How to Generate Awesome Content for Your Blog

Great content always makes great blogging. On the part of bloggers, great content means coming up consistently with topics that are engaging and constructive. Such topics that can keep your readers devoted to your blog and grow your audience. It means always finding hot stuff for your blog that will interest if not amaze your readers. The Internet is the collected knowledge of all humankind and with it comes the best ideas that humans have ever had. The real challenge to bloggers however is to be able to tap into this potential and to find something to write about that will make some impact within this body of knowledge. Once your audience likes the content you write, you are bound to make some impact.

Even though the Internet is well equipped to give bloggers a load of information and solutions, there are times they suffer from the old writer’s block and unable to write good content. If you are a blogger, any time you find yourself in such a situation, try these here tested strategies to help you write good content.

Think, Observe and Take Notes

In whatsoever you do and wherever you go, always think content. Be observant enough as not to miss out on anything or any information that may be of help to you when creating content. For this reason, always be prepared to take copious notes and to record any information that you may need later when writing content. It helps to carry around a portable notepad and a pen/pencil to jot down any information you may find useful later as you move around your daily activities. Such notepad comes handy to record the details of any idea in case your memory fails you as it often happens. Ideas that come around this way usually flesh themselves out pretty quickly when crafting your content.

Repurpose and Repackage Old Content

Once in a while, you can single out an old content for repacking as a new content. You repurpose and repackage such content as new and it continues to pull traffic. Repurposing and repackaging is not the same thing as copying and pasting such content. That is a no no.  You can actually give a new lease of life to an old content by taking the salient points out of the old post and combining them with new ideas and good images to make a brand new content. Repurposing old content and repackaging it remains a very good strategy to generate content.

Read and Note Comments in Niche Blogs

If you are diligent enough, you can get good content from comments on your own blog and comments on other popular blogs within your blog niche. The most popular sites usually have comment storms of hundreds of comments all saying what they liked or disliked about any blog post. You can note all the comments asking for more information or clarifying information on the original post. These are treasure troves for more content. A good content is one that gives readers what to want to read. Knowing what your audience is looking for helps you to craft content to meet their needs. Comments from your blog niche readers give you a unique insight into what the readers in this particular niche care about and are talking about. From these comments, you can get new ideas and inspiration to write more effective content. Through your content, if you manage to give your readers something they probably haven’t heard about yet and are yearning to know, you’ll have them hooked on your content.

Base your Post off Other Successful Posts

Style your posts around previous posts that are doing well and pulling good traffic. These are posts that bloggers like to call evergreen blog posts. You can also target the best performing posts of the top five or more blogs you follow. Determine what makes them unique and why they’re doing well. If you are able to correctly figure that out, it becomes simple to craft a post that mimics the style and the structure of the successful post. That’s one relatively easy way to give yourself ideas for new content in a short space of time. Even if the content may not perform as well as the original, it still has a lot of potential to do well.

Experiment with Ideas

By experimenting with new ideas in your content, you can always manage to come up with new thinking and new direction in the ever evolving world of blogging. A good blogger always utilizes all information at his disposal to craft content that appeals to his audience. The more he experiments with ideas, the more he arouses this appeal. No matter how skilled you are as a blogger, you cannot maximize your skills if you are unable to experiment with ideas.

Use Content Ideas Generators

Good thinking and good observation may not be enough to give you all the blogging ideas you need. You can thus supplement your thinking with good content idea generators. Online, a content idea generator like Hubspot’s Topic Generator is a small app that allows you to input words or phrases and then randomly generate topics that may or may not be of use to you to create blog content. If you input say about two or three nouns, the app automatically generates topics that you can streamline to fit whatever blog niche you’re writing on. This app is far from being a sophisticated tool, but it saves bloggers the time they would otherwise have expended physically juggling some nouns around on a pad to make some sense.

Be Active on Social Media

Presently, nearly everyone is social media 24/7 around the world doing one thing or another. Smart bloggers are taking good advantage of the enormous audience of social media. If you are a blogger, social media links you with your audience in the most direct manner that has ever existed since the dawn of the Internet. This simply means that social media allows you to observe first-hand the things your audience is discussing with their social groups real time. This vital insight has a lot of potential for generating leads for great content creation by bloggers. By creatively using this information, you can easily craft content around the most important topics that your users have chosen to discuss on social media.

Use User Generated Content  

You can have awesome content for your blog from user-generated content. Do this by diligently following the comments from your blog audience. Observe how your blog community relates with and discusses with itself. Through this observation, you can determine what they care about then use their questions and concerns to craft great blog posts for their benefit. If you spend quality time monitoring the trend of discussions of your audience, you can easily come up with some blog topics to address their concerns. You can even play the devil’s advocate by directly posing questions to your audience to elicit responses. Based on their responses, you can then craft some riveting content to meet their needs.

Effective Tips on How to Promote Your Blog

For most bloggers, blogging is essentially a business. You cannot hope to make it in any business if you don’t promote it. So it is with blogging. If you are a blogger and you want to excel in the fiercely competitive internet market-space, your promotion strategies, your products, and your brand’s reputation must excel. You must be able to deploy your knowledge and skills to promote your blog on the internet to do better than your competitors. Characteristically on the internet, the blogging environment is extremely competitive. For this reason, the more you deploy and commit your knowledge and skills to promote your blog, the better chances you’ll have to make it succeed. As the digital environment is constantly growing and technology advancements keep showing up almost every day, you must be able to take advantage of these changes to promote your blog to success.  Blogging success is dependent on many factors, and there’s a high degree of complexity when figuring out what works best for your blog. It requires your full attention, a lot of your time, energy, discipline and commitment and a great deal of patience. If you can muster and guarantee these things, you are well on your way to blogging success.

These here effective blog promotion tips if well deployed can help even an average blogger to gain some competitive advantage in his blogging niche.

