How to Promote Your Blog and Get Results

 

Having an internet marketing blog is an invaluable asset for any webmaster or online business owner who wants to go the whole hog to improve the bottom line of his or her ventures. This is why it’s important for you to know how to promote your blog in sundry ways and get the results you desire.

 

Blogging is a powerful tool to continually generate free targeted traffic from search engines if you invest time and/or money to do the needful. In our first article on how to create a blog, I started off to explain the basics of blogging for money and influence.

 

But as soon as you finish setting up your blog and publish your first blog post, the next onerous task is to promote your blog to your target audience. If you ask me, blog promotion is a Herculean task a lot of bloggers continually contend with on a daily basis if you don’t have the hang of it.

 

For you to succeed in blog marketing, you’ve to develop a plan and strategy and follow it to the letter in order to become successful at it. To get started, you’ve to first ensure that there are high quality blog posts published on your website worth reading, sharing and linking to.

 

Secondly, you’ve to optimize your blog so that your marketing campaigns and efforts will be minimal or at best result driven. If you research and aim at the right keywords, there is every chance that your promotional efforts will hit its target and bring in ideal prospects, leads and customers to your business.

 

Blog promotion can be done through paid adverts and free advertising methods. While free blog promotion is not entirely gratis, you’ve to spend quality time and energy to make it work. This is where search engine optimization (SEO) comes in.

 

SEO is twofold i.e. on-page SEO and off-page SEO. On page SEO are activities you execute on your blog website to make it search engine friendly and highly findable for your target keywords related to your business, products or services.

 

This involves having your search query in blog post title, meta description, body of content, interlinking related blog posts and web pages, using LSI (latent semantic indexing) keywords, and so on.

 

On the other hand, off page SEO strategies are digital marketing campaigns and content distribution efforts you do outside of your website in order to build backlinks and bring targeted traffic to your blog on a regular basis.

 

This could include guest posting, content marketing, blog commenting, video marketing, social media marketing, etc. The essence is to build authority, trust, popularity, credibility and expertise around your business blog, create brand awareness and ultimately attract ideal prospects, leads and customers in the long run.

 

With that being said, let’s go through some of the best ways to promote your blog and maximize your return on investment assuming you have stellar content already published on your blog.

 

Guest Posting

 

Guest blogging is a strategic method of creating brand awareness and building backlinks to your site by publishing content on other blog websites. The first step is to research and find blogs and websites with similar themed topics like yours and proposing guest post to the blogger or owner of the site.

 

If approved and accepted, you’ll publish your content on the blogger’s blog and then have the opportunity to include an author bio where you’ll embed an anchor text link to your blog for targeted traffic.

 

The greatest challenge of guest posting is getting accepted by bloggers who own the sites where you want to be featured. Successful bloggers hardly rub shoulders with upcoming bloggers. But you can increase your chances of getting approved by doing the following:

 

-Read and familiarize yourself with the blog you want to write for before cold pitching. You’ve to dig deep into the archives to read, learn and know what content has been published. This will help you to spot content gaps to fill and get quick approval.

-Be active at the blog comments section of your desired blog in order to familiarize yourself with the blogger through constant interaction. It’s easier to relate with a friend than a stranger.

 

Content Marketing

 

To start with, “What is content marketing?” It’s simply the planning, preparation, creation, distribution and marketing of content to an intended audience in order to attract qualified prospects, leads and customers to a business website.

 

Marketing content successfully on the internet to a target audience can be executed on various platforms where you believe your potential leads congregate.  And the best way to succeed with inbound marketing is creating high quality content both on your blog and outside of your blog.

 

Successful content marketing starts with good keyword research to uncover profitable long tail keyword phrases to focus on. You can also do competitor content analysis to discover gaps to further cover and write SEO articles to address immediately.

 

You can diversify your content distribution via videos, ebooks, podcasts, webinars, audio, infographics, blog posts, etc. The most important factor to get the desired result is the quality of your content which will help you to generate engagement.

