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.

Effective eCommerce Business Tips

If you market online, particularly eCommerce, be prepared for stiff competitions because of the millions of others online doing similar things you do. You can succeed though if you listen to experts who are always willing to give some business tips to eCommerce stores owners. Many eCommerce stores are usually individualized. They require no costs to set up their stores and start selling from popular and reputable eCommerce platforms. Others can set up their own online store and sell out of it if they have the knowledge, skills and wherewithal to do so successfully. If either or both of the situations arise, business tips from experienced marketers are always very helpful.

Here are some four tested and effective tips to help you succeed in your eCommerce business.

Diligently Build Your Online Reputation

In online marketing particularly in the running of eCommerce store, online reputation matters a great deal. You can take quality time to build your online reputation diligently when you start marketing online. By posting quality content regularly and spreading it widely on many channels particularly social media channels, your posts will stimulate robust reviews online. Many customers first read reviews of businesses before purchasing from them to ensure that the businesses are legitimate and trustworthy. That becomes a plus for your online reputation. Your online reputation is a very essential part of the process of converting ordinary online surfers to leads and even customers of your eCommerce store. Satisfied customers never fail to tell others and the reputation grows exponentially from there.

Create High-Quality Product Photos

In eCommerce business, high quality photos of the products you are selling are very important. By having them on your website or store, they help to attract traffic to the store. The better the photos, the more the attention they get and the more traffic they attract. Some eCommerce stores now use 3D photos showing all sides of the products they are selling in rotation. Such rotations can even be 360 degrees thereby allowing the potential buyer to see every aspect of the product on display. Such views play a significant role in their buy decisions. 

 

Get a Good Brand Logo
 
Every business needs a good reputation to do well. Branding helps that reputation a great deal. A good logo is a very essential piece of your brand. If it is attractive and memorable, it helps you to build brand awareness fairly quickly. Online, when people see your logo, they easily remember you what your business is and what you do. If you do not have the skills to design a good logo for your eCommerce store, there are online services like fiverr.com or upwork.com you can use to get a good logo.

Highlight What Makes Your Store Unique

This is part of your eCommerce store identity and online reputation. You can skillfully identify what sets your store apart from others and put it into words. If well drafted, this statement can conveniently serve as an essential value proposition for your business. It helps to tell customers at a glance what you do and why it matters. If it is quick and compelling, it will be good to get quality traffic to your eCommerce store.

How to Brand your Business

When you want to brand your business, the first thing you do is to make an honest examination of your product/service. Identify the qualities that you expect to appeal to your target market and emphasize them in your brand making sure to leave out the qualities that might appeal to others, but not necessarily appealing to your target market. If we accept the definition of American Marketing Association that a “brand” is a "name, term, design, symbol, or any other feature that identifies one seller's good or service as distinct from those of other sellers", we will then come to terms about how to brand any business we are involved in. Practically, and in a business sense, a "brand" can represent any organization, project, campaign, or cause and can take many forms; including a name, sign, symbol, color scheme, slogan or any combination of a name, sign, symbol, color scheme or slogan. Anything, just anything that distinguishes a business very distinctly from any and all others defines a brand. 


 
Anytime any day, it makes a very good marketing sense to brand your business taking into consideration that an effective brand requires an attention grabbing name, logo, slogan and color scheme among many other very distinct and unique qualities. Specifically, you have no other choice but to do the following as a matter of necessity if you want to brand your business and make any meaningful impact with the business.

Choose a unique name for the business

The name you choose must be sufficiently unique as to identify you and you alone in the entire business world. Any name you choose must in addition be in compliance with the local laws in your clime taking into consideration all Intellectual Property issues so as not to infringe on the exclusive legal rights of others. Because your name is an essential part of your brand, you must endeavor to choose it very carefully. Your choice must as of necessity, convey the positive qualities that make your business so unique as to appeal directly to your target market. 

Create a unique logo for the business

Every marketer must recognize that a logo is a “graphic, a symbol of other design, used to express the identity of a business.” To create a catchy and unique logo, you must let your imagination run wild depending on what you want to create. What is very important here is that your logo must convey succinctly what you want it to convey, that is, your attractive qualities which will appeal to your target audience. At a glance, that message must be decently and uniquely conveyed. If you are unable to create a logo on your own, there are many free or very inexpensive Websites that can help you create your own logo. Very handy is the Google "Free Logo Creator" which you can use freely and easily.

Create a slogan for the business

Creating a slogan could be very tricky indeed because of the dicey nature of English as a universal business language. You must know what you are doing and what you want to covey. A slogan is simply a way of playing around with words to meet the unique needs of your business. A lot of thought must be given to the words you want to use and how you want to use them to convey the qualities of your product/service.  A good slogan must be a short, striking and memorable phrase that conveys your business identity. It must be all words and nothing else, not even graphics or photos. A good slogan must be made entirely of words which can be included in your logo to pass on a business message uniquely and quickly.