I will start with what is a blog? A blog is an online personal journal that is updated from time to time. Now the next question is what is blogging? This is simply writing a blog or a way of expressing one’s passion to the world. Let’s go to the next question, Who is a blogger? well, a blogger is someone who owns a blog. Since we are through with the definitions, let’s move to the next phase of our discussion.
Requirements needed to start a blog
To start a blog, there are basic things one has to know before you venture into this type of business. It’s one of the easiest and also complicated things out there. If your expectation is to start a blog as a hobby then you don’t need much professional expertise, but if it’s to make a living from it, then you are at the right place. Let’s get the requirements;
1. PC
2. Internet connection (modem)
3. Domain name
4. Host
5. Time
PC: you must have your own personal computer before kick-off this type of business. No one goes into this by borrowing from friends or going to the cafe.
Internet connection: That’s a must. without the internet there’s no business, so set out some cash for these expenses.
Domain name: A domain name is the name of your website and its what you can be identified with some sort of your address. For example, my domain name is makemoneyland.com. There are many websites that offer these services and it’s very affordable, none of them costs more than $15 per year and some are even as low as $0.99. You can get a domain from this domain companies; 1and1, Godaddy, Hover, Namecheap, Name and many others. I recommend 1and1 as its the cheapest company that sells domains.
Host: Getting a host for your domain name is the next step for you to take. The host is where all your data are stored such as pictures, videos, and audios. Getting a host is important although it depends on the type of blog you want to run, like I earlier stated, if you are blogging for fun or as a hobby then you don’t need high-cost hosting if possible you can use blogger platform which is free. But for professional users, you can use WordPress or blogger but with a custom domain name. Here are some hosting companies you can go for; Hostgator, Bluehost, Ipage, eHost, JustHost and 1and1 that offer the cheapest WordPress hosting.
Time: I added this as a requirement because without time you won’t have focus. Your blog needs your time before it can excel. No one comes to a blog that is updated once in a month or once in two weeks.
What You Should Blog About
This is where most people fail in their blogging journey. They tend to open blogs that have no impact on the readers and in the end they get frustrated. There are contents that don’t have many contributions to one’s life, for example, an entertainment blog, its a nice blog but doesn’t expect many visitors because its already flooded and it doesn’t have much to offer. Here are things you should blog about;
1. Blogs that teach people something new
2. Solve a problem
3. Relieve a fear
4. Guide people on how to reach a goal
6 Best Ways Bloggers Make Money
Making money from your blog is the end product of all your hard work. Let me advise you at this stage, don’t think that blogging is a get rich quick program, cause I can assure you that you will be disappointed. If you’re new to blogging and expect money fast you will be frustrated and may end up destroying your initial hard work, so my advice to you is to get a job while you blog and use the salary from your job to foot the bills at the initial stage. I will present to you a complete list of how to make money from your blog and the in-depth details involved for each of them. Let’s get the ways bloggers make money;
1. Affiliate Marketing: Most bloggers use this method to make a lot of money from their blog and the income from this method is endless. It involves promoting other people’s products and earn a commission per each product bought from you. Examples of companies that offer such services are; Clickbank, Amazon, eBay, Linkshare, ShareASale, Google Affiliate Network and many others.
2. Sponsored Post: This method works only when your blog is popular to an extent. People pay to have you publish a post they sent to you, mostly because they want to reach more audiences through your blog traffic.
3. Advertising Networks: Sometimes called ad networks are companies that acts as a link by connecting advertisers to websites that wants to host advertisements. Today, there are many advertising networks that people find it hard to choose the best for their blog. The most popular here is Google adsense because of their high paying capacity, but there are others too such as; media.net, BuySellAds, Clicksor, Infolinks, Chitika, Bidvertiser, Revenuehits, Revcontent and Adsterra. Most of this ads pay when someone clicks on them through your blog while others some other actions.
4. Selling of Products: Some bloggers open their blog to sell their own products. For example you sell cars, you can run a blog on cars, your updates could be the latest cars, best cars to buy and other related posts about cars. Selling your product method is one of the best way to earn online becuase you don’t depend on any other 3rd party company to make sales. Products you can sell include; eBooks, Online courses/workshops, Apps, plugins, or themes, Images and Videos.
5. Sell Your Services: This is another great way to earn a lot of money as a blogger, are you a web designer, programmer or graphic designer, many people search for things like that online. Bloggers simply open a blog about this topics and when they get enough loyal visitors, they simply sell their services online.
