Blogging has become quite popular in recent times. It can be a great hobby as well as extremely beneficial to make you financially independent. There are some basic points that you need to keep in mind when you start blogging. The biggest advantage is the flexibility to work at your own time, you can work from home, and there is no limit on how much money you can make. My name is Aabhas Vijay and I am the former digital marketing VP of recycledevice.com and founder of www.smtpservers.co a marketing learning platform, and in this article, I will help you understand why blogging can be your el-dorado.

Let’s first start with just the basics, it would make your CV look really impressive. Just what you need is interesting things that are fascinating enough to write about. You will require patience and determination to generate traffic and follow-up. Blogging online requires a great amount of time investment. It is not something that can make you rich overnight. But with a good strategy and some patience, you can make it work.

First thing you need to know about blogging is that you can choose between using a free platform for your blogs or designing your own website. Here is how you can do it:

 

Using Free Blogging websites: 

You can set up a blog for free on a lot of sites, and they're extremely easy to use. It might serve you well if you only want to blog casually at first. But, free sites for blogging can be very restrictive. You will be able to customize your blog to a small degree, and your blog will have a storage cap that might make it more difficult to upload large videos and photos. Another point is that with the platform branding, the blog URL will be something like 'www.nameofyourblog.wordpress.com'. Most free blogging platforms also do not allow you to put on your site banner ads or affiliate links, which for most bloggers are main revenue streams. With free blogging, there will be some amount of limitation on the content, video and images etc. This can seriously hamper your content creation. 

Examples of best free blogging websites are WordPress, Blogger etc.

Free blogging can be great for starting out.0 It is when you are willing to invest time but sceptical about investing financially in it.

 

Building a Website on your own

It is ideal for committed bloggers and those looking to make money from their blogs to create their own websites. Below listed are the pros of having your own website:

• Websites give you absolute control over design. It will provide a proper impact over customization. 
• You will be allowed to have your own URL address. This gives a sense of belongingness. 
• You will have right over ads. No restrictions over affiliate links

The only disadvantage of this choice is that you will have to pay for a domain address which depends on certain factors. 

The idea of making your own website might seem very intimidating. If you have no idea about how it is made and how it works, it can be easily done with the help of some tech expert. Making a website hardly takes half an hour. Make sure the name you use for your domain is simple and clear. It should be easy to remember. Having your website, you will have the chance to create your own brand name, make your own logo, and establish an online identity. It will be personal that can be seen through your URL and website templates. You will be the owner of your own blog, and no third party will be able to take down your blog. You have complete control over your work. You will be able to find an appropriate template for your brand. The effort and process of distinguishing yourself from your competition are called branding. Branding includes designing or buying a logo from the logo for sale, also choosing your brand name and colors.

 

How to start a blog?

Select a Topic

Be clear about what you're going to write about. Defining a subject or focus and building all of your material around those subjects. It will motivate you and also help to develop digital products and services that complement your content. 

This way you can draw in readers, persuade them with your extremely insightful posts, then attract everyone with a core feature. You can research various blogs online to have a clear idea about what to write. It is important to know about the topics that are in high demand. Googling trending topics will also help in selecting a topic. Define your specific passions and interests. 

Although all of the above is relevant, there is no point in blogging about anything in which you have zero interest. You're going to get bored easily, and people can spot your lack of excitement. Write about something that really, really cares about you.

 

Choose a good domain name representing your business:

Your domain name can have a great impact on the success of your business. Find a good name with appropriate keywords that will help users in identifying your brand. It should represent the personality of your brand. There are many domain providers you can use, for e.g. GoDaddy, HostGator, IONOS. If you are worried about stuff like SEO at all, can look at the following recommendations: You must try to use a top-level domain (TLD). These are recognised as .com or .net. Domain names are easy to remember if they are short, usually less than 15 characters. Avoid using domain names with hyphens. They don't have a good impact on subscribers. They are usually associated with a spamming website. Make sure your domain name tells people how serious you are about your project.

