Blogging

Blogging is the process that implies creating articles, photos, and other forms of content and publishing them on a website. Its characteristics include informal language, a laid-back atmosphere, regular updates, lifehacks, tips, and a high level of customer engagement.

Watch the video below to learn 5 tips to run a successful blog!

In this article, we’ll explain the advantages and disadvantages of blogging, find out how it works, and uncover some steps to start your blog. We’ll also talk about how to make money on that, promote your blog, and review some free platforms to create it.

Pros and Cons of Blogging

Nowadays, when the number of blogs reaches 600 million, there’s evidence that this type of business brings good profits. People start their blogs for personal use, business, brand visibility, or high ranks on Google. Let’s now discuss all the advantages of having a blog in more detail.

The pros of blogging are as follows:

• Ranking optimization. Creating useful and informative blog posts allows you to get a higher ranking. With evergreen articles, your website will rank better on Google and ultimately drive organic traffic. To ensure improvements in terms of your site’s performance, don’t forget to update your content regularly.
• Good relationships and communication with your audience. Customer engagement is crucial when it comes to your brand promotion and sales. That’s why it’s imperative to connect with your audience. Starting a blog is the best way to do it since you can let your readers explore your relevant content, leave feedback, and rate your material. It also enables you to update customers on your company’s latest products, launches, and news.
• Additional revenue. Successful blogs make significant profits. You can generate more income not only from selling products but also from blogging itself. If you have a reliable and popular website, your revenue can come from traffic, affiliate links, sponsored content, ebooks, webinars, courses, training, etc.
• Extra exposure. If you aim to create buzz around your company and product, making content related to your industry is the best decision. Leads can come from different sources to find info about certain industries. This way, your website will obtain more visitors and drive traffic.
• Online visibility. As of 2021, 4.72 billion people use online networks. In one way or another, all these users use the internet to find answers to their questions, learn something new, or just fill in their free time. By creating interesting blog posts, you can draw users’ attention to your brand and establish brand recognition. A visible website enables you to generate new customers faster.
• Higher traffic. Additional pages on your website increase your opportunity to emerge on a search engine results page and obtain more website readers and prospects. Hence, every time you write an article for your website, you increase your chances of ranking high on Google and attaining new readers and customers.

However, like any other business strategy, it has drawbacks as well:

• requires a relatively long time to bring positive results;
• always needs fresh and unique ideas relevant to your target audience;
• brings only a little payoff in the beginning;
• needs additional ways of promotion like email, social media, influencer marketing, PPC, and pre-roll ads.

Now that we’ve figured out the pros and cons of blogging, we also need to discuss the way this kind of business strategy works.

How does blogging work?

People who begin their startups buy a domain name and design their websites by themselves, while established businesses create new landing pages for a blog on their existing websites to fill them with good content. With simple websites, blogs enable visitors to use them easily and find the necessary information.

Different bloggers choose different blog themes. Some prefer to talk about marketing and product reviews, and others discuss fashion, healthy life, cooking, or any other topic. Bloggers create a series of posts and make them available for reading on their websites. Articles usually appear in a certain order, starting from the most recent ones. They are also divided into categories to enable people to navigate them easily. Besides, blog posts have another unique feature, such as interlinking. This way, bloggers link to other blogs and promote each other to expand their audiences.

If you are interested in starting your own blog from the very beginning, let’s explore some steps you need to take to get started.

With basic computer knowledge and an understanding of what your heart desires, you can easily create a blog by sticking to our guide.

