How To Grow And Monetize Your Blog In 2020
Making money isn’t easy, but there are effective ways to turn the internet into your own personal cash cow without needing to bend over backwards to do it. By creating and maintaining a popular blog, for instance, you can attract thousands of your readers to a webpage which can generate you a sizable income in the form of advertising revenue or online sales. Growing and monetizing a blog is much easier said than done, however, and many people begin this process only to discover they don’t know how to do it successfully.
As the new year gets well underway, there’s no reason to let your digital dreams idle on the sidelines any longer. Here’s an exploration of how to grow and monetize your blog in 2020, what key mistakes to avoid along the way, and why this is a worthwhile endeavor.
Blogging is both fun and lucrative
You may ask yourself why you should bother with a blog in the first place. The simplest answer is that they’re both incredibly rewarding and, under the right circumstances, quite lucrative. There are proven ways to earn an income from your blog, and in some instances people eventually quit their regular careers and become full-time bloggers because of the success they’ve enjoyed. In order to do that, however, you’ll need to generate an excellent blog for yourself while simultaneously bolstering a fanbase that can support you both creatively and financially speaking.
If you review an article put forward by Forbes exploring the ways that blogs can be monetized, you’ll discover just how easy it is to earn a buck off your blog if you’re churning out excellent content that consumers crave. These proven ways to generate some cash from your blog are only successful if you manage to hook an audience in, though, and that’s incredibly difficult. Indeed, attracting readers to your blog and getting them to stick around once they’ve checked it out is perhaps the most important element of succeeding as a blogger.
Now that we’ve established the importance of generating and maintaining an audience for your blog, you’ll want to review strategies to rely upon when it comes to marketing yourself. This is because people will never want to read your blog unless it stands out from the crowd, and unfortunately you’ll be dealing with plenty of competition when it comes to garnering clicks. This is especially difficult in competitive niches, whereas as running an animal blog for a place like Pharr Road Animal Hospital should be a lot easier. Knowing how to make money blogging doesn’t actually matter if you can’t get people to read your blog in the first place, as their attention spans are what generates most of your income (e.g. from advertisements).
So, how do you stand out? Pay attention to what people are already buzzing about, as there’s no consistently reliable way to generate news for yourself that won’t backfire. Injecting yourself into the news cycle can be good from a commercial standpoint, but your blog might become inundated with too many people at once or even scandalized if you go viral because of something offensive. You thus need to toe a fine line between generating attention around your blog and not putting yourself in danger by going viral for the wrong reasons before facing consumer boycotts or malicious IT attacks.
Know how to protect your blog
It’s important to pay attention to the IT security of your blog. You may consider yourself somebody who’s familiar with and comfortable around technology, but unless you’re a dedicated IT specialist you should probably rely upon actual expert assistance when creating the security protocols for your blog. If you’re struggling in this area, don’t worry, as there are many helpful guides you can peruse which will ensure your blog isn’t vulnerable to outside attackers.
Why is this important? Largely because hackers and other nefarious actors may seek to hijack your blog to pose as you, especially if you’re popular and find yourself earning a tidy income for yourself through blog posts. By hacking your blog and pretending to be you, they could be damaging your reputation, crippling your blog’s digital brand, or simply stealing your money. Knowing how to improve blog security is thus an important responsibility that you can’t afford to forget about as the blog’s owner and operator.
If you’re particularly stressed out about your blog’s security, consider hiring a full-time professional to focus on running the technical aspects of your blog. You’ll personally be in charge of content and other important things, like the blog’s visual aesthetics, but this individual can ensure your blog is secure from outside attackers and running smoothly for the sake of your beloved readers.
Marketing your blog
Now that you’ve managed to get a handle on your blog’s security, you should focus on marketing techniques which will help your blog stand out. You can pay for advertisements and sponsor posts in social media feeds to ensure that new individuals are exposed to your blogs. For many people, however, such a strategy is cost-prohibitive and only effective in the first place if they have data which they can use to micro-target specific users who are likely to enjoy your blog. Sometimes, the best thing you can to to market your blog is to attract guest posts from popular writers who already have a following you can tap into.
Knowing how to attract guest-posters to your blog isn’t easy, and in some circumstances it can cost you money like a more traditional advertising campaign. It’s nevertheless a solid tactic because you’re not gambling by taking out an advertisement, but instead know you’re getting a guest-post from somebody who already has an established fan base which may also enjoy your blog. Know that you can’t welcome too many guest posters too quickly, however, as individuals won’t come to associate your blog with your own personality and expertise if you’re not regularly putting content on it yourself.
Marketing your blog is also much easier after you’ve perused a wide variety of exciting blog ideas, as these can help you change the theme or focus of your blog or simply help you find a new audience base you haven’t previously marketed to.
Remember that timeliness is important
Some obsessive readers save blog posts so that they can be revisited later, but most users read a blog post only once or, at most, twice. This means that your content must be timely, as individuals don’t want to waste their time browsing stale content that has little or nothing to do with ongoing social events. Successful bloggers must thus constantly have their fingers on the pulse of society in order to know what’s going viral and when. Fail to do this, and your blog will always be one step behind of the competition, something which will cost you in terms of popularity and money alike. Hosting fees aren’t cheap, after all.
Growing and monetizing a blog throughout 2020 begins with having an excellent idea which will lure in readers and ends with having a stellar execution which ensures that your website is constantly live and that your blog is regularly updated. Failing to keep your content relevant and timely is a death sentence for any blog, so don’t be afraid to keep an eye on what others in your industry are doing. Before long, you and your successful blog will be preparing for an even busier 2021.
