Content marketing has been on its rise over the last decade. Most people nowadays trust blogs as a source of information. A blog can be a great link for people to join your mailing list, follow you on social media, buy from you or better yet, become repeat sales. A blog can also give your business great visibility and will be a great way to attract leads and sales.
Here’s how to get started.
Decide on what you’ll blog about
Blogs are no longer just places where people rant about why life sucks or give daily opinions about what’s going on in the world. They are now great sources of useful content that will do two things for humanity:
– Increase pleasure
– Reduce pain
If you can do either or both of the above, then you’re in business.
Do lots of market research to double check and ensure that the area you’re getting into is really profitable. This will help you to target your audience wisely. For example, instead of having a general health blog, you can still start a blog that talks about solutions to acne or the best food supplements.
Numbers don’t lie, once you’re sure your niche is profitable, go to the next step.
Decide on a domain name
This is simply the name of your blog. For example, if your site talks about acne and you want it to be called acne.com, that acne.com will be your domain name. Make sure your domain is catchy and easily memorable.
You can either choose an abstract name that has never been used anywhere before; such as what Facebook, Google and Yahoo did. You can feel free to use your name, just like what NeilPatel.com does. It can be a name that identifies what your site deals with e.g. what doubleyourdating.com uses.
Are you thinking of using keywords as your domain name so that you can easily be found on Google? That method is no longer as powerful as it used to be. Google pushed an Exact Match Domain update in 2012 which ensures that poor quality sites with exact match domains don’t rank well.
Host your blog
You have your personal files hosted on your computer or smartphone, right? You, therefore, turn on your device to access your budgets, plans, and pictures. Your website is also a bunch of files that need to be hosted somewhere for full-time access. That’s basically what web hosting is all about.
Here are factors to consider when choosing a great web hosting company:
- Uptime guarantee: You want your site to always be up, therefore go for web hosts that will give you great uptime. Go for 99% uptime guarantee.
- Excellent support: You’ll definitely need help from the support team at some point in your blogging journey, therefore make sure you get a site with a fantastic support team.
- Price: As much as you don’t want to compromise on quality, price still matters. Go with what you can afford.
- Extra features: There are other features such as bandwidth, emails, number of subdomains, etc. For you to get value for your money, you can go for a plan that will suit your needs.
Install WordPress
WordPress is the most famous blogging software and content management system in the world. Most top blogs run on WordPress. It’s so easy to install that you can do it in 5 minutes or less.
Most top web hosts have a feature called “Quick Install”. Locate it in your web host, click on it and follow the prompts to install WordPress. In case your host doesn’t have that feature in its control panel, contact your web host and ask them how to go about installing WordPress.
Optimize and market your blog
Now that you have your blog up and running, you need to optimize and market it. Below are some things you should always do on your blog:
- Search engine optimization (SEO): Always follow the latest SEO trends from credible websites and use them on your blog
- Email Marketing: Email is one of the most powerful conversion tools. You will need to optimize your blog for email marketing. This is by simply strategically using sign up boxes and landing pages that will persuade people to sign up.
- Design: Your design should be enticing. Make sure you use an awesome theme and overall design on your blog that will compel your visitors to keep reading. Some people simply won’t read from an ugly website.
- Persuasive copy: You’ve got to have top-notch content. If you have all the above but your content sucks, you’ll not succeed in blogging. Make sure your content is always useful and relevant to your audience.
- Social media: Don’t forget to market your blog on social media. There are billions of people on social media at any one time. Take advantage of that space to woo them to your content.
- Other forms of marketing: There are always new or better ways of marketing coming up. Old methods also stop working. Always keep in step with different industry changes and implement what’s working in your niche.
There are people earning millions of dollars every month from their blogs. They all started from scratch. You can do it too. Start a blog today and keep improving it. You will only succeed if you take action constantly.