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Starting a blog isn’t nearly as complicated as it used to be. In fact, building a website may be the easiest part of making money online. Long gone are the days where bloggers need to know HTML, coding, or server management to set up a site. By using WordPress or Blogger, the process of starting a successful blog has been simplified.
Nevertheless, earning a part or full-time living online requires more than just putting content on a page and publishing it. Getting traffic, creating a community, and learning how to monetize those readers is the biggest challenge for most new bloggers. Here are some actionable blogging tips on ways to become a successful blogger!
Identify Your Niche
After setting up your men’s lifestyle blog, researching your niche is the first critical step. The type of blog you want to build will determine the potential of your website. For example, blogging about men’s fashion or lifestyle trends is great if you are passionate about the topic; however, you should certainly expect a fair amount of competition from big brands and other experienced bloggers.
On the other hand, a blog about “how to become a southern gentleman” that discusses chivalry, proper etiquette, good manners, professional fashion, and being a good father and husband may be a more unique approach that caters to a specific audience.
Give yourself a broad enough topic that you can publish at least 100 to 200 posts, allowing you to really build up your site. Learn more about identifying your blog’s niche.
Find Topics To Write About
One of the biggest challenges for a blogger is finding topics your readership wants to learn about. While Google’s Keyword Tool is an excellent resource, the company has been limiting the amount of information provided. Instead, why not spy on your competitors, see what similar blogs are writing about and what phrases they are ranking for?
For this, I highly recommend bloggers leverage SEMrush. SEMrush allows you to input a URL and instantly find the keyword phrases it ranks for, along with search volume and how competitive the term may be. This information allows a new blogger to find easy but high-volume keywords to target when they are starting out.
And as your blog continues to grow, this research can guide you in creating content that is more valuable and profitable.
Here’s a complete guide to keyword research and finding topics.
Quality Content
Once you start blogging, you’ll read about “quality” or “epic” content everywhere. Every SEO or expert in digital marketing touts this phrase. But what does it mean?
Ultimately, the content you put out is a reflection of you and your blog. It represents your ideas and beliefs, and can influence others to make decisions, so be sure you always publish your best. Furthermore, combine text with other media types, such as images, charts, graphs, video, etc.
And don’t forget the importance of formatting. Breaking up big portions of text with subheadings, images and other media helps those readers who scan content quickly find the information they are looking for.
Lastly, great content is the easiest way to earn links from other resources who want to share your blog with their readership. This is the basis of content marketing, and it can be a powerful strategy for growing your search engine traffic and developing an authoritative blog. Learn more about developing a killer content marketing strategy.
The Basics of SEO
SEO, or search engine optimization, is one of the cornerstones of building a high-traffic, successful blog. Because it is fundamental to create a site with diverse traffic sources, such as organic search, social, direct, and referral traffic, bloggers must learn the basics of SEO.
SEO isn’t really complicated – it just takes an investment of your time to learn it. Nevertheless, the ROI can be huge. SEO helps you earn free search engine traffic from Google, Bing, and Yahoo, meaning the right rankings in their results can amount to a flood in traffic.
Because the topic is broad and nuanced, I recommend you read everything you can get your hands on. Start with websites like Search Engine Journal, Search Engine Land, QuickSprout, and Authority Hacker, and branch out from there on specific topics aspects you’d like to learn more about.
Conclusion
You don’t have to be a developer or marketing specialist to make and grow a successful blog. In the end, like most businesses, it comes down to commitment, hard work, and resilience. There are countless stories of bloggers who have made it big starting blogs on topics they had no professional expertise in. So give it a shot and start blogging today – you never know what can happen until you try!
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