 

Having a good handle on content marketing and guest blogging can be of immense value to your business bottom line.  The best you can do is to master different methods of promoting your blog at scale one at a time.

 

Personally, I started with content marketing and gravitated to guest posting before attempting other ways to promote a blog when I was actively advertising my freelance writing services.

 

List Building

 

If you want to ease your blog promotion efforts, you should start building an email list of subscribers as early as possible. All you need to build an email list of subscribers from scratch is to sign up with a reputable email service provider (ESP).

 

ESPs are a dime a dozen on the internet but GetResponse email marketing software have all the features you need to get started including autoresponder, broadcast capability, automation tools, just to mention a few.

 

You can create a lead magnet as quickly as you can from questions your target audience is asking by making use of keyword research tools and websites to discover them. Provide the answers and compile it as a PDF ebook to give away for free.

 

As soon as you start building your mailing list, you can send your subscribers a link to your new blog post every time you publish one.  This is how to promote your blog to a highly targeted readers and maximize your marketing efforts.

How to Monetize a Blog and Maximize Your ROI

 

 

As you may already know, creating a blog is just the bare bones of blogging for money on the internet. Until you start earning money from it consistently, you may not be completely happy running a blog because you’ll be spending cash on online business tools such as domain name renewal, paying for web hosting fees, hiring freelance writers to create content for you if need be, etc.

 

It’s when you start making passive income online from your blog, month in and month out, that you’ll become keyed up to invest money, quality time and energy to run and grow your business blog.  As you may be aware, there are many moving parts to a successful blogging career including:

 

• Choosing a niche market to focus on,
• Registering a domain name as your business website address,
• Buying web hosting to enable you host your blog website online 24/7,
• Installing a blog on your domain name,
• Optimizing your blog for SEO (search engine optimization), and
• Creating and publishing constant but high quality content on your blog.

 

The above steps and tasks are relatively easy to complete if you’re passionate about your blogging topic. But the hardest part is making money from your blog on a regular basis.  This is where the topic of today on how to monetize a blog always becomes a hard nut to crack for a lot of beginners. But I’ll provide you with the best answers and solutions for you to hit the ground running.

 

The first step you’ve to take to get on track is to conduct keyword research. Profitable blog monetization starts with deep keyword research so that you can discover the types of search queries related to your business to target which online shoppers are typing into search engines to find product, service or information as solution to their problems.

 

The essence of doing this task is to continually generate targeted traffic to your blog website especially from search engines such as Google.com, Yahoo.com, Bing.com, etc when potential leads and customers type keyword phrases related to the solutions you are providing from your business to solve their problems.  

 

As soon as you’re able to optimize your blog for profitable long tail keyword phrases, you may be able to get free targeted traffic to your blog website on a constant basis, holding all other factors constant.

 

You should not forget that without the right people coming to visit your website, your chances of making money from your blog is slim. You can always get keyword ideas from various sources by making use of keyword tools and websites dedicated to keyword research strategies.

 

After you’ve conducted keyword research and generated search query ideas, the second step is to optimize your website for these keywords so that it becomes easier for you to monetize your blog post content.  Website optimization involves a lot of housekeeping details. This includes having your target keyword in blog titles, meta description, the content of your blog post, page URL or path, alt text for uploaded images, having a web of internally linked keyword structure, and so on.

 

The third step is writing blog post that is worth monetizing. To be frank with you, a lot of bloggers fail at this. Making money online is all about giving out the best to your target audience in terms of creating high quality and unique content in order to prime them for further marketing and action taking.

 

If you have published EATable content on your blog, monetizing it is not going to be a problem. You should not forget the fact that Google expects website owners to demonstrate EAT (expertise, authority, trust) for published content on their blogs as much as possible.