1. Choose a niche. Firstly, you need to select a niche in which you have a high level of expertise. Your passion and interest in the chosen industry are essential. Secondly, once you choose your key topic, make sure that it has a wide audience so that you have some space to grow your blog. If you don’t have any idea what to blog about, consider sharing your life experiences. You can start a personal blog and tell about your daily routine: makeup and cosmetics, style and clothes, traveling, or anything else. The key is to create quality content that will attract the public.
2. Pick a catchy and easy name for your blog. To make readers recognize your blog, you need to select an easy-to-remember domain name. It’s your address on the internet, so it should be unique. Your domain name will enable people to find your website or social media account easily. Your title should be descriptive so that new users can catch the main idea of your blog.
3. Select a unique design. You need to have some understanding of your blog and its design since it needs a face. As an option, you can consider leveraging WordPress since it has special layouts for blogs. The platform enables you to obtain a layout and its design just in a few clicks.
4. Write your first blog post. Once you decide on your design, it’s time to create your first piece of content. Bear in mind that to blog successfully, you need to create unique, engaging, informative, interesting, and relatively long posts. It’s not an easy task to always come up with fresh and interesting ideas, but they help attract people, engage them, and make them loyal to your brand. Besides, don’t forget to add some photos to create visually appealing blog posts and simplify the way visitors perceive your content.
5. Promote your blog through different platforms. Now when companies and bloggers promote products with the help of digital and traditional marketing, you can’t remain inactive. Use various forms of ads like PPC, native advertising, pre-roll ads, create email campaigns, and leverage social media channels to popularize your blog. More and more bloggers use paid ads that appear on users’ Instagram Stories and feed. Consider collaborating with other bloggers in your niche, commenting on other famous pages, communicating with your audience, and posting regularly to build a follower base and gain your readers’ love and trust.
6. Optimize and update your content. Once your blog post is published, remember to update it frequently. If you want your blog to rank higher on Google, utilize relevant keywords, write quality content, add SEO meta tags, optimize images, and reduce your bounce rate.

Now that you’ve already explored our guide on developing a blog, let’s jump into the next section to figure out the ways to gain revenue from your blog.

The popularity of your blog provides you with new opportunities to make money. You can see several effective ways to earn some extra costs below.

Conduct courses and workshops

One of the greatest ways to make money online is to create courses. Modern people look for new skills and knowledge that help their personal and career growth. However, due to their often heavy workload, they don’t have a lot of time. That’s why it’s always a problem to go somewhere to directly participate in different events.

Online courses and workshops come to the rescue and help both participants and bloggers. As a blogger, you can connect with your audience through different video platforms and share a topic you specialize in, and your participants can obtain the necessary knowledge.

Let’s take Gabrielle Bernstein, for example. The spiritual leader offers readers to buy her courses on relationships, business, and meditation. She earns money by sharing her experience and valuable hands-on tips.

Create sponsored posts

Bloggers often write sponsored posts on social media platforms or their websites to get paid by different brands. They help draw followers’ attention to a brand or individual promoted. Opinion leaders create blog posts, videos, or Instagram Stories to bring new customers to a company.

For example, let’s take Madelaine Petsch and Bliss. In the Instagram post below, the actress promotes the brand’s sunscreen.

Host a paid webinar or training

A lot of companies and individuals start with free webinars. However, if you are an expert in your industry, you can make money on your expertise by organizing paid training or webinars. To run webinars smoothly, pay attention to details and check your info for accuracy. Small errors and typos are unacceptable. Remember to make your training special and unique so that it can be useful and fresh for participants. If it shows good results, consider making a series.

For example, Jack Kornfield, an author and Buddist practitioner, conducts a seven-week online training about the power of awareness.

Consider affiliate marketing

One more secondary source of income is affiliate marketing. By recommending digital products, services, and other products of other companies on your blog, you can earn a good commission. This way, you get paid every time you promote a company.

Write books

Bloggers can get some additional income not only from recommending and promoting other companies but also from writing and selling their own books or ebooks to their audience. By reading books, people can sharpen their knowledge in various industries: marketing, psychology, design, sales, beauty, etc. As an expert, you can communicate your knowledge by creating something unique and fresh. Your readers will appreciate that.

For example, Becca Ludlum, who has a website and an Instagram page dedicated to nutrition and healthy eating habits, also wrote a new book called “Meal Prep in an Instant.”

Now that you know how to monetize your blog, let’s look at several ways to promote and popularize it.

How to Promote a Blog

Many great ideas can help you make your blog more popular, although not all of them are free. In this section, we’ll review the most effective ways to promote a blog.

