Hello everyone. How’s the day treating you? Blogging is a great way to express your thought. Many blog for hobby, few treat it as a business by making money online. If your hobby blog turning into a profession, here are few things that you must have. If you want to be a successful blogger, these are the few things that you should be prepared as a site owner. How to prepare for the transition from a hobby blogger to a professional? Apart from staying organized, writing top quality content, etc. What should a professional website owner have for his focused career?
1. Planning Goals & Understanding
It is very easy to start a website and setup up. But if you really want to rank, earn & do something, then you need lot of changes. Planning is very essential before you start and setup a website. Before picking up a domain, you need to plan out things. Ask yourself few questions like ‘how am I going to make money from this site’, what search terms do I want to rank it for; what am I going to offer for the readers etc. By doing this in before, you are setting up goals; you save time ultimately and focus on the approach when you get in with full flow.
The understanding part of a website should be very clear before you set up. The structure and design should be made clean-cut. Once you’re in with the content and marketing, the functionality of your site shouldn’t be a problem in your path. Understand all other things the website is related with such as analytics, widgets, etc. Plan out everything, understand it better and finish it off neatly.
2. Business Contacts
When you’re ready to make money, your Business contacts should be very helpful to you. Having a list of people you can rely on with different skill sets can give you the upper hand and help you achieve your goals. You may be the king in marketing, but cannot design or code and vice versa. So have plenty of people to contact and get the work done easily. You can also look out for a joint venture partner to your business. Finding the right ones might take a while, but when you have found it’s great for your online business. Dealing with your skilled business contacts (communication) is a separate chapter that I would like to discuss with you in the next post.
3. Ability to Change
As you all know, the web is moving fast. With the day to day changes happening on Facebook, Twitter – you need to have the ability to change according to it. Change doesn’t always have to be driven by something that happens outside of your control. You should be ready to accept and ability to change at any point in the business.
4. Tracking
Tracking? As a site owner you must track all the changes. Not only the traffic, but also you should know other things about your site. Where does the traffic come from? How much traffic do you get? Do the visitors stay on the site? For how long? Knowing this information will help your site grow as well to target your goals. You can target your audience, advertise in the right place and increase conversion rate. You can always use Google Analytics, a free tool to track the website. If your website deals with customers and products, then you should track sales, conversions, sign ups – it will help you know how much you sell, to who etc. Each and every thing that you place on your site should be tracked. It helps you to know your site & your readers mind better.
5. Marketing
Marketing is a continuity of the above mentioned point. When you track your site, you come to know what sort of products is more clicked by the visitor and how many are converted into sales. When you start driving traffic to your site and tracking products, what happens if they don’t buy what you are selling? You should always offer each and every visitor something. If you sell your product, then avail discounts. If you find that visitors don’t buy your product, then avail a free product with it. Give special discounts to members, blog readers, loyal Facebook/Twitter social fans. In marketing a product, if you want to make money online? Then start building a list of likeminded people.
6. Backup
Hosting companies are not always 100% reliable so it is absolutely necessary that you back up your site on a regular basis. The emails, databases are the main thing that needs to back up. Also, the backed up files must be stored in your local PC as well a copy of it on cloud server. This is a general rule that you always backup 2 copies. One to your local PC and another to the cloud which can be retrieved anywhere, anytime.
7. Control
Every site owner should have full control over their website. This includes the domain, hosting, site files, customer list etc. Make sure you spend as little on domain and hosting instead of going with free domain names and hosting. Because, you could create a very profitable site but all it takes is for the company to go bust, stop operating and you are left with nothing. So always go with a reputed domain and hosting registrars. Just a small suggestion, as you’re going to treat the blog as your business, pay upfront for the domains and hosting for minimum 2-3 years. This will get you some discounts and a tension free to monthly bills etc. Sometimes when you forget to pay bills, your blog is at risk.
8. Time Management
As a site owner you should know how to manage your time. Sitting with loads of email and spending the whole day to it, is not how professionals work. Organize your emails, label them. Make the important emails by setting a forward to mobile phones. These days, smartphones plays an important role in time managing. You can get your work done on the move. Schedule tasks such as backing up, site tracking, sales tracking, goal analysis, action plan etc.
Do you have any other tips for bloggers who make money online? Feel free to share them on comments below.
Very essential tips for all the bloggers. The blogger need to posses all the capabilities in order to be a successful one.
This article is absolutely helpful for me. I have different websites and I’m really having a hard time managing them. Will share this to friends and family. Thanks!
Hi great post i really appreciate the must haves to make money hope you will like my posts http://bloggersinspiration.com/blogging-tools-for-professional-blogging-2/
This post may turn out to be helpful for many a bloggers who are on the verge of this above-stated transition. Well however its not easy to change as every profession needs some serious commitments, and professional blogging is no exception to it. Rightly has been said in the post that great content is not everything when you talk about Professional Blogging, there are several other things involved. Going through the post I felt that these things are actually required for blogging professionally.
Now this kind of posts I like to read, 2 things I like to always have control over are: backup and time managment. If we loose any of these two we are set back and need to do all over again. When it comes to time, if we don’t manage it properly we can loos whole day and if we loose backup, we can los money for the business.
thanks for sharing Srivathsan
Nice article, I have not started earning yet through blogging but hope I will & surely these tips going to be very useful for me LOL. Time Management & marketing is very important I can say because once we start earning the work burden also gradually increases so we need proper time management for that & without marketing blogs not going to be hit.
Great share , every Blogger must read this and implement it in their Blogging field , the first and foremost point Planning , yes Planning is the basic and strong foundation for Blogging , is the basement is strong then automatically everything comes up good , but for that we need to work up really harder. Awesome write up 🙂
Great article! You should take blogging serious if you want to make money out of it..
Very good post, i think ability to change and experimenting with our blogs are must have to that will teach us very well to handle any problem if we face after Google Panda or Penguin Update because if afraid of these Updates then we have to ready to face this. Ability of tracking help a lot to see what is going wrong with our blog.
Thank you so much Kulwinder Singh 🙂
Well the main thing for bloggers is time management as you have mentioned in the last paragraph to gain the profit from blogging.
These are great tips for every blogger, Srivathsan. Thanks for sharing these tips in your article, I am sure by applying them, we will be able to build better blogs!
thank you so much Jasmine 🙂
Hi
absolutely right, its very easy process to start & set up a website but its also very tuff task to manage business. Planning is best key to set up a Business or bloggers but how it can be managed it depends on owner. At this current time Social Media is well performing like facebook, twitter & myspace etc. These Social Media network keep changing something so it also matter to Ability to Change for a blog or business owner.
Time Management and Ability to change are must for every bloggers. In addition to this he has Searching capacity and Smart thinking .
Valid points. what do you mean by searching capacity ? advanced searching techniques ?
Hey bro. I liked the post. You’re right time management is one thing we should learn. And the most, planning, that’s what we need to do to achieve more success in our field…
thank you so much 🙂