 

The truth is that if you constantly create high quality content and have ways of generating targeted traffic to your blog, you’ll discover it’s easy and simple to monetize your blog. And this era of AI writing tools like ChatGPT and the rest, you should be able to generate content you can modify for uniqueness.

 

Here are some of the best ways to make money from your blog.

 

Method #1: Affiliate Marketing

 

Affiliate marketing business is one of the best ways to make money online for beginners. Your job is to create high quality content around themed topics and publish them on your blog regularly. From there, you can sign up with affiliate programs that align with your published content and embed their affiliate links at appropriate places in your blog posts.

 

As long as your content is helpful, you should expect blog readers to follow your call to action (CTA) which should be a referral link to a merchant’s landing page. And when your referrals buy product or service from the vendor’s website, you’ll earn affiliate commission.

 

However, you’ll be more successful if you start affiliate marketing and integrate list building system with it your digital marketing campaigns. Also, for you to really make money with affiliate marketing, you should be able to find products and services that solve pain points and problems of your target audience.   

 

You may also want to look into CPA marketing to monetize your blog. Cost per action (CPA) marketing does not require you to close sales before you earn affiliate commission. Your task is to generate targeted leads to your vendor’s website and earn referral commissions.

 

You can fast track your affiliate marketing business success by signing up with reputable affiliate network programs such as CJ.com, Impact.com, Amazon.com, ShareASale.com, Clickbank.com, etc. It will help you to focus on the marketing side of your affiliate websites while getting affiliate products and services in one place.

 

Method #2: Provide Freelance Business Services

 

One of the ways to monetize your blog is by providing freelance business services to webmasters and online business owners who are willing and able to hire freelancers such as content writers, virtual assistants, web designers, freelance bloggers, etc.

 

Some years back, I started a successful online writing business career by creating freelance writer website and using it to get high paying clients from search engines. All I did was to focus on writing high quality and unique content around low competition long tail keyword phrases related to my target niches.

 

I discovered that starting a blog around my target niche market is one of the best ways to make money online without spending a fortune. The truth is that a lot of people out there are ready to outsource any type of online jobs including graphic design, web design, content writing, virtual assistance, and so on where they have no time or requisite digital skills to execute such tasks.

 

You can create a dedicated page on your blog to showcase your web business services with a “contact us” page for your potential clients to reach out to you. If you’re able to engage in regular blogging targeting long tail keyword phrases, you’ll be able to get website visitors who are eligible for further communications and monetization.   

 

Method #3: Ad Network Revenue Monetization

 

For you to make money from ad networks, you’ve to generate avalanche of targeted website visitors on a monthly basis. This is a major criterion to generate and earn revenue from ad network that will be enough to pay the bills.

 

As soon as you build a website or create a blog, your top priority and focus should be how to get targeted traffic consistently which you can monetize with reputable ad networks. In case you don’t know, an ad network is simply an online advertising technology platform that aggregates, brokers and sells ad inventory between advertisers and digital publishers.

 

Some of the most reputable and popular ad networks you can look into include Google Adsense, Media.net, PropellerAds.com, etc.

 

Method #4: Sponsored Post

 

For you to start a blog and make money with sponsored posts, you’ve to optimize your blog and make it super attractive to sponsors. Your blog optimization should be mobile friendly with dynamic theme. 

 

As long as you’ve themed topics discussed on your blog, you’ll be able to get targeted sponsors if your domain authority is high or above 20 or so. Also, you’ve to build authority backlinks over time. In addition, make sure you create essential web pages including About Us, Contact Us, Advertise With Us, Write For Us, etc, pages.

 

You will do well and better with sponsored posts as a blogger if you’re an influencer or even as a micro-influencer.  You can get sponsors from inbound marketing by blogging regularly or by making use of cold pitching strategies and outreach tools to find ideal sponsors.

 

Method #5: Write an Ebook and Sell It Online

 

Ebook writing is one of my favorite ways to quickly monetize a blog and make money. However, you’ll get the best results if you integrate list building strategies with it. By building traction around your book launch, you’ll be able to discover if it will sell in the first place.

