3 Vital Tips For Creating A Successful Blog

OK, you’ve decided that you want to start your own blog and make money online. You want to follow in the footsteps of many successful bloggers and online entrepreneurs in creating a successful blog to earn a living with. That’s great, after all it can’t be that hard can it?

Well in reality, most newbie bloggers give up and throw in the towel after just a few months of unsuccessful blogging. Why? Well for a number of different reasons. Perhaps they aren’t getting any traffic to the site, they aren’t writing anything that people want to read, or most commonly they aren’t making any money! So, how can you avoid falling into the same traps as so many new bloggers?

Below I’ll try to show you the three most important tips for creating a successful blog.

Tips For Creating A Successful Blog

1. Produce High Quality Content

First of all, you must have great content on your site! It doesn’t matter what your niche is, whether it’s; blogging tips, marketing tips, a technology review site or even a site about fishing. Whatever your site niche is, your articles and blog posts must be of a high quality, 100% unique and exceptional.

It’s also not enough to just have five or ten high quality posts. The whole of your site should be filled with great content. For example, let’s say that you have a blog with 100 posts. Let’s also say that 10% of your 100 articles are of a very poor quality. If your visitors read three of them, one after another, what will he or she think about your site? Well I’ll tell you! They will leave your site thinking that it is rubbish and won’t look at your 90% of good quality articles! Pity…

You need to try and make sure that every post that you publish is of a high quality. Yes, you may not get the same reaction to each post, but you need to work on producing each post to the highest quality as you can.

But great content doesn’t only consist of great articles. Your site must also look professional, be easy to navigate and enable people to interact easily. Your content and the appearance of your site must also reflect the type of the site that you are trying to create. You’re fine using photo’s of you on a night out and talking about your holiday if you run a personal blog, but using the same images and talking about the same experiences on a business advice blog won’t look very professional. Think about how you want your site to appear to your target audience, when planning out and creating a successful blog!

2. Drive Traffic To Your Blog

The second important factor to consider when creating a successful blog is traffic! I know, for some people traffic is not a problem, they have a lot of readers, followers, subscribers on their other sites. Starting new website for these established bloggers is very easy, they just inform their community of their new site and it’s done. But for most of us (including me) driving traffic, especially good traffic, is very important. And anyway, all these established bloggers started from the same point, they were all beginners to start with.

Having great content on your site (1st point) is very important, but without readers, it’s nothing more than having a beautiful car without any fuel! Of course, you could be forgiven for thinking that Google will automatically find your quality content for you, so you just need to sit back and wait for the traffic to roll in. Well if anyone tells you that, don’t believe them, they are lying to you! You must work on driving traffic to your site, even more than producing your quality content!

I won’t bother explaining to you in detail how you can drive traffic for your site, because there is plenty of quality posts on this site that helps explain it in greater detail. I’ll only mention that there are lots of ways to drive traffic to your blog/website.

If you are interested in this topic, I highly recommend you to read some of following excellent articles (in alphabetical order):

• 15 Great Off-Page SEO Techniques
• 30 Traffic Generation Tips
• 8 Helpful Tips, How To Promote Your Blog
• THE Backlinking Strategy That Works
• The Best Way To Drive Traffic To Your Blog

3. Create A Proper Business Plan For Your Site

The third important point to consider when creating a successful site is to create a business plan for your website/blog.

I know many website owners, who produce great content, get lots of traffic to their site and they still don’t earn any money from it! It’s very sad, but unfortunately true. The question is – Why?

In my opinion (and I think most of you will agree with me), they didn’t prepare a proper business model for their site. A proper business model must consist of at least these two things:

1. Specifying, how you aim to make money from your site.
2. Comparison of possible incomes revenues and potential expenses.

Point #1 is very important because it helps you to, not only, look at how you intend to monetize your site, but also, how you intend to promote it. Now, some ideas are better suited for beginners, whereas some will be better for more experienced online entrepreneurs. The point is you know how you are going to approach building your site and see it more as a business.

You can for example:

• Sell your own product online.
• Promote affiliate products.
• Display advertising on your site
• Create sponsored reviews of other products or websites.
• Create membership site.
• Become an online consultant.
• Etc.

There are a lots of other possibilities to monetize a site that you can look into. Some are easier to implement, whereas some require more attention from the website owner. For more ideas about monetizing a website/blog, Matt created a great article about it – ‘30 Ways Your Website Can Earn You Money!‘ In this post you can find a lot of other ideas about how to make money online.

Point #2 of the business model is also very important. It assesses whether you will make any real money or if you will be working for nothing, by looking at the potential income and expenses of a business. Of course, in the beginning almost everyone must invest some (or even a lot of) money and time before seeing any results. But in the end, it must be profitable for you to spend the time creating and building up a site.

For this reason, before putting any of your business ideas into effect, you must sit down and carefully calculate everything. This includes your costs (hosting fees, domain registration, utilities, work space, product creation, time, etc.) and possible earnings.

So, if you really want to make money online with your own website, you must first decide on your idea, plan out and evaluate how you can make money from it!

But the 3 crucial tips for creating a successful blog are:

1. Great quality content
2. Traffic
3. Proper business model

But what do you think? Would you add any points to this list? Are you one of the people who started a site, but gave up after a few months? If so why? Let us know by leaving your comments and questions below!
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Thank you to my Guest Post Author: Chris

Chris is an online entrepreneur, interim manager and beginner blogger at NoPassiveIncome.com. He prepared for you a list of Top 100 Websites For Bloggers.
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