Blog Smarter and Make Money Online

Many digital marketers are presently into blogging for the sole purpose of making money online. A huge percentage of them are trying real hard but not many bloggers are actually making good money online. Many of these bloggers keep wondering why this is and exactly what they need to do or do better to start making money too. The real difference between bloggers who are making money and those who aren’t is simply style. With over 600 million blogs active on the internet, less than 10% are really making good money. Now, that sounds a bit depressing but not to worry. You can make money too if you learn to blog smarter than most others. Most bloggers do about the same things with their blogs online, but those bloggers who manage to do these things a bit differently tend to have an edge over others. They tend to work smarter than others that is and they make more money too. Here are a few things you do better than others to enable you blog smarter and earn better.

Setting Up a User-Friendly Website

A user-friendly blog website is usually one of the very basic requirements for smart blogging. The site can also effectively serve as a credible business window in the internet world. If you aim to attract web visitors to your blog, the site must be well designed and friendly enough to welcome them. It is through this site you can deploy the right marketing techniques to advertise your business and attract customers. Through it, you must have the right information readily available to help the website visitors make their buy decisions on your e-commerce store. If your blog website is good enough, it should directly reflect your brand’s character personality and answer queries/questions or concerns visitors or even customers may have as they hit the site.

Deciding Your Business Niche
 
Blogging experts always advise that you must carefully choose the business niche you are passionate about for your blog. Doing so together with the demand for the product/service you are marketing hugely determine how much passive income you can make from your blogging efforts. That is smart blogging. It is why you must carefully decide on a niche you are passionate about to blog in. By doing so, you are more likely to blog with unlimited enthusiasm because of the passion you have for it. If for instance you are passionate about sports, you can settle for sportswear or sports equipment as your niche business. You can blog passionately about sports wears for instance with unlimited enthusiasm. This together with good products sales help you to make good income from blogging about such products.
   
High Quality Value-Filled Content

Smart bloggers don’t just write content for writing sake. Good blog content is always written for a specific purpose and must be full of value. It is the valuable content that helps to drive engagement, leads, customers and sales. Online, if your business consistently puts out quality content through your blog, your brand manages to gain some reputation for providing unique and quality content. That helps to attract more followers and a bigger audience. Your content can serve this purpose well if you optimize everything in the content. What smart bloggers do about that is somehow comprehensive but ranges from the keywords to the length of each blog post, web page or blog articles. Smart bloggers habitually use blog posts that contain a minimum of 300 words to about 2500 words in order to rank well in search engines. Good ranking in search engines translates to good organic traffic.

Optimizing Blogs for Search Engines

Without good traffic, it is virtually impossible to make money from your blog. Organic traffic with is attributable to search engines is about the best quality traffic you can get on your blog. Search Engine Optimization, SEO, makes that possible. With a good SEO on your blog, search engines will rank your content high on their SERPs. That translates to good organic traffic. Many bloggers who are struggling to make money from their blogs either choose to ignore or neglect SEO on their blogs. That is not smart. To make SEO easy to implement even by bloggers, expert marketers recommend the following tools.

•    Google Trends: This tool helps to check the level of interest in a keyword and determine which keywords are becoming more popular is Google Trends.
•    SEMrush: This tool helps to provide information about website traffic, backlinks, keyword positions and ideas for search engine optimized content, among other things.
•    Moz: This tool helps to check the positioning of your website in search results. It is some kind of ranking based on link authority and importance of your website when compared to others. A website’s Moz ranking is determined by the number of backlinks it has, the value of those links, and the authority of the website’s domain. Moz ranking range is usually from 0-100. The nearer the score is to 100, the better the SEO of the website.

Website Marketing

The greatness of a website is in its design and user-friendliness. To blog out of your business website, it must be designed and hosted for that purpose. Professional webmasters are always handy here to give you a good website design you can blog out of. That is one very smart thing to do if you want to blog for money. A good blogging website must be user-friendly and fast loading. It must come with a full complement of social media buttons for easy sharing of your content as well as a Call-To-Action, CTA button. The wider you share your content, the more traffic your blog gets. Widely sharing your content is smart blogging no doubt.

Social Media Marketing

Sharing your blog content on social media is one very smart blogging strategy. Presently, social media is where over 3 billion people are active 24/7 around the world doing one thing or another. Now, that’s one very huge audience to get your blog content into to attract traffic. Social media is very popular and simple to use. It is highly effective too for content marketing. Social media platforms like Instagram, YouTube, Pinterest, Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter are about the most popular of these platforms. Sharing your blog content on these platforms helps to give it a very wide exposure. That is good for traffic and smart for blogging. Because of the ease of sharing content on social media, making your content go viral is fairly easy to do. Social media platforms in addition help to provide an easy-to-use two-way communication and inquiry channel making it easy to connect with your readers and to establish business relationships fairly smoothly.

