Blogging Complete Course for Beginners | How to Start Blogging & Earn Money
Start Your Own Blog And Start Earning?
- Select a Niche: Choose a specific topic or niche for your blog to attract a target audience and establish expertise.
- Create Compelling Content: Produce high-quality, engaging content relevant to your chosen niche to keep readers coming back [1].
- Build an Online Presence: Utilize social media and other platforms to promote your blog and increase visibility.
- Monetize Your Blog: Explore various monetization strategies, including advertising, sponsored content, and affiliate marketing [4].
- Optimize for Search Engines: Improve your blog's visibility on search engines through SEO techniques.
- Engage with Your Audience: Foster a community around your blog by responding to comments and interacting on social media.
- Stay Consistent: Regularly update your blog with fresh content to maintain reader interest and improve search rankings.
🌐 Sources
- Adobe - How to Start a Blog and Make Money
- RyRob - How to Start a Blog (and Make Money) in 2023
- Forbes - How To Start A Blog And Make Money In 2023
- Google AdSense - How To Make Money Blogging
- Wix - How to Make Money Blogging (Complete Free Guide)
- Neil Patel - How to Start a Blog That Makes You Money
Building a profitable blog is hardly an easy feat. To start generating a meaningful income from your... [+] blog this year, it takes more than just great content. Here's how to do it.
Arnel Hasanovic on Unsplash
When it comes to starting your own side hustle, few opportunities are more enticing (and low-cost) than launching your own blog.
After all, there are countless stories of bloggers who went from zero to making tens of thousands of dollars each month, eventually turning their part-time blogs into a full-time career. I know because I've done this myself. Today, my blog generates over $50,000 per month on the side of my day job.
While I've been able to successfully grow my blogging income to a sizable figure, it took a lot of experimentation, work and winning habits over the course of years during my nights and weekends.
To build a meaningful level of income from your blog, it requires more than just quality content. There's a lot that goes into attracting readers, building an engaged audience and then finding the best ways to monetize your blog in a win-win fashion with those readers.
The good news is that it can still be done today—and you don’t even need to resort to strategies like running boring ads on your blog in order to accomplish it. As I’ve talked about in a recent interview with Brian Dean, founder of Backlinko, and a recent conversation with Chad MacKay, CEO of LinkTrust, today’s bloggers have more opportunities than ever before to monetize their content. Here's how to do it.
Though commanding a knowledge of the nitty-gritty tactics are important for eventually monetizing your blog, Dean notes during our conversation that taking the “10,000-foot view” is vital for setting the right foundations for your blog in the first place.
“The first thing I’d focus on is positioning,” he explains. “If you jump into the tactics without nailing this part first, it’s going to be a huge struggle moving forward. The first thing you want to do is look at your blog like a product or brand, and ask yourself what’s going to make your blog different than what’s already out there.”
Dean elaborates using an example, “If you’re launching a fitness blog, why would someone choose to read your fitness blog over all the others out there? Maybe you teach moms. Maybe you teach SaaS founders. Maybe you teach people that are already built, how to get that much more built. Or maybe you teach people that used to be fit, how to get back in shape. The point is, you want to have a positioning that’s really unique and helps you stand out from the crowd. Then you can create content that’s amazing and backs it up.”
Finding a unique niche within your industry will be vital for attracting the audience that'll help you build revenue in the first place.
2. Invest In High Quality Designs
What you write is important, but it's far from the only attribute that gets people interested in your blog. In fact, Dean says that investing in a visually appealing layout design has been his greatest investment in creating a successful, well-monetized blog.
“Very early on, I started hiring people to help me with the design of my blog," he explains. "As time went on, I realized it helped the blog stand out, it helped my content be unique, and it helped more people share—it was a huge differentiator. Most people aren’t willing to spend a lot on design because it's expensive for great designers. Looking back on all the money that I've put into my blog, that’s the one I've gotten the most out of.”
The Internet can be a very superficial place. High-quality graphics, beautiful images and a thoughtful visual layout are all absolute musts for building a loyal audience that wants to return and continue reading from your blog.
3. Monetize Early With Affiliate Marketing
With the right foundation for attracting a loyal readership in place, you’re ready to dive into specific monetization channels.
One of the most popular methods of doing this today, is affiliate marketing. By partnering with a brand’s affiliate program to surface their relevant product (or service) to your readers, you can earn a commission when someone from your audience clicks through and buys that product or service.
