Setting up a blog won’t take much time. You can install a WordPress blog in under 5 minutes on any reliable web hosting service. Nevertheless, making money from it is NOT easy.
9 out of 10 blogs fail because of 3 major reasons.
- Their content sucks
- They don’t have a proper SEO strategy
- Their website design stinks
If you observe any profitable blog or website, you will notice that they have a gorgeous looking design with high-quality content that is properly optimized for search engines.
If you want to build a profitable blog from scratch, you need search engine friendly content along with an appealing design.
Let’s now talk about all of these 3 essential things to build a highly profitable blog even if you are a beginner. Are you ready? Let’s jump into the details without further ado.
How to Make a Better Blog that Makes Money
Let's dive into the topic.
1. Get Found with Content Marketing
Content and promotion both go hand in hand. You can’t make your content go viral without using the right promotion strategies. Likewise, you can’t build a loyal audience without good content. Let’s now talk about both of them.
Content
Content is the king whether you agree on it or not. There’s no point in getting more traffic to your blogs if your content is not informative, engaging and entertaining. So how can you create engaging content that goes viral?
Here are few simple yet effective tips for you:
- Create powerful headlines: 9 out of 10 people decide to click on your posts by just reading your headlines. If they are not compelling enough, they won’t click. It doesn’t matter how much time you spend to create your content, if you write vague headlines, all your efforts will go in vain. I recommend you to come up with at least 3 to 5 headline ideas for every post you write and pick the best one among them. You can also use Portent (free tool) to create stunning headline ideas within seconds.
- Focus on ONE problem at a time: When creating content, don’t focus on covering too many topics or problems. Your audience will NEVER digest those type of contents. If you focus on solving and discussing one problem your audience have at a time, it becomes much easy for you to make your content go viral. Write problem-solving posts. Conduct surveys with your audience on social media or using your email list to know their pain points. Do your research and give the best information and you will get the best rewards in the long run.
Promotion
What’s the use of creating great content if it doesn’t get any readers to share about it? Most of the people create good enough content but they fail miserably to promote their content.
They just share it on Facebook, twitter and Google+ and forget about getting more exposure to their blog posts. There’s no way you can build a high traffic website without having the right promotion strategy.
Here are few highly effective promotion strategies to increase exposure for your content.
Use Skyscraper technique: Brian Dean from Backlinko coined the term “The Skyscraper technique”. It involves in 3 simple steps but they are highly effective in getting more social shares, traffic and backlinks to your blogs if done right.
- Finding highly popular content: Using tools like Buzzsumo is the easiest way to find popular content in your niche. You can also use Alltop to find the best content around your industry. Once you find the popular content in your niche, it becomes easier for you to understand what type of topics really go viral in your niche.
- Making it even better: You need to spend a lot of time in crafting better content around the popular content that you find in your niche. For instance, if “5 tips to lose belly fat” is a popular article in your industry, you need to make it “50 ways to lose belly fat faster”. You need to make it extra detailed, more informative and better crafted.
- Promoting it to the right people: Once you have crafted the great content around the popular post ideas, you should start promoting it to the people who have already shared that content. You can do this by again using Buzzsumo.
Repurpose your content: Why create more content when you can repurpose it to bring more exposure? If you have a great article, try to make a video around it. Create an Infographic, turn it into an eBook and give it away free.
You can also make your blog posts into slides and upload on Slideshare to get more views and traffic to your blogs. You can use your blog posts as email newsletters that can again pull some more traffic. You can turn your existing content (videos or blog posts) into webinars and collect emails in exchange.
Podcasts are going crazy these days. If you have a popular piece of content on your blog, why not create a podcast around it so more people can listen and share your ideas? You see, there are many ways to repurpose your existing content. The idea here is to find creative ways to easily repurpose your content to get additional traffic to your sites.
That way you will reach out to more people without creating more content on regular basis. Now, let’s talk about the second most important factor in creating a profitable blog: “design”.
Also read: Definitive Guide to Content Repurposing Process [With Infographic]
2. Design is the New King
User-friendly design should be your #1 priority if you want to build a blog that makes money. Google gives SEO benefits to the sites that load faster and give a better experience to their users with their site design.
Even if you have great content, your readers won’t spend much time on reading it if you have a bad design with bad typography. It’s extremely important for you to focus on getting a design that is not only unique but both mobile and search engine friendly.
There are multiple ways to make your design user-friendly. Either you can hire a designer to create an appealing design for your sites or you can buy premium WordPress themes. If you are looking for a budget friendly option, then go with the premium themes.
There are many options for premium WordPress themes. If you are a beginner and looking for great themes that are affordable, I suggest you to for Genesis Framework.
There are also other theme frameworks you can give a try. Themes such as WooThemes, Thesis framework, etc. all are both search engine friendly and mobile responsive. They are also cost effective and can help you design really good-looking blogs.
It all comes down to your budget, so pick your WordPress design carefully but make sure to check out whether they are mobile responsive or not.
3. SEO can Make or Break your Blog’s Success
Millions of people search the term “SEO” on Google every single month. If done right, by putting proper SEO efforts into your content creation strategy, you can bring thousands of visitors to your sites every day.
Unfortunately, most people struggle to increase their search traffic because they don’t know how Google ranks particular keywords. If you are using the right keywords in your content that your audience is interested in, you will surely increase your traffic by building quality links.
If you want to create the right and implement the right SEO strategy to make your blog successful, you need to have access to few SEO tools. Here are 3 SEO tools that are essential for every WordPress site to improve its SEO.
Google XML sitemaps: This plugin creates a special XML sitemap, which will help search engines to better index your blogs and websites. This is a free plugin and you must install this if you want your content to be crawled by Google search bots.
WordPress SEO by Yoast: If you are a beginner who knows nothing about optimizing your content for search engines, this is a treat for you. This plugin is used widely used by SEO enthusiasts and it comes free with all the premium features.
Long Tail Pro: Keyword research is the key to increasing your search traffic. However, finding great keywords is not easy. With Long Tail Pro, you can find better keywords no matter what your niche is. It is one of the most effective tools used by top marketers like Marcus Sheridan, Pat Flynn etc. Give a try to this tool and it won’t cost you much (onetime payment is just around $97) and you will get incredible features. You can read more about it here.
Apart from using SEO tools, you also need to read SEO related blogs such as Moz, Search Engine Journal, Backlinko etc. to improve your SEO skills. Make sure to subscribe to these blog email updates so you can get notifications whenever they post something new on their sites.
Final Thoughts
Building a profitable blog is NOT hard. You need to make sure to have all the 3 ingredients SEO, content and design to make your blog successful.
SEO has changed a lot in recent times. Google released many algorithmic updates such as Panda, Penguin, Hummingbird, etc. to improve their search results. At the same time, many blogs and sites with thin content were penalized due to these updates.
The most recent one is Google Rankbrain. Make sure to get to know about this update.
To not be penalized by Google updates, you need to make sure to create content that is not only user-friendly but also search friendly. Don't write short or crappy posts. Spend quality time on writing in-depth articles for your blogs if you want to rank higher in search results.
Having a killer web design is another important factor that you shouldn't ignore. You need to invest money in getting a professional design that is both fast and mobile responsive.
So let me know your thoughts on building a profitable blog. Do you have more tips or strategies on creating a better blog that makes money from scratch? DO share your thoughts in the comments.
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