14 Best Blogging Ideas for Beginners

If you know what many people don’t know and you think creatively, you can be a good blogger and command a long list of followers. You can write on any topic under the sun on any niche where you have valuable information to share. Blogging is a hugely competitive business though so you must be able to write well and be prepared to share valuable information consistently before you can get noticed as a blogger. It may be quite simple really to start a blog, but creating a successful blog requires a lot of time and patience.
 
If you are a beginner blogger, it is advisable to choose the right web hosting company for your blog. Most beginner bloggers prefer WordPress because it is a features-rich platform where they can seamlessly access a wide range of simple WordPress themes and templates. In addition, WordPress is a scalable platform which allows bloggers to use WordPress plugins and other features to set up a successful blog fairly easily.

 
You must ensure however that you fully understand and focus on some very important tactical aspects of blogging such as creating impactful blog post titles, using the right content management system, and search engine optimization, SEO, if you want to make a quick success out of your blogging.

As a beginner blogger, before publishing your first blog post, here are some very popular blog niches ideas you can consider before making a choice based on your own knowledge, interest and inclinations.

1. Marketing blog: This is one very popular blog niche. In this niche, beginner bloggers can always take advantage of the abundance of topics to cover. If you blog in this niche, you can easily draw lots of readers to your blog if you cover relevant and interesting topics in the niche. Most blogs within the marketing niche are always great to attract an audience. For instance, this blog you are reading now falls into digital marketing niche that lots of digital marketers are always interested in.

2. Self-help blog: Many beginner bloggers are always interested in personal online journals where they vividly described their daily lives, experiences, struggles and coping mechanisms. If you link your self-help blog to networks comprising like-minded people, it quickly gains readership and wider audience.

3. Parenting blog: One very interesting topic in our adult lives is parenting. Many new parents are always on the internet looking for tips and advice on how to care for and raise their kids properly. If you write a good parenting blog, it can cater to the needs of such an audience. You can in addition use such blog to promote and sell baby products to make money.

4. Gardening blog: Gardening can be some kind of hobby that easily attracts the interest of many home owners. If you write a gardening blog, you can share tips and showcase your own garden produce particularly fruits and vegetables. As an added spice, your blog can also feature stories from other gardening enthusiasts to inspire your audience.

5. Finance blog: This is one blog niche that concerns almost everyone particularly adults who pay taxes and like to make investments. Finance blog can be laced with popular blog topics that both individuals and businesses are interested in. Make sure you have the training and expertise to write an authoritative finance blog. This is because if you don’t know what you are talking about, your blog can easily lose readership and audience.

6. Business blog: You can write a business blog about any business you know well and you are involved in. Many people always want to share from the experiences of others in business. Many small business owners in particular like to follow blogs for inspiration, tips, advice and general information. You can write a good business blog is you have practical information on interesting small business topics.

7. Home Decor blog: This is one great blog niche that usually attracts the attention of home owners and people moving homes. Home decor blogs with cool tips and stunning visuals are extremely popular. Beautiful, vivid, before and after images in particular can help bring organic search engine traffic to your blog.

8. Pet blog: You can write a good pet blog if you own pets and have the experience of keeping pets. For effects, you must be specific about very popular pets instead of writing generally about pets. Topics related to pet housing, pet training, pet food recipes and health tips easily attract people’s attention.

9. Wedding blog: If you have an existing business and domain knowledge to attract potential customers, a wedding blog can be very interesting. This is more so if you choose to write about wedding issues that cover all types of topics like wedding planning, photography, reception venues, decoration, entertainment, food and drinks and suchlike topics that can be very useful to people who are about to get married.
 
10. Food blog: Yes, everyone loves to eat but you must have a real passion for food before you can write a good food blog. Among numerous food blog topics, you can choose to write about home-cooked recipes, exotic cuisines, health diets, reviewing new restaurants and hotels. The competition in food blog niche may be severe but you can get your blog to stand out and be noticed if you target some micro-niches many other bloggers may have overlooked. 

11. Fitness blog: These days, for health concerns, many people like to keep fit. These people are always on the internet searching for information. A good fitness blog can satisfy that need. Most health and fitness blogs are always in high demand and if you choose your own fitness blog niche, you can create a popular blog from a wide range of fitness topics to gain an engaged audience. This is why fitness blog is readily one of the most in-demand topics for bloggers.

12. Travel blog: If you like traveling and you travel a lot, travel blog can be a very good avenue to share your experiences and offer travel tips. Travel blog space is hugely popular and can be quite competitive but your blog can manage to stand out if you offer unique tips about travel routes, travel means, air travel discounts, hotel accommodation and pocket-friendly dinning. Carefully documenting your travel experiences, the people you meet and their cultures and way of life can provide very interesting topics for your travel blog.

13. Tech blog: This is a niche segment with tremendous potentials for blogging. Tech blogging is hugely popular and can be highly competitive as well. This is why you must have domain expertise and authority if you want to succeed as a tech blogger. You can easily increase your tech blog readership if you focus your blog on topics that are of special interest to readers. These are suchlike topics as new product reviews, tips and demos.

14. Beauty blog: The beauty industry is a multi-billion dollar enterprise and blogging in the niche can be quite interesting if you know what you are doing. If you follow the beauty industry keenly, you can leverage your knowledge to write an informative beauty blog. The industry attracts many interests and blogging in the niche is hugely competitive. Uniqueness will get your blog noticed faster than others by focusing on a blog niche within the industry that will enable you to stand out from the crowd. Topics ranging from beauty products, spas, food supplements, diets, beauty accessories, manicure, pedicure, nail art and hair care are great topics to write about in a beauty blog if you want to attract good readership.

