Did you know that only a measly 5% of the bloggers become highly successful financially and who also eat up a big meaty chunk of the online revenue?
That’s because most of the people who plunge into blogging or internet marketing are misinformed about blogging and think of online money making as an instant tea or a magic bullet formula that will make them rich overnight.
But when they see that it’s not happening, their dreams come crashing down and expectations begin to crumble. I really don’t want that to happen with you. This article will guide you through those crucial steps of starting a blog or an internet marketing venture that directly affects your online success in the long run.
1. Think of Blogging as a Real Business
You must never consider blogging as your pastime hobby or take it in a casual way if you want real financial benefits out of it. An online business must be taken as seriously as any other brick and mortar business and must approach it with utmost professionalism and discipline.
You must devote your heart and soul for it by nurturing it everyday with care to transform it into a flourishing online empire.
2. Choosing a Profitable Niche Market
This must your first step before you even think of starting a blog. I have heard many gurus preaching that you must only build a website around a topic in which you are an expert. It is absolutely valid if you are not expecting much financial gains from your blog or blogging is just a hobby for you.
But if you are a businessman, then just starting a blog around your favorite subject might not be financially beneficial unless your topic has a hungry market. So doing a solid market research is absolutely crucial before starting a blog.
But worry not! It’s really easy to do a strong market study with these powerful tools like Google Adwords Keyword Tool and Google Insights.
These tools will easily give you an in depth analysis of your targeted niche market in just a matter of minutes. Most importantly, you must try to choose a niche or a sub-niche that has a lesser competition and also has enough supply of buyers in the years to come.
e.g. Internet Marketing is a giant niche, but article marketing or email marketing can be called as a sub niche of internet marketing. Online guitar learning is a larger niche, but online blues guitar lessons is a sub niche of online guitar learning having a lesser competition.
3. Choosing the Right Domain Name and Hosting
This is the most crucial step that decides your blog’s success. After you have decided on your niche market, you must choose a domain name (eg. www.myblogname.com) for your blog which is highly relevant to your niche.
e.g. If you are going to start a blog that teaches how to play blues style on guitar, then your blog name must be learnbluesguitaronline.com or bluesguitarlessons.com or which contains your primary keywords i.e. learning blues guitar or blues guitar lessons and not just learningguitaronline.com or guitarlessonsonline.com
4. Choosing the best hosting company
This also plays a critical role in your blog’s success. If you end up choosing a bad hosting company then you are jeopardizing your online business. This can be in terms of your blog’s security, maintenance cost, smooth functioning, load time and management.
Your blog must be available for your visitor as and when he clicks on your blog’s link or types it in the browser address bar with minimum load time, if this doesn’t happen then you are risking your business in a big way.
So you must ensure that your hosting company is the best in the industry with a good reputation and value for money. I can tell you from my experience that I had a tough time deciding on a good web-host but I am glad that I finally got the best one.
Some of the best hosting companies that I would recommend are,
5. Choosing a Good Blogging Platform
The best way to kick off your journey as an online entrepreneur or a blogger is through a self hosted WordPress blog or by setting up a free blog at Blogger (by Google). There are many advantages of starting your blog on either of these platforms.
WordPress.org and Blogger blogs have all the Web 2.0 properties like comments, categories, archives, calendars, social media sharing etc which helps better ranking of your blog in the search engine listing.
Most importantly, you need not care about the blog design part as you have to just pick a theme and launch your blog, it’s as easy as that! All the coding and design are taken care by them. So you just need to write a post and publish.
6. Posting Useful Content on a Regular Basis
This should be the most important and on going activity on your blog. Search engines are always hungry for fresh, useful and unique content. So if you want your blog to rank high on the search eninge results and get more targeted traffic, you must have a regular supply of fresh content that resolves a problem of your reader.
Did you know that more than 90% of the internet visitors are in search of a solution to their problem? So your motto as a blogger must be to provide high quality, unique, useful articles, videos, or podcasts on a regular basis – at least once or twice in a week – that resolves a problem of your reader.
More the content and frequency of posts better are your chances of getting more traffic and ultimately making money! But do remember that quality is as important as quantity in the online world, as there are enough junk on the internet already.
You can write your articles on your own or you can employ a writer for that if you can afford to spend money on a content writer and/or don’t have time to generate content all by yourself.
In this post I have only discussed the most crucial factors that directly affect the success of your blog or your internet marketing business. There are a number of other techniques that you can use to drive traffic to your blog that I have not discussed here.
Thank you for stopping by and reading my post and I really hope that these tips would help you in setting up a successful blogging venture.