7 IMPORTANT THINGS YOU HAVE TO KNOW BEFORE STARTING A BLOG

There are about 200 million blogs online. There are as many takes on marketing them as there are websites online and there are about 2.5 billion websites online. They all have different approaches to blogging and how they make money doing it.

Today you’re going to learn the truth about blogging. In this brief post I am going to discuss and explain the following seven questions the most successful bloggers have asked themselves before they launched themselves into the blogosphere:

• How long does it take to start making money blogging
• How should I go about making money with my blog
• How much money can be made blogging
• Do I need to write a new blog every day
• Should bloggers use analytics (Apps/Websites)
• What will people buy off my blog website
• What should I blog about

Some say keeping content fresh is the key to more traffic; others say it’s all about good content. Well my experience has been that good informative evergreen niche content that is properly marketed wins every time.  Marketing is everything online. Some marketing bloggers know what they’re talking about and some don’t, some are just using their gift of gab. And you're probably going to do a helluva lot of reading to learn the difference between the two.

At the end of the day it’s your experience that brings traffic to your blog and nothing else.

Experience in writing, expressing yourself and your thoughts and ideas in print, media skills, understanding digital marketing and knowledge about what you blog about are all very important. Then, of course, there’s the business aspect if you intend to make money with your blog. You need to discover what people will buy from you on your blog, through your blog or by your blog.

And, you'll need to be patient at that stage in your career because it takes some time to figure that out.

You have to do sales research for the answer to that question and here’s how. Find other blogs in the same subject and category as your blog and see what if anything they are selling. Can you sell the same thing(s)? Or, learn who visits your blog through inquisitive questions using surveys, or comment boxes.

Look at your Twitter followers, Facebook likes, and so on. A lot of marketing companies miss the fact that you can tell who your websites personas are with social media too, not just surveys. Most people tend to be too busy to take surveys anyway.

Personas are descriptions of the household, the job and position your reader holds, the kind of business they're in, the company they work for, their income level, success level, and a estimation of what they’ll be looking to buy based on the track record of needs and desires of people of those personas.

You then provide those products to them. But not in just any way that comes to your mind. There are right and wrong ways to present a product to your audience. For example: banners don't do well below the fold of a webpage. That's been found to be true of nearly all websites with only a few exceptions. Jimisound.com is one of those exceptions.

But it took about three years to learn which ad dimensions work, why they work, and in which exact locations on a page to put them so they do work. Because when I started web developing on the Internet we were all still learning what works best, be it ad placement and everything else.

What do you want out of your blog is the question to ask yourself during the concept stage.

To profit from your blog some say focus on just getting subscribers while others say focus on who’s reading your blog. Here again, that will depend on what type of blog your blog is. If you’re a marketer writing marketing blogs the current trend is collecting email addresses so you can develop and keep an ongoing relationship with your readers, learn about them and what their needs are, and then offer products through email marketing to them.

As their trust develops and if you’re offering some things they want you’ll make some sales. The whole point of a niche blog on a subject that you already know well is the fact that you'll already know enough about your audience to sell them what they are looking for.

By keeping within that niche you'll always know what they're looking for. The rest will be all about traffic levels and your ability to add value to your relationship with them.

Let’s say you have a blog about skateboards; you might want to hook up with an affiliate or two who is a well-known skater "go to's" for accessories, and promote their product(s) for your income. But to do that you’ll need to know a lot about marketing and bringing traffic to your site. And you'll need to work at developing trust. Affiliate marketing is very traffic centric. You must have a steady flow of unique visitors.

For example: On one of my sites, as long as unique visitor traffic does not dip below 100 unique visits a day I can expect to see some Adsense income every day. But any number below 75 on any given day and there will be no Adsense income whatsoever on that day. It’s so consistent you could set your watch by it.