 

Choose the right Platform:

There are a number of blogging websites which you can explore as per your requirements. Although WordPress is perhaps the most common blogging platform, there are many others out there as well, including a micro-blogging platform including Tumblr, Blogger.com and even Medium. That being said, you'll probably need to go for your own website,in the future. WordPress will get you a free blogging website with a domain address like yourname.wordpress.com. Using your own website will be more beneficial if you want to earn using your blog.

 

Select a suitable company for Web Hosting:

There are a number of options out there of reliable web hosts. There are a huge number of choices if you're usually starting a WordPress, self-hosted blog. Hence, it is crucial that you do proper research before investing in web hosts. You should make sure that you are provided with good quality services within a reasonable period. You will probably want to start with just a shared Server at the beginning and grow from there. When you start attracting good traffic, then you would require to have a dedicated server with a CDN.

 

Make sure Permalinks are allowed:

Permalinks help you customise your URL’s. Allow Permalinks In WordPress, prior to getting things off the ground, which will give you nice SEO-friendly canonical URLs. Permalinks are present in the WordPress administrator's Settings > Permalinks area and click on the Post name option.

 

Subscribe for a platform for email marketing: 

Email marketing is the easiest way to make money from your blog. Hands down, your blog, provides one of the fastest and easiest methods for earning a salary. There are many email marketing services that you can use, such as NotifyVisitors, SendinBlue, Aweber, MailChimp, and ConvertKit. I personally suggest using SendinBlue as it offers 9000 free emails every month. Here’s a complete SendinBlue review that I had written on my website for you guys. 

 

Capture leads

There are hundreds of ways to get leads but the most effective way to capture email leads for email marketing is through pop-ups, I recommend using professional pop-up making services like poptin or popupsmart. Make sure you also use exit pop-ups, I have seen personally that exit pop-ups help get more subscribers. And the leads that you capture are directly proportional to your financial independence.

 

Use a CDN or Content Delivery Network

To ensure that you speed up the delivery of your web pages, use a framework such as W3 Complete Cache or WP Super Cache and allow browser caching. This may not seem as meaningful in the beginning. But this will be crucial as you expand and your traffic rises to thousands of visitors every day. To test stuff before and after the installation, use Google's Page Speed Insights. It's also critical that you set up a CDN that will increase the speed of your content delivery globally. CDNs duplicate information through various repositories worldwide and make the delivery of content ultra-fast. For the user experience, this is relevant because most people who are forced to wait for a page to load, even for a small amount of time, frequently leave the site and go to another one in the search engine results. ⠀

 

AMP Plugin installation: 

Google's Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) Project is an effort to improve digital access to a vast portion of its content. For thunder page speeds, the AMP specification, which you can learn more about here, allows for thinning down a webpage to its simple structural elements with proportioned JS and minified CSS code.

 

Install Webmaster Software from Google: 

Analyzing the keywords your blogs rank for and any notifications that may hinder their ability to rank, anybody who is serious about creating a blog and making money wants to use Google's webmaster software. This will also allow you, along with click-through rates, to upload an XML sitemap and log keyword impressions. This is one of the most valuable resources by continuous review of your attempts to expand your website or blog.

 

Install Analytics from Google: 

Download Google Analytics so that as you develop your blog, you will keep records of your activities. This way you can keep track of your progress, and check which medium is driving the maximum traffic.

 

Be consistent with your content: 

You ought to create valuable content if you're confident about flourishing with the blog. It must be entertaining, based on keywords, informative, original and well written. Write the material for your users, while still paying heed to web crawlers and what they really want. Strictly speaking, with practice, it's a talent that evolves over time. It's also essential to post your content frequently, on a regular basis.

 

Understand how SEO works: 

While you should not launch a blog in order to refine it to oblivion, the basic concepts of search engine optimization should most likely be grasped so that you pay attention to the main factors that will influence your ability to rank on search engines such as Google. Start with the search console from Google, then ingest the knowledge and apply it. If you decide to place advertisements on your website, make sure to get Click fraud protection support so that visitors won't get annoyed whenever there's a false ad.

