Do you know the difference between a successful blog and a failure one?
Paying customers.
Yes, if people are buying your products or services, you can consider your blog as a successful one. If not, it’s a failure blog and you need to take serious precautions to start making sales from it.
Building an authority site is the surefire way to get more traffic, backlinks, social shares and sales. If you are wondering how to build a successful blog that makes money, firstly you need to consider few things which you will discover in this detailed post.
Are you ready? Let’s dive into the details without much ado.
Table of Page Contents
#On-Site SEO
If you want to make more money from your blog, you need more traffic especially from Google.
The more traffic you get the more money you can generate. 90% of the blogs never make more than $100 because almost all of them struggle to get traffic.
That’s why you need a plan to bring more visitors to sites especially from search engines like Google. Here’s where on page optimization comes into play.
On page SEO is the process of optimizing your blog pages for Google crawlers. Keyword research plays a crucial role here. Once you start building a list of all the potential long tail keywords that you can use within your content, on page SEO becomes extremely easy.
That being said, once you are done with the keyword research, here are few places where you can add your primary keyword to get better rankings on Google.
- H1, h2 and h3 tags
- Image alt tags
- Meta description
- URL
- Inside of your blog posts
- Title
- At the beginning and end of your posts
Also make sure to interlink to your old blog posts which are relevant to your newly created blog posts. That way you can make Google crawlers to crawl your sites quickly so you can get your blog posts indexed fast.
#Website Speed
Go to Pingdom tools and analyze the speed of your websites. As a rule of thumb, a fast loading site loads within 2 to 3 seconds. If your site is taking much more time, you need to find ways to improve your loading times.
Otherwise, you might get bad search results on Google just because of your slow loading times. As a matter of fact, Amazon loses billions of dollars every year for every second of delay.
You can also use sites like YSlow to know the factors that affecting you website speed. Here’s an image that explains how slow loading sites kill your sales.
Make sure to choose the best web hosting service to run your WordPress sites as your website speed depends largely upon your hosting.
That being said, here are few quick tips to improve your website speed.
Optimize images: Even before you use images on your blog posts or pages, make sure to optimize them. You can also use plugins like WP Smush.it to compress your images.
Get a CDN: By using a CDN (Content Delivery Network), you can quickly improve your website loading times. There are a lot of CDN plugins available which can help you improve your website speed.
Enable browser caching: This makes it easy for your website visitors to quickly load your web pages.
Use less plugins: Seriously, the more plugins you use on your blog the more time it takes to load. As a rule of thumb, limit your plugins usage to 10 to 15.
#Long Form of Content Over Short Content
Most bloggers complain about one thing that they are NOT getting any traffic even after writing blog posts regularly. They might be struggling because of short articles.
In this Post-Penguin world where Google is rewarding the sites with quality articles, you should spend more time to write detailed and in-depth articles. The articles with over 2000 words usually get top rankings even for the toughest keywords.
So if you are thinking about boosting your search engine traffic, make sure to create authoritative articles with over 1500 to 2000 words. Yes, they take time to create but you can reap the best rewards sooner or later.
Have a look at the below screenshot to know how long form of content performs well on Google search results.
Moreover, your blog audience will consider you as an expert if you prefer to publish long form of content over short articles. Here are few tips for you to create long and informative articles.
- Before writing a single word on your blog posts, come up with the right blog post ideas. Try to find and create data backed blog posts. For instance, you can easily create detailed content for the topics like “how [someone] made $100,000 within a year from his blog and how you can do the same”. Are you getting me?
- Outline your blog posts. Make sure to add all the reference links. Take your own time to make them perfect. Do a lot of research before you begin writing.
- Make sure to find out what topics your competitor’s are covering. Try to beat their content’s quality by writing in-depth data backed articles.
#Monetization Strategy
Most bloggers struggle to increase their affiliate sales or product sales because of one reason: they don’t usually lay out a monetization strategy.
