Do you have a blog? Do you want to start a profitable blog? With ten years blogging and social media experience I have ten steps that can help you start your journey to having a profitable blog.
I started blogging in the days of blogville. The days when we blog our emotions or blog about what this lecturer did, what that lecturer did, who I am crushing on, which of my colleagues are ticking me out and what I should do about it. The lovely members of the blogville would then gather round and give advice of what could be done.
Google noticed the family growing out of blogs, bloggers and blogville in Nigeria, Africa and the diaspora and found a way to make money out of it and here we are today, making 520 million naira and buying a house in Banana Island. I don’t have a house in Banana Island yet but that is the dream.
#1 Commit the blog income formula to memory:
Your income is equal to the number of subscribers X (.02 x price of product). So how much you earn depends on the number of people who subscribe to your blog. How many subscribers do you have? Keep writing, posting, sharing and looking out for people who love your niche, that is a simple strategy to grow your subscribers. Work it.
#2 Set a year’s goal:
Split it into twelve months and plan the strategy to be used in developing the different categories of your blog.
#3 Break them down into monthly and weekly goals:
What are your weekly goals? Are you keeping up? Set priority goals and it will drive your actions each week.
#4 Choose your blog’s niche and name:
What niche are you picking? It would not hurt to include your blog niche in the url. It would make it easier for potential customers to find your blog and patronize your products when they use Google.
#5 Build your blog:
You can do this yourself or hire someone to get it done for you. Some of the two most popular sites used in creating blogs are wordpress.com and blogspot.com
#6 Build your following:
Create social media profiles on all the sites and start building a following. They are your tribe who will support you and share your content to their network. Ensure that what you are writing will be of benefit to them or someone that they know.
#7 Create /share good content:
If you create good content, it won’t be too difficult for people to click through and read when you start sharing content. Do share it everywhere. There’s nothing as painful as having great content that nobody reads because they don’t know it exists or know how/where to find it.
#8 Build your subscribers:
Create freebies and include them in your blog posts with an opt-in form so that your blog readers will have a good reason to subscribe to your content apart from all the great blog posts.
#9 Create a product
Ask subscribers one big problem that they would like to solve that would improve their business or make their life easier then start incorporating it into the product that you are creating.
# 10 Review and update your plan:
Look out what worked and what didn’t work after applying this over a three month period and start re-strategizing to implement.
Tessa Doghor is a social media expert who blogs at http://www.imagineitincorporated.com.ng