 

There is nothing complicated about how to write an ebook and sell it online. The first step is to research ebook ideas that will sell in your niche market and create an outline to serve as your guide. Every chapter of your ebook should focus on solving a problem for the buyer.

 

Apart from writing and selling ebooks from your own website, you can use Amazon KDP to increase your reach and become more visible to global market. Self publishing has become income generator for a lot of bloggers today. You can write non-fiction and fiction books depending on your writing skills and ability. 

There are so many ways on how to monetize a blog and make money blogging online. The above 5 ways can get you started in earnest. 

Writing Your First Blog Post Tips and Ideas to Help You to Rank

 

 

At this level of your newfound blogging career, I assume you’ve completed the following tasks already:

 

1. Registered a domain name to start your blog,
2. Bought website hosting services to host your blog,
3. Installed WordPress blog on your domain, and
4. Optimized your blog for SEO.

 

But if you’re still researching information on how to start a blog and make money blogging online, you should consider downloading and reading my complete blogging guide. But the free PDF ebook is only available to our readers who have used our partnership link to sign up for HostGator web hosting services from this link. The blogging ebook explains everything you need to know about blogging for money without breaking a sweat.  It’s a no brainer blogging blueprint to say the least!

 

Today’s blog article is focusing on tips for writing your first blog post and I’ll be giving you some examples where necessary. For you to become a successful blogger on the internet, you need a system and a plan to follow to a Tee. This will become your roadmap for writing and publishing content that resonates with your target audience all the time.

 

As a matter of fact, your first blog post is the foundation and pillar of your online business success and content strategy. In line with this, there is a lot of housekeeping details you’ve to consider and adhere to in order to create a great blog post that constantly draw in free targeted traffic from search engines especially the big Google.com.

 

Personally, my first blog post usually targets the most popular and competitive keyword or search query in my niche market. For example, if I’m in the “work from home” niche market, I’ll be very comfortable creating and publishing an SEO article targeting “work from home” or “working from home” keyword phrases. And this keyword will be the exact URL or slug of the post which I want Google to crawl and index for me ultimately.

 

Yes, I may never rank for this search term in the SERP (search engine results page) but I’ll be happy having a web page on my blog indexed for my target search query. However, I believe in the nearest future and with the right marketing strategy and back linking my first blog post will be indexed and optimally primed for ranking.

 

This means that as the authority of my blog increases with time, you’ll discover that the work from home post will begin to rank as well. Yes, from the analytics, you may be surprised that your blog post for that target search term will be ranking on page one of SERP in some countries depending on the web surfer’s choice of search queries contained in your published blog article.

 

But you must make sure that your article is a long-form blog post of about 3,000 words or more. Also, you’ve to include LSI (latent semantic indexing) keywords in order to be sure you’ve covered all the bases as far as keyword optimization is concerned.

 

But you must make sure that your content fills the gap omitted on the same topic or the questions which were not answered by other bloggers who are ranking on pages one and two of Google search results or other search engines.  

 

With that said, let’s dive in to the anatomy of your first blog post.

 

1. Keyword research
2. Selection of keyword to target in your blog post
3. Blog topic content research
4. Note taking of content ideas
5. Create your content outline
6. Craft the blog title
7. Write the introduction
8. Create the body of the blog post
9. Write the conclusion

 

Let’s go through the above steps one by one.

 

Step #1: Conduct Keyword Research

 

Your knowledge and ability to conduct comprehensive keyword research is the foundation of writing a great and compelling content that is searchable and findable on the internet. Web surfers, online shoppers and information seekers usually make use of search engines to find products to buy, services to subscribe to, find specific information for learning or purely for entertainment.

 

You can also do this by typing a search query that best describes your intention into the search field of a search engine like Google.com and go through the results that will be returned to you. For example, I can go to Google and type “how to make money online for beginners.”