Email Marketing

It is smart blogging to effectively share your blog content by email. But, first you must build your email list. As your blog audience grows, your followers grow too. Your followers list directly complements your email list as vital assets. Your followers automatically get email notifications if and when you post new content. Your email list is one very vital marketing asset you can diligently build over time and segment as well to receive your blog content. That is smart blogging too. Email marketing serves efficiently as a direct communication with your blog readers. Most people because of their busy schedules prefer blog content delivered by email which they can read at their own time and convenience. It is smart blogging to ensure everyone in your email/followers list gets notified every time you make a new blog post.

Diligent Keywords Research

Smart bloggers do not go into real blogging without diligent keywords research. Keywords research is hugely important for SEO because keywords are the real foundation of SEO.  You can take advantage of free online tools for your keywords research. Doing so will help you to discover the right keywords searchers are using online to find your type of business. Once you get the right keywords, you can deliberately use them in your blog content for the benefit of search engines. That is what SEO is all about. Relevant online keyword tools can help you to find the best keywords related to your demographic. If you deploy these keywords in your blog content correctly, it helps your SEO.

Smart bloggers always crave a robust online presence for their blogs. Working out of their blog websites in digital space, bloggers want to be noticed by people who are actively searching for goods and services online. Smart bloggers are aware that a very large percentage of searchers habitually turn to Google for every search query and question. As a very active search engine, Google works with keywords to decide exactly what to serve to people in direct response to their search queries.  When people enter a “keyword or phrase” on the search engine box and hit the search button, Google displays millions of webpages offering similar products/services relating to the keywords or phrases. These keywords and phrases tend to work like connectors, connecting brands to their curious audiences online. Smart bloggers deliberately optimize their blog content to position their blogs for organic traffic. It is the clever placement of these keywords and phrases on their content that helps these bloggers to get this much-needed traffic.

Every search query on Google has an intention. The reason smart bloggers classify search intent into three categories. These are navigational, transformational, and transactional search intent. Bloggers depend on keywords to help them understand user search intent. That is what smart bloggers use to design quality and effective content. Once you understand search intent and how it works, you will find it easier to deploy and display more relevant information to correctly target your audiences. For instance, a searcher with transactional intent will use a brand name or location in the keyword to target a “product categories” page. Such keywords help search engines to direct the searchers towards the right blog content. That helps to save time for searchers by eliminating the hassle of surfing websites aimlessly in search of what blog content they need to read.

Earning Quality Backlinks

Google algorithms take backlinks into consideration when ranking blog content.  Smart bloggers know this and they take maximum advantage of it. For bloggers, links can thus make a considerable difference in the search rankings and SEO of their blog content. Smart bloggers earn backlinks by interacting with high-quality blog platforms and institutions by way of blog commenting and guest blogging. If these links are from reputable, high-authority institutions like universities and research institutions, good blog websites and reputable publications, so much the better. Strong and high quality backlinks do not only increase credibility for your blog content, they also help it to rank high in Google SERPs.

Optimizing for Local Searches

Smart bloggers know that every small business is local. They know that most searchers first search for businesses “near me” on Google when they get online. The reason they usually optimize their blog websites for local searches. Such blogs get to benefit from the huge local search results out there. If you blog for business and your business location is part of your local SEO, major search engines like Google take note. That helps to increase the visibility of your blog particularly to local searchers which is the target audience of the business you blog for. On social media, if you set up your business as a location on Facebook for instance, it can ensure that users tag you on account of that location. That again helps to amplify the visibility of your blog/business.

Smart bloggers carefully place geographically-related keywords as often as possible in the titles, headers, image tags, body, and meta descriptions of their blog websites to increase local visibility. Even when describing the products/services you are blogging about, you must ensure that you are optimizing your location. Make sure your location is in the blog/business listings as in GMB, social media profiles, and your blog website pages. That helps your blog/business visibility in your locality a great deal because more local traffic finds your blog as a result.

Wrapping Up

Blogging for business online is a hugely competitive one because most digital marketers are currently blogging as part of their marketing strategy. These bloggers do most of the foregoing things and much more to project their blogs within the huge competition out there on the internet. However, it is only smart bloggers who get to make good money from their blogs. That comes down to as low as 10% of all bloggers on the internet. Not to worry though. If you blog smart yourself, you too can quietly join that somewhat elite group and make money from blogging. Just get your hands on it and commence smart blogging now. Good luck!