Do you also want your blog to succeed?
Well, who does not…
Everyone wants to be next TechCrunch, CopyBlogger or Perez Hilton but only a very few actually achieve the level of success that these big boys have.
The truth is that due to the very low cost of starting a blog and the easiness of setting it up, the idea of blogging is very appealing to most of the people but the vast majority of them do not take their blogs seriously, they do not want to sacrifice and they do not make many important things that successful bloggers do.
I have been diligently studying the top online entrepreneurs aka bloggers for few years and today I have decided to share with you the best 7 tips that will help you to grow a blog in any niche.
1) Invest In Your Blog
Do you not want to spend additional money on your blog besides on hosting and your domain name?
Oh boy, I was there too.
I was very reluctant to invest in my own blog in my early stages of blogging because why would I spend my hard earned dollars on something that I can get for free?
So, I would not buy any premium templates, ebooks, online courses, plugins or even get a simple logo in my first years of blogging.
I did not change my mind until one day my old friend showed me his travel blog that was looking really cool and it blew me away that he did not spend that much on his theme and he said that I could get one for myself from the shop that he recommended to me.
Now, it did happen ages ago (well, not ages but about ten years ago) but I still thank my old friend for his amazing advice every time I see him.
If you really want to succeed in blogging, then you have to invest in your blog because after all it is a business like any other, even if it is an online business that you can start for just a few bucks.
It is a shame that a vast majority of beginners forget about that fact or they just do not realize it.
If you were to start a sports bar in your home city, then you will need to have at least $50,000 to open one and on top of that, you will need to pay for the liquor license and other fees that would cost lots of cash.
With your blogging business, you just have to spend your money on the two things: the hosting and domain name and they both should cost you about $30 or even less if you are just starting out.
But if you want to succeed and make your readers take you seriously, you will need to invest in things like themes so your blog looks professional and unique.
It is also highly recommended that you use a premium email marketing software so that you build your subscribers list and then email your audience any time.
I have spent over $500 on plugins and themes last month alone and I am going to use them on almost all of my blogs and I know that these investments are going to give me lots of good returns down the road.
All successful businessmen know that the more money they put in their businesses, the more they will get in the future and the same principle applies to blogging.
And that is why you will see some popular bloggers spending thousands of dollars on themes, conferences, backlinks, hiring designers and much more.
They all know very well that it is necessary to invest in some important things in order to take their blogs to the next level.
2) Monetize Your Blog The Right Way
If you really think that Google AdSense or sponsored posts are the best ways to generate money from your blog, then you are in for a big surprise, buddy.
I have tried to monetize my other established blogs with AdSense and other ad networks and all I made them through them was not even enough to cover my hosting bills.
Now, some of my blogs get over a few thousands of visitors every single day, so if you are just starting out, then you are really going to earn pennies if Adsense is your only stream of income.
I am not using them anymore because they change rules often and it is super hard to follow them and there is always a possibility that they will close your account over something trivial and they will take all your unpaid earnings.
I have read some really depressing stories about bloggers losing their accounts out of the blue and I have seen some established bloggers like Zac Johnson or Spencer Haws have their accounts shut down over something absurd.
So it just shows that even if your blog is totally legit, you are not doing anything dodgy, you can not sleep safely because you might get banned next morning.
However, affiliate marketing and especially selling your own products are two best ways to make money online because they are more profitable and they will keep making dough even when you sleep or watch your favorite TV show.
An amazing thing with digital products is that you create, for example, an online course once but this product will continue earning you money even years after years with a very minimal work involved on your part.
So you create something, be it an Ebook, an online course or a software once, and then you just might have to update them once in a while, but you will not work on them every day for hours and you will make cash whether you are running, meeting with your family or even when you make a poo (I know it sounds ridiculous, but it is truth).
Read this post on 5 ways to earn money from blogging because there is lots of knowledge contained in it for you.
3) Create Amazing Content
Do you know what is the most important ingredient of a successful blog?
If you would ask me this exact question ten years ago, I would probably tell you that it is the domain name or the template that you use.
But, now I know that the quality content is often the only thing that can separate a few popular bloggers from millions of dabblers.
Look, you can grab that theme that I recommend you to get, or even you can hire a top coder to design your custom theme or you can buy a premium domain name like Health.com or Hotels.com, but it all does not really matter if you do not create a content that is valuable to your audience.
I have seen it happen in the real life, I am not kidding you.
Sorry, but I can not remember the actual name of the domain that the one guy bought but it was a dating related domain and the guy paid 2 million dollars for it but did he build a great site on this amazing domain?
No, he just set up a white label on it so it is obvious that he did not get much love from his visitors or from the Google either.
I am sure that he makes some money but it is really nothing comparing to what he could make if he would create a real site with an original and valuable content.
All successful bloggers are where they are right now, it is not because of their professional looking themes and it is not because of domain names either, it is because of their high quality posts that help solve people’s problems like no one else can.
I am nowhere near as successful or popular as Darren Rowse or Steve Kamb of NerdFitness, but I do make a decent living online and I can say safely that the content of your blog is a must have ingredient, no matter which niche you are in.
You should not expect to get any decent results on Google if your posts are very short, non unique and useless since a potential visitor can not get any value from them and none really wants to read such articles.
Google and your readers value engaging and comprehensive posts.
So if you go create something that is valuable, interesting and helpful, you will be greatly rewarded in return. That is how you win more new readers through providing value to them.