“Bloggers are frequently some of the most successful affiliate marketers out there,” MacKay notes. “Their niche knowledge and expertise make them trusted sources of information. When they share a link as part of a product review or list it as a resource they've utilized, their readers pay attention. It's also a great opportunity for bloggers to see which items resonate with their audience if they are planning on eventually selling their own products or services.”
The right affiliate programs can prove extremely valuable, as evidenced by the fact that they're the main driver of my blogging income, but remember that you're required to be transparent about the use of affiliate links, as not to deceive or confuse your audience.
4. Create Your Own Product (Or Service)
What starts as a simple blog can quickly grow into a full-time business venture when you offer your own relevant products or services to excited readers.
This is how many of the most successful bloggers earn the bulk of their income—through sales of online courses, books, training programs, coaching packages, software tools or otherwise. Still, it's crucial to develop a proper understanding of what your audience is looking to solve, in order to make money this way.
“You should evaluate your past successes and failures with affiliate marketing and basic content before trying to promote your own product or service,” MacKay recommends. “This will give you a better idea of which digital or physical products will be the best fit for your audience. An online course may be ideal for one blogger, but a disaster for another. Make sure your offerings match your blog’s unique positioning and your audience’s needs.”
There are countless options at your disposal today, so it's important to do your research and determine which products or services you can provide, that'll also appeal to your current readership.
5. Optimize Your Blog For User Intent
During our interview, Dean noted that Google is increasingly optimizing for user intent when determining which articles they feature in search results.
He explains, “There’s a post on my blog that’s optimized around the keyword ‘SEO campaign.’ The old post was a long-form case study of how I helped someone execute an SEO campaign. It covered every step, every email they sent, every keyword phrase, but it didn’t do well because people searching for ‘SEO campaign’ didn’t want to just read through a long case study.”
So, Dean decided to research what his readers were actually looking for.
“They wanted a step-by-step plan that they could follow that wasn’t one person’s experience that they don’t necessarily know how to apply to their own projects. So, I changed the post to talk about how to set up and execute a step-by-step campaign. Before, this post wasn't even on the first page; now it’s number one on Google for that keyword with no extra promotion work.”
By better understanding what type of information your readers want and tailoring your content and products to them, you'll achieve higher SEO rankings—and thus a greater number of loyal readers over time. This will lead to more lucrative affiliate marketing opportunities and more meaningful ideas for your own products or services to sell.
There's no doubt that earning money from a blog will require a lot of time and effort.
Focus on striving to learn what will best appeal to your readers, so that your monetization efforts don’t just drive your audience away.
As you leverage these techniques and experiment with your offers over time, the reality of becoming a successful blogger will be within reach.
The Definitive Guide To Starting Your Own Media Company
Feature / December 13, 2023
How to throw off the corporate shackles and launch an independent news outlet.
So you want to start your own media company.
This is a bad idea. We are qualified to say this because we have done it. As founding members of two new, worker-owned media companies (Discourse Blog and Defector Media), we are begging you not to do this. Maybe open a bakery, or open a dog sanctuary, or even go back to law school! If it is too late for you—if you (like us) did not heed this warning and stuck by your silly little dreams of making the media ecosystem a healthier, more interesting place—then at least don’t repeat the mistakes others have made before you.
You might have noticed that very few of the upstart publishers of the social media age have survived: Just in the past few years, companies like Bustle Digital Group have either closed entire publications (RIP again, Gawker) or, like HuffPost, merged into the holdings of BuzzFeed (which itself has shuttered its news division). Things aren’t much better in legacy media: The Washington Post is owned by one of the richest men in the world. Yet even though the paper’s operating costs amount to pocket change for Jeff Bezos, reporters at the Post still face near-annual rounds of layoffs and buyouts.
In all likelihood, you’re among the thousands of journalists who have been canned in the past couple of decades as the Googles, Apples, and Facebooks of the world ate everyone’s lunch (and then some). The insane idea of starting, running, and, God help you, living off the money you make from the media company you built yourself has its own appeal when the typical routes to a livelihood keep disappearing. Is it really a saner option to get back in line for one of the 12 jobs left in journalism—only to get laid off two years later?
Or maybe you’ve survived the layoffs and are making ends meet in your incredibly shrinking newsroom, with dwindling resources to do the work of two (or three or four or 16) people, and have reached your breaking point. Perhaps you’ve been toiling for far too long as a permalancer, subsisting on contracts from a publisher who never seems to be able to bring you on full-time. Or you’re freelancing, watching all the places you used to pitch die slow and painful deaths, taking with them the trickle of income you had left.