 

Create a Vision Board:

Instead of choosing to run advertisements on your site (which would not earn you actual money until you have at minimum hundreds of thousands of users every day) or participating in affiliate programs, if you are serious about advertising things online, you can develop a topical vision board that will advertise a virtual product. Later, as you use these email addresses for email campaigns, don't forget about using an SPF checker tool to ensure your messages are sent securely

 

Develop a content strategy:

To help you create an integrated sales engine, plan your content strategy beforehand. You need to concentrate on the products or services you wish to sell. Create funnels to drive traffic to high ticket products. If you are just starting out you can always hire a writing service to help you with your content plan. Check out the articles or content that has been written by your competitors for the keywords that you wish to rank for. 

 

Invest in Social Media: 

By any metric, creating a blog isn't easy. You have to be social in order to support yourself along the path. Not only through joining up on social networks such as Facebook, Instagram and other social networking sites like bloggers involved in content marketing, but also by interacting and communicating with other fellow bloggers. An awesome social media account helps you gain the attention that your blog deserves. You can take advice from the experts at delesign. A service that can help you gain the social media limelight, through hilarious post designing.

 

Make your blog financially active: 

It can be expensive to keep and operate a blog. Don't dream to instantly get wealthy. You may, nevertheless, take some steps along the way to monetize several of your content. For additional ideas on how to monetize your blog, check out this book review on how to make money blogging.

Keep updating your content regularly. Apart from that, though, you can still choose to raise tiny quantities of working capital by doing those stuff, such as producing articles that can direct individuals to courses or audiobooks that you have made, or producing instructional videos that will finally sell a huge bundle or device that will help educate people. 

There have been various ways to make a living from your blogging and commercialize your posts, but just don't attempt to go for shortcuts along the path. 

 

Use Marketing Skills: 

Content promotion is the single most effective tactic you'll find to create a blog and improve your exposure on search engines such as Google, and my all-time go-to strategy for rocketing up the search charts on Google's SERPs. Advertising your blog is a complex task that includes creating more valuable off-site content that connects to your key anchor content for long, almost never-ending hours, but it will pay handsomely. 

If it is done the correct way, you will use this one tactic to place number one in Google's searches for virtually every keyword. This, and also a technical description and doing it correctly, is most definitely an art. In an attempt to sell the material please do not spam or use overcrowd keywords. Be professional and reputable by integrating SPF flattening into the email marketing process. Content promotion can be achieved through posts on platforms such as Medium.com or Scribd.com, it can be done through answering Reddit or Quora queries, and it can be accomplished together with a number of other approaches through videos on YouTube or Vimeo. 

The argument is that all the content should satisfy a need, needs to be useful. For the greater return, don't attempt to do the least amount of work. If you want to excel, you ought to do the very opposite.

To make a blog work, hard work is crucial. But to be kept in mind, it comes with great challenges. You don't have to think that it takes time for blog commercialization to take shape. Per month, most bloggers just make pennies by monetizing their site, and this is despite having focused for a while on their blogs. 

Thus, you need to have sufficient cash flow from a variety of outlets to have a shot of generating a full-time income by blogging. It takes time to monetize a blog and depends on you getting some readers. More and the more followers you get, the more marketers you attract.

 

Conclusion 

The digital world is expanding more than ever. Blogs are a new market. If done correctly, it can be a good source of income. Especially in the circumstances where writing is your hobby. Blogs can be a great tool for advertising brands or writing your ideas down. 

A strong journey of self-discovery and development is the continuous and ongoing attempt to build and post online. It's going to be a life-changing experience. Keep in mind the guidelines above when you start blogging. 

Author Bio - Aabhas Vijay is a seasoned blogger and digital marketer, He loves to write about how to use free email services in your marketing efforts and increase your revenue.