• Optimize your website. To make everything run smoothly and rank high on Google, you need to select a reliable web host, optimize the loading time of your blog, put security measures, and manage external and internal links. Monitor the performance of your blog with tools like Google Analytics.
• Create an account on social networks. With 3.96 billion social media users, digital platforms are perfect for promotion. There are plenty of great ways to obtain new leads, boost traffic to your website, and enhance your audience. You can use giveaways, paid advertising, influencer marketing, and sponsored content to drive interest to your blog. Special campaigns, hashtags, reviews, freebies, and referral programs enable you to create word-of-mouth promotions.
• Find influencers. Influencer marketing is a very powerful tool right now. Perhaps you should give thought to contacting an opinion leader in your niche to support your blog and promote it at the same time. An opinion leader can draw the attention of new readers to your blog and encourage them to participate in your events, webinars, and courses.
• Send email newsletters. Email campaigns are another effective tool to educate people about your website. It has a lower cost compared to other methods, but it doesn’t compromise efficiency. By sending email newsletters, you can reach your existing audience, deliver targeted messages, and have an immediate impact. With SendPulse, you can craft professional emails and set up email send-outs without any technical knowledge and for free.
• Answer questions on Quora. To enhance the number of your readers, you need to visit a popular platform where you can communicate with people. Quora is the best option. You can engage with people that are interested in your blog’s topic. If you succeed in intriguing them with your blog posts, there’s a great probability that they will follow your blog updates.
• Reach your audience through web push. With push notifications, you can instantly deliver your information, educate readers about your blog, and obtain excellent results. They help inform your blog readers and visitors about your new content, improve engagement, and increase conversions. SendPulse enables you to create automatic web push notifications based on your blog’s RSS feed.

You are acquainted with the methods of promotion, so it’s time to review the best platforms to create an up-to-date website for your blog.

The Best Free Blogging Platforms

You can encounter many platforms that help create wonderful blogs with high engagement. We’ve prepared the most effective and convenient ones that offer a free plan.

WordPress.com

WordPress makes the creation of blogs easier and enables both beginners and professionals to create engaging blogs with modern design. The platform offers responsive themes, website statistics, built-in SEO, social media integration, and sharing features. With WordPress, bloggers don’t need to worry about complying with clients’ demands. The service helps create a modern site and customize it with content, features, and branding.

The platform provides its users with hundreds of design options, color schemes, and advanced design tools, so your blog will definitely satisfy your future readers. Besides, it offers secure hosting, custom CSS, and 24/7 support.

Free plan: Available forever.
Paid plan: From $4 per month for one user.

Wix

Wix offers to build a successful blog with its free plan. The platform allows users to access designer-made templates and built-in features. The website builder’s features include integrated SEO tools, blog post scheduling, embed HTML, and adding categories and hashtags. Besides, it also has an app to provide its services on different devices.

Clients can add writers and editors to a website so that they can help manage blogs, create content, and share blog posts. Bloggers can leverage Wix’s blog name generator, select a domain name, obtain reliable web hosting, and use professional templates to have a strong online presence.

Free plan: Available forever.
Paid plan: From $4.50 per month for one user.

HubSpot

HubSpot is a well-known all-in-one business tool that ranges from an integrated CRM to marketing, sales, service, and obviously content management system (CMS). HubSpot’s drag-and-drop website builder offers a free platform to create and manage your website and blog to build your online presence. It features a drag-and-drop function that allows you to create a website without any prior coding knowledge on top of plenty of ready-to-use templates.

On top of using the platform to write and host your blog, HubSpot also provides tools to optimize your content for SEO and organic traffic along with integrated tools to connect with your website visitors. You can easily add email marketing, customer service tickets, and sales pipelines to provide a synchronous customer experience.

Free plan: Available forever.
Paid plan: From $360 per year

Ghost

Ghost is a service that focuses on professional publishing. It allows users to access native SEO, email newsletters, modern design, and technology. Bloggers can use this editor to ensure a seamless writing experience. Besides, the platform offers to connect with target audiences through built-in registration forms, subscriptions, payments, and more.

Users don’t need any additional plugins, extensions, or codes to share their content on social media. Moreover, bloggers can leverage the automated publication setup to save time.

This platform invites users to check its rich library of new themes. Ghost also doesn’t leave its clients without a detailed report on their blogs’ performance. That’s why its team developed native engagement analytics that allows bloggers to monitor which content drives the most attention and understand their target audience.

Free plan: 14-day trial.
Paid plan: $9 per month for one user billed annually.

Congrats, now you know the advantages of blogging, great platforms to create an engaging website, and ways to receive income. If you are well-versed in a certain industry and are considering starting a blog, just give it a try. When you succeed, you’ll reap many benefits.

Resources:

1. This article uncovers the benefits of blogging for business.
2. This article shows 30 ways to make money blogging.
3. In this article, you’ll find the best free blogging platforms.

Last Updated: 08.02.2024