When you start blogging, your first year can be an uphill climb; it will not be completely smooth for you.
It’s common to experience a lot of setbacks and you might end up feeling frustrated. But I’m going to tell you how to make a profitable blog come true for you.
Yes, you will have to work hard, as hard as you do now for your boss but you will own it and have control of your income. This means that you will be learning heaps of new things about SEO, content creation, and social media promotion but knowledge is no load to carry.
Firstly, pace yourself and enjoy the journey.
When you take a look all around you, you’ll see many others walking through the same journey. They will have had similar experiences and feel a bit alone but there are a few tricks and tips that can help you do it easier.
Don’t let the growing pains put you off. If you want a different life, you will become a different person, the choice is yours.
Table of Contents
Tips to Operate a Blog Successfully
- Accept that it is going to be difficult
- Make small profits
- Drive 100+ visits a day to your blog
- Write guest posts
- Get 500 Twitter followers
- Generate a lot of shares on social media
- Get some comments
- Create five roundup posts
- Generate subscribers
- Create five-pillar posts
- What strategy are you to implement in your first year of blogging
- The Ascent of your first year
- Write at least 3 quality content articles for your website a week – 2 x 2000+ words, 1 x 1300+ words
- Consider employing a copywriter to share the writing load
- Create backlinks to your website
Accept That It Is Going to Be Difficult
Don’t fight the journey, just accept that there will be lots of work to do and that the results will come if you just keep going and don’t stop. Write content and promote, write content and promote!
Place it at the back of your mind that it is going to be challenging. Nothing of value comes without effort so make sure that you know ‘Why’ you want a business. This will keep you going in the downtimes, the key is for you to never give up.
An interesting fact is that 8 out of 10 people do not make it to the top as far as blogging is concerned, it’s because they quit! But if you persist and simply refuse to give up, you will be setting yourself up to be among the 20% who succeed.
In the days when nothing is working out as you’ve planned, stay hopeful and consistent, and then you will hit your luck and be back writing easily again. It all goes in cycles, respect that and work with it.
Make Small Profits Along The Way
When you’re just starting out as a blogger, you should aim to make some small profits, and stay
consistent no matter how small they are, it’s just the beginning.
Also know that, no matter how small the money you make is, you can scale it up as time goes on. The more traffic you get to the website can make you money. So focus on that quality content.
Drive 100+ Visitors a Day To Your Website
As a beginner blogger, reaching up to 100 unique visitors a day is an important foothold in your journey up the hill in your first year of blogging. It is a sign that you understand the key to driving traffic.
Use social media to display your links to your articles and draw a crowd every day with quality content. Make sure that your blog posts are answering questions that people ask in Google to gain attention.
Now all you need to do is apply the same strategy you implemented in getting your first 100; if you stay consistent, your blog will become a big one within a matter of time. That first year is all about learning skills and building content so that Google and the world will notice you. The goal is to rank on page one of Google, Bing, and Yahoo.
Write Guest Posts
In your first year of blogging, you will not have much traffic, so you will need to take advantage of someone else’s traffic, and you can do that by guest blogging. It not only builds your authority, but it builds your relationship with other bloggers.
Get 500 Followers on Twitter
Bloggers, most times, use Twitter as a means of engaging with one another. It is a place for creating strong bonds with people who blog in the same industry as you.
Generate a Lot of Social Media Shares
Try as much as you can to get at least 500 social media shares across the content on your blog. This is a way that Google uses to give you higher rankings on search engines.
You do this by sharing your links on social media (Pinterest, Quora, Facebook, etc) and bringing organic traffic to your posts.
Get Some Comments on Your Blog Posts
When you receive comments on a blog post, it can serve as a very powerful marketing medium, basically because when you get those comments as soon as you publish the post, it changes from a one-directional instrument used for broadcasting to an interactive community.
Commenting allows bloggers to build their following, and also give feedback to their readers. When there are no comments on a blog post, it can most times be discouraging to read through. If there are a couple of comments, it will seem interactive and you want to jump right in.
These are some ways to encourage your readers to leave comments on your posts.
- End every article with a question
- Be chatty and engaging
- Have a comment section at the end of every post
Create Five Roundup Posts
Having a round-up post can be a good way of developing relationships with other bloggers and influencers. A great way to do this is to reach out to expert bloggers in your niche and ask them to contribute to your roundup article. This will help build relationships that are badly needed in your first year of blogging.
Generate Subscribers
Having an email list is important because it enables you to post in front of your audience anytime you want. In building an email list, you must have a subscriber base; that way you will not depend on any social platform to get them for you.
To have a solid foundation for your blog, you should aim at having at least 500 subscribers. These will come from your social media promotion and join from your auto-responder on your website. You need to stay in touch with them once a week at least to grow the relationship.
Create Five Pillar Posts in Your First Year
Pillar posts are long-form posts that will act as a foundation for you when starting out a blog. As a beginner blogger, you should aim at writing at least 5 pillar posts in your first year.
These are in-depth posts of between 4000 and 10,000 words that define a subject.
A good way of creating pillar posts is to search through Google and find at least five good posts on a given subject related to your niche. Analyze these posts; find the areas the posts didn’t cover and find ways to complete them.
A pillar post covers a topic so deeply, that in the future people will be linked to it. Here are some types of pillar posts.
- Definitive articles
- Resource roundups
- The ultimate guide to something
- List articles
- The how-to articles
What’s Your Strategy for Your First Year?