 

Now, knowing how to dig deep and conduct keyword research to discover these search queries will help you to focus on the relevant and helpful content to create when writing your first blog post.  First, you’ve to select a seed keyword and enter it into keyword software like Google Keyword Planner tool.

 

From the keyword ideas, you can tentatively select a list of some of these search queries to target that best describe your products and services.

 

Step #2: Select a Keyword to Target in Your Blog Post 

 

In this step, you’ve to evaluate the best keyword to write your first blog post from the list of keyword phrases which you’ve selected in step #1 above.  You should base your keyword selection on the average monthly search volume, relevance of a search term to your target readers and its difficulty for ranking.

 

For possible SERP ranking preferably on page one of search engines, you’ve to choose a long tail keyword phrase with high search volume, high keyword relevance but low difficulty. For you to complete this task seamlessly especially to determine the ranking difficulty of a keyword, you may have to use paid keyword research tools such as Ahrefs.com or Semrush.com.

 

The easiest way to rank on page one of Google is to pursue long tail keyword phrases with low competition. These are search terns with 3 or more words which will be relevant to your readers and website visitors if you write content about them.

 

One of the best writing your first blog post tips which I learned a long time ago was to target transactional keywords especially when I’m building niche websites.

 

Step #3: Content Research

 

As soon as you’ve concluded your keyword evaluation step, it’s time to do content research in order to learn what information and topics to include in your blog post and information gaps to fill. Your goal is to write your first blog post that will attract targeted website visitors in droves.

 

You’ve to take down notes when reading published content by other webmasters or bloggers who are actively targeting the same keyword you hope to pursue. The websites and blogs actively targeting the keyword will certainly have it on the blog title, Meta description, introduction, body of content, and conclusion of the blog article.

 

If you’re making use of WordPress blog and you’ve installed and activated SEO plugin like Yoast SEO, you’ll have the opportunity to type the search query in the focus keyword field available at the bottom of every blog post editor.

 

Step #4: Create Blog Post Outline

 

When you’ve gathered sufficient information to flesh out your article writing assignment, you need to create a blog post outline to guide you as your roadmap as you type your content on your computer or laptop. You want to capture all the ideas and points to include and discuss in your first blog post.

 

The template of your blog article outline should be similar to the one below:

 

• Blog title
• Introduction
• Body of article
• Conclusion

 

Blog Post Title

 

This is the headline of your article. This is what will be indexed by search engines along side with the information you have filled out for your Meta description before publishing your blog post. Blog title should be catchy and tersely conveying the major benefit for the potential reader to be compelled to click on it to visit your web page and read your content in full.

 

If you’re relying heavily on free website visitors from search engines, you’ve to learn and master the art and science of crafting irresistible headlines. This will help you to have a high CTR (click through rate) to your blog web page.

 

As much as your title is expected to include your target keyword, it should be readable by your website visitors.

 

Introduction

 

Your blog post introductory paragraph has to ignite the interest of your reader for him to continue perusing your content. In addition, you’ve to find a way to make use of your search query in the first few sentences of your blog post.

 

However, I’ve seen some of my blog posts ranking even if the first paragraph did not mention my target keyword phrases. The corollary of this is that creating stellar content is paramount to your web page ranking as you target a long tail keyword phrase.

 

As a blogger, you must understand that you’re writing blog post to serve two fronts, namely to appeal to human readers and search engines bots. Although keyword stuffing is no-go area, you still have to find a way to naturally weave it into your content so that the search engines bots will understand the topic of your post.

 

Body of Article

 

The body of your blog post is where the full course meal is expected to be served for your website visitors and readers. Here, you’ve to appropriately make use of relevant search terms, images, screenshots, bullet points, number list, references, quotes, and so on. 

