Strategic Blogging Is the Only Way to Succeed in Blogging

No Blogging Strategy - Don't Know where to go

Most people who are starting their blogs are starting with the same goal altogether, to make money from it. Who wouldn’t want it anyway? Making money while writing something about your passion, making money while exerting part-time effort and many more. Unfortunately only a small fraction of people do make a significant income from their blogs and bragging aside, I am one of those.

Anyways I initially started my first blog way back 2007 and like everyone else the plan was to create a blog and then signup for Google Adsense and plaster the site with the ads. It didn’t take too long for me to realize that ‘hey this isn’t gonna work, I’m not going to get paid for my efforts. That’s when strategic blogging came into my mind.

What is Strategic Blogging?

Strategic blogging is just simply blogging with a plan and goal in mind. Because of the nature of blogging, most of us just go with it and try to enjoy it as much as we can. There’s nothing wrong in it except for the fact that you need to have strategies and these must be put into action. Let me explain further.

When I created MelvinBlog.com, I initially said to myself that I’m not going to monetize it for one year, I’m just going to build my readership, increase user base, have a very engaging community throughout my blog. Of course it can be overwhelming for everyone since you have to pay all the bills while realizing you’re not going to make anything.

What happened was the blog grew kinda well and I started reaping the rewards in 5 months. I could’ve waited more but then I already saw the potential of monetization so I gave it a go.

Why not Monetize at Start?

People always have mixed opinions on whether to monetize the blog from the start or not. My take is always to put some ads but expect nothing because nothing will really happen. The problem with trying too hard to make money with a blog at first is that it shifts the focus from growing the blog to monetizing which is completely wrong. What eventually happens is that the blog never makes money because it doesn’t have a consistent stream of traffic (or worse, no traffic at all) and therefore all efforts are put to waste.

The one thing that I always focus on is the results. I don’t exert effort on things that don’t give a good result. By working on growing the blog, I know there are good and reasonable results. So that is always what I do.

Steps to Strategic Blogging

Strategic Blogging is not rocket science so in this post I am going to list down the exact steps I use to do blogging my way. Do take note that these are all in birds-eye view for the sake of brevity.

• Create a blog and build an initial brand
• Set up all technologies (which is the hosting, plugins, etc.)
• Put out good content and not expect anything
• Optimize the blog for search
• Market those content by engaging into relationships with other bloggers.
• Network more with others by doing forum marketing, guest posting.
• Leverage the current readers by putting out more pillar content
• Leverage the current marketing techniques mentioned above by duplicating them
• Use Social media wisely (not trying too hard)
• Play with stats and tweak more based on the numbers.
• Start monetization
• Rinse and repeat.

As you can see, it took 10 steps before I got to the monetization part. The important thing to keep in mind is that it is a cycle and there’s no shortcut, meaning you can’t skip. Its also essential to understand that we get the best return for our effort by focusing on things that really give good returns. Putting ton of hard work on trying to monetize a blog with no traffic will not gonna do anything, while growing a blog which has a potential to grow can really make a good progress.

As I end this article, I hope you get my point here. Success in blogging really varies depending on the person. Some are contented with just getting read, some with good search rankings and some for making good money from it. But with strategic blogging, you start doing it right and as they always say “build and they will come”.

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