Without creating a monetization plan, you will find it hard to convert your visitors into subscribers and then into customers. Getting traffic to your sites is one thing and using that traffic to increase your blog’s income is another thing.
That’s when you should be thinking smart to turn your visitors into buyers. Spend some quality time in defining your target audience, get to know their wants and needs and deliver the products that suit their problems.
Here are few surefire ways to monetize your blog.
- Figure out ways to monetize your blog’s content. You can definitely give a try to ad publishing platforms like AdSense, Chitika etc but they are not so effective if you want to make more money. You can also write product reviews that pays you money or you can create quality review blog posts around the products you promote. All these methods can help you make money from your content.
- Analyze how your competitor’s are monetizing their sites. Are you promoting affiliate products or their own products? Are they making money by offering services or something else? By analyzing them, you can come up with few strategies that might work well for you own blog too.
- Make sure to build an email list. It’s the surefire way to convince people to buy stuff from you. Create an autoresponder to send high quality emails each week so they can trust you.
- Ask people for help. If you know someone who’s already making money from their blogs, seek their help. Ask them how to monetize their sites. Most bloggers will help you without any hesitation.
#Networking
Traffic, traffic, traffic. Well, every blogger and entrepreneur struggles and go crazy to drive more traffic to their websites. But one thing they miss is to networking with others. Most bloggers think advertising massively can bring traffic to the website and so spend lot of money.
But it won’t fetch you any good results unless you have connections with other influencers in your industry. So make sure to spend time in finding and networking with other bloggers who are relevant to your blog topics.
Also find ways to offer them help before seeking any help from them. Be in touch with them on social media and frequently engage with them through emails.
#Email List Building
No doubt, social media marketing is powerful to get followers and consistent visitors but of all, the one that is often neglected is email Marketing. Email is very powerful tool in bringing desired results when compared to Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. By using email list, you can easily create a sales funnel for your blog. Look at the below image.
Here are few email list building strategies that can fetch massive traffic to your website.
Identify your potential audience: In order to drive massive results, the foremost step is to identify your potential audience. To whom you are offering services or selling your products? Does the recipients interested in receiving mails from you?
For example, if you are niche is textiles, send the new offers or arrivals to your audience. Why this is important? because, as your subscribers are interested in textiles they subscribed. So , if you send cooking recipes they may mark you as spammer. So, never spam them with unwanted and unnecessary emails.
Always write mobile friendly emails: With the smartphone evolution, majority of the people open or check their emails in mobile. So, it’s highly advisable to customize your mail as mobile-friendly.
Make necessary font sizes that which gives enhanced readability in smartphones. If your emails are not optimized for mobile, there is a possibility that your email is moved to trash. So, customize your website theme in such a way that it is responsive to mobile device.
Offer FREE content: Well, who doesn’t love to get anything for FREE? Provide your audience free templates or tools or free PDF’s. Remember, it should be beneficial to your readers and the content you are offering them for free should not be available in your blog or website.
#Choosing One Social Media Platform at a Time
Instead of wasting your time on all the social media sites at once, focus on one medium at a time. Engage with your audience on social media sites one at a time.
The one common mistake that most of the people do is they try to build their fans on Facebook, twitter, instagram all at once. It takes a lot of time and you are wasting your energy.
Instead engage with them using one particular social media platform at a time and give them a reason to come back and visit your website. Every time you share something on social media, make it an interesting one like what’s new about your services.
So next time, instead of wasting your time on every other social media site, focus on just ONE source and try to add as much value as you can with your posts.
Final Thoughts on Building an Authority Blog
Starting a WordPress blog is so simple but making sales from it is NOT. If you are a beginner with zero online selling skills, it gets even worse to make more money from blogging.
That’s why you need to first focus on building loyal readers around your blog with your content and SEO strategy. Once people started finding value in your site, they won’t hesitate to buy your products or services.
So make sure to implement all the 7 factors mentioned above to build a better blog that adds value and makes money in the long run.
What are your thoughts? Do you have any more tips to build an authority site in any niche? Share your views in the comments.