5 Key Strategies to Make Money with Affiliate Links

If you are already writing a blog, you can monetize it with affiliate marketing to earn money from it. You can consistently write compelling blog posts on a popular niche and you place affiliate links strategically on the content. These links are meant to lead your blog readers to the product pages of the products you are helping product merchants to promote. When your blog readers click on any of these links and make purchases, you earn commissions from the sales. That in a nutshell is affiliate marketing which operates on a performance-based business model. The more sales you generate through your affiliate links therefore, the more commissions you earn. Simple!

 
The following strategies derived from experience, research and expert recommendations have proven to be of great help to affiliate marketers who want to make money online with affiliate links.

1. Quality Content Creation

Quality content creation always plays a key role in affiliate marketing. This is why one of the most common and successful ways to utilize affiliate links is through content creation on your blog or website. For effectiveness, you must make sure the content you consistently create is highly informative, engaging, impactful and even entertaining. If you strategically incorporate affiliate links on this content, the links when clicked by readers lead them to the product pages of the products you are promoting. Any click that results in a sale earns you a commission. Irrespective of whether your blog is about writing detailed product reviews, how-to guides, or opinion pieces, the key is to provide genuine value. That helps to quickly build trust with your blog readers. When your blog readers trust your content, they are more likely to click on your affiliate links and make a purchase. Then, you earn commissions from the sales generated through the affiliate links.

2. Search Engine Optimization, SEO
 
Among digital marketers, SEO is the practice of optimizing websites and content to improve their visibility and ranking in search engine results. It is a very effective marketing technique that helps marketers to attract organic traffic to their websites. The higher your website is ranked on the SERPs of search engines, the better placed it is to attract organic traffic. The technique is to selectively use special keywords on your content to make it attractive to search engines. Once your content is search engine friendly, it greatly helps its ranking. The more organic traffic your content attracts, the higher the chances that your affiliate links will be clicked and purchases made. More purchases through your affiliate links earn you more commissions from the sales.

3. Email Marketing

Email marketing may be “old school” but it remains a very effective online marketing method and still very popular among digital marketers. It is one of the most effective ways to promote affiliate links. If you have a responsive email list which you must have built up over time, it gives you a direct line to your audience. The list serves as a personal and direct way to connect with them regularly to give them vital marketing information. If your email list is responsive enough, it can directly help to boost your affiliate sales if handled correctly. By using this list, you can regularly embark on email campaigns to share exclusive deals, promote fresh blog posts, or offer valuable content. By strategically inserting affiliate links in your emails/newsletters, you’re creating a straight path to your product pages. That directly increases the chances for your audience to make purchases, then you earn commissions from the sales so generated.

4. Social Media Marketing, SMM

Because of the immense popularity of social media, (about 4.6 billion active users worldwide), it is now a great channel for promoting affiliate links. This is why social media platforms presently offer immense potential for affiliate marketing. The very popular social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok now provide great opportunities for sponsored posts, product reviews, and affiliate link promotions. Influencers with a significant following on social media do help share, (for some benefits of course), affiliate links with their audience, showcasing products/services they genuinely endorse and even recommend. If you diligently research your target audience, build a strong social media presence and promote your affiliate links widely on the very popular platforms, you can significantly increase your affiliate sales and earn more commissions.
 
5. YouTube Video Content Marketing

Digital marketers have since discovered that videos are very effective marketing tools online. This is more so when the videos are on YouTube channel. So, if you want to earn money through affiliate sales on YouTube, you can start your own YouTube channel about a specific topic/niche then start reviewing or showcasing related products on the niche you are promoting. For effectiveness, make sure the videos are short (about 2 mins) and of very high quality. The videos should be fun and highly informative in highlighting the best features of the products you’re promoting. If you strategically add affiliate links in the video descriptions or overlays, they attract clicks from viewers. As your YouTube channel grows in popularity, the clicks are bound to increase. Same thing happens to the sales you generate and the commissions you earn.

Final Thoughts

No doubt affiliate marketing is a great money-making opportunity through affiliate links, but you must put in the right efforts using the foregoing strategies to get the right results. Irrespective of whether you’re a blogger, a social media influencer, you’re good at sending impactful emails, you do good product reviews, you’re part of online communities, or you run niche websites, what matters most if you want to earn good money with affiliate links is to consistently give real value through your content. This earns you the trust of your audience. You can therefore carefully choose the right products/services that resonate with your audience to promote. That is what brings in the steady commissions you should care about as an affiliate marketer.

4 Resourceful Ways to Improve Your Affiliate Marketing Revenue

Affiliate marketing is one great way to earn revenue online particularly if you’re a content marketer. It is a simple business model where affiliates help product merchants market their products/services and they earn commissions for their efforts. What affiliates do in the process is to promote affiliate links/codes to products/services in their content particularly blog content. When users click on these links and make purchases, the affiliate earns commissions from the sales. Depending on the type of affiliate program and the products/services involved, the commission rates can vary from 5% to 30% of the sales value.

Below are 4 actionable tips on resourceful ways to increase your revenue through affiliate marketing.

1. Publish In-Depth and Impactful Blog Posts

You cannot do affiliate marketing successfully without content marketing. Blogging comes in very handy in that quest. Most successful affiliate marketers are good bloggers. It is through the in-depth and impactful blog content they publish regularly they are able to widely promote affiliate links to help them generate sales and earn commissions. Through this content, they widely promote affiliate links which if blog readers click on and make purchases, they earn commissions. Most marketers generally agree that good blogging significantly increases affiliate marketing sales. For this reason, the topics you blog about must be relevant to your niche, well researched and written to make them impactful on readers. That is the type of content that attracts readers in significant numbers. The more blog readers are attracted to your content, the higher the chances that some will click on your affiliate links and even make purchases. These purchases earn you good commissions.