See how it works? That's how it works for everything! It’s a numbers game. I know that’s a cliché, but in every respect, it is indeed a numbers game. And the more you learn about manipulating numbers i.e., analytics, traffic, page reads, unique visitors, wherever there are numbers, the more apt you are to stay in the blogging business. Lets face it, whether it be blogging or anything else, a person won't keep doing it if there is no reward in it.

Wherever numbers are involved, Facebook “likes”, Twitter “likes” or retweets, and so on, it’s all about having big numbers in the right places congruent to your blog subject(s).

But even the big number thing has its saturation points. That meaning there will come a time when you have the numbers but you are not happy with the income. All is not lost when that happens. Most of the time that just means’ you’ve grown lax and complacent from living the good life having those big numbers. Now something in the market has changed and you have to go back to the drawing board and develop ways of increasing sales again because just having those big numbers isn't cutting it anymore. You'll either need to grow bigger, or make better use of the traffic you have.

This has become my approach. I’ve found that a site with only 2 visits a day can compete if those two visitors are contributing to the income of your site.

If you begin your blog business with a mindset to simply maximize sales with the number of visits you already have, you’re better off starting out that way. Things can only get better for you from there.

The reason its best is because you’re teaching yourself how to survive without numbers in a game of numbers.

Imagine having that skill, having your blog set up that way, and then come upon a massive increase in the number of visitors to your site every day. WOW!

You’ll have increased your income exponentially, automatically through preparation and past work efforts alone. You’d probably be able to quit working altogether, except maybe for a couple days a week to analyze and make minor adjustments here and there in your blog business.

NS or non-specific blogs might want to employ Adsense for income.

With Adsense Google determines which ads your readers see, and when someone clicks on one, you get paid. The best thing about Adsense is your visitors see only ads they’ve expressed an interest in at some other point in time during a previous visit online somewhere. What you get paid is a pittance, but do your marketing right, get traffic and that pittance can really swell up. My very first Adsense check was $125.00, and it proved to me that Adsense can be made to work.

There are sites out there using the only Adsense for income and generating over 20 thousand dollars a month, and I’ve heard about some making more. And by the way just so you know, there are blogs out there bringing in more than a million dollars a month. Blogs like that though are generally big budget blogs with whole teams of writers and marketers on payroll. But when you do the math you find that those sites have a huge number of unique visitors every day. When I say huge I’m talking huge.

You need between 750,000 and a million visits a month to make $20,000 a month with Adsense.

Although there are no guarantees, blogging has great monetary possibilities.

How many blogs are on the net, is it worth getting into? Questions like this are the first questions people who are thinking about blogging ask themselves? Well that all depends on what you write about. If you do your research and write about something of great interest to a large demographic of people you’ll probably do much better.

There are as many creative ideas as there are celestial bodies in the universe, so again there are no guarantees your blog will make money. But the more determined you are and the more creative you are, the better your chances of profiting from a blog will be.

Gene

How many blogs must I post before I can make money? There is money to be made blogging. It will all depend on how you’ve approached your blogging business startup. With Adsense, affiliate marketing and email marketing you can start seeing money with your first blog post in about a month, how much will depend on the blog, its subject, titles, social media experience, affiliate merchants product values, advertising, and SEO?

Like any business, your initial investment of time and money will usually be more than the money the blog brings back for a couple of years. And it will probably be that way for most new bloggers, sometimes less, sometimes longer. But let nobody fool you, it will take time, so give yourself time to learn about your new trade before you try to draw any conclusions. I will say this, if you start a blog in a very competitive subject you will probably have one to two years go by before you can rank for those keywords. You can forget a million hits a month until then.

So there you have it. No hype, no false promises, just the bare truth about blogging. It's work and a lot of it. Just learning how to research and what to use and not use has a learning curve to it. There's a science to titling, sentencing, action words to use etc, etc., you'll learn. With a true, honest love for blogging, you'll learn, you'll succeed and you'll be fine.



This blog is just one in my network of Internet business blogs. Visit Jimisound.com to learn more.