When you know you want to create a successful career for yourself, it’s important to focus on two main things. You need to both have a passion for the path you choose and know that you’re good at it. While you can always learn and grow, and you don’t have to be the leading expert in your field to be successful, you should have a natural affinity or enjoyment for what you want to do. Even if you feel like there’s a set industry or job role that society says is highly regarded or looks upon as successful, if you won’t enjoy it, it’s not the one for you. This is why many people prefer to turn to entrepreneurship.
Being an entrepreneur isn’t always about launching a huge company and being business-focused. Creatives, athletes, spiritual people, and everyone in between can be entrepreneurial. It’s all about deciding that you want to carve your own way in the world and be your own boss. You can be freelance and enjoy a flexible, slower pace of life, or you can work around the clock. That’s the beauty of doing your own thing–you get to do it in your own way.
This is often where the world of blogging comes in. Many people want to create something for themselves and do it entirely on their own terms. With a blog, you get to create content around something you’re passionate about, work to your own schedule, and turn it into a blossoming career or business. In this blog post, we’re going to show you how.
1. Choose Your Niche
The first thing you need to do is decide what kind of blog you want to have. There’s no right or wrong way to do this. Even if people say that blogging is dying, it’s still as popular as ever, with blogs continuing to grow year-on-year. While some niches will be more popular than others, you can make a living in a wide range of niches. So, you need to choose a topic you’re passionate about and want to build a career around.
2. Get a Domain and Hosting
The next thing for you to do is purchase your domain and hosting package. This starts by deciding on the name of your blog. It’s a good idea to do your research and be sure that the name doesn’t already exist. You’ll also need to find a domain name that is free. Ideally, it will also link to your niche. Then, you can look at getting your site up and running.
3. Create a Content Plan
When it comes to writing your blog posts, it can help to have a content plan. If you’re starting at a blank page and wondering what to write, it can be tough to come up with ideas. But as you’re content planning, you can do some research into different topics and blog post ideas. You can also look at what people are searching for and the kind of information that’s popular in your niche.
4. Prioritize SEO
The next thing you need to do is make sure that you’re prioritizing SEO in your content and marketing. If you’re not familiar with SEO principles, you have two options here. The first is to get the best SEO services to help you make sure that your content is optimized. This can be a great idea if you have no idea where to start and you want to get it right. Or, you can do it yourself and aim to learn the best approach and apply it to your content. Either way, SEO is essential for getting your content found online.
5. Design a Cool Brand
It’s also important to make sure that you create a brand around your blog. This will include your logo and things like your brand colors and fonts. Building a brand can seem like a lot of work, but it can be super fun too. You can then make sure that your chosen blog design or template works with your brand.
6. Secure Your Social Profiles
Another thing you need to make sure to do is grab your social media handles. You don’t need to be on every single platform, but you will want to choose some of your favourites. It can even be a good idea to get started on one platform first and build up your audience, then move on to the next. But you might want to secure your handles first, just to make sure you have them.
7. Monetize Your Blog
If you’re going to make a career out of your blog, it needs to generate an income. So this is where the idea of monetizing it comes in. Here, you can look to earn money through showing ads on your site, from affiliate links, or even by selling your own products or sharing sponsored content. Either way, you might want to start incorporating this early so that you have everything in place to generate revenue as your traffic grows.
8. Enjoy the Marketing Process
Marketing your blog is going to be a huge part of the work you do. There are lots of different ways to promote a blog, but you need to choose the ones that work best for you. Most of the time, these will be the methods that you actually enjoy doing the most. That way, you’ll end up doing them! Again, you don’t have to do everything. But if you can choose to do a handful of things consistently, you should find that it starts getting results.
9. Focus on Growth
Ultimately, you want to make sure that you’re focusing on growth. In order to make money out of your blog, it needs to have an audience. This means you need to get people clicking on your site and reading your stuff. Your content needs to be relevant, and you need to market consistently. But alongside that, you may want to make sure that you’re setting growth goals for the site and expanding as time goes by. That way, you’ll be able to generate enough income from your blog in order to turn it into a profitable business and work on it as your full-time career.