2. Create and Post More Video Content

Due to the rise in smartphone technology and the increase in the use of smartphones to access the internet, there is increasing popularity in the use of videos as marketing content. Most people in the world now own and hugely depend on mobile devices for their daily activities. Many of these people prefer watching videos instead of reading content on these devices. Human beings are visual beings. The reason short videos have become highly popular marketing tools. Even on social media platforms like YouTube, TikTok and Instagram the use of videos as marketing tools is the mainstay of these hugely popular platforms. On these platforms, affiliate marketers can create impactful video content in form of demonstrations, online courses, reviews, how-to tips, promos and giveaways to attract the attention of customers. This content is produced in a combination of pre-recorded videos and live streams designed to get people to engage with the products/services they’re marketing and even to lure them to purchase products. If well produced and used correctly on these platforms, affiliate marketers can rely on video content to grow their social media channels, generate affiliate revenue, and increase their website engagement.

3. Market with Eye-Catching Emails

Email marketing may have been around for a while but it is still a very effective marketing tool for affiliate marketers. Aside being cost-effective to use, they’re easy to deploy to thousands of recipients in a matter of seconds. Emails are thus some of the best marketing tools to get leads, conversions and even customers. You can easily use email marketing to connect with your subscribers and promote affiliate products to a very wide audience. If you regularly send well-crafted, eye-catching, segmented and personalized emails to recipients, the marketing returns are amazing. That impacts your affiliate marketing revenues positively as well.

4. Set Measurable Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)

If you want to have a good picture of and understand the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns, just track your Key performance Indicators (KPIs) diligently. KPIs are important metrics that help every affiliate marketer to monitor and to gauge the performance of their marketing campaigns. Expert marketers recommend for close monitoring important metrics like conversions, time on page, and revenue by traffic, retention rate and so on. If you have a standard marketing website, you can easily access these metrics and even more by reviewing the Google analytics tools on your website. To maximize your earnings and revenues, make sure you monitor your KPIs diligently to see if and how your marketing strategies are helping your business to grow. 

5 Techniques to Make Money with Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketers are independent business persons who work to earn commissions. They help product merchants market their products and earn commissions from their efforts. They are not directly responsible for product manufacturing, warehousing/storage, product delivery or customer service. These are the responsibilities of product merchants.  The job of affiliate marketers is to simply direct traffic from their websites, blogs, newsletters, and online posts to the brands they are promoting. Affiliates earn money in form of commissions in exchange for driving traffic and/or purchases to the referring brand.

Here are some tested techniques affiliates use to earn money in affiliate marketing.

1. Coupon Sites

When product merchants want to introduce a novel or underappreciated product/service into the market, coupon sites come in very handy. For a limited period of time, you can promote a reduction on first-time purchases in an affiliate arrangement with a coupon website. These coupons can entice buyers to visit your website and sign up to become supporters of your brand. Commissions are paid for connections made in this process.

2. Bloggers/Influencers

If you connect with popular and established writers or social media Influencers in your business niche, they can directly help you through their separate audiences to expand your own reach. That makes your reach exponentially wider. If these writers and influencers help to propagate your marketing messages or write articles to promote or endorse your products, it directly enhances your sales. What they write or endorse, because of the trust they have built with their separate audiences over time, can directly attract people from their audience to look up the website of the product merchant. When these visitors make purchases, the writers or influencers are then entitled to be paid commissions relative to the sales made.

3. Review Sites

Products merchants take to review websites when they have high-priced products to sell. It is customary for buyers and customers to desire more information about any product before making their buy decisions. That is where review websites become handy to provide this additional information by way of product reviews. When businesses and authors on review websites willingly give a referral link to your product and rate it highly, it usually increases the likelihood that potential buyers will click through and buy from you. The referring parties earn commissions from their referral efforts.

4. Search Affiliates

Search affiliates are mostly independent business owners who spend money on ads to have their products shown in search engine results. There are affiliates who earn commissions through PPC on their ads. The ads can also be placed on popular social media networks, like Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, Facebook or other online advertising networks. The more searchers click on these ads, the more commissions the affiliates earn.

5. Email Marketing

Email marketing may have been around for quite a while but it is still a very efficient affiliate marketing technique. It remains one of the most efficient methods to get individuals to sign up for a brand, a survey, a contest or a webinar. Affiliate marketers can send out a huge mass of emails with the contents having affiliate links to the product they are promoting. Once these links are used to sign up or make purchases from the product merchant, the affiliate earns a commission. Quite an effective affiliate marketing technique no doubt!

Wrapping Up

Earning money with affiliate marketing is a simple business model that is performance based. The more you intensify your promotional activities, the more commissions you earn. It is however unrealistic to expect to earn tonnes of money overnight. If you have the diligence and patience to set up the right techniques, money will gradually start to come in with time. Affiliate marketing is really a very simple legitimate business that requires perseverance, ingenuity, focus, and devotion over time. That is when appreciable income is expected to start to accruing to the affiliate marketer.

Important Blogging Rules Every Guest Blogger Must Know

As a guest blogger or collaborative content marketer, you are expected to showcase your talent in the website of your host. If you have guest blogging as part of your overall content marketing strategy, you had better be good at your trade. You must therefore know the rules of guest blogging and play by the rules. If you can consistently create good content around topics relevant to the audience of your host blog, using the right and appropriate format, and directly promote your content and the host website, you’ll quickly endear yourself to your host. Thereafter, if you follow the rules and keep to your host’s lead, you can succeed as a guest blogger. That success rubs off on your host as well as your own business. That makes the relationship mutually beneficial to both the host and the guest blogger. In this relationship, the golden rule is read the rules/guidelines, reread the rules/guidelines and keep strictly within the rules/guidelines in your guest blogging activities.

