Blogging: Understanding the fundamentals - PUNCH

October 18, 2013 by Niyi Adegboye 

Niyi Adegboye

On the average, 20 per cent of the time, the major question I am being asked as a digital media expert is “How do I make money by blogging”? So I have decided to write this article to answer this question.

To fully grasp this topic, we will take American online news aggregator and blog, Huffington Post as a case study. If you look closely at Huffington post and compare it with a typical Nigerian blog, you will see a lot of similarity and then notice some technical differences.

The difference can only be seen from an expert point of view but we will concern ourselves with what makes blogs successful. Characteristics of successful blogs:

1. They have a circle of influence.Whatever niche you are, you must be able to influence people.

2. They have lots of traffic. On the average, the Huffington Post has over  four million comment per month. That is a huge amount of traffic. It is this huge traffic that it leveraged upon before it was sold to AOL for $315m.

Now that we know what makes a successful blog, lets discuss how you can make your blog successful. This principle will apply to anyone in whatever niche you are. Even if you’re just blogging for your business growth, the fundamentals are still the same, you might only need to change the strategy you will use.

How to make your blog a success

You need to blog about your passion: The amount of passion you have for your subject might be what will make you or break you. Knowing quite well that your blog will not turn into a money making machine overnight, you must be blogging about a niche that even if you are not making money from it, you are still interested in talking about it.

This is what will keep you going till you hit that gold mine. If making money is all you care about, you might as well forget about blogging.

You must choose your niche carefully:

Apart from having a passion for your niche, you must chose your niche very carefully. With over 56.6 million blog on WordPress alone, you have to really define your niche. That way you become a leader in your niche. So suppose you love to talk about dogs, won’t it be better to choose a particular breed of dog and blog about it.

But be careful, choose a niche you will have plenty of topics to talk about. You don’t want to run out of stream midway.

You need to drive traffic to your blog:

No blog is successful without lots of traffic. So you need to drive traffic to your blog. The first method you need is to optimise your blog. This is because of the stiff number of competition you will face as practically almost every niche has bloggers in it.

So you need to give your blog the necessary exposure it needs.

Another method is to give free offers on your website but without the maximum exposure SEO will give you, you might really not see any difference.

For example, most websites will be able to increase its traffic to over 63 per cent within two weeks of optimising their website. You must work really hard. No one gets successful by luck.

You must be willing to work harder than anyone else to make your blog a success.

When Mashable started way back over 10 years ago, the owner Pete Cashmore worked an average of 20 hours each day. Today Mashable is worth about $2million. Remember the king of pop, Micheal Jackson? He practised an average of 19 hours every day in front of a mirror to get his dance steps right. No wonder he is still being celebrated even after his death.

You must leverage technology:

Technology changes very fast. If you started about 20 years ago, you might get away with a lot of things like bad design, not optimising your blog, not doing email outreach etc. But with the fast pacing in technology, all these things are now fundamental.

You cannot have a blog design like everyone else and expect your blog to stand out. The first thing you need to do is get a domain name for yourself. Using Web 2.0 portals like blogspot.com or wordpress.com will not give you a good web ranking.

You might need a designer to do some work over on your blog. You must have a strategy for your blog. Without a strategy in place, you won’t be able to track your methods to know what works and what needs to be discarded.

Almost every profession is an art and in art, you need to keep drawing the lines and rinsing it until it is perfect. You must have a strategy for writing your blog post, a strategy for promoting your blog, a strategy for even the length of your blog post.  No one is an island.

No one can exist alone. That is why we have social media like Facebook and Twitter. You must learn to cultivate the friendship of other bloggers.

Be their friend on Facebook, follow them on twitter. Reach out to them via email. Link to them in your blogs and you will be surprised that the favour will be returned.

In conclusion, to make money in blogging, you must get maximum traffic to your website and arouse the emotions of people in your posts. Once you have enough traffic, then you can promote products on your blog via advert placements and combine email marketing to sell some of these products.