6. Build a Credibility: This option is also related to previous options i stated like selling of products and services. When people know you as a popular figure in a particular niche, then you have built credibility in that field, people won’t be scared to buy the products you recommend or look for your services. The third point i want to add is that at this level, people might approach you to co-author a book on debt management, or you could charge to speak at conferences or to run employee financial training days.
Bonus
Niche: People tend to forget this option when starting a blog. This is what will determine whether you will make it or not. Niche is the category or topic your blog writes about, for example, my blog is all about ways to make money, so heading to a very competitive niche could be a problem in the long run
Create Quality Content: If you want visitors to love and bookmark your blog or subscribe to it, its simple, create quality content and with time you will gain a lot of visitors. When you post content with only about 200 words for a vast topic and another blogger posts the same related content with about 1000 words with a detailed explanation, visitors will love his post more than yours because they got the information they needed and even Google will rank his post better than yours.
Experiment: As a blogger, you don’t have to be afraid to experiment. This helps to guide you to identify your mistakes and know the way forward. Every top blogger today was once a beginner and through experiments they made it.
Note
You cannot make money without traffic on your blog. The visitors that visit your blog generate the income for you so getting traffic is the paramount thing to note about your blog. How to get traffic to your blog depends only on you.
To make money from your blog, you need as much traffic as you can get. We are still on the topic of making money from your blog. Traffic determines all you do in blogging, without it you are just wasting your time. Getting traffic to your blog is one of the hardest things to do and also one the simplest thing to do if the proper technique is used. I will simplify this as simple as possible to make it easy for you to understand. If you have got the cash to spend is very easy, you can simply send it by paying social media websites like Facebook, Twitter and so on, or moreover, you can pay ad companies like Google Adword,Media.net, etc, or you pay to popular websites to advertise for you. But what of those who don’t have anything on them or who don’t want to spend much? Yes, that’s what am here to talk about. Let’s analyze the ways you can do this.
22 Simplest Ways To Get Traffic To Your Blog For Free
1. Type of Niche: Niche is the type of thing you blog about or the interests you are focusing on in your blog. Choosing the right niche is the first step to getting traffic because you have to know your target audience and how many they are. You can’t compare someone who posts about technology with someone whose blog is all about literature books. They can’t have the same traffic when equal input is made within the two blogs. Everyone makes use of technological stuff in one way or the other but not all are interested in literature books. You can check NICHES you can blog about. So choose wisely.
2. SEO: this means search engine optimization, it’s all about making your blog to appear in search engines, I won’t go into much details about this, but just know that posting original content and having a target audience is the first step to succeed in this. The search engine can give you all the traffic you will ever need more than any other means. The Traffic here is from search engines which include Google search, Yahoo search engine, and bing. To get traffic with this method you need to enter a niche that doesn’t have much competition in it.
3. Social Networking sites: you may be surprised how I brought back this topic again since I said you can pay Facebook, Twitter and other social media websites to get traffic from them. Well, it’s not always so, let me explain some simple ways you can make it in social media:
Facebook: One of the best ways to succeed here is by creating a group and making it have many members, make sure the group is talking about what you post in your blog, you can restrict other members from posting there. It’s very simple to invite your friends and tell your friends on Facebook to invite their friends too, you can have up to 5000 members through this means then update it with links to your website. Another means is to share your posts automatically to your wall. There are plugins that can do this automatically for you if you are using WordPress like jet pack, or you can use twitter feed if you using blogger platform.
Twitter: you can increase your twitter followers here and use your profile to share the posts from your blog, include the hashtag that’s trending in twitter concerning your update by adding it to your post, for better tips check my post about how to increase your twitter followers.
Reddit: is a social networking website where you submit your contents which can be text posts or links. It has millions of users and people vote posts submitted, if the post you submitted gets lots of votes it means a lot of traffic to your blog. This website has subreddits which are different topics and each of them has rules. Please read the rules before submitting to that subreddit in other not to get banned.
StumbleUpon: As the name suggests, you stumble on a webpage you love and submit it to them. Apart from this feature, you can follow people and interests, see what your friends have shared and browse popular trending posts.
Pinterest: Don’t underestimate the power of Pinterest. Though it’s all about images using an attractive image and pining it to your board with a captivating heading can bring huge traffic to your blog.
