Blogging has become a powerful way to communicate what you want to say to a wider audience. Many people blog from time to time as a hobby or pastime, however there’s some people who have made a lucrative career out of blogging where they now make a good steady income stream from it. The question is how do you start a blog and make a career in blogging? This guide will give you an idea on the most powerful tips on how to achieve just this. Let’s get started.
Tips To Making Your Blog Hobby A Career
Blogging revolves around enticing the right people to read and review your blog. The problem is not everyone knows who they’re trying to target. Without knowing who your target audience is, you can’t properly write and market yourself to them to gain the traffic you’re after. So how do you know who your target audience is? Here’s some tips how you can achieve this:
- Work out what your blog is about and what niche you want to cover.
- Determine what demographic of viewers you’re trying to gain the interest of. For example, travel enthusiasts aged between 25-35 who love to travel to all parts of the world.
- Work out what problems your blog can solve for your readers. Example travel tips for safety, newbies, or those travelling with pets.
- Who else in the blog sphere is your biggest competition? What can you do and offer that they don’t.
By knowing who your target blog audience is, you have a higher chance of gaining interest for your blog which can result in more traffic and more followers. Eventually this can lead to more money long term.
Many people who write blogs generally only do it from time to time, however when making it a career you need to post quality and interesting content on a regular basis. When writing and posting your content here’s some tips to help you get started.
- Write content that people would want to read about. This should be something about solving a problem, unusual places in the world, tips and trick on how to do something etc. In writing helpful articles it’ll gain interest from readers more than just general articles.
- Bring life to your content by adding bright, colourful and interesting images. Your imagery should be relevant with the content you’re talking about. Don’t add a cat photo to an article about birds for example. When it comes to blogs visual effects are just as important as the blog itself. If you see a food blog for example, you’ll see the owners generally work on taking photos of the food in it’s best light.
- Make sure the blog doesn’t have spelling or grammar mistakes. It should read well and be structured with good formatting to make it easy to read. Use subheadings and bullet points to help make it more digestible. If you have a look at some of your favourite blogs, take note on their formats and layouts and how they address themselves. While you don’t want to copy another person’s blog, it’s still a good idea to get some ideas.
- Make sure your content is unique and has personality. The blogs that are popular have a unique personality which is reflected to their audience.
When it comes to writing your blog, it’s a good idea to know the above tips first to ensure people will like and continue to like what you have to offer.
What many of the most popular blogs have in common is they allow guest posting and advertising on their site – within reason. This is how many successful bloggers make their money. Here’s some things to consider before allowing advertising and guest posting.
- Don’t just advertise anything on your website for the sake of it. The problem with this is that your viewers will get annoyed with the amount of ads all over your site. If you also advertise by writing reviews about a company you haven’t used before this can also cause issues as well as not everyone will want to hear about different companies over and over again.
- When allowing sponsored guest posts on your website it’s important to also consider a few things such as:
- Whether you write the content or the person asking writes it make sure the quality of their content is up to scratch with your blog.
- You need to make sure any sponsored guest posts are in line with what the niche of your blog is.
- Setup guidelines for people to follow and have a strict application process to ensure only the best gets on your website.
Allowing advertisements and guest posts on your website are a good idea but make sure you know what you’re looking for to help keep your site clean and of good quality.
Social media is powerful and a great way to find people who are interested in the same thing. The best thing about social media is that you can help improve your chances of really improving your blog popularity. When it comes to social media, there’s some things you need to consider which include:
- Join groups that have the same interests as you. When you become established in a group you can slowly start to share information about your blog.
- Don’t overwhelm your followers or the groups you’re in. Share but don’t overdo it. People don’t like to be inundated with loads of the same or similar posts.
- Schedule posts to go out once or twice a week.
- When you’re building up your followers work on interacting with them on a professional but personal level. Answer their questions, interact and ask questions back.
Social media is powerful and a great way to really improve your overall career in blogging.
Overall
When it comes to starting a career in blogging it’s important to know where to start. By taking the time to do your research as well as start off slowly you can gradually take the time to build up your career for long term success.