This guest blog content was written by Anil Agarwal – Founder of Bloggerspassion
Hi Anil,
As always great article. All the tips that you mentioned here are equally important to each other. As a regular visitor of bloggerspassion I saw that you always recommend to write long in-depth 2000 words articles. As stasistic suggeat that google love lengthy articles. I also love to read detail blog posts. But at the same time I see some of the blogs doing well with shorter content. Is it because of backlinks or what?
Anyway thanks for sharing Sathish.
Cheers
Hey Anil,
Building a blog seems so easy but people forget about the SEO factor. They should try their best to put everything together.
The H1 tag and adding the proper keyword always helps. Choosing the social media platform can bring more exposure.
An informative post indeed.
~Ravi
The point which many of the bloggers ignore is the site speed. It is regarded as one of the most important user satisfaction by google. And with it’s inclusion int he ranking factor clan, it makes it even more important. And i see more and more people just ignore it, for a tacky design. Also responsiveness should be kept in mind, while designing your blog, so that all audiences and users find it attractive to the eye. 🙂 Great post.
Gonna write long content soon any Off page SEO Tips for yahoo or Bing Search engine ?
Hi,
This article is actually helpful for all beginners. All tips are so accurate and effective. I just wants to add one thing here, Bill gates were say that “Contents are the King”. Yes! Contents are actually king because about Ranking it depends most on it. The better your content is, the better position it will gain in Search engines. It is not necessary that one blogger always need to post contents that contains 2000+ word. But trying to post 1500+ words content is the best practice.
Almost all peoples related to SEO must know about Brian Dean, He is the founder of backlinko.com, Do you know guys?! Brian only posts 35 articles in backlinko.com.
Shocked!!? Yes, I was also. He did it in a right way, so you should also do the same. Just publishing high quality contents blindly will not makes it successful, you need to optimize every single contents so that will pay your effort.
I really appreciate the tips in this article, If someone follow them all, he will be a successful blogger in near future.
Thanks for sharing.
Hi, Thanks for the wonderful insights. Choosing One Social Media Platform at a time was fruitful one for me.
Hello,
Indeed, it is the most truthful words to agree. Focussing on one social platform leads to a great success!!
Thanks 🙂
Hi Anil,
So nice to see that Sathish has hosted your article on this blog site.
You certainly make many good points that will help bloggers build the popularity of their sites.
Then, to monetize them, you need to understand just what your readers want. If they value your authority and trust you as a reputable blogger, you will have a great opportunity to make sales through things like product reviews on your blog, and in offers that you present to subscribers to your email list.
Excellent advice and it points the way for a successful blogging business.
-Donna
Hello Donna,
It’s a great pleasure to have this expert Anil’s words on my blog!!
Yes we need to know what our readers want, then only we can get some products sold out of our blog. Proper on page and off page should be learnt by everyone as it helps to get more targeted customers/buyers and hence those traffic converts well.
Thanks for the post. A complete guide!
Sathish, it’s important for bloggers to build authority by doing guest posting, too.
Guest posting builds natural backlinks for bloggers, and exposes you to a new audience that closely matches your own target audience.
Have you done any guest posting yet? I’d like to know.
Lorraine,
You are right. Guest posting strategy can help to improve the authority not just in the terms of DA, but as a whole. And, Lorraine I do contribute guest articles often.
Great post. You have aggregated all the tips for successful blog in this article. Page speed is a crucial factor and that’s why despite good content, it affects your site bounce rate adversely if neglected. Although Long articles pleases google in terms of top serp but it’s not something mere sake of length and missing relevance to the topic.
Prashant,
Obviously, the long-form content helps us to better explain the topic in detail. And, hence we can engage readers. Thanks for dropping your valuable comment here.
