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How To Start A Business Blog That Converts 2024
Two solid reasons why you want to start a blog for your business include getting traffic to your blogs and eventually converting those visitors into paying customers.
Then there are other reasons too; establishing yourself as an industry expert and gaining an edge over your competitors.
But the question is, “How do you start a business blog?”
Here in this guide, I will walk you through the entire process of starting a business blog so you can break free from your confusion and start working on your converting machine – a business blog.
Let’s start.
How To Start A Blog And Make Money
We’ve laid down the 7 steps you need to follow to start a blog and make money. Don’t forget to make notes.
1. Decide on the Purpose of Your Blog
You need to set clear goals and ensure they align with your overall content strategy because a clear “why” makes the “what” more powerful.
Set clear expectations and ensure you revise them along the way. For now, these are things you need to consider before diving into the actual blogging part
- Determine Your Target Audience
The target audience is the people who you want to read your blogs. You can make their personas and clearly outline who they are, their demographics, and other aspects.
Doing so ensures that your strategy and every keyword you target align with their needs.
The more targeted your content is, the higher the chances of your target audience remembering you.
- Determine Your Success Indicators
Clearly outline how you’re going to measure your success.
Is it by measuring the number of monthly visitors, monthly subscribers, or the sales your content generates?
- Analyze A Gap In The Market
Keep a keen eye on your competitors and see what they’re doing.
Don’t do what others are doing. Instead, strive to do better. The best way to do so is to observe what other businesses and your competitors are doing and look for the gaps.
There must be things they’re overlooking and those are the points you’re going to focus on to ensure your blog offers something unique.
2. Set Up Your Blog
Since your goal is to monetize your blog, we recommend choosing a self-hosted WordPress blog. By self-hosted, we mean you have complete control over your blog without any third party involved.
Once you made up your mind, the first step of setting up your blog is to buy web hosting from a company. We recommend you go with BlueHost which offers wide functionality within a reasonable budget.
What we like the most about it is they will register your domain name for free and offer free installation of WordPress, saving you the effort and headache.
Let’s have a quick look at the steps you have to follow while getting started
- Go to their website and select the “basic” plan. This plan fulfills our requirements from free custom domain name to WordPress installation to web hosting and even custom email addresses.
- Now it’s time to register your domain name. Type it in the domain name box and click ‘search for domain’ on the right.
- From hosting package options, the 1-year option gets you the best price. Also, do delete the “professional email” free trial because you won’t need that.
- Fill out your billing details, click “skip this step” and you’ll be taken to the dashboard.
- Once you have the WordPress installed, finish the process by logging in.
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Choose a Blog Template
Your blog will represent your brand and should be professional and engaging alike.
If you don’t want to frustrate yourself with HTML and CSS, we recommend you choose from the 12,000 blog templates available in the WordPress library.
Moreover, you can change the layout of your blogs by using “themes” which you’ll find under the “appearance” tab in the WordPress dashboard. These themes are minimal and go with almost all kinds of blogs.
To choose the theme, simply install it click the “activate” button, and see the entire design change.
Some popular website builders also allow you to set up a new blog easily using drag and drop features.
3. Create Content
Now, you don’t have to jump straight into writing.
Instead
- Write Your Static Content
Your static content includes your ‘about me, ‘contact me’, and ’privacy policy’. This will help readers understand your journey better which in turn will build trust.
- Set Up Your Menus, Sidebar, And Permalink Structure
This might seem like an unnecessary step but it can make or break your readers’ experience. This includes your menus, sidebar, and permalink structure.
Getting these rights means your readers can engage with your content better and easily navigate to the pages they want.
- Write And Publish Your First Blog Post
Ah, we’re finally here.
By this time, you have a clear niche and have decided on the blog categories you want to write about.
The idea is to write a ‘cornerstone’ or foundation post for each category. This is an important SEO factor as these posts will help search engines understand what your blog is about and its structure.
To publish your first blog post, go to the left menu and click “posts”. Click on the “add new” link which will take you to the editor screen.
Here’s where the magic lies. Enter the title of your blog post, write content, and add images. Play around for a while, see how things work, and then hit “publish”.
Congratulations! You’ve published your first post. But wait, is that all? Three more steps before you begin your journey to making money through blogging.
4. Post Regularly
There’s a ton of advice floating around. And while it makes sense to post bi-weekly or monthly depending on your feasibility, we still suggest you publish more.
Because let’s mention the obvious. The more you post, the higher your chances of ranking on the first page of Google, driving more traffic, and earning more money.
So publish frequently, even daily if you can. This will help you win Google’s trust early on and once your site gets noticed, it eventually starts attracting more traffic.
But yes, whatever you do, do it consistently because that signals to Google that you’re an active, trustworthy source of information.
5. Promote Your Blog
While there are many ways you can promote your blogs, we recommend going with these 2 to get the most benefit
LinkedIn, Pinterest, Instagram, Twitter, Reddit, and Facebook are the biggest platforms to grow your audience.
What you have to do is experiment and see which platform interests your audience and suits your niche. Once you get this clarity, you can double down on that platform and stop focusing on other platforms altogether.
- Guest Blogging on Other Relevant Blogs
Guest blogging offers the least resistance and the greatest return. Starting a blog means you’re joining a community that’s more than happy to support your endeavor.
Think about the sites that you love reading. See if they cover the same niche as yours, or maybe a similar one. These are the sites you want to pitch.
Two things you have to consider are the following:
- You have developed a connection with them: This could be through a meaningful comment you left under their blog toad value or a friendly message you left on their Twitter. This will increase your chances of being seen when you reach out.
- They are slightly bigger than your blog: if you have 500 email subscribers, your ideal blog would be one with 5000. We want to stay in the range because targeting big sites would be difficult especially when you’re new to guest blogging.
6. Make Money from Your Blog
Making money would be a relatively simple step if you’re posting high-quality content and promoting it effectively
While it will take some time (or precisely, 6+ months) to start earning some money, once you have a large enough audience, here are a few ways that can help you bring in some cash.
The best way to allow advertisers to advertise on your blogs is through Google Adsense. All you need to do is to place a Google Adsense code on your blog. It will start running ads and soon you’ll be cutting checks with Google Adsense doing the hard work for you.
Affiliate marketing is one of the best ways to make money with your blog.
Here’s how it works
Readers will click the link to the product reviews on your site, they’ll be taken to the advertiser’s site and you’ll earn money if they make a purchase.
Remember to mention that you’re their affiliate to ensure transparency and you’re good to go.
If you’re an expert in your field, you can easily write an e-book and readers will love to purchase it since it’s coming from a trusted source.
E-courses are another most consumed digital product by bloggers and you can sell these if you present them well and keep the price reasonable.
Verdict
There’s a basic content marketing principle you have to follow to reap the benefits of your business blog – provide value and value will be returned to you.
Remember the target audience we talked about? Those are the people who have to obsess over. What are their pain points, what challenges do they face, and what are their desires? Dive deeper into the research and understand every little thing about them.
Once you write content that solves their problems and answers their queries, you’ll see a drastic improvement in your website traffic. Then your content strategy will come into action and will take them from readers to paying customers.
Remember, all these things take time, but you’ll see the results if you follow the right strategies. Remember, you don’t have to reinvent the wheel – just optimize what already works.