We started our own media companies after our newsroom was sold to private equity—chop shops for businesses, but the suits wear $800 down vests—and the workers were either let go or forced to endure a torrent of bullshit that eventually compels you to quit. We’re here to tell you that what we did might have seemed insane—but it was worth taking the leap. Here’s what we learned.
TO BEGIN, YOU MUST FIRST BECOME CURSED
The real key to starting your own media company is to become as traumatized as possible by the media. Our journey with the evils and dangers of the industry began before either of us could legally drink. In the early 2010s, we worked together at a college newspaper that (in retrospect) projected a metaphorical blinking red sign that read “Do not go into journalism” on every wall of the basement we worked in. The college newspaper did not have enough money. The pages of the print edition were chopped every quarter. We paid our staff writers nothing. We worked full-time, many of us piling up personal debt just to work there in between classes. This, we thought, was “paying our dues.” It turned out to be the perfect preparation for the burgeoning new-media industry!
After graduation, we made our way to New York. We worked and wrote for various blogs—from Gothamist to The Awl to Fusion.Net—that are now dead or mere husks. We lived through the pivot to Facebook, the pivot to video, the pivot to uniques, the pivot to Google News. None of these pivots made our writing any better or our mental health any stronger. The pivots themselves were bad business—for journalism, if not for the platforms. The companies we worked for lost money. We were laid off (more than once). Every single workplace we have ever shared has gone down in flames. The last jobs that we held at the same company were at Gizmodo Media Group (later G/O Media) in 2019: Aleks at Splinter and Kelsey at Deadspin. We made a joke about how we’d be lucky if it lasted a year. Within six months, both of our sites were dead—Splinter after being bled dry, stripped of resources, and thrown off a cliff overnight, and Deadspin after C-suite editorial interference so egregious that the entire staff quit en masse.
We recommend this process. Not only will it cost you thousands of dollars in therapy bills, but it’s a great crash course in how not to run a media company. Who needs an MBA when you can watch a lot of doofuses with MBAs drive perfectly profitable companies into the ground? You can’t buy that kind of experience, but you will in fact pay for it.
BE A POPULAR GENIUS
You will need so many more things than you’ll realize, but to get started, you really only need two things: (1) an idea for what you want your company to be, and (2) friends.
Does the idea need to be “good”? Hopefully! Would it help if you had a distinctive approach or point of view to differentiate yourself? Sure. Mostly, though, it has to be a framework you can see yourself living with for (ideally) a long time. How do you get an idea for what your company should be? Please return to step one. The terror of working in the industry (or even reading anything from a major newspaper or one of the few blogs that still exist) will show you how many holes there are in the media ecosystem. Surely one of them is interesting enough for you to try and fill. Defector chose sports, and Discourse Blog chose politics and birds, but we are sure there’s an audience of readers out there for any topic, be it books or fine art or pickleball or brain surgery.
Now about those “friends”: They should be people you are comfortable owning a company with. We chose to form our companies with the coworkers we knew well from having worked together for years, almost all of whom we are trauma-bonded to. That’s beautiful.
When you know everyone’s deal, it can be easier to reach consensus on difficult decisions. You do not have to do it this way. But think hard about who you want to put your name next to on official documents that say: “WE OWN THIS BUSINESS AND ITS PROBLEMS TOGETHER.” Don’t just think about who you want to be a part of the big party you want to throw for surviving five years—think about who is going to make you feel comfortable and secure when you’re forced, in your first few years of existence, to survive both a pandemic and a global recession, too.
Ad Policy BUILD A FOUNDATION
Now that you have your idea and your pals, get everyone together and start talking. Take notes. You don’t have to figure everything out to get started, but you should talk about the big-picture items: What is our media company called? What do we stand for? Who does what? When do we want to launch, and how?
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As you make your plans, figure out your timeline and decide who is responsible for doing what and when. Focus on the truly structural elements, to start with, and resist getting bogged down in the day-to-day details like posting schedules or headline conventions. That all comes in due time. For now, concentrate on the big picture.
This will involve more discussion than you realize, and there will be disagreements. It could take a few weeks or even months to reach a consensus. Something we’ve found helpful is trying to make decisions from a place of active solidarity, where everyone can be OK with an option even if it isn’t their first choice. But getting to that point requires some amount of fighting and debate. You might be seeing friends in a new light (business owners), and that might be very different from how you already know them (weirdo journalists). Some people might decide this isn’t for them.
