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Launching a New Blog? Do This

Launching a New Blog? Do This

Launching a new blog of your own? Of course you do! Not only is it a great decision, it’s also very simple and easy to get up and running — with pretty much no technical design or programming skills required.

No matter what your interests are, why you want to have a site online, or even if you are just playing around with the idea… a blog is a great place to start.

In fact, some of the most famous influencers, people, authors, celebrities and entrepreneurs started off as bloggers and then turned their expertise and passion into so much more. A well-known example of this can be seen with Perez Hilton, who started a celebrity gossip blog, and then flipped his fame and following to become a Hollywood actor, TV personality and a business and brand of his own.

If those aren’t enough reasons to get excited about the idea of starting a blog of your own, just think about what it could potentially do for you!

But wait… just starting a blog will only do so much. Before we get started with the process, we first need to make sure you know the basics and what it takes to go from a generic domain name and WordPress site, to a successful blog that can change your life, brand or business forever!

Ready to Start a New Blog? Here’s What You Need to Know

Anyone can start a blog. In fact, it’s probably one of the fastest and easiest things someone can do online in regards to starting a new side project, hobby, or even just to launch a website for a brand or personal use. The reason why it’s so simple and fast, is that WordPress makes the whole process a breeze and pretty much makes the whole setup a ‘hands off’ process.

For more details on this process, you can follow this step by step guide to starting a blog by Neil Patel. That’ll get you started why WordPress is the best content management solution out there, what hosting works best, and also provides plenty of examples of what’s working in the world of blogging today and more.

With all of that being said, let’s now cover five very important things every site owners and blogger should consider before starting a new WP-powered site of their own.

Focus on Your Niche Audience and What Value You Serve

One of the very first things you need to consider before going live with your new blog, is asking yourself why you are starting one in the first place and how it’s going to serve value to others. With hundreds of millions of blogs already out there in a wide range of niche markets, pretty much every topic you can think of has already been discussed time and time again.

With this in mind, the last thing you want to do is start another blog that not only wastes your own time, but also just adds more clutter to what’s already out there.

To help analyze this process, be sure to ask yourself the following:

  • Why am I starting a blog?
  • Who is my target audience?
  • How will people benefit from my blog?
  • What will make it different from what’s already out there?

By spending some time on these questions before going live with your site, you can save yourself a lot of time, effort and frustration down the road.

Quality of Quantity is the Winning Formula for Blogging Success

With so many websites and blogs already on the internet, content is everything. But, if you are thinking that you need to continually come up with new articles and content ideas all the time, you are wrong.

The internet has changed a lot over the past several years, and the way content ranks in Google has changed as well. For example, back in the day 500-word articles were enough to rank in Google. Now you typically need around 1,200-2,000+ words per article in order to have a chance to rank against established competitor site content.

This means, focus your efforts on writing LESS content articles on your site, and MORE content per article.

This is something that is always a big point of discussion on site owner and webmaster forums, and was also highlighted by HubSpot.

Also, when it comes to the promotion of your site, it’s much easier to promote a few really great articles versus trying to promote hundreds of shorter ones with less value.

Know Your Options When Marketing Your Blog

Content creation is only one part of the blogging process. As they say “Content is King”… and it is, but content will only get you so far.

With more bloggers and site owners competing for ranking space in the search engines and traffic in general to their sites, “great content” will only get you so far.

This means you need to have a great content template and marketing plan in place. And depending on the niche marketing you are in, this could be easier or harder than you might think. After all, how many times can we all write about the same thing over and over again.

Some of the best ways to accomplish this are:

  • Start a newsletter or mailing list for your site
  • Utilize all of the major social media platforms
  • Understand the basics of SEO and on-site optimization
  • Continually promote and link to your best site content

As much time as you spend on the content creation aspect of your site, you really need to spend 10 times that amount on the promotion and marketing of your site content.

Understanding the Different Ways to Make Money Blogging

You started a blog, you have some great content and you even have people coming from search and social media… now what? Most likely you will want to start making some money with your site as well.

The good news is, there are plenty of ways to accomplish this.

We could write about this topic all day and dive really deep into the process, but I’ll just give you a few working methods that you can further research on your own. Such methods include:

  • Affiliate marketing
  • Google Adsense / Media.net
  • Sponsored posts and paid reviews
  • Selling your own products and services

The important thing to remember here is that content monetization is only as good as the value it provides to your audience. In short, don’t try and sacrifice the on-site experience of your audience, just to make a few dollars.

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Of the many different methods mentioned above, affiliate marketing has to be our favorite — and also one of the easiest to set up and make money with as well.

As outlined by Dustin Howes, there are plenty of affiliate program to choose from, but some stand out more than others. However, when choosing an affiliate program for your site, it’s not just about picking the ones with the highest payouts…

In order to truly make money with affiliate marketing, you need to understand what your audience wants, and delivering it to them in a way that provides value. Once you understand this, you can then choose the best affiliate program and monetization methods for your site.

The three most common types of affiliate programs offering the following methods:

  • Cost per acquisition (CPA).  This is where an affiliate is paid a commission  on every sale attributed to them. This is the most common practice in affiliate marketing and performance marketing.
  • Cost per lead (CPL). In this model, affiliates are paid an agreed-on commission for the leads they drive to a business. 
  • Cost per Click (CPC).  Here, merchants pay affiliates a commission for every click of a link.

The last important thing to note when it comes to affiliate marketing, is that it’s not a get rich quick scheme and the amount of money you can make per program depends on how much existing traffic you have, the demographic audience and how well the offer fits in with your existing content.

To learn more about how to find success in the world of affiliate marketing, be sure to visit any of these top blogs.

Leverage Established Blogs and Authority Sites to Grow Your Brand

Last but not least, in order to really stand out from the competition and create a new blog that eventually turns into a successful business and brand of it’s own, you need to leverage the success of others around you. It sounds weird at first, but it’s not at all. In fact, it’s also helping other sites grow while bringing authority and promotion back to yours.

Here are a few examples of how to best accomplish this.

  • Start guest blogging and contributing content to other sites in your niche
  • Reference other great case studies or news stories on your site
  • Tag other brands and influencers in your content, and then on social media
  • Create your own expert roundup with other influencers in your niche

By implementing these methods into your content creation and marketing efforts, you will see some drastic increases in not just traffic back to your site, but likely improvements in search rankings and social media engagement as well.

Follow these Steps to Launch a Successful WordPress Blog

As mentioned at the beginning of the article, anyone can start a blog. However, not everyone can have a successful blog — and there are some very huge differences between the two.

With more than a billion websites and blogs on the internet today, there is a lot of junk cluttering up the internet. I would not consider this junk of any value or substance.

In order to have a successful website or blog, you must have quality content and also be serving value to your audience. For this to happen, you must be implementing each of the winning methods mentioned above. If you do, then you will definitely have quite a successful website, blog and online brand of your own in no time.

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