If you’re aspiring to start a side hustle business or already have one, you can increase your website traffic, leads, prospects, referrals, sales and revenue by deploying and using blogging and content marketing strategies to achieve your goals. These two digital marketing tactics alone will positively impact on your bottom line by leaps and bounds.
As you may already know, the World Wide Web is powered by constant
content and information about topics of interest to any target group of people
at any point in time; be it videos, ebooks, audio, books, blog posts, podcasts,
webinars, white papers, newsletters, and so on. So, you can tap into any or
combination of these content formats and use it to create brand awareness and
get clients consistently to your side hustle business for the long term.
In this blog post, I’ll walk you through the steps to successfully
start a blog and make money and then use content marketing to propel and popularize
your side hustle business in the web space.
Let’s get started and talk about blogging.
Blogging is all about building a blog website on the
internet where you can regularly create and publish content around a topic you
know enough of and be willing to share, teach and educate others about it. And
to build a blog, there are tools and resources which you’ve to invest in and
deploy. I’ll talk about this shortly.
The most important aspect of blogging is publishing content
consistently. This is the area a lot of bloggers miss out and fail to succeed. As
it were, a blog is like an online journal or diary where you can chronicle
every content worth sharing with your target audience. To this end, it’s
necessary for you to constantly interact with your blog readers by publishing
topical articles on it so that you and your business will remain top of the mind.
What do
you’ve to blog about?
It’s about what your target readers will be interested in reading
and learning from you. In essence, you’re positioning yourself as a solution
provider or problem solver before your followers and fans by answering their
questions and/or solving their problems or pain points.
This is why before you get started, you’ve to conduct market
research and keyword research to know the palpable content gaps, needs and
opportunities which you’ll be able to serve in the marketplace before you create
a blog.
For example, if you decide to run a personal finance blog where you’ll discuss, among
other things, side hustle ideas, starting a business successfully, budgeting,
investing, and building wealth, etc, you’ve to know where your potential
audience are on the buyer’s journey so that you can write and publish specific content
that will resonate with them.
For you to create a blog on a self-hosted CMS (content
management system) platform like WordPress.org, you’ve to register a domain
name and buy web hosting. Any website hosting company which you decide to sign
up with must support WordPress hosting to make it easy for you to set up your blog
website seamlessly even if you’re a newbie or beginner.
I’ve been using HostGator web hosting to build websites and
create blogs in different niche markets. They are quite affordable, reliable
and they have excellent customer support in case you run into technical issues
that need to be resolved by a professional sooner than later.
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guide which will help you to start a blog and make money in a matter of weeks
like a pro blogger.
The best part about blogging is that it’s interactive between
you and your readers especially if you publish high quality content regularly.
It’s blogging and content sharing that make the internet merry go round. Personally,
blogging for money is my passion as long as I’m constantly delivering value to
my target audience in every niche market I’m targeting.
Here are the basic steps to start a successful blog.
- Choose a niche market to target
- Research a niche topic to focus on
- Conduct keyword research to find profitable search queries to write content about
- Create a blog to get started
- Optimize your blog for on-page SEO
- Set up data analytics to measure website activities
- Regularly publish content on your blog targeting profitable keywords
- Monetize your blog to make money online
- Promote your blog and build backlinks
- Measure your web metrics and improve where necessary
In a nutshell, the above steps are the length and breadth of
blogging, and anybody can do it. However, it takes time for your blog website
to gain traction in your target niche market. You’ve to be exceptionally
creative to stand out in the blogosphere in any niche today because of
cutthroat competition. And you’ve to be patient too.
If you’re starting a blog to make money, you’ve to set your
priorities right from the get-go. You’ve to optimize your blog for on-page SEO,
target low competition but profitable long tail keyword phrases, regularly
publish high quality content, promote your blog, build authority backlinks and
connect with your prospects and leads anywhere they regularly congregate, build
an email list of subscribers, and so on.
Blogging is a serious business and you’ve to treat it as
such. There is a huge learning curve for you to navigate if you’re just getting
started as a beginner. But you can be rest assured that it pays the bills ultimately
if you can maintain a blog around a topic that people are eager to learn more
from an expert like you.
A lot of successful bloggers have transformed their blogs which
started with a humble beginning into mega businesses making millions of dollars
yearly in revenue. They got speaking engagements, coaching and consulting
briefs, joint ventures and partnership opportunities, book contracts, etc, just
by starting a blog around their areas of expertise and experience and staying
through.
You should know that your target audience will perceive you
as an authority or thought leader on a subject matter over time if you take
blogging as a business through regular content publication and updates.
The flexibility in blogging can make you go viral with a
single blog post especially if you’re controversial or opinionated on a topic
in a good sense of the word. This can generate a lot of comments from your
readers, followers and fans and you’ll be able to interact with them and balance
opinions on any subject matter at hand.
The most vital virtues you can hone as a blogger are
charisma, uniqueness, expertise, having a listening ear and promptly answering
questions you’re asked frequently. This can quickly turn your blog articles into
user generated content that will create website activities and positive
experience.
Blogging is an integral part of content marketing, and
having an active blog in a niche market puts you light years ahead of other average
bloggers. From your blog, you can build an email list of subscribers who will
serve as a pool of ready buyers when you’ve a product or service to promote and
sell to them.
Content
Marketing
Content marketing is the bread and butter of internet
marketing. Simply put, content marketing is the research, creation and
distribution of content about a topic of interest to a target group of people by
someone (blogger, marketer, webmaster, online business owner, writer, author,
etc).
The goal of content marketing could be to engage readers, create
brand awareness, generate leads and prospects, retain customers or clients, and
so on. A good content marketer must have smattering of SEO, keyword research,
list building and marketing automation.
Beyond this, you’ve to create content marketing strategy and
a plan to execute it with a time frame in mind. You should be able to research
the competition to discover content gaps which you’ve to fill and use it to get
free targeted traffic from search engines like Google.
Knowing content marketing tools to use at every stage of the
buyer’s journey is critical to your success as well. At the heart of marketing
with content is story telling. Your major goal as a content marketer is to
engage with your target audience and build trust and credibility so that it
becomes easy for you to drive positive customer action.
Online shoppers hardly buy a product or service on the first
day they are exposed to it. It takes about seven times or so for a product to
be exposed to a prospect before he decides to open his wallet and pay for it.
And a potential customer will only do business with a merchant or vendor who he
knows, like and trust.
In light of this, blogging and content marketing are the
best and most viable strategies to get clients and customers to take the desired
action. There is a lot of housekeeping details in planning and executing any content
strategy.
You’ve to:
- Know your audience
- Research profitable keywords to target
- Create a content plan
- Write content to match every level of buyer persona
- Publish content at designated channels to attract website visitors
- Measure your metrics to evaluate areas that need improvements
Content Marketing
with Personalization
A good content marketing campaign is when you integrate it
with a list building software. This will
help you to further follow up with blog readers who decide to join your mailing
list and learn more about your business.
Building a mailing list will give you the opportunity to personalize marketing messages through automation and gain customer’s attention. All in all, blogging and content marketing will remain the most profitable ways to improve your search engines rankings, nurture leads and drive targeted traffic from various sources to your blog website. And you can get started now!