Provide Relevant High Quality Content

If you want to please and satisfy your blog readers and future customers on a consistent basis, you must provide them relevant content that has high value that can earn their trust. Blogging is basically dependent on content. The more valuable content you post, the faster your blog will grow in awareness, reputation, and customer trust. Blog right consistently and people will begin to trust you. If people trust you, it becomes easy for them to do business with you and be happy to try your products/services because the barriers to purchase will be considerably lowered.

Optimize Your Blog

All blog content is expected to be targeted at an audience. Optimizing your content with the relevant keywords in your niche and targeted at that audience makes the content more effective. Welcome to Search Engine Optimization, SEO. With the right SEO on your content, Search Engines tend to rank it high on their SERPs. Of course, the best blogs usually occupy the first positions in the SERPs and they get more organic traffic. However because SEO is highly technical and can be very challenging for bloggers, hiring professional help to get it done is always a very viable option. If you want to do it yourself, you can only get it right through diligent practice and with trial-and-error approach. It takes good content, great connections, time, patience, consistency and a lot of commitment to have a good SEO on your blog.

Study and Understand Your Audience

You can better target an audience you know and understand. You can only market successfully to an audience you know and understand. It is this understanding you can leverage to sell them products/services. Put simply, it is difficult to make money as a marketer if you don’t know how to approach your future customers. That requires a good understanding of where they come from, how they act, what they want, and what motivates them to act. Through this understanding, you can have an idea of your ideal customer whom you can have in front of you as a target persona to market to. You get better results that way because your marketing and sales strategy will prove to be much more efficient and result oriented.

Leverage the Most Popular Social Media Networks

These days, nearly everyone is on social media around the world 24/7. If you are a blogger/marketer, you must figure out where your target customers love to spend their time on social media. That is where you must focus on to promote your blog. The very popular social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram are great places to promote from but success on each platform depends on the products you are marketing and the demographics you are targeting. You must therefore decide on which social media platforms work best for you and leverage them effectively.

Leverage Relevant Niche Influencers

A niche influencer is a person that is already well known and respected by your target audience. As a blogger, you have a duty to identify influencers who do not represent a threat to your business. What this means is that even if such persons directly endorse or even promote your products, there is no chance that they’ll convert your customers to themselves or direct them elsewhere. These are the kind of influencers you should make direct contact with and request collaboration. Most influencers have their own large followers/audience and you can leverage this audience to widely promote your content through their direct endorsements or content sharing. Be willing to offer influencers commissions if they help promote your products to make sales.

Build Strong Relationships

Most businesses thrive on good relationships. So is blogging. This is why networking is a very crucial part of your blogging experience. You can build strong relationships through a good network of customers, business owners, bloggers and influencers. Through this network, you can get good business advice, good ideas, encouragement and support. Your blog can benefit from quality backlinks, if others in your network, share, retweet, or link your blog posts in their own marketing activities. A strong relationship with your “close customers” is even more valuable. These are customers you can depend on to help you with different tasks such as surveys, word-of-mouth-marketing, and any other type of support you may need from time to time.

How to Start, Run, and Operate a Successful Blog

You can start and run a private blog for fun or to make money. Even when you start your blog from scratch, you can monetize it and make a small business out of it. That’s exactly what bloggers who want to make money from their blogging do these days. Blogging may appear quite common now particularly among digital marketers who are running their own businesses. These people effectively use their blogs as marketing/promotional tools for their business. If however you are just starting out in your blogging business, you really need quite a bit of guidance to start, run and operate your blog successfully. These here tips can be of help.

 
Decide what you want to Blog About

Deciding on what you want to blog about is hugely important right from the outset of your blogging experience. What you can successfully blog about is what you know and are passionate about because discovering your passion early enough is the key to successful blogging. You must think deep and brainstorm well to come up with relevant subjects and topics for your blog. If your blog mission is well defined, coming up with relevant topics to blog about becomes fairly easy. What your blog readers want to see is high quality and informative content and they stay hooked on to your blog. Just give them such content regularly and consistently and your audience will grow.

Carefully Select a Blogging Platform

The blogging platform you choose to blog from is very important to the success of your blog. You must therefore take adequate care to select a platform for your blog. The right platform to settle for depends on the product you are marketing and the nature of your blog. It is a need based decision that also factors in your skills and your personal preferences. Most blogging platforms have various in-house tools that can help to enhance your blogging experience. These must be factored in too before you choose a platform. Among the many blogging platforms available, experienced bloggers do recommend WordPress, Blogger, Square Space, Wix, Tumblr, and Ghost. For beginner bloggers, WordPress and Blogger are great to use because they are text-based and search engines particularly Google love them.
   
Consistently Create Quality Content

In blogging parlance, content is always king. The more the content you create, the more following you get for your blog. That translates to good traffic too. Your blog can never succeed if you only manage to create poor and mediocre content. This is why you must pay special attention to content creation. In this wise, it is advisable to consistently create high quality informative and educational content that will interest your readers. Grammatical presentation is important too. For this reason, before posting any content, make sure you proofread it thoroughly and correct all grammatical errors as well as formatting mistakes.
 
Create a Brand

For marketing purposes, your blog must reflect your brand. You must therefore create your blog name, logo and even colors to reflect your brand. Figure out your unique storyline that will reflect your brand and be attractive to your audience. Come up with ideas and test run them to see what works best. By the time you get what works best for you, you can proceed to use it consistently and use it as often as possible to consolidate it as a brand.

Network to Build your Community

If you want your blog to quickly succeed, it is not enough to consistently post content, you must network well too. As soon as you start posting, you’ll have to spend a lot of time networking. This you can do by way of blog commenting, cooperating and working with other bloggers. In fact, you must carry out all activities needed to get audience for your blog. This is important because the audience will not just come to you except you work to bring them to you. To build a reliable community for your blog therefore, networking is the answer. For good results, you must spend quality time commenting on blogs, engaging on social media, communicating with your blog followers, reaching out to and collaborating with various influencers.