 

Therefore, if you want to be a great guest blogger, it is important you know these here tips/rules/guidelines.

Do Your Homework Well

Knowledge and preparation are vital keys to successful guest blogging. Always do your homework well before starting out. Part of this preparation is proper investigation of your host blog before selecting them. You must know something about the audience, the blog niche, the categories and tags for the content, frequency of publication/updates, preferred topics, and if by-lines and backlinks allowed on the content. This information will enable you to prepare well enough for the huge task of guest blogging ahead.
 
Review and Understand the Guidelines

Don’t ignore the blogging guidelines as related to your blog host. Always review and understand the guidelines well enough as you start off and as you blog along. Whatever the guidelines require you do, be sure to comply. Some guidelines may require you to first submit an expression of interest form, or a pitch and even a completed article and your concise Bio. Compliance with these requests to the satisfaction of your blog host helps to quickly cement your guest blogging relationship.

Create Only Unique and Relevant Quality Content

Do not ignore consistent good content. That is what attracts readership. You can always review what’s been published on a particular topic then give the topic a bit of twist to provide fresh and additional information for the benefit of your readers. If you manage to consistently come up with an uncommon angle about a particular topic such that your content manages to provide a fresh take on the topic, you have very bright chances of impressing your host website’s submission reviewer and the audience.

Carefully Pick Your Target Websites

One of the major benefits of guest blogging is to extend your reach beyond your website and your brand. That way, your content manages to reach more readers, secures quality backlinks from authoritative domains, and increases your social-sharing opportunities. That naturally translates to more traffic back to your website. It is important to figure out which sites reach the people you want to reach and which domains offer more credibility to your content and brand. Thereafter, you can carefully pick your target websites before you guest blog on their sites. 

Conform with Set Formats

Most blog websites have their preferred blog formats. The reason you must avoid submitting content on a radically different topic or format. You do not have the luxury of content experimentation as you can have on your own blog website. It is best to fit your content into your host’s blogging environment as much as practicable. Unless you have express permission to do so, never submit a content type that your host blog is not used to publishing. If it becomes absolutely necessary to publish something a bit different, you can explore the possibility of convincing your host blog to expand its focus to your particular format or topic of interest.

Write Only for Their Audience

A guest blogger writes solely for the audience of his host blog. If your content fits in seamlessly for the readers, they may not even know you are a guest blogger unless your bio says so. Write content to fit what the audience expects. This content is reinforced with a matching blog style, factual and informative content as well as educating and entertaining content. Your content must focus fully on how it can help your audience and not as disguised ads for selling anything. It should not in any way be perceived by your audience as a way to get as many backlinks as possible to your website.

Always Submit Original Content

In content marketing, content is king. The best content for guest blogging is original content. Some host blogs don’t accept content that’s been published anywhere else on the internet. It is easy for them to detect any content that’s been published elsewhere through Copyscape software for instance. Some blogs may accept content if a disclosure is made and proper acknowledgement and attribution shown. Failure to do this, you risk getting blacklisted.

Don’t Fail to Promote Your Content

Promoting your content vigorously is highly beneficial to your host blog and your own website. It is therefore advisable to widely share your content on appropriate online channels particularly social media channels. While sharing, be sure to include links to the original post. That helps with directing traffic to the right places.

Routinely Engage with Your Readers

If you routinely engage with readers, you can get useful feedback and even great ideas for more content. User generated content too is very useful for SEO. Try to always read and respond to all comments generated by the content you posted. It is also advisable to track where your content is promoted on social media and carefully interact with any comments posted therein.

Always Follow Up Diligently

By following up, you can always review performance feedback to evaluate the success of your content. If you detect contents not doing well, you can find out why then take remedial actions. Poor performance of content may have to do with issues relating to your blog headlines, your audience, the topics and even your general approach to blogging. It is good too to always check in with the blog editor or director of your host blog. That way, you can tap into their thoughts and opinions about how well you are doing as a guest blogger. You can share your host blog editor’s opinion together with your content stats as intro for other guest blogging opportunities.

Write to an Appropriate Length

Most host blogs usually have word count ranges for the blogs they allow. Their blogging guidelines usually specify this. Even if not specified, you can spot-check the length of existing content then craft your own content to fit in. You diminish the likelihood of your articles being accepted if you write too long or too short.

Respect Facts

In blogging, facts are sacred. They help to enhance credibility and authority. Always make sure your facts are correct and all direct quotes/statistics attributed appropriately. When it comes to quoting statistics and figures, be sure to get to the original source to verify before quoting. If you are unable to verify any information or statistics, it is advisable to exclude them from your content.

Follow the Stylebook of the Site

Most blog submission guidelines often specify the site’s stylebook. Just stick with it. In some cases you may be required to stick with American grammar or English grammar and that includes the dictionary type too. Stick with their formatting style as well and be sure to stick with the steps provided by the host website to submit your content.
 
Always Make a Case for Your Content

It is part of blog promo to always make a case for your content. If you are given an opportunity to craft an introductory email, make it brief but intriguing. You can customize it for the site as proof and to show you know the audience and the purpose of the blog. That helps to project why your authorship and content should work well on the site. If you introduce yourself well enough through your accomplishments, you can quickly build authority, social proof, and a great rapport with your audience.