 

Depending on the type of blog post (how to, step by step, ultimate guide, etc), you’ve to explain and discuss your topic in detail in order to demonstrate your expertise. If you’re doing email marketing as well, you need to go extra mile to please your prospects or leads who may eventually become your subscribers. 

 

Conclusion

 

The conclusion of your blog post is the last paragraph or section which will summarize and round up your content. If you’ve not done so before now, this is where you’ve to use clickable CTA (call to action) link to direct your blog readers to more information on another web page on your blog or to an external website.

 

In blogging, this is the best place to ask your readers some questions and encourage comments from them. It helps to ignite discussion among the blog owner and followers and I see this section as a perfect conversation starter.

 

In conclusion, there is lots of writing your first blog post tips to share here which include:

 

• Know your target readers and write your blog post to address their needs, solve their problems and answer their questions accordingly.
• You can import content from Google Documents, MS Word, notepad or type directly in the WordPress editor.
• Be original and conversational in your writing.
• Let your writing style, tone and voice resonate with your ideal audience.
• Make use of the right vocabulary, lexicon, jargons, etc which your readers will understand without scratching their heads for meaning and interpretation.
• Let your content meet the EAT (expertise, authority and trust) criteria.
• Write for your target readers without leaving any stone unturned.
• Write for search engines too because of SEO (search engine optimization) factor.
• Write in short sentences, paragraphs, and use bullet points for easy reading and scanning.
• Edit your permalink for the blog post to reflect your keyword target.
• Include keywords in your post both primary and secondary keywords.
• Include images with alt text where necessary.
• Size your images for speed loading on your blog website.
• Assign as many tags as possible for each blog post. Tags represent relevant keywords associated with your blog article.
• Create a category for your blog post. Categories group your similar blog posts in their related folders.
• Make relevant quotes, references, links, etc, where appropriate.
• Tell your story to educate, inform and entertain your readers.
• Hyperlink texts for both internal and external web pages and websites.
• Use CTA (call to action) to help you drive home your points and direct your readers to other places on the web for further reading and action taking.
• Build an email list to get the most from your published content.
• Ask questions to encourage conversation for your blog article.
• Ask your readers to comment on your blog post, make contributions, add their own ideas, etc, so as to make your active.
• Ask your readers to share the link to your post on social media with share buttons.
• Your blog post story line should be able to move your readers to CTA or solution you’re recommending.
• Preview your blog post before you finally hit the publish button.
• Publish your blog post.
• Promote your blog post.
• If there is any major update or revision you want to make in your article, simply revert to draft, edit and republish your blog post.

 

Go ahead and do so if you have any questions to ask or comments to make. You can also share the link to this blog post in your social media circles.

 

How to Optimize Your Blog

You can read my previous blog posts on how to start a blog and make money part one and part two. In today’s guide, I’ll focus on WordPress blog customization and optimization.

 

First, you’ve to start off by logging into your WordPress dashboard and tweak 2 or more settings in your account.

 

Go to the domain URL you registered and log in. in the example below, you've to replace "YourDomainName" with the actual domain name you bought and the "TLD" with the extension or top level domain i.e. .com, .net, .org, .xyz, .co, etc.

 

http://YourDomainName.TLD/wp-admin

 

For example, I'll replace YourDomainName.TLD with my actual domain followed by its extension e.g.

 

https://hustlevim.com/wp-admin

 

This will take you to your WordPress (WP) blog account dashboard which is basically the backend of your blog website. You’ll be working from this environment a lot. So, you’ve to take note of a lot of details as we go along and optimize your blog.

 

After you’ve successfully signed in, the first task is to change and update your password if it was auto-generated when you installed WP on your domain name except you manually imputed the password yourself.

 

For you to do this, take a look at the left hand side of your dashboard and locate “Users” icon as shown in the image below.

 

Click on the “Users” icon in order to see its sub menu. Now, click on “Profile” sub menu and scroll to the bottom of the web page where there is “Account Management.”