But everyone should try and be honest about what their limits are. This is when you get everything out in the open.
LEARN ABOUT MONEY
OK, so you have an idea, and you have friends. You’re an innovator, even. You are the future of the media business! Good start, but famously, businesses need money. How are you going to pay for all this? How will you turn a profit? Subscriptions? Ads? Car washes?
Should you find yourself in the enviable position of being able to start your own company free of conflict and rich in capital, then by all means, go ahead. But if you are not the progeny of the elite, then you may have noticed: Writers and editors aren’t usually paid particularly well, at least not compared with the people who laid them off. To choose to work in media is to trade the ability to buy a new couch for the knowledge of what every single meme means.
So you’re likely not flush with cash. There’s a good chance you’ll have to work evenings and weekends launching your new company, probably without any money at first. This could be prohibitive for many people, and it certainly wasn’t easy for us. We helped build Discourse Blog and Defector Media between freelance assignments and day jobs. In short, we still have to make ends meet, silly dreams and all. For a lot of us, these sites are not yet our only source of income. You need to be prepared for the fact that even if you do manage to get your company going, it might not make enough for you to live off its revenue alone. Only you can decide whether the risk is worth it.
PLEASE, FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, DO NOT TRY TO DO THE BUSINESS YOURSELFAfter watching a ton of dreary men in gingham shirts and khakis destroy the companies you love, it is easy to believe that businesspeople don’t do anything and aren’t helpful. This idea has a lot of potential, until you begin asking your fellow writers and editors if they know how to look up how much they have in their 401(k), or even if they know how to navigate a spreadsheet. One major decision you have to make as a company is whether you are going to file your taxes as W-2 employees or W-9 employees or K-1 employees. If you don’t know what those terms mean, you can’t do this on your own. You need to pay some businesspeople to help you. Not everyone with an MBA is so bad!
One option is to try and persuade someone who knows anything about money (fundraising, tax codes, business shit) to join your janky pirate ship full-time. This may work, but it may not. It is worth a shot, because one businessperson is worth 82 bloggers. Do not tell them this. They will get a big head. Also, you can’t afford to pay them that difference.
But at the absolute minimum, you will need a lawyer, to prevent you from getting sued; an accountant, to prevent you from getting sued and keep you from giving the government every single dollar you make; and someone who understands how things like paychecks and invoices work.
Unfortunately, finding this person will also require you to do something called “decision-making matrices.” Don’t worry—the MBA-havers will know what this means. It’s just a framework that will help you decide what powers people have within the company and what checks exist on them.
It is important not to repeat the mistakes of the rich dudes who came before you. Do not take money from venture capitalists. Do not seek riches beyond your wildest expectations. This is journalism, after all! No businessperson (or team) can do magic. No media company can scale itself to infinite profit forever. At their absolute best, profitable media companies will make ends meet. The ideal situation here is enough stability to allow everyone to quit their second job. That’s the best-case scenario.
THE PART YOU KNOW HOW TO DO: GET POSTING
It is a media worker’s dream to have full power over what your website looks like. There’s no one imposing restrictions on your work! There’s no dude who just bought the company asking you if you’ve considered posting about the start time of the Super Bowl! No, Josh, we hadn’t considered doing the exact same thing as every other company!
There is no Josh here at your own media company. There is only you.
Still, the power to post what you want is daunting: The website becomes an empty document, taunting you, reminding you how much opportunity and beauty could exist if you just stopped being so scared. It is helpful, we have found, to set boundaries to work within. The infinite space of the blank page is too intimidating. You have to figure out what you want your main focus to be, what tone you want that coverage to carry, how often you want to publish, what time of day (or night) you want to publish, and what you think readers will want.
Writing, editing, planning, publishing—you know, those tasks everyone always complains about doing—is the easiest part of this process. This step (the second-to-last on this long list) is the easiest because you already know how to do it. This is the part of your job that’s second nature, which is why it comes so late in this handy guide. It is easy to get bogged down in these fun questions instead of doing the active work to set up your company to succeed. But don’t worry: You can fight about what to post, and when, and with what frequency for the rest of your company’s existence! How lucky!
Planning is important, but planning past the point of productivity is procrastination. No amount of planning can save you from launching your website with a typo in a headline, or only realizing later that no one knows how to obtain health insurance.
