A blog is born every half a second.
And yet 81% of blogs never make more than $100.
Why is it that so many blogs are being started, and none of them ever seem to make much money?
My hypothesis is that most of the people that start a blog do so on a whim. As a result, they never really take much time to see what the experts in their niche are doing and end up making all the same old mistakes.
A few months later, they get bored from not seen any results and quit.
But it doesn’t have to be like that.
I have witnessed firsthand how blogs have been started out of the blue and within a year are making hundreds if not thousands a month.
And most of them are utilizing the same tried and true methods for growing their audience.
We are going to analyze how the experts deal with:
In the hopes of getting people started on the right track.
Starting A Blog
The most common mistake that people make is that they simply start a blog without a plan.
At best, they might read an article about how to start a blog, which will tell them the technical details of what they need to know to get up and running.
That’s all well and good, as we all need to get up and running, but then what?
Where are we running?
I recommend that people read the following posts and see if the lessons learned here can apply to the blog that they are looking to start:
At a minimum though I recommend that you ask yourself the following questions.
- What goals do I have for the blog in six months? One year?
- Who do I want my audience to be?
- How should the blog look and flow? What themes are popular in my niche, and how are people designing their blogs? What are the primary topics that will be featured in the navigation menu?
- What are 20 articles that should definitely appear on my blog? What are things that my audience wants to know?
- How am I planning on monetizing the blog? Will it be through my own products? Affiliate sales? Display advertising?
- What level of traffic will I need to reach my goals?
Content Creation And Promotion
The old philosophy said that if you wrote great content, people would come. To be honest, I don’t know how much that was ever really true, but nowadays I can confirm that it certainly is not true.
Content promotion is just as integral to content creation, in fact I would advise that you spend about 20% writing and 80% promoting.
So how do we create great, shareable content and promote it?
Here are some techniques:
Implementing The Skyscraper Technique
Brian Dean’s famous Skyscraper technique is perhaps one of the most thorough posts on the topic. In it, he describes the process for researching articles, writing an excellent resource, identifying the influencers who will benefit from his post, and reaching out to them to catch their attention and hopefully get them to share the post.
Brian’s articles are regularly shared thousands of times, so I think he knows what he’s doing.
Creating Ultimate Resource Guides
When I launched my business blog I wanted to create a resource that included top articles in my niche for everything related to business. I compiled this in my Ultimate Business Resource Guide (post no longer exist).
The result?
I got 100 shares myself in my first week!
What made this post work so well that I included a part of influencers in it and link to all of them, which gave me an occasion to contact them and get the word out about my launch.
Even if you’re not creating such an alternate resource guide, is generally a good idea to be very generous in linking out to other influencers in leveraging that as a means to get them to share the post.
Building An Awesome Round Up Post
Together in a roundabout in between dozens of differences at once. It’s an excellent way to craft an article that will be the authority on a topic as well as build in a basis for promoting the article once it is ready by simply contacting the influencers you featured.
Here’s one that I wrote, 39 Successful Entrepreneurs Share Their First EVER Sale (post no longer exist).
That post has also received nearly 400 shares because it is a great resource and featured dozens of influencers.
Are you seeing the trend yet?
Using Software Like Buzz Bundle And NinjaOutreach
Software is meant to save us time and enable us to accomplish a task that would be difficult to do manually. One thing you’ll notice is that effective outreach can be very time-consuming.
Luckily we have tools for that, of which I have chosen two to highlight.
Consider Matthew Woodward’s review of BuzzBundle, as well as Ron’s review of NinjaOutreach for more information on how these tools can help your outreach campaigns.
Social Media
Nowadays people consider it almost mandatory to sign up for every different social media platform.
Unfortunately, much like blogging, social media sees 800 consecrated every day, but most of them don’t result anything.
Inevitably, people give up and the social media account languishes for eternity.
But it doesn’t have to be this way.
Here are some tips and case studies you can emulate on driving targeted traffic with social media.
Targeted Traffic From Reddit
A recent case study from Spencer over at NichePursuits revealed how he collected 10k page views from Reddit with just 45 minutes of work.
It was relatively straightforward.
- Find some BIG, general subreddits you can fit into.
- Find a few small, relevant subreddits you can fit into.
- Post in those subreddits (not all at once!) exactly how everyone else posts there, following all the rules and conventions of the subreddit.
- Do some light promotion to your friends and social network to get just a few initial upvotes.
- If the post is good, those few upvotes will start a traffic snowball!
Click Here To Tweet This
I first got this idea from Pat. The idea is to capture a nice, short phrase in the form of a hyperlink, which somebody came click to automatically Tweet it. Just a nice, quick way to engage with people. Here’s what it looks like:
Social Locker For More Shares
Have you ever seen those posts that have hidden bonus content? Often they are using the social locker plugin. I have implemented this myself, and it has resulted in many additional shares.
Here are some stats for my dashboard.
How You Can Get Started Now
Although we are only scratching the surface on the dozen dozens of strategies that experts implement on a daily basis to take their blog to the next level, is already more than enough to get started on today.
Make today the day you consciously decide to take your blog from a hobby to a business.
Take a few of these strategies, and incorporate them into your daily blogging.
If need be, go back over some old articles and tweak them to improve them. After all, this is the beauty of blogging, everything can be edited.
Author: David Schneider
David Schneider is the cofounder of Ninja Outreach, an innovative new Blogger Outreach software for marketers. David exited from Ninja Outreach and can be found at lesschurn.io and daveschneider.me.