BLOGGING: How To Start Up A Blog And Make Money From It
With the massive increase in blogs in Nigeria at the moment, taking giant strides to starting and owning a blog seems like a herculean task and an unprofitable business to venture into.
Then the question arises, why do I want to start blogging? How do I actually start? Where do I look for inspiration? To whom will my blog be targeted? How do I get found among the millions of contents been poured out daily.
But all that is not as hard as it looks, with dedication, passion, perseverance, and focus you are well placed to making over a million dollars on your blog.
This information will take you on a journey through the sure strategies you can employ to grow your blog and maintain it.
Basic Skills Needed For Blogging
Be informed that blogging deals with sharing contents on a website to attract readers to it. The content may vary from text, images, music and videos. Below is a list of basic skills you will need to be good at blogging:
Writing skills
Communication skills
Editing skills
Analytical skills.
1. Writing Skills:
This involves sound knowledge of the use of English. You must not be a graduate to master the English language, as long as you know how to read and write and you can express yourself in written English, you are good to go. With this already in place, you have put yourself in good stead to be received by your target audience.
2. Communication Skills:
Now that you can express yourself in written English, do not just write for writing sake, write to pass a message to your readers, write to communicate. You as a blogger must know your audience and the best way to communicate to them in writing. It will be energy wasted, no work done if you use a style of writing for adults on a teens’ blog.
3. Editing Skills:
Editing is a very important part of blogging. It sets you apart from the rest out there. Many bloggers just rush to put up their contents out there without properly editing it. If for you, anything goes, over time, your blog will tend to lose respect and readership. Go the extra mile, edit your blog post and save your blog from early death.
4. Analytical skills:
You need to be familiar with what happens in your blog, analytical skills give you a clear picture of what is happening to your blog. Some key information analytics can reveal the number of people viewing your blog post, location of your readers, the source of the readers, monitoring of links on your blog post and several other information. Examples of popular analytical software include Google analytics, kissmetric, Mint, Spring Metric etc.
Setting Up Your Blog
You will need a content management system (CMS) in order to set up your blog. The popular ones in use these days are wordpress and blogger. Each of these CMS have both the free and paid versions. The paid version enables you to customize your blog name, so instead of using ABC.wordpress.com, you have ABC.com. It is preferable to use a custom name as it allows you to add many features on your blog.
Below are the steps to setting up your blog:
Step one:
Buy a domain from any domain company such as Godaddy, Whogohost, Namecheap etc
.
Step Two:
A hosting company will be needed by you to store all files used on your blog. Some popular hosting companies include Hostgator, Ipage, Bluehost, SiteGround etc.
Step Three:
After you must have obtained a host for your blog, you will need to point your domain name to your hosting company. This can be easily done by looking for the Nameservers from your host website which usually looks something like this ns1.forinstance.com.
Step Four:
After you must have identified your Nameserver, you will need to login to your domain website and look for “my domain page” or “domain manager”. Once that is done, you’ll be required to click on the DNS or Nameserver and paste the two nameservers you copied from your host into the primary and secondary Nameservers.
Step Five
Once you have successfully added your Nameservers, you will need to go to the cpanel of your hosting company in order to look for a CMS application such as wordpress and Blogger. Install it and start building your website.
Growing Your Blog
The biggest challenge many bloggers face is how to grow their blog. After going through the joyful stress of buying their domain, host and designing their blog, they realise all too soon that all their efforts are not yielding the money they expected. At this stage many bloggers tend to throw in the towel and give up but to be really successful as a blogger you will need all the patience and focus in this world.
You should understand that you will need to grow your own audience and there are so many ways to do this but a few ways will be treated so as to give you a feel of how to go about growing your blog:
Social Media: Social media to a blogger is a powerful tool. This is one of the major ways to grow your blog from one reader to thousands of loyal readers. Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, Whatsapp and Instagram are some of the popular places to visit online to grow your blog.
Fora (Forums): Fora can easily generate free traffic for you if you use them frequently and effectively. Many bloggers have used fora such as Nairaland to grow their blog. It is free and easy to use.
Networking with other Bloggers:
Networking with other bloggers can help in spreading your contents. You could approach any blogger you are interested in and discuss how you both could work together in promoting each other’s blog.
Influencers : People who have strong following on social media are called influencers. They have become popular over the years and have become an authority with whatever they post on social media. Try to locate any influencer within your niche using software like SumoMe.
You will do yourself a lot of good if you are friends with influencers. Over time they will warm towards you.
Email Marketing: The most effective way of building an email list is by guest blogging on popular blogs.
The reason you must build your email list as a blogger is because email has the highest click through rate of any other forms.
Making Money From Your Blog
Now that your blog has grown over time, it is time to make money from it. New bloggers should expect between four and seven years to make anything significant from their blog. You have already gathered an audience that believes you, trusts you and are ready to support you. The most significant ways of making money on your blog is
Placing ads
Affiliate marketing
Writing a book
Sponsored post
1. Placing of Ads:
Very popular among all bloggers. Money can be made by placing banner ads or using advertising networks like Google adsense. Increased traffic assures you of getting good money through ads.
2. Affiliate Marketing: This simply means promoting other people’s products on your blog. It is a very easy way of making money on your blog. Simply visit any Affiliate company and register for a product which you can promote.
3. Writing A Book: Young could just write a book and sell online. With a growing audience who trust you, it is very easy to sell your book on your blog and make cool money from it.
4. Sponsored Post: Most companies would love to advertise themselves on your blog, they pay you to put up something for them on your blog. This is also an interesting way of making money from your blog. But you have to be careful and only pick content that that fit with your blog.
This is the information you need on how to start up a blog and make money from it. I believe this information should help put your doubts away and challenge you to start up a blog today.
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