Be Diligent and Patient

It takes quite a while for your blog to get noticed online and indexed by search engines. For this reason, you cannot expect your blog to have overnight success. Waiting patiently for your blog to start getting the right traffic may be discouraging, but it is not sufficient to frustrate you out of blogging. You must be diligent and consistent at creating and posting content and with time, traffic will come. You must endeavor therefore to be patient with your blog and with yourself. Try to maintain your blogging schedule, create and post content regularly and establish your presence in as many social media platforms as convenient for your schedule. It may take a while but with time, your blog will be a success if you are diligent and consistent in your content creation.

Blogging Tips for Beginner Bloggers

Most digital marketers always want to get into blogging but not many really blog right. Some do right but quickly hit a block, get confused and don’t really know what to do next. Many zealously get into the highly competitive world of blog writing only to realize that they are not quite making a success out of it as they would have wished. Some do get some bits of traffic inflow which may be disappointing to them. Many of such bloggers are perpetually struggling to get more traffic. If you are in this category of bloggers or you are just starting out on a long journey of blogging, pay attention to these here tips. Expert bloggers do not hesitate to recommend many of these tips which have one way or another helped them out in their very eventful blogging experiences. These tips have helped me tremendously too.

Write What You’re Passionate About

When you are starting out as a blogger, it is in your best interest to write something you know well and enjoy and are passionate about. That saves you the drudgery of writing on what you do not have sufficient information about that others will like to read. Writing about what you know will help you to easily give out quality info that will attract and sustain your blog readers’ attention. Doing so consistently translates to good traffic. Good blogs content must be uniquely written from your passion. Bland and uninteresting topics and subject matters are not helpful to quality blog content.

If you aim to promote products you love and make money on the side, you can embed a few links to these products in your blog content. Anytime a reader clicks on these links and buys a product, you earn a commission from the sale.

Write Purposefully

Write only what will interest your readers. You must always write with a clear purpose that will not be boring to your readers. That is about the only credible way to keep them interested in your content and to anticipate more. Avoid writing randomly about whatever you fancy or whatsoever comes to your mind. That is not very helpful to your readers and may even confuse them. If you write on purpose, you will not only educate your readers, you will entertain them as well. Problem solving for your readers should always be paramount in your mind. That helps to shape your content. If for instance you blog in the “make money online” niche like most professional bloggers, then the purpose of your blog should be clearly to help people make money legitimately online and to avoid scams and get-rich-quick schemes that abound on the internet.

Write Naturally and Simply

If you write what your readers do not understand, not writing at all is better. Write naturally and simply for everyone to understand no matter their level of education. Avoid grammatical complications and jaw-breaking words. Write conversationally as if you are having a one-on-one conversation with your reader. This is because most people welcome and enjoy conversational speak particularly when it is intent on helping to provide them with valuable information. Good blog content should not be presented like a college thesis, business report, or some complex legal document. The technicalities that characterize such reports are always a put off for most blog readers. Therefore, you must blog to entertain and to inform in a very simple style of presentation just as you are reading here.

Always Proofread Your Work

If you are a beginner blogger, do not unduly worry if your grammar is not perfect from the outset. Start writing and keep on writing to improve your grammar. If you aim to be a good and credible writer, proofreading your work is a must. Depending on the speed of your writing and your thought process, it is inevitable that your first draft in any written document will have errors. Such errors include improper punctuation, spelling errors, a lack of proper paragraphs, bad formatting, and improper words spacing. These are put offs for most blog readers. Proofreading your work thoroughly helps to clear most of such errors. It shows professionalism too. The more you write, the better you become as a writer. It is best to read and re-read your content thoroughly before publishing. That way, you can spot most of the errors and correct them adequately. In addition, you can use online tools to aid your proofreading process. These tools may not be 100% perfect but they are quite helpful and handy to use. Many expert bloggers do recommend Grammarly and ProWritingAid tools for proofreading. I do use such tools too but they have a few tolerable drawbacks even though they can help spot a handful of errors you never even thought your content had.

Be Consistent and Stick with Your Theme

If you want to succeed fast as a blogger, make sure you are consistent. Consistency helps to build trust and credibility for your content fast enough. By consistently sticking to your central theme and avoiding diversions, you build trust easily because your audience likes it. That is one of the best ways to grow your audience as a blogger. Starting with one theme and diverting into another is not professional. It manages to kill the interest of your blog readers. You must strive to give your original readers what they want at all times without diverting to something different. Writing about too many different things at a time could result in you losing track of your blog’s subject/theme. You lose the interest of readers as well. If you want to write about making money online for instance, stick with that. Anyone who is interested in making money online will stick to your content. That helps to grow your audience.
 
Have a Blogging Schedule/Calendar

Scheduling your content not only helps to boost your productivity, it also helps to release your content timorously. Your content writing schedule/Calendar could be set on twice a day, daily, or even weekly, during which time you shut off all distractions like phones and TVs to concentrate on writing. If your blog is designed and specially targeted, you can also time the release of your blog content depending on the audience you are targeting around the time zones of the world. That helps the effectiveness of your content. Blogging is hugely tasking no doubt. So, having a schedule/calendar can help to organize things a lot better and make your blogging easier and more effective. Through these efforts, chances are, your blog writing will start to come more naturally and effortlessly once habits begin to build even if you are a beginner.

Worry Less about Traffic Early on

Most new blogs usually go unnoticed for some period of time. This could extend to several weeks or months without any tangible traffic. There is no cause to worry. Do not let lack of traffic discourage you at the beginning. Avoid the discouraging feeling that you are writing for nobody and wasting your time. Just keep writing and publishing. It takes quite a while for search engines to find and rank your content. Brand new domains are always viewed with caution by major search engines like Google. That is why you need real patience to give search engines time to start trusting your content. In addition, populating your blog across social media platforms also takes quite a while before your content starts trending with enthusiastic audience. All you need is patience. Keep writing and the traffic will come in due time.