Quickly Establish Your Credibility

You need credibility to build authority, social proof and rapport with your audience. Credible references are essential here. For this reason, you can always cite relevant outlets where you’ve published content, and if convenient, demonstrate your content’s effectiveness with credible stats and laurels. Don’t leave out your bragging rights if you are not compelled to. They help your credibility.

Diligently Scrutinize Feedback

User generated content is helpful for a blog’s SEO. The reason you cannot afford to ignore feedback from your audience. If you diligently review the comments and questions posed through feedback, it can help you to craft new content or to retouch old content with new information. You may even decide to take down an old post if the feedback you get makes it necessary.

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. 

How a Business Blog can Help Boost Your Marketing Strategy, 5 Tips

Content marketing is increasingly becoming popular among digital marketers and blogs appear to be leading the charge. A huge number of marketers are now using blogs as their main attractions tool to pull traffic to their business websites. However, it is only marketers who blog high quality and highly informative content on a good niche that tend to get the best results. These are marketers who when creating content for their blogs never neglect to follow the best SEO practices to optimize their content for search engines. The reason for this is simple. With content optimization techniques on their blogs, these marketers manage to increase the number of visitors to the blogs. With a good SEO, search engines particularly Google are able to rank blog texts higher on their SERPs. That is good for organic traffic which is highly valuable to marketers.

Most experienced marketers achieve organic reach by using a content-optimized blog. What this means is that these marketers are able to cut down on promotional expenses by using less of paid ads in their promotional efforts. With good SEO in place, experience shows that a large portion of the target audience still finds its way to business blogs through browser searches. That is organic traffic. Most of the people who make up this traffic are usually looking for a solution to their problems. What is therefore critical for a good blog is to consistently create appropriate content that isn’t just about selling, but about solving peoples’ problems. If you want your business blog to act as a real booster to your marketing strategy, do not ignore the following.

1. Produce High Quality Content Consistently

The only credible way to get traffic and earn money from your business blog is to consistently provide your blog readers with valuable content. The more often people read your posts, the more likely they are to click on the affiliate links embedded in the content. Doing so translates to more leads, sales and good income through earned commissions for the blogger. For this reason, a blogger must always aim to gain the trust of his target audience by being absolutely honest about the products/services he is promoting. The high quality content you consistently produce as a blogger helps to build this trust.

2. Target a Market Niche

Your blog can never gain much traction on the internet if it is not well targeted at a market niche. Be sure to restrict this niche as it fits the type of product/service you want to promote. Your blog posts become interesting when you write about the offers/opportunities that will attract the interest of your readers. Do concise surveys to determine who your competitors are in your chosen niche. You can choose several related topics and use them to further broaden the niche. But, be sure to target a less competitive niche since the lower the level of competition, the better attention your blog gets.

3. Identity your Target Audience

Because it is by far easier to successfully market to an audience you know, you must always endeavor to identify your target audience before marketing to it. If you know who your target audience is, you can easily craft your marketing messages to meet their needs. Such messages become more effective as a result.

4. Carefully Choose your Blogging Platform

You must carefully choose a blogging platform from a variety of platforms available for creating blogs. Blogger and WordPress are readily two of the most popular of all blogging platforms today. They offer a wide range of features and tools that assist bloggers to make a success of their blogging activities. Both are great blogging platforms that can help boost any marketing strategy no matter how sophisticated.

5. Optimize your Blog

To optimize your blog successfully, you must give serious consideration to SEO, Search Engine Optimization. SEO helps to make your blog content visible to search engines. With it, search engines can rank your blog content high on their SERPs. That translates to good organic traffic coming over to your blog. So, you can effectively use optimization strategies to increase blog traffic and earnings. Great for your marketing strategy no doubt! If you do not have the technical knowledge to effect SEO on your blog, you can hire the services of professional webmasters to do it for you. DIY tools are also available to help you out. Expert marketers recommend the following tools to optimize your blogs for search engines:

•    Google Trends: This tool helps to check the level of interest in a keyword and to 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.

How to Get More Social Media Followers and Drive Sales

With now an estimated 4.2 billion active users on social media worldwide, the quest for followers can be quite challenging since it depends on many factors. The benefits are enormous as well if you can have a large number of followers on any of the social media platforms. Even though it can be pretty difficult to gather a huge following, the techniques and tactics you deploy in your social media activities play a very significant role in that quest. If for instance you are an active blogger, it is only when you have a huge following that you can profitably monetize your blog. Same thing applies if you want to become a social media influencer and join the league of good money-makers on social media. If you are able to deploy the right techniques and tactics you can easily generate a good following, build a great reputation from a loyal audience and drive sales for your business. Find below some tested and reliable techniques you can use to get more social media followers and drive sales for your business.

Have a Social Media Strategy

It is true that haphazard marketing on social media hardly ever yields good results. Therefore, you need to have a strategy that works well to help get the best results. This strategy must be such that can effectively help to drive more traffic to your website or blog. If your social media strategy is right and effective, a huge bulk of your readers can come from social media networks. You must therefore endeavor to formulate a social media strategy that helps boost traffic to your business website or blog.

Create Valuable Content

In social media marketing, content is king. Good content is what helps to attract readers to your page. The reason readers come to your page is because you are offering them something that they need. Therefore, you must endeavor to create content that is of value to your readers. One very easy and effective way to get that done is to think from your readers’ perspective and create content along that perspective.

Offer Free Stuff

Yeah, everyone likes free stuff. Nothing attracts people more than free stuff. You can offer up promotional coupons, eBooks, free templates, how-to guides, and other useful stuff to ingratiate yourself with your audience. They respond accordingly and that helps to attract traffic to your website/blog.