There are so many steps before this one that it could be easy to never get here. You must roam through the terrible halls of your brain for weeks, maybe months or years, to find your good ideas. Your friends might be busy. Your money problems might feel insurmountable. But at some point, you must declare it good enough. No starting position will be so good that it can prevent failure. You must face the terror of being seen. You must launch your website and try. No more dilly-dallying.
Very quickly, you will realize the true benefit of working for a major media company that could lay you off at any time: isolation from tiny problems. Sure, the big companies will restrict your freedom of speech, refuse to give you cost-of-living raises, try to police what you do in your personal time, edit your work into a bland shell of what it started off as, and one day at random kick you out of Slack as a signal that you’ve been laid off before they even call you—but at least when you work for a corporation, it is someone else’s problem when the homepage isn’t working on your smartphone, or a button doesn’t work, or the entire site is suddenly taken over by a pop-up ad without any warning. Unfortunately, all those problems are your problems now. You are the one who has to help your colleagues find health insurance. You are the one who has to figure out how to get people to subscribe, troubleshoot when not enough do, and make plans to try and reduce the dreaded “churn.” Everything is your job now: the blogs and the backlash and the W-9s or W-2s or K-1s or whatever.
We tried to warn you at the start. We tried to tell you that this would be miserable and difficult and suck up every single minute of your free time. But if you’ve gotten this far, you may be a lost cause like us. You may have a silly little dream, and all you want to know is: Is it worth it?
Of course it is.
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Kelsey McKinney
Kelsey McKinney is a writer and co-owner at Defector and the host of the Normal Gossip podcast.
Aleksander Chan
Aleksander Chan is the publisher and co-owner of Discourse Blog and the former editor in chief of Splinter.
The story you just read is made possible by a dedicated community of Nation reader-supporters who give to support our progressive, independent journalism. A generous supporter has agreed to match all donations up to $100,000 from now until the end of the year. Make a contribution before 12/31 and double your impact. Donate today!
How To Start A Blog – Tips From A Professional Writer
Maya Angelou once said “there is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you” and if you feel the same, perhaps you should start a blog.
Blogging can be a great way to express yourself, build a community around something you love, or even make an income. But how do you start a blog? The Content Team at Simply Business are here to share their best tips and tricks for writing online.
From coming up with ideas, structuring your posts, and a look at the best blogging platforms out there – we’ve got you covered.
How to name a blog
Before you even begin writing your first post, it’s important to give your blog a name. The name of your blog will be the first thing your readers see, giving them an indication of the type of content they can expect to read.
This means that you should use words that relate to your theme or chosen topic. If your blog is about baking, use some terms related to that. Or if your blog is all about showcasing your latest gardening projects, a nature-themed name can help show what your blog is about from the first glance. If you need some inspiration, using an online blog name generator could help.
It can also be a good idea to use popular keywords so your blog comes up in search results (we’ll talk more about SEO optimisation later in this article). Try to strike a balance between popular search terms and words that will resonate with your target audience.
Make sure your blog name is catchy and easy to remember. But most importantly, make sure it’s a name that you like. This will be part of your brand identity so it’s important that you feel it reflects your brand and what you want to be known for.
Blog writing tips – how to write a blog
Now that you’ve named your blog, it’s time to write your first blog post. Here are a couple of things you’ll need to think about before you get started.
Choose a topic
You need to choose a topic that you’re passionate about – especially if you’re going to be writing about this topic regularly. There are many different reasons you may choose to start a blog – perhaps it’s a form of advertising for your business, a way to make a living as a writer, or maybe you’re just passionate about words.
Whatever the reason, it’s important to choose a blog topic that you’re interested in so you can commit to a regular posting schedule and put out good quality content – so choose something that you’re both knowledgeable and passionate about.
For example, the writers here on the Knowledge centre are all experts on business topics – but we each have areas of business that we’re passionate about and interested in.
Conor Shilling is our go-to guy on the buy-to-let market.
Catriona Smith is passionate about tax, marketing, and business operations.
Zach Hayward-Jones, who previously worked as a pastry chef, loves digging deep into topics surrounding the hospitality industry.
And Rosanna Parrish loves writing about HR news and side hustles – including blogging tips.
If you’re starting a blog to gain exposure for your writing and don’t have a set topic in mind, a consistent theme in your writing can help you to build your readership.
Article structure
When it comes to writing a blog post, how you structure it is just as important as what you’re saying. Always start with a compelling introduction to entice the reader to keep reading. The following paragraphs should be organised into individual points.