Brainstorm Regularly

Take it from me, everyone including yours truly struggles to come up with good ideas to write blog content. The antidote to that is to form the habit of brainstorming regularly. Doing so helps you to be more and better productive in your blogging. If you are brainstorming particularly in a very quiet corner of your home, have a pen and notepad handy to jot down any ideas floating around your mind. If you don’t get distracted, brainstorming can help to get your creative juices flowing unlimited. That way, you could come up with some credible new content ideas within an hour or two. If you go to work immediately after that, you may be able to knock out a few good blog posts from such ideas.

Avoid Becoming Overwhelmed

Focus and deep focus is recommended for beginner bloggers. It is best to focus on just one blog and theme when starting out. As most experienced bloggers very well know, writing about too many things can quickly become overwhelming. That scenario inevitably leads to poor productivity. If as a beginner blogger you out of excitement and enthusiasm decide to start several blogs related to many different themes/niches, you’ll quickly begin to fail once you realize how much work is involved to keep your many blogs online. Many new bloggers usually give up and quit at this point when they realize that updating and posting on too many blogs at a time takes quite a lot of work and time. The only viable solution to avoid being overwhelmed is to concentrate on one blog at a time and master it well. That helps to save valuable time and efforts and to have enough concentration to really improve on and master your blogging activities.

Write with Empathy

Yes indeed! As a blogger, you must realize early on that you are writing for others to read. So, you must put yourself in your readers’ shoes when writing your blog posts. You need to empathize with your readers while attempting to help solve their problems. You can win the trust of your readers faster if they perceive how empathetic you are in your content. That way, they’ll relate better with you as well. You can for instance think about how to help bald men. You can put yourself in the reader’s shoes by explaining a story related to how you handled your own balding problems. That way, you can better help your reader find that very cure you have used in treating your own baldness. By doing this, you are clearly letting it on to your reader that you are human trying to reach out and help another human and not just another fast talking salesman attempting to make a quick sale.

Maintain a List of Future Ideas

This is why as a beginner blogger, it is advisable to always have a pen and notepad with you anywhere you find yourself. As you walk around and network with people all day, any ideas that come up should be jotted down for future use. Experience shows that maintaining a list of future blog posts and ideas is imperative to your content creation strategy and resourcefulness. Sometimes, a random idea could pop into your head at a random time of day and anywhere. If you don’t jot it down for future use, you may forget about it. These notes can be of tremendously help to you when figuring out what to write. They could save you time too. That’s quality time that would have been spent trying to remember or figure out an idea/topic to write about. These days, nearly everyone carries around a smartphone. If the idea of carrying around a pen and notepad is not cool with you, you can install an app on your phone that will sync with your computer. That comes in very handy to jot down ideas when you are away from your computer.

5 Tips to Consistently Create Successful Blog Posts

Anyone can start a blog but not everyone can make a success out of it. The biggest challenge about blogging is not just starting a blog, but operating it and filling it with relevant content consistently. For some people, that could be really daunting. A personal blog is simply a platform on which the author can express their thoughts, communicate with readers, and indirectly promote particular products/services. These days, many bloggers even turn their blogging passion into a profitable business and they make good money for their efforts. Good blog posts on a regular and consistent basis make this possible. So, if you want to consistently create good blog posts to make your blog successful, pay attention to the following tips.

1. Carefully Choose Your Blogging Platform

For convenience and good hosting, you must carefully choose a blogging platform to create your blog. The blogging tools the platform offers are also very important in this consideration. Two options are really quite popular among bloggers. You can use a free platform or launch a website with your own domain and hosting. Alternatively as is increasingly popular these days, you also have another option of blogging on one or more of the very popular social media networks. Whatever platform you choose must help you to properly position yourself and your blog on the internet. That way, you can easily build up good following and audience for your blog. The bigger the audience/following your blog has, the higher the chances that your blog posts will be read widely.

2. Define and Stick to the Main Subject of Your Blog

Having a clear subject or business niche for your blog is also vital. You may choose to blog about your profession, a hobby, or any aspect of your life that interests you and you feel will interest bothers. Once chosen, you must adhere strictly to the theme with your blog posts to help build trust for the blog. Research and develop topics based on this theme with the interest of your readers uppermost in your considerations. Thereafter, you can write about anything and everything always making sure to highlight trending events and expressing your opinions about them with a view to arousing the interest of your blog readers at all times. By doing this consistently with high quality and information content, chances are, your blog will be in demand. This helps the blog posts to succeed exceedingly.

3. Provide only High-Quality and Informative Content

The content you share on your blog must be useful to your readers. Such content must be valuable to readers and informative enough to help solve their problems. It is such content you must post regularly and consistently to keep your readers hooked up to your blog. You must continue to be true to your blog and your readers by posting only valuable and reliable content at all times. That way, your blog will be easily recognized as an authoritative and trustworthy source of information. Adopt a writing style that is easy to read and understand while completely avoiding slang and vulgar expressions. Write only what you know to be true and factual and diligently research what you are not too sure of before writing about it. Above all, pay attention to readers’ feedback/comments and respond to them politely, factually and promptly. You can even filter good ideas from this feedback that can help you to craft more helpful blog posts.

4. Decide on a Blogging Plan/Calendar

For your blog to be successful there is a need to clearly outline your plan, purpose, and the main task of the blog. This you can do by creating a clear and concise blogging plan/calendar. This plan must be purposeful and with datelines for posting content. It could be daily, weekly and monthly in concept with specific times of the day depending on which audience you are targeting and in what part of the world. A list of probable topics and even some outlines for some of the topics helps to ease up the job and keep to schedules. That helps to display a reputation for your blog while showcasing your competence. Your reading audience likes that and it usually helps your blog posts to succeed widely. It is advisable to pay particular attention to a variety of content while making sure your content is not overly promotional of any product/service. Your blog content is successful if it attracts visitors to your blog. It takes other website marketing strategies like CTAs to get these visitors to make purchases. You should therefore endeavor to build a strategy that works in a way that makes your blog visitors wish to purchase something once they hit your website through the informative content and positive customer reviews your blog makes available to them.