This is a question you will have to answer for yourself. In building a blog, you need to find ways to make it a success and, at the same time, handle the difficulties that come along with it.
Take time to write a list of the points above that you can work on throughout the year. This way you will know that you are building for success. If you don’t know where you are going, how will you know when you reach there?
The Ascent of Your First Year
You already know by reading up to this point that in starting a blog, you are going to face a lot of challenges, and most of these challenges will come in your first year. The most important thing you need to do is stay consistent.
All the problems and frustrations will eventually pass as you begin to understand the clear path to creating a successful blog and making money from it. Make a plan and follow it. Polish your plan as you work through the year and learn other tips to help you succeed.
Once you have learned the ropes and are ready to upscale your business then it might be time for you to pay a copywriter to help you add content to your website at a greater speed. Read how to find a good copywriter.
Wishing you a happy journey.
I hope this has helped, please leave a comment or like and share. Thank you.
LILY
Thank you very much for these useful tips. I admit that the hardest part in making a profitable blog is consistency. I think there are many ups and downs when I try to publish my content consistently. Sometimes, I can publish two pieces of content per week, but at another time I don’t have time to publish at all. I’ll try to push myself harder to make my blog successful. Thanks
I totally understand what you are saying Al and unfortunately, it will take you a lot longer to establish your website if you can’t be consistent. Google notices these things. I had the same problem when I first started so I now write my articles in two chunks, this way I get started and go back when I have another bit of time until it’s ready to publish.
This way you can get two done a week. You can do this.
Some great tips here for when you start blogging, and the one thing that I wished that I had done is build a subscriber list, but I couldn’t find a decent autoresponder at the time that didn’t cost an arm and a leg.
Guest blogging is another great way to piggyback off of other bloggers, but make sure to find a blog that has a lot of visitors to make it worth your while.
I haven’t thought of pillar posts, and probably only have one or two of those types on my blogs. I will definitely look at increasing those numbers.
Luckily if you follow all this advice the traffic does eventually come.
There are certainly some great tips here for getting the most from your blog and building a profitable future. I will put a link into this answer to an article that I wrote on Aweber because like you I found it hard to find a free autoresponder to collect email addresses. Finally, I found the Aweber free and the Mailerlite free which both work perfectly.
https://cleveraffiliatesuccess…
https://cleveraffiliatesuccess…
I created my site a few months ago, and I love reading articles like this one that inspires and motivate me that hard work in the beginning will pay off over time. Thanks for all the very helpful tips, I got some great ideas of what I can do today to further improve my strategy. So far, I am still very weak in the field of social media, so I still have a lot of work and opportunities here. This is now my number one task, and I will focus on that first.
I wish you all the best
Nina
Hi Nina, I’m so pleased that my article will help you get motivated to write wonderful blog posts. Wishing you a really happy journey.
Great blog. I’m not sure about the social media part… Mostly, I’ll throw a blog on one of my discord servers now and then but that’s about it. I can’t bring myself to get interested in twitter or facebook. I’m mostly sticking to the post and pray method. I suppose I should work on that… These are pretty demanding goals, haha!
Hi Christina, great comment and I hear you. It seems like a huge amount of work but making the headspace to learn the best SEO practices and following them in all your posts does pay dividends. Going back and fixing it all later is a pain. I wish you luck with the “Post and Pray” plan.
Th article looks good as it gives much detail on the topic. This is good for people looking to learn how all these things work. But it looks like the article is too long, which may some people not read it all as people always seem to be in hurry. Having it shorter is always best.
The other thing I notice is that the post has no image or picture. Always plan to insert images in your article posts as people seem to enjoy reading texts that have images. Thanks
Hi Edward and thanks for your insightful comment. I can see that you had a good read and I went looking to see if I had put pictures in as you suggested as I always add 3 – 4 pictures to every blog post and they were there. Obviously, they didn’t load for you which was a shame.
I tend to disagree with you on the length as I have found that Google really likes these 2000+ word posts and ranks your website higher over time. It’s all about giving quality and valuable content. But we can agree to disagree about this and do what we each think, that’s the great thing about an internet business.
This is a great article, Lily. Now that you’ve mentioned the roundup posts and the pillar posts, it never crossed my mind before until now. And that’s something I will consider including on my website moving forward. Thanks for this informative article. The nuggets I found here will go a long way to improving my site.
Hi Sie, Thanks for this comment and I’m delighted that you gained some extra insight into why you need to put pillar posts and roundup posts on your website. Let me know if I can help in any way.
Hi and thanks for sharing this. This is the first time I read about the concepts of pillar posts and roundup posts. I have been struggling with this myself. I have been creating content consistently for my site for a year now and traffic is still low and slow but building slowly and my google rankings are creeping up too. There were a number of key posts that I created many months back and I have had the thought in the back of my mind that I need to go back and revise these and make them really stand out as authoritative. I don’t see how anyone can reasonably publish 5 posts a week of quality content. That would seem to be overambitious to me and likely lead to burnout and disappointment. But that is my personal opinion. There are some excellent tips and suggestions here. Many thanks again. Best regards, Andy
Hi Andy, it looks like you have been heading in the right direction all along. Definitely polish those old posts to make them stand out but don’t be put off by the 5 posts a week. I honestly couldn’t do it myself and ended up employing a copywriter to do 3 of them while I handle social media and forum promotion. This is just if you want to see results in a year.