Blogging is in vogue: Be it for self-publishing or corporate PR, blogging opens the conduit for multiple engagement opportunities in terms of customer engagement, lead generation, content marketing, customer interaction, information dispensing, and even ecommerce.
If it’s professional blogging, free blogs are out of the question. What works then? How do you manage to plan on building a blog that gets you what you want? What works and what will not? Is it possible to have a mini-guide that tells you exactly what you need to do to grow your blog from a fledgling to an authority resource?
Let’s explore how smart blogging looks like. Rip this plan off and use it for your success:
Planning to Pivot Later
Everyone talks about planning. I recommend planning ahead too but with a twist: plan to pivot.
While you make standard plans for starting out and charting a course for your blog’s growth, have some space within your plan to spin the other way or to change direction.
Just like large businesses seek new markets to enter and as startups morph when their original ideas aren’t sustainable, blogging plans need to have a plan to change plans later.
To give a technical example, let’s take hosting. Most bloggers and little sites with blogs start with shared hosting. You’d ideally do your research on hosting by sifting through reviews or comparing hosts. – this is one of the most important investments you make for your blog.
Believe me, “A stitch in time saves nine” doesn’t apply better to anything else in blogging. As time passes, your blog grows in terms of traffic and engagement.
At some point in future, shared hosting won’t make sense anymore and you might want to move to a VPS hosting solution or even a dedicated server.
Likewise, you’d start with blogging on a niche or micro-niche but you might want to change the topic of blogging. You might even want to re-launch your blog with a new strategy.
If Gary Vaynerchuck, author of Thank You Economy, CEO of VaynerMedia, and one of the most famous bloggers of all time, can rethink his approach to blogging, so can you.
Accommodating Tools of the Trade
Blogging comes with its own set of tools for you to use.
Blogging itself requires a project management approach and you might want to use web-based project management tools. You’ll need a way to reach out to bloggers if you’re going the guest blogging way, and thankfully you have marketplaces such as MyGuestBlog and BloggerLinkup for finding like-minded bloggers who play host and/or guest.
Guest blogging goes a long way towards your traffic generation efforts. You can manage your outreach efforts with a CRM and contact tool such as BuzzStream.
If you plan to charge for advertising on your blog (sooner or later), you’ll need invoicing tools.
SEO/SEM automatically becomes an ongoing endeavor and you have a host of free tools (at least to try) to use to manage your search optimization efforts.
Inevitably, you’ll want to plug into the power of social media which carries its own truckload of tools – from scheduling to management, from monitoring trends and sentiment to analytics.
Accounting for Growth
Blogging might start off as an individual attempt but can eventually grow into a daily marathon effort if you insist on being a one-person show.
Growth calls for scale and that’s when you’ll look to build a team of contractors (ideally) and collaborate with them to continue blogging. You might hire ghostwriters or have experts contribute. How do you plan to account for this growth? Will you outsource to freelancers or will you hire help that you can directly oversee?
By this time, your blog also gets to a stage where you need better management for content creation, graphics, comment management, social media management, technical assistance/support, and team management. How do you plan to tackle all that?
Monetizing & Strategic Expansion
A blog can make only so much money through regular means of monetization. If you’ve come this far into your blogging sojourn, it’s time to expand strategically. Blogs make money when you monetize and we all know that, so we aren’t getting there.
Monetization through Google AdWords, Amazon, Bidvertiser, and other such programs, affiliate, partner, and referral programs.
There are several other ways to make money directly or indirectly off your blog:
- Blogs – essentially a collection of your ideas (or content you own rights to) – can roll into a book to launch your new career as an author.
- Your blogging efforts (along with your guest blogging efforts) can pile up leading you take up lucrative speaking gigs, conduct workshops, get invited to conferences, etc.
- Blogs make for a great way to promote your digital products: create new products, curate and sell others’ products, or even go for digital rendition of your knowledge and expertise by doing webinars.
Unrelenting Creativity, Continuity & Consistency
At a certain stage in your blog’s growth, there’ll be a time when you risk stagnating. You’ll peak and there’s usually a fall just beyond unless you do something about it.
Here’s where creativity, continuity, consistency, and parallel growth comes in its own. While you will feed great content continuously for your blog, you can plan to launch other blogs and build an empire of blogs to achieve scale. You can also plan to focus on a single blog and scale on available resources such as number of writers.
None of this would mean that you’d have to depart into topics you don’t want to get into or niches that you have no authority on. Brent Weaver, for instance, is an Adobe Business Catalyst Guru who started CreationChambers.com.
To provide value to the community, he started BCGurus.com, where he provides free training for new, hopeful Business Catalyst partners.
BCGurus grew tremendously in prominence and popularity, prompting Brent to launch UGurus.com, an exclusive home for web designers who’ve launched (or hope to launch) their own design businesses.
He holds on to his niche. He expounds on what he knows. He leverages his knowledge but builds parallel knowledge resources within the same domain for different target markets.
What are you planning to do?
14 comments
Excellent points!
In my perspective, accepting guest posts on a blog is a good strategy as it can help the blog’s webmaster to concentrate on Affiliate marketing or other monetization strategies. Thanks for share the BloggerLinkup service with us, I had applied to MyBlogguest few times and my application got rejected .I hope BloggerLinkup accepts me . Thanks for sharing the information.
-Pramod
Pramod, Cathy at Blogger Linkup emails you a great list of sites accepting and offering guest posts! Twice a week at that – turns out you don’t even have to visit the site regularly 🙂
Blogging professionally is definitely a lot harder than just blogging for fun, or for your own pleasure. It has to have the right moves to be established as that- professional blog.
The first tip is very reasonable. Some plan with only one path in mind. If that doesn’t work out, they end up hopeless. But when one plans to pivot later, you give options where you can always turn to whenever the first plan doesn’t work out.
The rest of the tips are all great!
Found this post shared on Kingged.com, the IM news and content aggregator site, and I left this comment.
http://www.kingged.com/how-to-plan-smart-for-professional-blogging-success/
Blogging professionally is a lot more harder than just blogging for fun. It is a bit harder to do it professionally but one can earn as a result of it.
When you will think about your readers more deeply and deliver every blog according the niche of your readers then you can get number of things to become best blogger.
In my perspective, accepting guest posts on a blog is a good strategy as it can help the blog’s webmaster to concentrate on Affiliate marketing or other monetization strategies. Thanks for share the service with us, Thanks for sharing the information. –
Hi,
If a blogger has a perfect strategy, and if knows how to properly implement it, then the success is sure.
A newbie can be easily become a pro if he act smartly with the own made strategy.
If you wanted to be a good blogger you mast be know what you visitor wants.
Blogging professionally is a lot more harder than just blogging for fun. It is a bit harder to do it professionally but one can earn as a result of it.
Hmm, this sure is some work but nothing good comes cheap so rolling up my sleeves for some corporate blogging. Thanks for the tips Tracy.
The first tip is very reasonable. Some plan with only one path in mind. And guest posting is very effectable for blogs
I am personally blogging to collect leads and aproach new customers. I trully believe that the main focus should be on marketing the content and converting the leads into loyal customers!
A blogger having desire to learn more is successful in the long run AND also keep your passion is the important thing for a professional blogger.
Blogging professionally is definitely a lot harder than just blogging for fun, or for your own pleasure. It has to have the right moves to be established as that- professional.
Some plan with only one path in mind. If that doesn’t work out, they end up hopeless. But when one plans to pivot later, you give options where you can always turn to whenever the first plan doesn’t work out.
The rest of the tips are all great!