When beginning a new blog with the intentions of monetizing and making money, it is a little different from starting a blog to just write for fun. If you read our previous article on how to start a blog, you have now gone through and gotten the basics out of the way. But now comes the next important steps. We have put together a list of five blogging essentials that are needed to start a blog. Grab a pen and paper and take some notes on how to start a blog!
Business goals
To begin, one of the most important blogging essentials is setting business goals. Start by setting business goals for your newly founded business. Not all ideas will work with an online business so determining what you goals will be is a great place to start. For example, if your goal is to start making money by using Amazon Affiliate links or Shareasale to start with ads on your site. This a good place to start so you can include these links and advertisements in your blog posts from the start.
Posts are easy to read
Secondly, another important blogging essential is an SEO plugin. We highly recommend Yoast SEO or Rank Math. Both will give you the same outcome of optimizing your website, it is just your preference on how it helps you. Yoast provides only one keyword with the free plugin whereas Rank Math has more. Rank Math SEO uses numbers to help show you your score, when Yoast uses the colors red, yellow and green.
Many times when there is a big blob of writing on a screen, readers tend to not read most of it. By using H2 headings, it helps organize your writing and tell the reader what they will be reading under each heading. Yoast helps with giving your article a Readability score and describes if your article is hard to read or not and how to fix it if so. Trust us, you want to make your article as easy to read as possible.
Stay on topic
This can be really hard if you are an enthusiastic writer. Sometimes we squirrel and go off topic when writing. It’s important to stay on topic and get to the main point without having an extremely long story. It is great to have a personal touch on your articles but remember, many readers don’t want to go through 900 words and not even get to the point of the entire article yet.
Blog regularly
In the beginning, blogging regularly is really important. There are different types of bloggers out there. Ones who blog every day, every other day, once a week, twice a month and once a month. If you are looking to gain traffic and readers immediately, you will need to add content regularly. Twice a week is a realistic goal to set, especially when starting off. Also be mindful with how much content you want to put out so burnout does not occur. Guest blogging is always an option, but until your blog is established, hold on off having other people write for your site.
Use social media to promote
Another blogging essential is promoting your content on social media. Social media, especially Pinterest will be your biggest traffic drivers until your organic search has caught up to your blog. It can take Google’s bots anywhere up to 3 months to crawl a brand new site. So many sure you are pinning to Pinterest to its best use and get yourself set up with a Tailwind account.
Final thoughts
In the end, starting a blog is a lot of work, but chunking it off is a great way to ease into a new career. These blogging essentials are an important part of being able to monetize your blog to start making money for your talent.