Choose a Specific Niche

A specific niche allows you to target a specific audience interested in that niche. The success of your blog depends on you finding your passion and your ability to create compelling content. Expert marketers advise that your niche should not have too much competition as your blog will need to compete against highly rated sites. If it does, the content can easily be stifled out and unnoticed by readers. That scenario cannot help your traffic. Be sure to choose a subject matter that you are very knowledgeable about and one that people can take insights from and with a demand that will impact your potential following. That means you will also need to get an accurate picture of your target audience in terms of age, level of knowledge of the subject matter, and other factors to make a meaningful impact on the audience.

Focus on a Few Social Media Platforms

It is quite impactful to focus your content on a few or even a single social media channel. If you don’t, you risk not capturing the right amount of followers to make your blog worth looking into. Carefully identify your target readers’ demographics and then identify the social networks that they prefer. If for instance your blog post is geared more towards professionals and businesses you might want to consider using LinkedIn. If however your target followers are younger and more visual, you may tilt towards Facebook, Instagram or Pinterest for best results.

Build Trust Diligently

In any human endeavor, trust building takes time and efforts. This is even more delicate when you factor in that you are dealing with all kinds of people with various backgrounds on social media. For most readers, it could take some very little things to get them to trust you or distrust you. All of it depends on the content they read from you and expect from you. If you manage to build a track record of creating useful content that serves them well, and you are diligent, consistent and reliable about it, it helps you to build trust.

Create Quality Content Regularly

This helps to establish and build your social media presence. If your content does not attract readers, it is not worth the while. Therefore, you must regularly churn out quality content that readers need. To sustain the interest of your readers, it helps to set out a calendar for your content creation and posting. Doing so helps to guarantee regularity and consistency in your quality content production.

Increase Engagement Rates

How people engage your content is directly related to the relevance and quality of the content. Therefore, one credible way to increase your fan base is to get more engaged followers. You can only get more engaged followers if your content is important enough or interesting enough that people share, link to, like, and even make comments on. To sustain this engagement, make sure to reply to comments as well as collaborate with other content creators for mutual benefits.

Use Analytics to Understand Your Audience

Social media analytics is all about feedback data. You can rely on this data to better understand your audience. Social media analytics data allows you to get the right insights about who your followers are. With that vital information, you can regularly tweak your content to align with their needs. If your content aligns well with their needs, it is better engaging and good for traffic. If you back that up with Search Engine Optimization (SEO) techniques, you can maximize your audience and income with ad sales.

Use the Right Hashtags

Many social media users tend to ignore hashtags. Hashtags are hugely important to help direct more followers to your website/blog. This is because posts with hashtags have higher rates of engagement than posts without hashtags. To take advantage of this, you must make sure that the hashtags you use are relevant, funny, interesting, easily recalled, and in good taste. It is such hashtags that are really great for engagement.

How to Monetize a Low-Traffic Blog

With the increasing popularity of blogging as a credible way to make money online, many experienced bloggers tend to over emphasize the real importance of traffic to a blog. Yes, every blog needs traffic, mostly real organic traffic to make money, but you can still make money with your blog even if the inbound traffic is not yet fantastic. If the number of visitors to your blog is still considerably low, do not be discouraged in your blogging efforts, you can still monetize it to make money. To do so, you don’t really need the often recommended monetization strategies like affiliate marketing, paid ads, Google Adsense and a host of others because these methods depend on huge traffic before they make good money for you. Not to worry though! You can still make money from your blog even if it is yet to be hugely popular with a lot of inbound traffic.


 
Here is what works to make money from a low-traffic blog.

Freelance Blogging

You can make money from blogging by blogging for other sites and brands. By doing so, the money you make will not depend directly on the number of visitors you attract daily. You will make money by cooperating directly with brands, agencies, and corporate bodies who are always in search of skillful bloggers to work with. All you need are relevant skillsets such as WordPress, SEO, Social Media and persuasive skills. You must in addition to these skills be able to really understand the audience of any particular brand. If you understand the audience well enough and what it needs, it becomes easier for you to create relevant content that spurs them into action. To be a successful freelance blogger, you can incorporate in your own blog the option to hire you as a freelance blogger. More like an open invitation though! The most popular option however is by registering as an agency on any major freelancing websites, such as Problogger. Apart from making you look more professional, registering as an agency with a freelancing website helps to position you to be well known as an in-demand freelance blogger and not just an ordinary freelancer who may neither have the requisite skills nor experience in blogging.

Virtual Coaching
 
If your blog has limited traffic and you are keen on finding a credible way to make money from blogging, you can look the way of virtual coaching. No matter what niche your blog is involved in, it will not get the desired effect on readers if it does not affect them in one of or all three ways of business, life or personal. Once your blog manages to help provide solutions to its readers along these three ways, it is bound to be effective. It doesn’t really matter the niche of your blog, once it offers online coaching service to motivated consumers, you can make some money. By giving expert advice on your blog through consistent content, you can sell your expertise as a business, life or personal coach. Even if your blog only gets limited traffic, you can still get your expertise to go viral by way of social media channels to attract real patronage and you make money as a result.

Selling Online Courses
 
One other profitable strategy to monetize a low-traffic is to create and sell courses online. If your blog niche has to do with exercises and fitness, you can create and sell “how-to” courses to help people benefit from your knowledge in their own private times and chosen places of convenience for them. Just find any popular area of human need you have the knowledge and you can create and sell courses on it to make money, more particularly now that virtual learning is on the rise. Any course you can create which somehow helps to address and solve major human needs/problems, people will buy it from you online if it is well packaged and presented.