5. Regularly Rejig and Improve Your Blog

Trends change and so are blogging tools and techniques. Therefore, you must regularly rejig and improve on your blog to keep up with trends and changes in techniques and technology. You can collect relevant data about the performance of your blog posts through in-house metrics and analytics tools. Info from the data helps you to decide what to improve on and what to discard all together to improve the overall performance of your blog. In addition, as you garner more blogging experience, your blogging skills improve as well. These skills come in handy to help keep your blog up-to-date with changing trends and techniques. A blog post that is not attracting traffic is not good enough. If you discover such posts, you can then consider among other things to see how you can improve the blog content with images/graphics because blog posts with images tend to increase the number of views significantly.

Conclusion

You must understand that successful blogging is not an immediate business. It takes time, efforts and diligent blogging to get good results. With time and effort, you are likely to get more consistent results in form of increased traffic, public recognition, and increased audience loyalty. Once you are diligent in your blogging efforts, these results will keep coming in to enhance the effectiveness of your blog. That by all accounts is blogging success.

5 Easy Ways to Monetize your Blog

To earn money from blogging, you must know what you are doing. It is not enough to consistently churn out good content on your blog. Deliberate steps must be taken to monetize the blog before you can effectively make money from it. That is in addition to doing everything blog-related like networking and content writing. By the time you have a real hang on your blog, it is imperative to constantly and regularly update it, test it, and diligently work it to grow it. That requires some bit of patience and practice though. It is by doing these things you can only expect to have some measure of success with it provided you put in enough time and resources growing the blog. Making money from your blog depends on how it is monetized. Following are some of the most popular monetization ways most bloggers usually adopt to make money. 

 
1. Affiliate Marketing

You can earn money from your blog as an affiliate. It is one popular way bloggers earn commissions paid out by product merchants. The arrangement is quite simple. Bloggers simply place unique links or codes on their content linking products on third party websites of product merchants. If anyone clicks on these links and makes a purchase, the blogger earns a commission from the sale. Quite a simple and effective way to earn money from a blog no doubt!

2. Selling Products

You can list products for sale on your e-commerce store and use your blog to promote them. Once the products are listed for sale, you simply use your blogs as an advertisement tool for the e-commerce store. If you sell your own products, orders are taken directly from your website, payments made and you supply the products yourself. Even if you don’t have your own products to sell yet, you can sell the products of other merchants by way of dropshipping. By this method, orders are taken from your website and the products are supplied by a third party merchant who will be responsible for handling, packaging, shipping and delivery to the buyers. You earn a commission from each sale originating from your blog website.
 
3. Offering Services
 
As a blogger, you can offer various services on your blog. Depending on your skillsets, you can sell your skills profitably online. Such skills as learning a new language, playing a musical instrument, singing, dancing and suchlike skills people are interested in and are prepared to pay for. You can also offer writing services, programming services or even Virtual Assistant services to busy Executives. If you have any of such valuable skills, you can through your blog advertise them properly and market yourself as a freelancer. That way, you’ll be able to earn good money from your skills.

4. Advertising

This is one of the most common ways of earning money from blogging. It is also very easy to understand and utilize once your blog is up and running and its readership is growing satisfactorily. You can work with many brands to advertise their products/services on your blog mostly through banner ads, codes or links. It is one easy way to earn money by way of paid commissions once your blog has garnered an audience.

5. Google AdSense

Google AdSense is a free, simple way to earn money by displaying ads next to your blog content. These ads are served through very unique and specialized codes from Google. With AdSense, you can show relevant and engaging ads to your blog visitors and even customize the look and feel of ads to match your site. Google AdSense provides a way for bloggers/publishers to earn money from their blog/online content. AdSense works by matching ads to your site based on your content and visitors. The ads are created and paid for by advertisers who want to promote their products. Since these advertisers pay different prices for different ads, the amount you earn varies. You earn money from AdSense through click-throughs and page views and the rates differ. You can for instance earn up to $1 for 1000 page views. 

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!

5 Tested Ways to Boost Your Digital Marketing Strategy

If you are a digital marketer and you want to ensure broad coverage for your marketing activities, you can combine all the marketing channels you are using with direct mail in your marketing strategy. An effective combination of both can help boost your marketing strategy even though both can be a bit complex in planning and execution. With good planning, popular direct mail examples include flyers, brochures, newsletters, catalogues, postcards, packages, coupons envelopes, and postcards can help to give a great boost to your marketing strategy. A bit of creativity with these direct mail examples in your marketing strategy can help you to reach more customers and to do better business as a consequence.

Here are five tested ways to give your digital marketing strategy a boost:

1. Carefully Set Your Marketing Goals and Objectives

This is a given if you want any worthwhile results from your marketing campaigns. For your marketing campaigns to be successful, you must have very clear goals and objectives to measure your success by. Right from the outset of the campaigns, you must clearly define your goals and objectives. For effectiveness and measurability, such goals should be specific, measurable, and achievable. They must in addition be relevant and time-bound. The more specific and measurable your goals are, the better for your success.
 
2. Always Analyze Your Content Against Competition

No one does business in isolation, least of all digital marketing. Competition abounds on the internet which you must constantly analyze and measure your content against. To find out which content is worth using in your campaign, it is advisable to do some research into the success of your competitors’ content. This content gap analysis will help you create a digital marketing strategy that is unique and not just generic but more engaging. For effectiveness, you can strategically add a Call-To-Action, CTA to any content you create.