Make sure you’re using headings, subheadings, and bullet points to keep the reader engaged. Large chunky pieces of text can be off putting for readers, so it’s important to keep your content digestible. Using images and graphics can also help to break up your words.
You should always conclude your blog with a CTA, or call to action. This drives your reader to wherever you want them to go next. This could be a related blog post you think they’ll enjoy, a product page, or links to your social media.
Blog posts on the Knowledge centre are roughly between 1000-1500 words long and all end with a CTA to a related page.
Best time to publish a blog postThere’s been many studies over the years about when the best time to publish a blog post is. But unfortunately, there isn’t one simple answer. The ideal time to post on your blog will depend on your audience.
To find the best time to publish posts on your own blog, you should use website analytic tools to identify your peak traffic times. You can also experiment with different publishing times and track when your audience is the most active and engaged.
Best day to publish a blog post
Much like the best time to publish a blog post, the best day to publish a blog post will depend on your blog’s audience. However, studies by both Shareaholic and Kissmetrics revealed that Monday was the best day to publish a blog post – so this could be a good day to start with.
Best platform to start a blog
The next step is to decide where to host your blog. There are plenty of blog hosting platforms available nowadays, so what you choose will come down to personal preference.
Things to consider include your technical skills, the features you need, and your long-term blog goals.
Here are just some of the most popular blogging platforms.
Wordpress
Wordpress offers a user-friendly blogging experience. Because it’s so popular, there’s a wide variety of plugins available which can help enhance your experience – such as SEO and analytics tools. You can choose a free subdomain or even pay for your own custom domain, which can add authority.
Wordpress has two options: Wordpress.Com which is hosted by Wordpress and Wordpress.Org which allows you to self-host your blog – whatever you choose will depend on your technical skills, with the .Com option being better for beginners.
Blogger
Another popular option, Blogger is owned by Google and is one of the most straightforward blogging platforms available. Rosanna's first blog was hosted on Blogger and she feels it was a great place to start writing for the web.
There are plenty of templates available meaning you don’t have to have any experience designing for the web. But if you do want to add additional features, you can choose from a list of ‘widgets’.
A great selling point of Blogger is how it links to Google AdSense, meaning you can easily begin to monetise your posts as a side hustle.
Medium
Medium is an interesting blogging platform because it’s all about distribution and engagement. Medium promotes articles hosted on the platform, making it a great opportunity for you to engage with blog posts from other writers. This has the added benefit of a built-in distribution system for your own posts.
If lots of Medium members like and engage with your content, you may even get the option to join the Partner Program and earn money from your posts.
If you want to just focus on your writing without having to worry about website management – as well as be a part of a larger blogging community – Medium is a great choice.
Blogging on your website
If blogging is part of your wider business strategy, you also have the option to host a blog on your company website. This can be a great option if your blogs support products you sell or services you offer.
Read our guide on setting up a website to learn more.
Newsletter or blog?
One popular option that many writers are looking towards nowadays is forgoing the blog and instead starting a newsletter on a platform such as Substack. While more traditional blogs can be better for complex content and those interested in SEO, starting a newsletter could be better for you if:
you create simple content
you want to focus only on writing
you want the option to monetise your writing through subscriptions
Another option is to use both platforms: with your blog focusing on more in-depth content and your newsletter for quicker updates. For example, the Simply Business newsletter features monthly roundups of posts from our blog.
Promote your blog
Now that you’ve written your posts, it’s time to get your blog out there and build up a readership. Here are a couple of things to consider.
SEO for blogging
One way you can start to build an audience for your blog is by using SEO techniques. SEO, or search engine optimisation, is about using relevant keywords to appear higher on search engines.
If you’re writing a blog about a specific topic, this gives you a great basis for figuring out your keywords.
If you’re interested in learning more about SEO, we’ve listed some of the best SEO tools for small businesses in our guide.
Promote on social media
If you’re serious about growing your blog, you also need to think about post distribution. Sharing your blog posts on your social media channels can help make sure that no one misses them.
Posting on social media also gives the opportunity for others to share your posts through reposting – while comments and likes will always boost your engagement.
Remember to include posting on social media as a final step whenever you post a blog.
How to make money from blogging
Some of the blogging platforms we’ve mentioned have built in ways to monetise your writing but there’s still a couple of other things you could try.
If you have a large enough following, one way to earn money is through affiliate marketing – with people paying you to promote their products. You can also consider writing guest posts for other blogs in your industry.