should have a hint on what your company offers by looking at it. Therefore, take good care of how you choose the color palette, typography, and image to put on the logo.
A tagline refers to a short sentence explaining your company values and target audience. Thus, don’t forget to formulate those two aspects before deciding on a tagline.
3. Know Your Target Audience
Defining your target audience helps you determine your writing style, tone, and voice.
First, you may want to reflect on your niche, as tech-related blogs attract different audiences from beauty and fashion blogs. On top of that, it’ll also help you determine whether you’re going business-to-business or business-to-customer.
Next, specify your demographic by creating a persona. It will help you find out who’s most likely to benefit from your content. When creating one, include the persona’s age, gender, location, job, salary, education level, interests, hobbies, and pain points.
4. Provide Great Content
Google strives to show users the best article for their search intents. Thus, writing high-quality, informative content helps you rank high on the search engine results pages (SERP). Therefore, the more optimized your content is, the more organic traffic it’ll get.
For that, conduct keyword research before writing your blog posts. The analysis helps you find the subjects and pain points that your target audience is looking for.
Additionally, utilize a search engine optimization tool, like the YoastSEO WordPress plugin, to help you optimize your written content. The extension scores your keyword density, readability, meta description, and focus keyword use.
5. Promote the Blog
To generate more traffic, promote your blog by encouraging social media shares or guest posting. Besides reaching more people, the strategy also helps improve brand visibility.
For the former, you can add social media share buttons on each of your blog posts. Note that you don’t have to include all social media platforms. By displaying the most appropriate ones, you’ll reach the right audience.
In comparison, guest posting allows you to write for other blogs. In exchange, ask the blog owners to let you squeeze a link to your article on the piece you’re writing. That said, keep in mind to reach the blogs that share a similar niche to yours.
6. Grow the Email List
Conducting email marketing is one of the easiest ways to make money blogging. With the strategy, you can offer a paid subscription for premium content, broadcast your online course, promote your ebook, and integrate it with affiliate marketing.
But first, you need to grow your email list. Typically, blog owners will display a pop-up contact form on their website. However, that’s just a starting point. Here are some of the recommended actions to get your contact form filled:
- Giveaways. By registering for the event, you can get the participant’s email addresses.
- A How-To series. Suppose you write an ebook for how to develop a blog. In that case, break down the tutorials into parts. That way, you can ask your readers to register an account for full access to the materials.
- Referral program. Related to ebooks and online courses, leverage a referral strategy to promote your digital goods. In return, you can reward your partners with discounts, gifts, or hard cash.
7. Test and Optimize
Building a blog is an ongoing process. Besides continuously creating high-quality content, you also need to follow the web design trends to avoid your blog looking old-fashioned.
To make sure your blog always looks attractive, conduct A/B testing every once in a while.
For the test, you’ll need to prepare a control and a variation. When preparing the two design versions, make sure to change only one element. That way, it’ll be easier to determine the aspect impacting your conversion rates.
Once you’ve got the designs, display both versions to users at random to see which one performs better based on your success indicators.
Conclusion
You’ve learned the seven easy tips to prepare your blog for monetization. Next, you’ll need to put those steps to action. While reshaping your brand and determining your target market is crucial, don’t forget to care for the technicalities. For that, choose a reliable provider to support your blog development. Happy blogging!
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