Blogging is one of the most popular ways for a person to build a platform on the Internet. As more and more people spend a majority of their waking hours connected, it is more important than ever to have a strong online presence. Generally, when people start a blog they will continue to write for several weeks and then their passion fades. There are several things that people can do in order to drive traffic to their blog. However, the number one thing to do to create or start a blog is to be passionate about the subject you intend to write about. There is absolutely no substitute for passion, and when a writer has a love for the subject that he or she is writing about that energy is going to translate in to the blog.
Picking A Subject You Are Passionate About
In order to make a blog interesting, a prospective blogger must pick a subject to write about. The number one thing to do when starting a blog is to pick a subject that you are passionate about. Many times, people have subjects that interest them in life. However, there are few subjects that people are generally passionate about. When a blogger is passionate about a subject, he or she will enjoy writing about it after a long day of work. When someone writes about a subject just to get page clicks, the passion and work over time will fade and so will the readers. Think long and hard before picking a subject and make sure it is something that you are truly passionate about. With more than five years experience blogging, one of the most consistent things I have seen in this field is bloggers writing on a popular subject and getting burned out. It is true that if you have Justin Bieber or Beyonce keywords in your blog that it will get more hits, but if that is not something you have passion for it will only be temporary.
Driving Traffic
One of the main reasons that people start a blog is to drive traffic to their site, build an audience, and then interact with that audience. Having a blog with a lot of traffic opens the doors to a lot of other opportunities in life, both from an income perspective and also from a networking view. You will be surprised at how diverse your audience will be when first starting a blog. It is not unusual to have over half of the readers be from countries outside of the United States. In order to continuously drive traffic, there are several things that blog owners can do. First of all, make your blog conducive to mobile traffic. With the new search engine algorithms, the main search engines are punishing sites on their rankings for not having mobile friendly sites. Strive to be as high up on search engine rankings as possible by having a good mobile site, keywords, and clicks per visit.
Another good tip that works well in the blogging industry is to offer a free product in exchange for a person signing up for email alerts. For example, if you have a health blog you could make an EBook on how to lose ten pounds in ten days. Allow users to sign up using their email for this EBook and the email addresses connected to your blog will continue to grow. There is a fact of life in the blogging world which is the more email addresses sign up for a site, the higher the traffic, which in turn means higher revenue for the blog owner. Continuously adding value to readers of a blog is the best way to grow and maintain an audience. In addition, once your blogging audience is several thousand readers, continue to interact with those readers even when it starts to get overwhelming. This is another reason it is important to have a blog on a subject you are passionate about so you can continue to interact with readers.
Monetizing a Blog
When you create a blog, at the end of the day the goal is to have a large audience base to drive revenue through. Although there are many ways to do this, when people start out to create a blog they want to be successful at it. Readers of a blog should be treated as if they are going through a funnel. The vast majority of visitors to the site will never purchase anything and will just click through the blog. However, there will be some very engaged readers that will be willing to pay for products or services. Of those that purchase something, there will be a select few of that group willing to pay much higher prices for better products or services. Going back to the example of a health blog, readers may be willing to pay five dollars a month for health coaching in an online group, while ten or twenty readers may be willing to pay one hundred dollars a month for one on one online consulting. However, before monetizing a blog it is important to drive regular and engaged traffic to the site. Overall, always create a blog on a subject you are passionate about and the readers, money, and influence will follow.
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