Hi Anil,
This is very useful post for bloggers like me who’s still on it’s ‘infancy stage’ when it comes to blogging. To be honest, I’m still hesitant to build my own blog because I think all of my ideas are ‘already written’ on the internet. But when I read this article, I learned that there’s still a chance to build authority even for starters. Great post! 🙂
I totally agree with you on several points and I am thankful for bringing forth the importance of site speed. I think I need to work on this aspect when it comes to my own blog. Thank you so much for the share, much appreciated!
hi Anil,
I was very informative article thanks for the time and efforts. Blogger should also understand the value of good server, site should open in less than 3 seconds
Great Tips Over Here Dude!
…. Choosing the Right Hosting
…. Choosing the Right Theme & Tools
…. Choosing the Right Keywords
…. Writing Detailed Articles
…. Making Relationship with other Bloggers is the way to success.
Yup.
Cheer,
The content written is very clear and concise also it is reader friendly
Keep on sharing this nice article
Thank you
Great points. I do have an opinion as well. Listing in local search engines and directories will also drive a decent traffic and ranking.
Hey Anil,
Welcome to Sathish’s blog, good to see yet another guest post from you,
Totally agree with you about defining success or failure, because sales is the ultimate metric – we do build blogs and look for so many other stats including DA or traffic and even content value, but no one can challange the ultimate metric which is sales!
On site in terms of readability and user experience has become the most important ranking signal, because if the site isn’t formatted, relevant, or broken in some other ways then the user can directly click the back button – via. which Google can award a negative ranking trust.
I like your social media approach, that is how it should be. With limited time, one can focus on one site only – it is always preferable to book your username in every social site that is around – but you can only be active on one at a time!
Thanks,
– Shantanu
Shantanu,
Thanks for your detailed comments and compliments. Also, I read Temok blog articles regularly and comment often.
How consistent we are – whether it is a single site or multiple. I am satisfied and engaged with single blog, Traffic Crow putting all my efforts together.
Great post. I think it gives a huge knowledge about starting a blog, increasing traffic and making money through a blog
Thanks for sharing
Its always important to check your SEO factors of your website in order to get more online exposure. The website speed is one of the important factor, as Google has started to penalize websites with low loading time. In the above article the author has explained the importance of SEO for website and also how to keep your blog on top notch. Applause to the author for this post.
Hi Anil. Excellent post – I particularly like the comment about “choosing one social platform at a time” – really good advice as to how to spend your time with social media. I tried building all at once and got nowhere with any of them. Instead going for Facebook first, then Pinterest and then I’ll see what I can do with Twitter.
The other tip I would have when you start to blog is not spending too much time agonising over how it looks. I did, and hadn’t realised I was such a perfectionist ! You really need to crack on building your content and growing your audience
Yes, Andy – Anil has nailed the topic. Thanks for checking out and commenting in detail.
Thank you, for sharing such a quality information it was really great, and helpful. I agree with all of your point especially E-mail list building. according to me to get more traffic on our blog post we must also add some Images and Info graphics on our blog it helps a lot.
This is great articles for new blogger and who start there carrier as a blogger well I am really appreciate your work regarding blog content and seo tips that you have put in your post, also you are really a great guest blogger and got amazing writing skills with blog content I will wait for your next post…. Thank you for such a useful post about blogger seo.
Writing long-form articles really work. And thanks for sharing your ideas on On-site SEO. I appreciate the work you have done here. Thank you so much.
Hello Satish,
Based on my experience, adding more plugins or unsupported plugins will surely return with website slowness issue.
As you said, website speed (loading) is more important like On page SEO.
Thanks
Saravana
You’re right, Saravana. Page loading speed is a great demanding factor when we think about click-throughs & conversions.
Satish,
Yes, Guest posts help to get more authorities to our website.
Do you have any other article about simple ways to get backlinks to our website.
I have already read one of your article about the list of guest posts sites.
Would you please share the URL here?
Saran,
Thanks for stopping by. By the way, we doesn’t have a post on guest posting sites, whereas we have related posts on guest blogging guide, importance & benefits of guest posting, tips to choose best titles for guest posting outreach, etc. We insist you to check those posts as well.