Work From Home Blog Tips To Grow A Successful Blogging Career
Running any kind of work from home blog can ideally be an expression of your personality and opinion, whatever the subject. Your readership rarely just come to see what you have to post. They come for you. For your specific thoughts, point of view, and ideas.
The Secret to a Successful Work From Home Blog
The trick to effectively writing a blog for income is understanding how to maintain credibility with your readership while at the same time productively navigating the behind-the-scenes circumstances of operating a profitable business and developing a brand. And even though that may appear to be very difficult or even unachievable, it’s seriously absolutely not.
What you just have to do is to sincerely be yourself. Don’t attempt to imitate other bloggers too much. Don’t get so concerned about looking to create your visitor stats that you fail to be awesome and genuine. And don’t get so captivated with getting paid to create a sponsored post that you find yourself endorsing things you don’t even like.
So what do you like more than just about anything?
What…
- exactly are you most interested in?
- makes you want to leap up out of bed each day, or has you enthusiastic to a point that you simply can’t stop speaking about it?
- exactly could it be you happen to be truly great at?
- do people ask you about?
- topics are you normally fascinated by?
- subject matters do you really like to read about?
Already Blogging But Losing Momentum?
Even if you have a blog and you have been talking about something else entirely, something apart from what you are truly interested in, you need to make a few changes. Under no circumstances be afraid to steer your blog in an exciting new direction, if that’s where your heart is telling you to go. Above all else, your readers hunger for authenticity. If you’re holding back, they are going to notice it. Provide them with everything you’ve got and make it awesome.
For anyone who is setting up a brand new work from home blog, think long and hard as to what you want to post about. So what do you already know about? What do you care about? Exactly what are you most enthusiastic about? Don’t talk about recipes if you don’t like to cook. Don’t blog about organisation tips if your home is in chaos. Take notice of the blogs you’re keen on, but do not make an attempt to replicate them. Concentrate on your own talents and experience and make the blog your own.
And before you begin, think about these questions again…
What…
- is it that you’re really good at?
- makes you want to leap out of bed each morning?
- issues are you normally interested in?
- exactly you most enthusiastic about?
- subject matter do you really love to find out about?
- do you like more than just about anything?
- do other people ask you about?
- gets you inspired to a point that you simply cannot stop speaking about it?
Which Blogging Platform?
Self-hosted WordPress is what I prefer for my blogging and site-building platform. It is very simple to use and now has loads of features. Lots of people happily use Blogger, Google’s blogging platform, and I’ve heard it’s really to easy to use. But I know that there have been a number of people who started off with Blogger, but then were forced to make the switch to WordPress down the road. So do yourself a favour and use WordPress right from the start and you will avoid a whole lot of complications in the future.
Which Web Hosting to Use?
When deciding upon a website hosting company you will want to ensure that you invest in one that is reliable, affordable, and that has exceptional customer care. I’m now happily on my own Interserver VPS. They have a variety of hosting plans, a great reputation and excellent support for WordPress hosting.
Blog Layout and Design
When you finally start up a blog it might be tempting to engage a graphic designer to create a professional design and style. However this can be very costly and is largely unnecessary at the start. If I had to do it all over again, I would still probably use Hostgator which can automatically install WordPress on your domain and a WordPress template from myThemes. The other thing you need to make sure that your blog looks professional and stands out, definitely get yourself a custom logo designed. You can get a really decent logo done for as little as five bucks on Fiverr. Or if you’re happy with an attractive text only logo you could go to cooltext.com where you can create a simple logo, apply some nice effects and download it as a transparent png graphic logo.
How to Get Traffic to Your New Work From Home Blog
You can get traffic to your blog by using social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn, Instagram, etc. Hootsuite can be used to help manage your social media platforms, it’s easy to use and you can schedule updates and manage all of your accounts in one place (apart from Pinterest at present).
The other primary way of obtaining traffic is by employing both on-page and off-page search engine optimization (SEO) techniques that will help achieve organic search rankings in Google and Bing. Virtually all my traffic originates from Google, and this happens because certain keywords and key phrases on my blog have ranked well in search engines like google. Internet search engine traffic is free and you will certainly wish to take full advantage of it.
Build an Email List From Your Blog
You should definitely make sure that you’re building an email list from your visitors from the day your blog goes live. With an email list you can actively stay in touch with your visitors and audience and drive regular traffic back to your blog almost on demand. An email list can be your businesses most important online asset – it is something you own and that can always be used to reach your blog followers. Getresponse and Aweber are the two major email list service providers, although there are others of course.
How To Build, Run and Make Money Blogging
I’ve read loads of blogging and site-building training systems over the years and there are plenty of different methods to earn income from your work from home blog, such as Google Adsense, other ad networks, direct ad sales, affiliate marketing, and even selling your own information products.
But the very best beginner to advanced blogging training which has most significantly helped me personally has been Glenn Shepherd’s Advanced Blogging Dynamix, which is available for free as part of your iPro membership (UPDATE: Now relaunched as the Internet Profits Certified Partner Program.)
If you’re not yet a Certified Partner of Dean Holland’s company Internet Profits Ltd. and want to find out more about it…
Check out this free webinar video… which tells you everything you need to know.