 
Virtual Summit

For many bloggers even those with very low inbound traffic to their blogs, a new way to make money online nowadays is by way of virtual summits. This too is another way of selling expert knowledge online. Because most bloggers already know that Media Influencers usually bring engagement, expansion of reach, and credibility with them, they now use virtual summits to link up with such Influencers with a view building long-lasting relationships. Now, everyone I know always wants to hear directly from the experts. These are people who have made it or are still making it. This is the major selling point of virtual summits. Virtual summits are basically visual contents like short video interviews on any topic of interest with industry experts, celebrities, other bloggers, and business industry experts and so on. Viewers are then given the “opt-in” opportunity to subscribe and watch these videos online over a limited period of time. They need to purchase access pass to view these videos. When the time expires, they will need to purchase more access time to watch more and this costs money which the blogger makes as income. If you choose a good topic of discussion and your experts/influencers are well known, they come along with their own audience which helps you to grow your own audience as well. You can make money by selling your back-end product to this enhanced audience and from the summit subscription fees.

Private Label Rights, PLRs

What really attracts bloggers to selling PLR products is because they save themselves the drudgery and stress of having to create the products/content afresh. Even if your expertise is very limited on any field, you can easily repackage the works of an expert in the field and place under your own label before selling. Basically, PLR products are pre-written content that you can claim as your own without incurring any legal action from plagiarism. It is one clever way to leverage other people’s products and use it to create your own products even if your expert knowledge in the field is severely limited. You can use PLR articles to write a Kindle book related to any important topic of your choosing then sell the book from your blog. On the alternative, if you want to improve the readership and popularity of your blog, you can also use PLR articles to generate content for it. If you want to make money with PLR products, you must take cognizance of these three major attributes. Firstly, they must be published in limited circulation. Secondly, they must be written by a reputable and well known author. Thirdly, they must have been recently developed. It is only PLR products with these attributes that can help you to easily make money online.
 

Why Blogging Remains the Best Way to Earn Money Online

Can you write? Do you know something others will like to read about? Can you clearly write about such things? If you can, you too can be a blogger and earn money online. Blogging is one of the most favorable online businesses that allow you to earn passive income in perpetuity. If you are merely having fun blogging, you can earn a cool second paycheck monthly or even a full-time income if you are a serious blogger. Making money online by way of blogging requires skills, patience and a bit of hard work though. You must be prepared to learn on the job and to work your blogging business with diligence, dedication and with genuine interest if you hope to earn money from it.

If you decide to earn money online, blogging is one of a few basic and easy-to-start online businesses which require very little or no money at all to start. If you can write, just start writing a blog that people like to read and you are in business. It is as simple as that. Blogging is one great way to express your own unique ideas to the world. Once you can simply write about these ideas and express your thoughts about them very lucidly for others to understand, you become a blogger. Expressing these thoughts regularly and freshly on a website for many and diverse people to access and read online empowers your own blog website. It is from this website you can regularly share your ideas with your readers and consequently make money online as a result. Most online marketers generally agree that blogging is the most successful online business anyone desirous to earn money online can get involved in. Depending on your blogging skills and the popularity of your blog, you can earn up to $20,000 or even more monthly. Now, that’s cool money to earn by merely churning out your own fresh ideas from your blog site. Not bad at all. 


 
You can start a blog without any major financial layout. Sometimes it can even be done freely depending on the blogging platform you’ve decided to use. In addition, it is very simple to create a blog once you’ve decided on the niche business you know something about and you have the capacity to churn out very regular and fresh content about the niche. Once the blog is up and running, the readership will continue to grow. By the time it gets sufficiently popular with impressive readership numbers, you can start earning money from it using many different monetization methods. The most popular of these methods is Google Adsense. Once your blog starts running well, you can apply to Google for an Adsense account. On approval, Google will start displaying specialized and unique ads on your website and you earn income from the performance of these ads as determined by Google Adsense.

If you do not have money to acquire your own website and pay for its hosting, you don’t need to worry too much. It is possible for you to blog from many free blog platforms online. The most popular of such platforms is blogger.com. It is very easy to create a free blog by signing up at blogger.com and you are on. Apart from helping to you to create a free blog, blogger.com also helps you to monetize it with Google Adsense and boom you are in blogging business. As a blogger, you may not have total independence from blogger.com. That to me is not too much of a trade-off for the free blog platform they are offering you. Because of the dependence of your blog on blogger.com, your blog/website name for example will be something like yoursitename.blogspot.com. That however does not in any way stop you from making the very best from your blog as your blogging skills and expertise will allow. However, the major drawback in a free website blog is that you may not be able to completely customize or change your website settings. That greatly limits the control you have over your blog site.

If however you have some money to invest in your blogging business, you can go for your own business name, something like yoursitename.com. You’ve got to pay to acquire the name and also pay web-hosts who will help you to host it on annual renewal hosting fees. The choice is yours really. It is mostly for reasons of complete control and total independence some people go for their own self-hosted blog websites even with some costs attached. This control allows you to manage all your data and files by yourself, meaning, nobody can damage or harm your blog site without compromising it yourself.

 

Free and Easy to Use SEO Tools Every Blogger Needs

If you are a blogger, you must be aware that digital marketers have discovered that search engine optimization SEO, is one of the most important components of every digital marketing strategy. Every blogger needs SEO in most efforts to improve a website or blog’s organic search ranking. What that means is the much needed traffic to the site. Not every blogger can afford to pay for SEO tools so many really go for the free tools some of which are for measurements and others for monitoring. It need not be overemphasized why monitoring is extremely important for every website/blog owner. The reasons are rather very obvious. The following are some free tools which readily come in handy for every blogger to use.