 

 

While you're there, click on “Generate Password” and overwrite the auto-generated password with the password you can easily remember. After you’ve done that, simply click on the “Hide” button immediately beside it and click on the “Update Profile” button.

 

You may be logged out after you’ve effected this password change. If this is the case, you should log in again with your new password. But remember to keep your new password safe!

 

The next step is to go to your “Settings” menu and click on it.

 

 

The first item on the sub menu is the “General” settings. Click on it and update the “Site Title” and “Tagline.” Essentially, your website title should include your primary keyword while the tagline should include your secondary keyword.

 

 For example, success in life blog, it may be:

 

Site Title: Success in Life Blog (primary keyword: success in life)

Tagline: Personal Development (secondary keyword: personal development)

 

Your primary keyword is the target keyword phrase which you want your blog to be ranked and known for while your secondary keyword is the second best keyword that you are also pursuing to rank for concurrently.

 

You should and must take the time to settle for keyword with low to medium difficulty based on your research.

 

My rule of the thumb is to target a minimum monthly average search volume of one thousand for my primary keyword and secondary keyword respectively.

 

After updating your site title and tagline, go to the bottom of the page to save your changes.

 

Depending on your choice as a blogger, you may prefer your blog website URL to look like either of the two options below:

 •    https://hustlevim.com, or

•    https://www.hustlevim.com

 

If you prefer the former, you don’t have to do anything because that is how WordPress comes by default. But if you prefer the latter, you’ve to go to the section on your general settings tab immediately below the tagline and simply add the “www” to “WordPress Address (URL)” and “Site Address (URL)” without the quotes and save your changes.

 

Always remember to save your changes after making an update. Again, you may be logged out after you’ve done this. Log in back and continue with your customization and optimization tasks.

 

The third step is to click on the “Reading” settings as shown in the screenshot below. What I usually do is to edit some items here from the default setting to my own preference.

 

The default setting is like this:

 

But my blogs reading setting is usually like this:

 

 

I will reduce the number of blog posts to show on my home page to 5 while the syndication feeds to 5 and “Summary” for each post in a feed.

 

I don’t want any of my blog readers or followers to read my blog post in full from his or her feed outside of my blog. If it is set to “Summary,” he has to visit my blog to read the whole blog post. This will boost website traffic in the long run.

 

The fourth step is the “Permalinks” settings. This is where you’ve to optimize your blog the way you want every post or page URL to be indexed and displayed. You’ll see some blog URLs with day, month and year while some will use keyword in the title.

 

For blog SEO purpose, it is advisable to set your permalink to custom settings by making use of keyword URL.

 

To do this, click on “Permalinks” and make sure the radio button beside “Custom structure” is checked. After you’ve done that, simply type the code below and paste it in the field beside “Custom structure.”

 

/%postname%/

 

And you should have a permalinks custom structure like this.

 

This will overwrite the default permalinks after you’ve saved your changes.

 

The fifth step is to go to “Discussion” settings and locate the section that says, “Comment must be manually approved” and tick the check box there and adjust the “Comment moderation” to “1 or more links.”

 

You’ll now have something similar to this:

 

This will make sure bloggers or spammers don’t invade your blog with spam comments and links that will dilute the power of your blog in search engines. Every time a blogger includes a link in the comment section, you’ve to moderate and approve it before it can go live.

 

It will give you modicum of sanity in your blogging career.

 

This is how to optimize your blog on a very basic level. You can use this to start a blog and make money. However, there are other tasks you’ve to complete in respect of search engine optimization (SEO).

 

This includes:

• Meta description for your blog using WordPress SEO plugin like Yoast.
• Making use of category and tags.
• Doing internal linking.
• Using H1, H2 and H3 tags where necessary in headings and sub headings.
• Including “Alt text” in your uploaded images.
• Using responsive WordPress themes
• Mobile optimization
• Etc.

 As I progress with this side hustle website, I’ll explain some of these SEO topics one by one.