Write Great Content Consistently
What is the single most important part of a blog? The content! Consistent, high quality content again and again over time is what helps your blog grow. People discover your blog, it brings readers back, and ensures you get plenty of backlinks.There’s a saying in the blogging community: Content is king. In the decade I’ve been blogging I have seen many trends come and go. Google has introduced penguins and pandas. Yahoo has fallen from a top source of online search to an online property worth less than $5 billion. Facebook has grown from less than 100 million users to nearly 2 billion. But the online demand for high quality online content has never ceased.
Promote Your Content to Grow Your Following
Have you ever hit the publish button on the greatest blog post of all time, expecting it to go viral and spread like wildfire across the web, just to see a small traffic spike from your Facebook friends sizzle after just a few minutes?Odds are this was a predictable event if all you did is hit publish and send to Facebook. The Internet has billions of users, but only a small percentage of them are Facebook friends or Twitter followers. To ensure your content succeeds and reaches the largest audience, you must promote it.
Build an Email List of Dedicated Subscribers
In the click of a button, Facebook could hypothetically turn off your page or stop showing your content to subscribers. You could wake up one morning to find that your Pinterest and Twitter traffic have died off and the only way to get it back is paid advertising. This has been the experience of countless bloggers, but you have one powerful hedge against the traffic whims of search engines and social networks.Your email list is one of the most powerful tools you have to reach your audience. While Facebook and Google algorithms change, email doesn’t look to be going anywhere soon. In conversations with successful bloggers Darren Rowse of Problogger and Pat Flynn from Smart Passive Income, they shared that one of the most common mistakes site owners make is not starting an email list on day one.
Monetize
Now let’s say you have great content. You’re promoting it, and building your list to grow your traffic and following. Now it’s time to actually make money. You can’t make a living online without any income coming in the door!Different Types of Ads
Display and click ads—The most basic form of online advertising is display and click ads. Networks like Google AdSense, Media.net, and others have brought this type advertising to millions of websites. Basically, you, as a site owner, earn money for every impression and click from an ad on your site. Just sign up, add a few lines of code, and the ads are live.On the down side, however, ads are ugly, many users ignore them or block them, and they take away from the overall site experience. However, many businesses and bloggers have built a great income on this type of ad, and it is a popular starting point for newer blogs.
I have earned thousands from affiliates, but I pale in comparison to friends like Pat and Michelle who earn six figures every month from affiliate programs. If you have a growing and loyal audience in the right niche, this is a lucrative income method.
Test, Optimize, Don’t Give Up
One of the attributes of successful bloggers is persistence. Sticking with it over time, testing to learn what works, and optimizing your site to earn income while providing an awesome user experience is a great formula for success. As I recently shared in a presentation at travel blogging conference TBEX, lazy people don’t earn six figures online.I’ve been earning six figures online since last year, and it is a wonderful, life changing experience. But it all started with a blog post on a fateful summer day in July 2006. As they say, the rest is history.