Professional blogging can be incredibly lucrative. The most prolific professional blogger, Tim Sykes, was earning $1 million per month in 2021, according to FounderJar. But getting to that level takes a monumental amount of time and effort. You’ll have to treat your blogging business as a full-on enterprise that you have to grow and invest in. You’ll be doing many of the same things business owners do, such as forge business relationships, enhance the customer experience, and compound upon your own expertise.
Making your fortune on blogging requires you to turn your humble blog into a veritable empire. Here’s how you can do that.
Keep Collecting High Value Contacts
Perhaps the most crucial part of growing your professional blogging empire is continuously compounding on your contacts list. To expand your empire, you need to establish pathways to everything from fresh and relevant topics to write about, to gaining access to tools and resources. Collecting reliable contacts is going to be your main method of doing this.
Joining linkups and blogger communities are some of the best ways to do this. Forging new relationships and reinforcing new ones are essential for continued growth. Try to prioritize smaller-scale linkups, as you’re much more likely to make higher quality connections in more intimate groups. To reach more readers and raise your stock among your existing ones, you should also double down on email marketing. With the right tools, some even being free, you can employ a relatively unobtrusive yet efficient method to reach out to your readers.
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Perfect Your Website Design
It’s been established since the 2010s that the average time people spend on websites before leaving due to frustration or lack of interest is 15 seconds. Knowing that, you need to ensure that your website design is as sleek, functional, and accessible as possible. A big part of this is making sure that your host is up to par with your target traffic. Nothing frustrates the modern web surfer more than slow load times. Website responsiveness is the foundation of good user experience.
Atop responsiveness sits comprehensive yet streamlined navigation options. People need to be able to get to where they need to go on your website without much fuss. Well-organized navigation bars and effective internal search are two of the best ways you can ensure this. And on that note, you should also make sure that the rest of your website features work smoothly and that the entire site is accessible to all users. Things such as mobile-friendliness, modern embedded video player features, color adjustments for colorblind people and text-to-speech for the visually impaired are all great examples of accessibility enhancers.
Enlist the Help of Other Bloggers
No empire has ever been built through the sole efforts of one man. As you grow, you’ll need to take more creative power onboard in order to support your size. This can be done either through a partnership or by hiring employees. With a partnership, you’ll be able to reach your partners’ audiences, and vice versa. This is best done with a mix of creators from the same niche and creators that are a little ways removed from your area of expertise. This way, you get to spread your reach over a wider range of potential audiences.
Alternatively, taking on employees lets you amp up the quality and frequency of your articles in a way that a mere partnership can’t provide. Taking more manpower under your wing is a logical next step to take as your business grows. You can direct more effort towards research and following up on leads, be able to work on multiple articles simultaneously, have your WIPs edited and proofread, and whatever other role you need filled.
Employees are also essential for running other blogs, which is something many of the most successful pro bloggers do. Just remember to observe the proper protocols when taking on employees, such as getting personal workers comp insurance. It may not occur to some, but even remote workers can sustain an injury or have their health deteriorate while on the job. They are eligible for workers’ compensation if these things happen while they are performing work duties..
Constantly Improve Your Content
In order to keep putting out content that your audience will appreciate and consistently find either useful or interesting, you need to dig deeper into your chosen niche. Getting in the know about even the most minute aspects about your area is pivotal to digesting the latest developments and converting that into valuable, readable articles.
Keep looking for new sources while constantly watching for new stuff from your existing ones. Watch what your competition does and do regular research on trends and keywords. Being intimately tied to your niche also lets you think outside the box better, thus allowing you to easily mix things up and keep delivering fresh and engaging content.
Variety is essential for ensuring that your audience doesn’t get burnt out by your blog posts. Hence you not only need to change up the content you deliver, but the format with which you deliver it as well. It’s going to be incredibly dull to read through a blog that exclusively puts out deep-dive analyses. Throw in some graphics, videos, and other media in there as well to keep readers engaged whatever kind of content they’re in the mood for. Plus it’s also a great look for your blog as it makes you appear more fleshed out and full-featured.
Be More in Touch with Your Audience
Social media integration is more important now than it ever was. It’s no longer enough to have share buttons for individual platforms at the bottom of your posts. The more effective thing to do is to use your social media presence to promote your work.
This invites a far greater magnitude of shares and generates a much bigger buzz. Plus, your readership will be able to more readily communicate with you through comments or replies. Interactive website design and calls to action that point readers in the right direction are other examples of good audience engagement practices.
There are going to be obstacles on your journey that are going to be specific to the area you blog about, which these guidelines may not be able to help you with. But as long as you’ve prioritized these key focus areas, you should be able to overcome those obstacles just fine.
