After you’ve been blogging for a while on a regular basis, it may be time to consider making something substantial of your hobby. If you adopt the proper strategies and apply suitable dedication to your blog, you could make a comfortable living from it.
Many have managed it before you. Some even make six figures from the effort, although to be fair, this group totals only about 1 percent of all the bloggers out there.
It’s impossible to say how much you’re apt to make from your blog, but it’s worth contemplating. “How much you could make would depend on several factors, including how often you blog, the quality of your content, how competitive your topic is, and how effective you are at building an audience and generating traffic,” says blogger Melanie Pinola of Lifehacker. “Plus a generous sprinkling of luck.”
If you aspire to transform your blog into a sustainable way to make a living, you have to start with a proper plan. Here are some tips to help you achieve your goals.
1. Write Your Business Plan
When you step from casual blog to business, writing content whenever you feel like it is no longer enough. You have to set a schedule.
If you’ve never launched a company, it can be helpful to “start a business checklist,” which includes everything you’ll need before your business gets underway, including your company name, social media presence, the format of your firm, financials, operations, and more.
Be thorough and detailed with your business plan so there’s no question about how to reach success. If you’ve never written a business plan before, search for templates online or ask friends who have done it before. You won’t regret having a detailed plan to set a clear guide for your business.
2. Find Ways to Monetize
The most vital portion of the business plan is your monetization strategy, which must be well-designed and executed. There are many ways to monetize a blog; one of the most common is through affiliate marketing.
“If you have some following, you can pitch other people’s products and can get a commission on every referral sale,” Sumit Bansal, found of Trump Excel, told BusinessNewsDaily. “You can also use many amazing affiliate networks such as Amazon or eBay or Clickbank to refer their products and make a cut on every sale.”
It’s not too difficult to get started and to sustain the effort. As long as you’re authentic with each promotion, you shouldn’t have any problems maintaining your following.
“Alternatively, you can sell your ad space to other brands in your niche,” Bansal said. “This can help you generate good recurring income.”
Allowing ads to appear on your blog necessitates a level of balance that keeps the blog looking productive and professional while enabling you to generate income. As a rule, you don’t want to accept any ads your target audience wouldn’t benefit from. The goal is to keep your followers engaged with your content and prevent the site from looking spammy.
3. Develop Consistent Content
Once your hobby blog becomes a business, you can’t take a break from blogging whenever you feel like it. You owe it to the audience to publish content at regular intervals; you’ll struggle to generate income from it if you can’t maintain a steady flow.
Design an editorial calendar that designates the days you’ll post each month and the names of the pieces you’ll publish. Experts offer mixed reviews about how often one should be posting to keep an audience engaged.
The standard used to be that you should post daily, but modern marketers have begun to disagree with that benchmark. Dries Conje of SmartBlogger says that posting daily could actually destroy your social proof, make it harder to bond with your readers, and lower your subscriber count.
“Scarcity breeds value. Abundance doesn’t,” Conje explains. Instead, he promotes careful planning of your posts, and adds that you should only publish a new blog post when you have a quality piece worth publishing.
“A remarkable post is almost always a well-planned post,” he says. “If you post only once every two months, but the content is truly awesome, you will be much more successful than someone publishing crappy posts every day.”
You should try to post at least once every couple of weeks, though. Create an editorial calendar that encourages you to post high-quality content, then spend enough time on each piece to make it worthwhile.
The three steps above are the essentials for making a blog into a successful business. The rest entails promoting yourself on social media, building your email list, and maintaining a consist flow of content that will keep your audience engaged for years to come.
With the proper planning and steady effort on your part, you could be on your way to becoming a member of the one percent of bloggers who earn six figures a year.