3. Carefully Define Your Target Audience

You could be marketing in vain if you do not have a clear audience you are marketing to. Therefore, before you start a digital marketing campaign, it is essential to understand your target audience and location. Because one combination of words and images might be appealing to one customer but not another, a clear understanding of your audience helps to make that distinction clearer and how best to direct your marketing messages to the right audience. The best way to make sure you are targeting the right market is by segmentation. That helps you to know and clearly define who you are marketing to at any point in time and what marketing messages will have the best effect on the audience.

4. Diligently Monitor the Effectiveness of Your Campaigns

Yeah, you can never know how well you are doing in your marketing campaigns if you cannot effectively monitor your results. For this reason, you must always make sure to properly align your strategies with your goals. That way, you can keep track of who responded to your campaigns, from where and through what channels. Routine and regular reviews of your campaign results will help you to evaluate what worked and what didn’t. An accurate data base for these results will help you to diligently track your engagements. This will allow you to not only track your effectiveness but also make follow-ups with your leads/customers.

5. Leverage Different Marketing Channels

Do not ignore any marketing channel. The bottom-line is to directly reach your customers and to get traffic. So long as any marketing channel helps to get traffic to your website, you can effectively leverage such channels for that purpose. It is best to always use a variety of marketing channels. This will ensure that you reach more customers and get more traffic back to your website. Some of the best known and effective channels you can consider using include website marketing, social media marketing, email marketing, and content marketing or blogging.

How to Turn Your Blog into a Profitable Business

To turn your blog into a profitable business, all you need is strategic planning and a bit of tenacity, if you want to get things right. Part of that planning should be how you can consistently provide good content to attract readers and to grow your audience. Even if your aim is to make blogging your full-time job, you cannot afford to ignore these basics in your strategic planning. The blogosphere may be currently housing over 600 million blogs on the internet and with less than 10% of them profitable, that’s OK.  You can make your own blog profitable if you do the right things in the right way. It may not be easy though but it is an absolute possibility. 

These here tips will show you how to turn your blog into a full-time profitable business if you diligently and consistently do what they suggest.

Establish a Content Strategy

In content marketing in which blogging is a foremost tool, content is king. First step is to build a content strategy based on user intent. If you are able to build a content strategy based on user intent, you'll be telling both searchers and search engines particularly Google that you care about providing value for readers on the internet. This is because getting more eyes on your content is hugely important and pivotal to creating a profitable blogging business. With time, if you consistently share highly valuable content with readers, it helps you to position yourself as an industry expert. Not only does this help build your reputation as a thought leader, but it also fosters trust with your target audience. The more people read and share your content, the more profitable your blog becomes.

Ensure Your Business is Legally Registered

Before you can turn a profit with your blogging business, there’s a need to make sure it's legal first. This is one legal way to ensure the protection of your content as a valuable intellectual property. Depending on which country you’re blogging from, be sure to comply with local laws and internet protocols/regulations in your blogging activities.

Create Strategic Workflows

All businesses thrive on efficient processes and consistency. Your business blog is no exception. If you create workable strategic workflows, they will help to support your business every day of the week to ensure consistency and efficiency. To do this, you can sit down to design a series of steps to follow diligently for every part of your business every day of the week. That helps to establish very clear processes anyone can easily follow in a predictable and imitable manner to ensure a timely and consistent publishing of your content to the benefit of your readers. Profitability derives from this consistency and reliability in the long term.

Establish an Affiliate Marketing Strategy on Your Blog

Yes, you need affiliate marketing on your blog if you want to make it profitable. This is because affiliate marketing is one of the most common ways to earn money blogging. It is simple to operate and to earn income. It simply entails promoting other peoples’ products/services by way of affiliate links on your blog and you earn commissions for sales made through these links. Anytime your blog readers click on the links you embed in your affiliate marketing articles and make a purchase, you get paid a commission by the product merchant as per agreed terms. Simple isn’t it?

Weave Your Products/Services into Your Content

Besides affiliate marketing, you can also integrate your own products/services offers into your blogging strategy. There is practically no limit to what you can do when it comes to how you weave in products/services in your blog content. You have a lot of room to maneuver when it comes to matters of promoting your own products/services through your blog content. Part of your marketing strategy then should be by deliberate planning to map out how your products/services will integrate into your content strategy. Through this strategy, you can sell outsourced products, you can dropship products, you can buy products wholesale and sell as retail, you can promote slash in prices and even new products in your inventory, you can sell digital products like eBooks, software apps, and online courses and lots more. All these activities help to generate unlimited income through your blog.

Take Advantage of Collaborations

Collaborations, guest posting, and running ads are three methods that can help to boost your blog profits if well handled. The main aim is to make your online presence strong enough to attract attention. Collaborations, guest posting and running ads help this process significantly. All of these options can help boost revenues for your business in very unique ways. Collaborating with successful brands helps you to build important business relationships and expand your audience reach. Guest posting helps you to build a reputation as an industry expert/thought leader and quality backlinks to your blog. This eventually raises your site's authority score with search engines particularly Google. Running ads if professionally handled can help put your blog in front of more people in a shorter span of time.

Be Serious with Cyber Security

With cyber crimes on the increase, you cannot afford not to secure your blogging business. Losing your blog content can be quite frustrating and awful. In extreme cases, your blog content can be wiped clean due to a cyber-security flare-up. If that happens, starting a new blog from the scratch is no mean fit considering the time and efforts you’ve invested on your blog to make it a profitable business. To avoid frustration and to continue on the path of profitability for your blog, it is essential to take cyber-security seriously. For effectiveness, your blog security should be all embracing. Ranging from providing users access to your blog to running virus protection software on it, you can take several measures to protect your blog from cyber-security threats. Experts recommend the use of 3-step verification for access, free access through VPNs, virus protection software installed and updated regularly and securing the services of a cyber-security expert to routinely conduct a health exam on your equipment, website, and all the online portals you use for your blogging business. Hopefully, all these can help to protect your blogging business and keep it on the path of profitability at all times.