Google Analytics

This is readily one of the most popular free web tools at the moment. When integrated on your site, it enables you to easily comprehend the organic as well as other traffic flows to the site. It allows you to compare the past performance in a better way. With the data it generates, you can easily notice any changes in your site traffic. Such information enables you take decisions to ameliorate the causative problem or to eliminate it all together. Great tool no doubt!

Google Search Console

This is an instrument that gives you the ability to visualize how your site may appear in a search and how to impact with other appearance components. With the information it provides, you can at any time decide to rejig or juggle your site appearances until you get what works best before you adopt. The tool also lets you get the information on your top search queries, landing pages, countries and how it performs across devices and web browsers. In addition, it advises you on various mistakes that happen from website crawls by Search Engine bots and recommends HTML improvements. Another great tool no doubt.

Bing Webmaster Tools

Because of the very large share by Google, about 65% of search results, many marketers tend to neglect the Bing search engine which houses over 20% of the Internet’s search traffic. For that reason, experts also recommend the use of Bing Webmaster Tools as a decent method to keep a tab on how your webpage is dealing with Bing. This tool also offers benefits beyond Bing by providing insights into crawling, indexation, on-page keyword optimization, and other components that can affect your performance even in Google. This is one more great free tool to have and use for your marketing efforts if you are eager to run with the pros.

Expert Blogger Marketing Tip: Service Your Leads

 In blogging business, it is not enough to build links and leads. You must devise ways to test and service these links and leads for good results. One of such ways is to keep a keen eye on the growth of your Email list. By so doing, you become the credible source of information in your niche. That credibility helps your blog to build backlinks to your site. Backlinks determine the sites that are linking to your website, thus building your site’s authority.

That is what Google Search Engine really loves. So, if you want to build your rank on the search engines, you become THE authority in your niche. Simple! You must explore all ways to routinely create content that others will link to and share all over the internet. The real reason you must strive to be the reliable expert in your industry. You must however be willing to build your authority over time by earning the respect and trust of your audience. That requires some real work and overnight success is not guaranteed. The real reason you must keep innovating and honing in on what your buyers want. Be willing to be ahead of the curve and to offer products and services that you know meet their needs before they even know they have those needs. You must be the leader in using specific terms and phrases in your industry. Be the source that first coins the phrases and uses them repeatedly in your marketing campaigns. Real authority is derived therefrom and the Search Engines love to showcase that.

Expert Blogger Marketing Tip: Build Your Email List

 Email marketing may be old fashioned but it still gets results. According to experts’ parlance, there are two things you own completely: Your website and your email list. Even though social media outlets may come and go, and algorithms may change, but your list is yours. It is always there for you to use as you please. Many successful bloggers know the power of email marketing, so they use it to maximum advantage.

For best results, most successful bloggers routinely do many things in common when it comes to email marketing. Some of such things are:

They treat their contacts as serious human beings.

They respect their contacts.

They are thoughtful in the way they communicate with those on their email list.

They don’t overstep their welcome by emailing too frequently.

They don’t email irrelevant information.

They build relationships with their followers with consistent, high-value email content.

They habitually give more than they expect in return.

They let it be known that it is more about the list and not the list owner.

Bloggers who fail or neglect to follow these best practices, suffer a very high unsubscribe rate.
Everyone is after results so good bloggers always keep very keen eyes on the numbers. That is why successful bloggers are deliberately strategic in using email in their marketing campaigns. Besides consistently sending valuable information, they use links to bring readers back to their website. They make it easy for readers to share their emails by using social share buttons. They offer content that isn’t readily available anywhere else but via email. They ensure that their subscribers are treated to the very best information. The real reason they are very successful in what they do.

 

Expert Blogger Marketing Tip: Spend More Time Promoting Content than Creating it

As most bloggers know, quality and consistency are more important than quantity when it comes to content. Such good content takes time and other valuable resources to create. Even if you spend time creating very good content and people don’t get to know about it, you are simply wasting valuable time and efforts. That is where content promotion comes into the mix. Many experts believe from practice and experience that it is best to “spend 20% of your time creating new content and 80% of your time promoting it.”

If you blog, no doubt you are aware that writing and publishing content is very time-consuming. It does not end there. You must explore credible ways to get your blog out there for readers to find fairly easily. It is imperative therefore for you to find the best outlets to share and promote all the content you worked so hard to create. That is a logical expectation but sadly, not many bloggers explore this strategy to the fullest. It helps to know what social media or content-sharing platforms your targeted audience can be found. Google search techniques come in very handy here.  With it, you can get to know your target buyers’ online habits. That information will enable you to develop a potent strategy to reach them on the social media platforms they can be found in record numbers. A focused content promotion strategy will help you work smarter, not harder. You get better results that way.
 

Expert Blogger Marketing Tip: Create the Content Your Readers Want

 Content! Content!! Content!!! That’s what brings readers to your blog. Depending on the nature of the blog, you’ll find that readers want to be entertained or educated. Highly successful bloggers know that and invest their time and effort to create focused content to meet their readers’ needs. They know that when your content is good, educating, informative and entertaining, readers keep coming back in good numbers. That is exactly what online marketers want to happen and their businesses do make something out of this traffic.

As most bloggers know, quality and consistency are more important than quantity when it comes to content. That is why it profits many bloggers highly if they commit to producing high-quality, relevant content on a consistent basis which their readers will come to depend on for a regular cadence of fresh content. Doing that consistently and over time, you’ll manage to build a loyal following of readers who are always hungry for more. The more good quality content you dish out to them, the more they keep coming back for more. That keeps the traffic in regular inflow and it benefits your business no end.