Do you plan on starting a blog? If the answer is yes then you probably made an excellent decision. Blogs are great way to share your thoughts and ideas with the rest of the world and connect with people with similar interests. Blogs can also be very lucrative and you can monetize them and start making money online.
Thanks to many blogging platforms, to create a blog today is very simple and easy and if you want you can create a blog completely free. But to make a blog successful is something different. There are millions of blogs but not all of them are successful. Before you start a blog that you wish to make it successful, here are some questions you need to know the answer before you do:
- Do you know your target audience? This is one of the most important things to consider. It’s one thing to design and write for a blog that has as it’s target audience teenagers, and completely different if your blog is intended to be read by professionals or elderly people. Different target groups have different interests and expectations from the content they find on your blog.
- What are your goals? What is the goal of your blog? Do you intend on sharing your opinion with the rest of the world and having fun with your blog or is it’s purpose to make money by monetizing it by placing ads or affiliate links, or both. Or is your blog's purpose to promote your service as an online freelance? It’s very important to clearly define your goals before you start your blog because this will give direction from early on about what design and content would be best for your blog.
- Do you have enough patience and persistence? To create a successful blog takes a lot work in creating original, useful and interesting content regularly and constantly updating your blog. You audience will expect to find fresh and interesting content to read regularly posted on your blog. Successful blog also require lot of work in promoting them by commenting on other blogs and forums using social networks. It takes some time before blog start receiving decent number of visitors and making money. Many blog owners give up and abandon their blogs when after a few weeks they don’t see results they were expecting.
- Are you prepared to deal with comments from your readers? One of the best thing about blogs and reason that makes them very popular is the ability of it’s readers to leave their comments on posts. Blogging is a two way communication between the blogger and the blog readers. You must write interesting posts that will be interesting to your readers and request their response by leaving comment on your blog. Some of the visitors will be supportive of your point of view others will have negative comments. You must know how to deal with both positive and negative comments and keep a lively discussion on your blog. Some of your readers might ask you a question and you should be prepared to make time to answer it.
- Are prepared to learn constantly? World is not standing still. There are always new tools and technologies appearing. If you are using Wordpress as your blogging platform you probably have installed many plugins that help you enhance your blog appearance and usefulness. However there are always new plugins appearing that do the exact functions as old ones only better. You must keep track on all the changes and implement them in order to constantly improve your blog.
There are millions of blog's online today and many more started each day but not all of them become successful and are closed by their owners. Are you cut out to be successful blog owner? If the answer on above questions is yes, then your blog may be a success story after a while.