5 Inbound Marketing Strategies to Grow Your Blog

Most digital marketers now realize the real benefits of inbound marketing to their marketing activities. If properly annexed, inbound marketing usually brings the right people to your business website. That means traffic, good traffic in the main. The main goal of inbound marketing is to bring people who’re most likely to buy what you’re selling. That means the people who recognized the need for your product/service who tend to need just a little nudge to take the final step to buy. As at today, blogging is, by far, one of the most efficient and result-oriented inbound marketing strategies available to digital marketers, and its benefits are widely recognized by most marketers. If you don’t have a blog on your website, the time to create one is now if you really want to boost the inbound marketing strategy of your business.

If however you already own a blog and you are desirous to grow it, below are tried and tested inbound marketing strategies most bloggers are using to grow their blogs.

1. Boost Your Landing-Page Strategy

A good blog must have an effective landing page strategy to get results. This is because landing pages usually serve the purpose of helping to market your product/service. More specifically and with the right strategy, landing pages actively serve to encourage customers to take some desired action among other numerous benefits such as:

- attracting more traffic and conversions
- giving the first good impression to your website visitors
- making your visitors stay longer on your website
- generating more leads as a result
- helping to build credibility for your business
- offering the right solutions to your audience’s problems
- starting to build a mutually beneficial relationship with your audience

To get these results, you must make your landing page strategy an inevitable part of your overall inbound marketing strategies as a blogger. To do this right, be sure to pick a relevant and interesting topic in your niche your audience will love. Test different landing pages for maximum efficiency before you settle for what works best. Don’t forget to make a CTA button obvious to your audience by placing it correctly in your landing page. You’ll manage to get these results from your landing page if you don’t clutter it up with irrelevant massages.

2. Use More Long-Form Content

High quality and interesting content on a blog helps it to attract traffic. Additionally, the content should be long-form. This is because long-from content is more likely to become viral and gets much more links than regular-length blog posts. If the content is long-form, it has the potential to improve your website’s rankings on the SERPs of search engines. Through that, it will help to create organic traffic to your website, generate quality links for it, and consequently establish good authority for your business in its niche.

3. Use Captivating Headlines

This is rather obvious in content marketing. The more captivating your blog headlines are, the more attention they get and the more traffic they attract. If you are a blogger, the first thing your audience will see on your blog is the headline. It is the quality of this headline that usually determines whether or not people will click on the link and read your blog post. It is therefore advisable to always make sure you spend enough quality time thinking through your headlines and crafting one that will spark the reader’s interest.

4. Give Real Value to Your Readers

Most online surfers are always there to solve one problem or another. Your blog succeeds if it helps provide them with solutions. Therefore, if you want to succeed in your inbound marketing efforts, your blog must always give something of value in addition to quality content to your readership. Some of such things of value include downloadable materials such as research data, e-books, biz quizzes, online courses, and so on. Thus, your blog must be seen to be providing value and not just outright selling. Providing value is important because it helps to increase your brand’s reputation, increases the trust your audience has for your business, and the overall value of your brand.

5. Do Some Niche Guest Posting

Guest posting remains one of the most important inbound marketing strategies available to bloggers. It is good for quality backlinking to your website. However, you must take adequate care to ensure you only do guest posting on quality websites because links quality is very important to search engines. For this reason, having a solid amount of links back to your website is a good idea, but the quality of such links is hugely important. If generally you deliberately do more guest-posting on the quality websites that are in the same niche as yours, you’ll be able to increase your traffic and reach potential customers much more efficiently than doing link building on just any website. For bloggers who want to grow their blogs, guest posts bring a lot of value for their businesses. This value includes providing backlinks, increasing the website’s ranking, promoting brand authority and communicating effectively with the audience that may turn out to be good leads and trusted customers.

Best Tips to Manage a Blog Successfully

Digital marketers see blogging as a very effective marketing strategy, the reason they embark on it. Many however do not realize that a blog is only as successful as the management of time and content put into it. You cannot simply write content and say you have a blog if it is not widely read. Your blog can only prove successful if it routinely brings in traffic to your website and helps convert readers into customers. If your blog is unable to do these things, it is simply an unsuccessful blog. It is quite a frustrating experience for bloggers if their blogs are not successful. Making your blog successful is hugely dependent on how well it is managed. This management is all about planning and knowing who you want to read your content, and what you want them to do afterward. Here are some great tips to help you set up and manage your blog successfully.

Find Your Niche

A good blog must have something interesting and important to write about. That is why you must settle for a well-defined niche. It is on this niche you can write content to attract readers who may translate to customers at some point. Of course your chosen niche must have a clear relationship with the products/services you are selling. This niche could be in form of a topic, industry, product, or service. You must write and develop content about all things related to the niche. Doing so consistently is one great way to connect with your customers and to attract the attention of search engines like Google.

Carefully Choose Your Platform

Your blogging platform is as important as the blog itself. You may choose to blog out of your business website or some free blogging options many of which are out there online. Even if you already have an established website of your own, you can still have a platform that will easily integrate into your website. One very popular example of such platforms is WordPress that has the advantage of making available to you lots of free blogging tools, themes, memes, graphics, SEO and even blogging tutorials and guidebooks. This arrangement allows you to have a blog that is managed independently, but shows up on your website seamlessly. That is great for blogging if you ask me.

Incorporate Images

Good images on blogs are like traffic magnets because most online users love images. However, any images on blogs must have real quality to be helpful. With this as your guide, you can carefully select and use images based on their quality and relevance to your niche. You can settle for high quality photos, graphics, infographics and videos. On this score, the more the merrier! Most successful blogs on the internet feature images that break up the text and add visual interest. This is a great way to expand your horizons, add interest, and alert search engines like Google that you are incorporating interesting media elements in your website/blog. If they notice, you get more organic traffic as a result.