4) Be A Lifelong Student
The one thing that I have learned over the years is that the moment you stop learning, is the moment your business aka blog will start to deteriorate.
If you want to succeed as a blogger, you simply have to be a lifelong student, because otherwise, you are going to be left far behind your competitors that keep learning new things every single day.
So please, do not ever be an Mr know it all because such attitude will only lead you to very negative outcomes.
Just take an example of the most successful people in this amazing world.
Warren Buffett who is arguably one of the best investors ever, reads at least 4 hours a day.
Elon Musk, the owner of Tesla, reads books obsessively every single day.
Also, the founder of Microsoft named Bill Gates has read over 60 books last year alone.
So I can safely say that constant learning is a very important part of every successful entrepreneur’s life.
You see, SEO is changing constantly.
If you would stop to keep up with it from now on, then after some time you would notice that you get less and less traffic from Google and in the worst scenario, your blog might even be hit with a penalty.
SEO rules change by the minute and you will find often that some things that were allowed in the past few years, might be denounced this year.
So for example having an HTTP site was perfectly fine until last year when Google announced that they will penalize non https websites.
Many bloggers, especially new ones do not realize how important it is to keep learning new things that are not only related to blogging like SEO, but also to marketing, self-development or to business in general, because running a successful blog is like running any other kind of business.
If you want to stay ahead in any kind of business these days, especially in blogging, you have to read books on different subjects, read blogs of popular bloggers, listen to podcasts.
Every successful blogger knows that:
Always remember that when you stop learning, you also stop growing and if you do not “grow” these days, you are going to be outperformed very quickly by your competitors.
Many newcomers think that once they reach a certain level of success, they will finally rest on laurels and they will no longer need to acquire new knowledge anymore.
You really have to perish the thought that you will ever stop learning if you want to make it, this is a never ending process.
5) Work On Your SEO
In order to achieve any level of success in blogging, you need to get some traffic because let’s be real, if you do not have any traffic, it means that no one visits your blog so no one even knows that it exists.
That is why every successful blogger out there puts lots of time into working on the SEO on a regular basis.
If you do not know what SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is, then simply put it is the process of improving your blog’s visibility in search engine sites like Google, Yahoo or Bing.
Why should I care about SEO?
You might ask me.
You really should care about it for many reasons.
For instance, organic traffic from Google and other similar search engines is not only number one source to get visitors from but it is also by far the best converting source of traffic and it does not matter if you a fitness blog or a site that revolves around the topic of Second World War.
It is also worth mentioning that organic SEO traffic is highly targeted which means that people coming from Google are more likely to buy something from you because they have actually searched for a particular thing and found your blog rather than clicked unintentionally on a random ad on another website.
On top of that, you do not have to pay anything to get such traffic. Once you become better at SEO, you will get more and more visitors from search engine sites and Google will never charge you a penny even when your blog starts to get millions of visits from their website.
If you are just starting out and then you are already overwhelmed with other stuff so I can recommend you to just focus on writing valuable posts that are helpful to your audience.
You will learn more and more progressively as your blog grow because you would not get much love from search engines right away anyway because it takes some time for new blogs to get any attention from Google.
Luckily if you use WordPress and a plugin like Yoast SEO then you have already done a great deal of work because WordPress is such a powerful platform that automatically solves lots of SEO issues.
It would be really stupid to ignore Google rankings because SEO is arguably one of the best investments for any blog.
If search engines will see that you regularly post new quality content that gets shared a lot by your readers and you are not just another spammer and you want to provide value to people in your industry, they will reward you by ranking your blog on the top of results for free.
6) Interact with Your Audience
This one is almost always overlooked by new bloggers and they do not know what they are missing.
It is very common among all successful bloggers in any niche (be it traveling, fitness, money saving, you name it) that they interact with their readers every single day.
They respond to almost all comments that they get, even though some of them might get hundreds of comments on a daily basis.
They also engage with their followers on Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr and other social media platforms they actively promote their blogs on.
Some of you might think that it is crazy or it is just a waste of time and this is exactly what I thought myself as I was taking my first steps in the blogging world.
But now I know that nothing could be further from the truth.
Developing relationships with clients (or readers) is one of the most important things to do in any kind of business and it does not matter if you run a small coffee shop or a cooking blog on the side.
If a one person finds your blog on Google search results page, she or he will more likely to buy anything that you offer, subscribe to your mailing list and share your posts, if she or he sees that you genuinely engage with your audience or even better, she or he sees that you provide a helpful answer to a question that she or he might ask.
Not to mention that responding to comments will also give you lots of new ideas about potential post topics, because hey if many of your readers ask you the same question, it is obvious that they would be interested in reading your more in depth take on that specific subject.
Conclusion
Do you feel like it will be hard for you to implement these tips today?
Welcome to the bush league then!
Well, I have got some good news for you.
I understand that you are new to blogging, but you do not need to worry if you do not do any of these things that I mentioned in this post because they all can be implemented over time, little by little.
These are 7 simple yet very important things that all successful bloggers have been doing for a long time and they all have led them to where they are right now.
It is really up to you if you implement them or not, but if you implement most of them, after a month or two you will be enjoying the fruits of your labor.
If you have enjoyed this post then please do check out my article on the 3 most common blogging mistakes because you have to make sure that you do not make them if you want to become a successful blogger this year.