Becoming an influential blogger does not happen by luck. Sure, someone might catch a lucky break here and there, but success is an outcome of hard work and following a process.
So, what might this successful process look like? I’ve put together four key components of this “Starting a Blog from Scratch” process that will set you on the path to success.
Picking the Right Niche
If you are planning to eventually monetize your content and turn blogging into a living, it is extremely important to pick a big enough niche.
Now, this does not mean choosing to be extremely broad and attempting to compete with sites such as the New York Times, Forbes, or Huffington Post. If you do, your strategy will likely fail, as they are well funded and produce enormous amounts of quality daily content.
On the other side of the scale, if your niche is too small, it will be difficult to drive enough traffic to monetize your content and to find sub-topics to write about.
In order to discover the right niche, we suggest you use Google Trends. When searching for your niche, find one that is large enough to talk about that specific topic in a broad sense, and also dive into specific topics within the same scope.
For example, let’s say we create a “Marketing” blog. We can talk about “Marketing” in a broad context but also dive into topics such as “Digital Marketing”, “Social Media Marketing” and a variety of other narrower topics that still relate to “Marketing”.
Blogging is About Conversation
When you begin to write your first blog posts, ensure that you pay attention to always creating different Call-to-Actions (CTA) and opportunities for your readers to jump in on the conversation. People who are reading your content inherently want to connect with you and build a relationship.
A great way to do this is by always asking questions. By asking a question you give the readers direction and, hopefully, a portion of readers will leave a comment answering your question. This also builds social credibility and the more answers you receive, the more likely other readers will engage in your post.
Although you may be positioning yourself as an expert, no one knows everything. So, be self-aware and ask your readers the questions you don’t know and maybe together you can find the answers. This, in turn, will help build a loyal readership base.
Don’t forget to be personable and utilize “You”, “I”, and “We”, this builds connections with your readers. You are not writing a corporate whitepaper, have some fun with it!
Finally, a successful blog has the potential to become more than you. It can serve as a community where conversations take place and it is not just you doing the talking. This will take time but stick to the process and you will be successful.
Purposeful Consistent Content
Now, the topic of content - one of my personal favourites.
The days of creating quality content occasionally have passed. While creating quality content is one of the keys, you must also create it in quantity.
This means that although you could write a blog post masterpiece, it does not mean it will get any traffic. To increase the likelihood of getting traffic, create quality content in quantity. This will require blocking off time in your busy schedule to create this content.
Lastly, ensure your content has a sense of purpose and people find it useful. If your content has true meaning and purpose, it will generate steady traffic over time. Your time is valuable, do not spend it attempting to create a piece of viral content that won’t receive any traffic if it falls flat.
Leveraging Multiple Platforms
You have made it to the final key component that is essential to your blog’s success. Sharing and creating content on multiple platforms.
By leveraging a variety of channels, you can grow your community with unique audiences from each channel. You can do this by repurposing content from your blog with a message tailored for each channel.
For example, if you are planning to share a post on Facebook and LinkedIn, your LinkedIn post will likely be more formal compared to Facebook post based on the types of audiences who use each channel.
Repurposing your content could also mean that you create a different version of a previous blog post and post it on LinkedIn as an ‘Article’. This allows you to create a quality piece of content without spending as much time on it as a full-length blog post.
The final point on leveraging multiple platforms is to reach out to different bloggers, websites, or influencers, who create content in a similar niche. Outreach and partnerships can build new connections and collaboration opportunities to grow your blog!
With that, I’d like to personally wish you the best of luck on your blogging journey and ask you one final question. If you had to add an additional key component to this list, what would it be?
Email me at mbrown@sherpamarketing.ca.
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Thanks for reading!
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