Give Value Consistently to Your Readers

Content is king in blogging business. The more high quality content you produce for your readers, the better for your blog. Expert bloggers opine that one of the reasons why many personal blogs aren’t successful is because they don’t offer any real value to the reader. With this in mind, you must not only write about your opinion on current events even if hugely interesting and entertaining, but your blog should also offer value to the most readers possible. That is what helps to get the traffic you need. Whatever topic you chose to write on in your niche, your opinion, research, and insight into related topics in the niche is a great way to bring value to readers.

Incorporate Marketing Strategies

In digital marketing parlance, a blog is a great content marketing tool. You get better results from blogging if you are able to incorporate effective marketing strategies into the blog. Most business bloggers use their blogs as good marketing tools. They rely on their blogs to help drive traffic and get customers. Depending on the products you are selling and your blogging niche, you can incorporate some of the following marketing strategies into the management of your own blog for best results. 

•    Encourage interaction with your readers by asking for comments/suggestions.
•    Make interacting easy for users.
•    Leave valuable comments on other blogs/forums with a link to your own blog.
•    Contribute intelligently to e-zines, online news sources, and other reputable sources.
•    Avoid the temptation to respond harshly to negativity or criticism.
•    Write more on topics that are trending in search engines.
•    Portray yourself as offering solutions all the time.
•    Do not unduly delay in your responses to inquiries/comments.
•    Be absolutely honest and truthful in your responses.

Last Line

If you are getting a blog started or you want to revamp one, the foregoing tips from SEO experts can be of immense help to you if you are desirous to succeed in blogging. If you follow these tips, you could be well on your way to starting and managing a successful blog. Once you get the blog going with quality regular content, the results will start coming in through increased readership, interactions and leads, and with time, customers as well. That’s blogging success no doubt. 

Effective Affiliate Marketing Tips for New Bloggers

Blogging has become a hugely effective tool for affiliate marketers to drive purchase-intent traffic to their website and affiliate offerings. The reason most affiliate marketers and actively involved in blogging. Even if you are new to blogging, what you do to get results must be similar to what experienced bloggers do. Even though affiliate marketers are expected to effectively promote different products and get a commission without having to deal with any physical products or even customers, many usually have great difficulties getting purchase-intent traffic to their affiliate offerings. One practical way around that difficulty is blogging. A good blog can help improve traffic and even sales/revenue for most affiliate marketing efforts.

New bloggers are best advised therefore to concentrate on using their blog to attract good traffic. This they can do by improving their domain authority, performing keyword research on purchase-intent keywords, writing reviews on products/services and joining new affiliate programs. Doing these things consistently will enable them to use their blog to effectively increase their chances of making more affiliate sales and increased commissions.
 
Even though experienced marketers usually volunteer many blogging tips for affiliate marketing, these here tips are particularly suitable for new bloggers who want to maximize their affiliate marketing efforts using their blogs.

Don’t Target Highly Competitive Keywords

If you do so, you’ll be beaten black and blue by more experienced bloggers who are already fully into such keywords. It is an avoidable mistake for new bloggers doing affiliate marketing to target highly competitive keywords early on. Once a keyword is lucrative, chances are always very high that many other bloggers, some very experienced bloggers at that, are already writing blog posts about the keyword. It is usually very difficult if not impossible for new bloggers to make any impact with such keywords. If you start with such competitive keywords immediately, you risk poor ranking. When that happens, it can be quite demoralizing and could even stunt your blogging efforts in totality.

What then is best to do? Just target low difficulty and less competitive keywords! By using such keywords, chances are very high that your blog posts can age and increase rankings over time. As you garner more blogging experience with even some initial traffic, you can then muster more confidence to target more competitive keywords going forward. It is best to aim for higher volume and lower difficulty affiliate keywords. Such keywords give you the best chance of driving more traffic to your website and making more affiliate sales as a consequence. To locate such words, you can do keywords research on online tools like Ahrefs.

 

Target Recurring Affiliate Sales

Recurring affiliate sales are a dream income stream for many affiliate marketers. New bloggers who have attained some level of domain authority and keyword research can rank competitively for many affiliate keywords. That is when it is best for them to target recurring affiliate sales. For new bloggers, having passive affiliate sales is OK but having recurring monthly affiliate revenue is much better.

Even though the commonest affiliate marketing model with most bloggers is to promote an affiliate product/service and getting a commission after a sale, that income can be passive. But, the recurring traffic you get by ranking well usually ensures you get more sales month in month out going forward. Now, that is great for affiliate income! Recurring affiliate sales are like the icing on the cake and they tend to improve greatly on the passive income model. With recurring affiliate sales, you are paid commissions indefinitely for each new customer you refer. That by all calculations is much better than getting a one-time commission for each sale. Your commissions come in steadily each month a customer you referred pays for a product indefinitely. Targeting affiliate programs like these instead of one-time commissions can skyrocket the affiliate revenue from your blog.

Increase your Domain Authority

Domain authority refers to the authority your blog commands in cyber space. Digital marketers measure domain authority by way of rating on a scale from 0 to 100. It indicates the quality and number of sites that link back to your website. The nearer your rating is to 100, the better your website is ranked in Google SERPs. This is important because backlinks are a ranking factor that Google uses to rank sites. The higher your domain rating therefore, the easier it is for Google to rank it for affiliate keywords. If you are a new blogger, you can improve your domain rating by doing guest posts and getting backlinks to your website among other blogging activities to help your ranking. Technically, this appears to be the most efficient way to increase your domain rating because it helps you get initial backlinks to your website and this can attract more natural backlinks to the site.

When your domain rating is high enough, you can start ranking for some important keywords. This helps to increase the traffic to your website significantly. Thus, if your website has a clean backlink profile and high domain authority, its commercial valuation as a valuable web property increases. This is so because domain authority is one of the main factors that buyers take into consideration in pricing a web property. The higher it is, the more valuable the web property is.