Yesterday’s post on making money from a blog was all about coming up with ideas and knowing what to blog about in the first place.
Today, I’m covering the next step to making money with your blog: getting a leg up on your competition and planning to build high-quality content. Let’s jump in!
Step 2.1: Know Your Uniqueness
Whether you’re into knitting scarves or parasailing, there are likely already several other blogs out there covering the same topic as you. You need to know your special sauce—what makes you stand out from the others.
When I started this blog back in 2013, I was writing about visual communication, writing, and rhetoric. It took me a year to realize that that wasn’t enough to propel my website to the next level. I needed something more unique than that. After some soul searching, I figure it out: I could turn otherwise mundane and widely-written-about concepts like punctuation, plagiarism, MLA formatting, or image copyright laws into interesting infographics! Turns out, that unique take on communication hadn’t really been explored much yet.
Your expertise may not be in the subject matter itself (at least, not exclusively; you need to know something about your subject!—you just don’t need to be the world’s greatest whiz at it), but it might be in your approach. I may not be the world’s greatest rhetorician, for example, but I apparently have a unique ability to make the figures of speech into a poster. Your special take may just be the way you write or talk. It may be your personality, the design and layout of your site, or your unique focus on your niche content (see Step 1 on the niche stuff). It may be the visual content you add (like your own, unique photos), or your flare for capturing nuanced perspectives in culture. Whatever it is, find it. The sooner you do, the more likely you’ll be able to attract an audience—and make money!
Step 2.2: Determine What’s Popular
There isn’t a secret formula to discovering this, but Google has given us some tools. Use the Google Trends tools to start looking for words and topics that are trending (or declining!). Your website will do better if you can find ways to talk about your topic with words and ideas that are trending. For example, you might be interested in knowing that that word “infographic” was barely searched at all on Google until 2010. Before then, it wasn’t a popular topic at all. Now, though, people search that term all the time.
Find blogs that are similar to yours and see where they’re finding the most success by using sites like SEMrush.com. These sites track popular pages and traffic based on key words. You can see what terms and pages appear to be getting the most traffic. Basically, you’re doing your research and seeing what people care about, what they’re actually typing into Google, and what they’re reading.
Remember: while content is always king on the web, you’re always simultaneously writing to both your target audience and Google. If you want people to find your site, you have to know what people are typing into Google that will lead you there. And you need to use key terms and a few search engine optimization techniques to pull you higher in the searches.
All that said, don’t fret: if you’re not an SEO wizard, you can still write great content. Just be sure you’re giving people what they actually want, and not writing a bunch of fluff.
Step 2.3: Hone in on the Competition
Like any good businessperson, you’ll quickly realize that you have competition out there and you’ll need to study them in order to play in the same arena. In the blogosphere, you are competing for readers’ time and attention. Recognize what your competitors (meaning, other bloggers that are writing about similar stuff as you and reaching the same audience for similar purposes) are doing. What does their website look like? What’s their unique approach or expertise? How do they write? What cool features do users seem to be engaging with? Are they getting a lot of comments?
You don’t want to copy your competitors, but you do want to mimic what they’re doing well and you want to find areas where you can do something unique or different. In branding, we call this “differentiation.” As a blogger, you are establishing your own brand. You do this by studying the competition, recognizing their strengths and weaknesses, and then capitalizing on both by doing what works and differentiating where possible.
I recommend you complete this quick questionnaire for yourself:
- List the three most direct competitors to your blog.
- State what each competitor is doing well.
- State two or three ways in which your blog can differentiate from the competition.
Step 2.4: Determine if You Have Enough to Say
Lastly for today, determine if you have enough to say. Recognize that monetizing a blog isn’t easy and it requires that you write and post a lot. You likely won’t get a lot of traffic until you have 50 – 100 posts. That’s right! You have publish almost daily for three months to really get any traction. Or, if you only post three times per week, it may take almost a year to get regular and consistent, meaningful traffic.
That means you have to write and post on quite a few topics. Start by jotting down a list of thirty (30) article ideas. Can you do it? If you can’t come up with enough to say about the topic, it may not be a good area for you to seek monetization. You really need to have a niche topic that you can cover in real detail.
Now…recognize that content doesn’t need to be long and you break topics up into several articles. I’m writing a series right now, for example, on making money from a blog. I’ve turned that into eight article ideas. And, if I really wanted to delve deeper, I could probably write 30 – 40 articles on that topic alone, getting into more specific nuances about, say, Google Analytics, SEO and blogging, or even “How to Write Conversationally for Your Audience.”
Hopefully, once you get started making a list, you’ll find that there is plenty to write about. But start with that list. It can be overwhelming to start a blog, so having a list of topics in front of you can really help.