4. Email List: Everyone has this belief after visiting a nice website that they will come back again for more but chances are there they won’t ever come back again most of the time due to busy schedules. If you have not been using this you are missing a lot. It’s very important for you to get and maintain your fans. This is one of the oldest methods of getting traffic but it still remains one of the best You can use the free email marketing service like Feed Burner.
5. Write a Guest post: Writing a guest post to blogs that have more traffic than you increase your popularity and also gets you a backlink, but make sure both of you are in the same niche before you contact them through email. Here are the points to have in mind in this aspect;
a. Getting a no from top bloggers is well expected but that shouldn’t discourage you from still trying others.
b. The post you want to send to the other blogger has to be original content and easy to read and understand.
c. Make sure the post you want to give out is well written and researched.
6. Web Directories: Submit your website to Web directories. Simply select the category of your website and submit it, people often visit these websites to look for a particular type of website in the numerous categories. You can check my posts about the list of Web directories you can submit your website to.
7. Comment on people’s blogs: When you make a nice contribution by commenting on other blogs regularly you become known with the admin of that blog which can lead to them visiting your blog or accepting your guest posts. While using this method make sure you comment on popular blogs that have authority in that niche.
8. Publishing of longer contents: research has shown that contents that are original and long ranks well in search engines. Here, we are not talking about only quantity but quality too. Google ranks long comprehensive articles high and those articles are shared more to other blogs and social networking websites. The reason why this occurs is because longer contents of about 2000 words and above have lots of long-tail keywords.
9. Publish regularly: When i say publish regularly I don’t mean publishing daily. The problem with new bloggers is that they think that publishing daily will increase their traffic, but that’s not the case here. A minimum of 16 well written comprehensive posts per month is a good way to.
10. Internal linking: Linking to other blog posts in your blog will go a long way in keeping your visitors in your blog which in turn reduces your bounce rate. You may ask what is bounce rate? according to google’s definition; its the percentage of visitors to a particular website who navigate away from the site after viewing only one page. The first step to do this is adding related posts to your blog.
11. Use of pictures or images in your blog posts: We all love pictures, writing lots of articles without pictures doesn’t make the article appealing according to research. Check out tips on how to do that at Shopify.
12. Best time to post: This is another aspect you have to take note of in your blogging career. As a blogger, you must have known the time people regularly visit your blog, the time they visit more often is when you publish your new content.
13. Make use of Quora: Quora is a popular website where people ask questions and get answers from other visitors through comments. Being active by answering people’s questions in Quora especially in your area of expertise can help boost your traffic if you run a blog in the same niche.
14. Have an attractive headline: headlines do a lot to your traffic. Nearly everyone sees your headline but few clicks on it. Making your headline captivating could do a lot to people clicking on it.
15. Slow-loading websites: If your website takes time to load may be due to so many plugins, widgets or heavy images could do a lot of harm to your blog. No visitor likes websites that take time to load and this would lead to a reduction in visitors.
16. Submit your blog to Google and Yahoo news: If you blog about news then this is an opportunity for you to earn lots of traffic. For applying to google news for your website to be included you can use that link. They turn a lot of requests down, read below for a few tips.
Here are the requirements you need to be accepted:
a. Your content must be unique
b. There must be over one author in your blog
c. Server response time
Check out evancarmichael’s blog to learn more tips about this.
17. Make your content easy to read: Earlier on I talked about writing many articles in other to be ranked well, but many words make it difficult for people to read which could frustrate them to read a few from it. The solution to this problem is making use of subheadings and minor headings, and also adding colors to them could make your visitors easy to get the points they need.
18. Add social share buttons: Not adding social share buttons to your blog makes your blog posts not to be shared which in turn lowers your post visibility to many other people out there and this reduces your traffic.
19. Build your own website template or theme: If you have some knowledge about using html, you can create your own theme and a link to your blog at the footer of the template. This would appear on every page of the blog and could result in massive traffic.
20. Keyword research: Before publishing any post, kindly do keyword research. According to Wikipedia, it is a practice search engine optimization (SEO) professionals use to find and research actual search terms that people enter into search engines.
21. Link to authority blogs: Getting links from other blogs does well in increasing your blog traffic but linking to other top blogs makes google rank you high also. Google believes that your links to other top authoritative blogs in your niche prove you did your research well.
22. Understand your source of traffic: When you are able to analyze your traffic, you will understand the source and kind of posts that give traffic to your blog. After your research work more on that source and your blog traffic will improve more.
