Creating a blog and monetizing it is one of the legitimate ways to start making money online. There are many reasons for this. Contrary to what many people believe blogs are easy to create today.
There are many platforms that make it very simple to do that even for people with very limited technical knowledge. Creating a blog can be both cheap by buying a domain name a web hosting account and installing a free blogging platform like Wordpress with a single click on the mouse button and there it is you have a blog of your own. New bloggers can even start a blog completely free using platforms like Blogger or DevHub. There is no cost and only the need to do is choose a name or their blog, start writing blog posts, drive traffic and make money using one or more monetization methods.
A large number of monetization methods is another reason why blogs are legitimate ways for making money online. Once your blog has decent traffic you can monetize it easily by placing advertisements. Finding advertisers is another thing that is also easy today because there are many online advertising network that do that for you, all you need to do is insert code in your log and relevant ads will start to appear.
The most important thing for every blog – traffic.
Blogs are started for many reasons. Some of them are started for making money, others to share ideas and connect with people with similar interest. However not all blogs are successful. The measure for a success of a blog is the how much traffic it has or how much people visit it regularly. Because of this blog owner work hard to increase the number of people who visit their blog by use of many strategies.
How to drive traffic to your blog?
There are things bloggers invest their hard work and time to drive traffic to their blog. The first one is creating SEO optimized content and the other way is to promote that content to increase the exposure and connect with interested audience.
Both of these components is critical to the success of a blog. One can not go without the other, but many blogger are wandering the same question: Which one of this is more important so I can put more efforts and time in? To answer this question Is neither simple nor easy. Content creation involves SEO optimized content that is loved by both search engines and people. It’s not easy to write content that will be both optimized for certain keywords by using those keywords through the posts and written for people, so there must be made some compromises as well.
The other component of marketing your blog or promoting your blog posts involves using online services like social media websites to increase exposure of your blog posts and drive traffic to your blog. Both the content writing and marketing your blog are important but in some way contradict each other so to help you decide what is more important for you we will give some facts about why is their importance when looking at it separately.
When bloggers create content for their blog they do keyword research and use SEO practices with hope that their blog posts will rank highly and drive lots of traffic from search engines. Search engines are one of the best traffic sources for your blog. You can use search engines to generate lots of targeted traffic if your blog posts rank high on the first page for a give keyword that has large number of searches. If your blog is on the first page than many people will click the link and visit your blog. The benefit of having your blog ranked firs can be huge and you will see a huge spike in the number of visitors to your blog that may even exceed your wildest expectations. Because of this is good idea to invest time and effort in creating quality content for your blog.
However there is no guaranty that will happen, because keywords that have high number of searches are used by other bloggers to create their content and one or many of them are possible to have published content that is ranked higher than your content. Because of this a good written blog post is not necessary going to bring lots of visitors to your blog. So at the end of the day a blogger may feel that they have worked hard on writing good blog posts for nothing.
On the other hand it is not absolutely necessary to have your log post ranked high in order to bring traffic to your blog. Another great source of traffic for your blog are social networking websites like Twitter. Let’s say you have 1000 followers on Twitter. Every time you publish new post on your blog you tweet it and about half of them visit you blog to read your new post, you have 500 hundred visitors to your blog post from Twitter alone. This shows that using various method for marketing and promotion of your blog can bring you great results in form of traffic and earning is you use methods to monetize your blog. But, just marketing alone is also not enough. If your blog post does not provide value and some useful information to your Twitter followers then you can expect they will not be coming back once they are disappointed in you.
When to concentrate on creating content and when on marketing?
This is very hard to give definite answer. Successful blogs need both quality content and exposure to interested audience. But if we have t choose than the best time to concentrate our efforts in creating original content is when the blog is new. It’s make sense that you must have at least few before you start posting links on blog, social media websites and forums inviting people to come to your blog.
Later when you have at least several posts you can start to put in more work in marketing your blog. There is not a clear answer on what individual bloggers dedicate more time, because that changes over time. Some days or weeks they are more involved in creating content and other days or weeks in promoting their blog.
If you are a blogger please leave a comment and tell what you spend more time on and what you think is more important for a blog to be successful writing content or marketing your blog?
