Blogging: The Super Simple Guide On How To Make Money Blogging in 2016 - Stop Working and Start Blogging (2016)

Chapter 1. UNDERSTANDING WHAT A BLOG IS

To start with, you should well understand what a blog is before you decide to venture into the business. By doing this, you will have the full information about what you are going to venture into.

First, think carefully about what you want to say and what information you want to communicate via your blog. Make sure you have enough content to share over the long term, and will be able to regularly update your blog with fresh, engaging, and relevant content.

Next, consider who your target audience will be. Then, figure out the best way to convey your information to your audience, and determine if you’ll primarily use text, photos, video, audio, computer graphics, and/or other multi- media content.

Think about how much technological knowledge you have, and how much time and money you want to invest in developing and producing your content.

Once you’ve considered all of these important elements, you’ll be in a much better position to begin planning and creating what will hopefully become a successful blog. Plus, you’ll be able to determine which service you’ll use to host your blog, and be able to discover effective ways to promote it.

This book will help you understand the significance of the blogging phenomenon, and more importantly, show you how people from around the world are using blogging to circumvent commonly accepted publishing procedures, and keep the profits generated from their own work, while also maintaining 100 percent creative control over their content.

Once you decide to create a blog, the next step is to come up with an amazing topic to write about—one that will allow you to keep creating new, interesting, engaging, and innovative content (blog entries) on an ongoing basis.

Once you’ve chosen your topic, it’s important to develop an overall goal for your blog. You must truly understand the blog’s purpose and what you want to get out of it. At the same time, you need to clearly define your blog’s target audience, then develop content that caters specifically to that audience. All this needs to be part of your blog planning process, but more on that later.

As with any business, success is impossible without a solid foundation.

Take your time with each and every step. Do your research, and think about the long-term ramifications of everything you do. At the same time, keep considering your overall blogging objectives, and make sure your actions will help you achieve them.

While there’s no limit to how much money you can earn running a successful and popular blog, it’s important to have realistic expectations. Truly successful bloggers often use their blog as a way to better communicate with customers and clients, or as a sales and marketing tool for their businesses.

If you’re creating a blog as a business venture with hopes it will generate profits, this requires a lot of planning and promotion, because you’ll need to build and maintain an extremely large and dedicated following for the blog before it will generate any serious revenue.

In fact, self-publishing and self-promoting any type of work can be a bit of a challenge. While it won’t cost you a fortune to create and publish a successful blog that generates revenue, it will require that you put in serious work—not just creating, publishing, managing, and promoting the blog, but also over- seeing the business side of the online venture as well.

Before you start calculating all the riches you’ll be earning as a blogger, let’s spend a few minutes exploring what a blog, vlog, podcast, and microblog actually are. After all, you need to determine if this is what you want to do, what approach you want to take, and whether you have the wherewithal to do it right.

Let’s first start by knowing what a blog means

WHAT IS A BLOG?

The term “blog” comes from combining the words “web” and “log,” which was used for a short time to describe websites that published a running archive of dated entries, sort of like a digital diary that was displayed in chronological order. The techno-geeks that created the first “web logs” coined the term “weblog,” which ultimately evolved into the term “blog.”

The word “blog,” as a noun, can describe a regularly updated, primarily text- based website with individual, dated posts that are displayed chronologically.

This is a traditional blog. Of course, today’s traditional blogs can also incorporate photos, videos, audio, and graphics, but they’re primarily text-based, and use a standard format for each entry.

The word can also be used as a verb, as in “to blog,” meaning to actively submit posts to a website, which is also referred to as “blogging.” The people who run blogs are known as “bloggers,” and the whole collection of all the internet’s blogs is known as the “blogosphere.”

The anatomy of a traditional, text-based blog is nothing more than a basic website with a bunch of dated entries. All of the blogging services that host blogs allow bloggers to customize the look of their blog, by choosing text colors, fonts, and an overall layout or design.

Many use professionally created templates that can be fully customized but that require no programming to use.

Beyond traditional blogs, there are also vlogs, podcasts, and microblogs. A vlog is a collection of videos, recorded and edited by the vlogger.

Instead of using text, the vlogger stars in their own videos, and often simply looks into the camera and talks to their audience. You’ll find many popular vloggers on YouTube. Some have become popular internet personalities with huge followings.

Thanks to Twitter, and services like Facebook and Google+, millions of people have gotten hooked on microblogging. Instead of writing lots of text for a traditional blog, or recording videos for a vlog, they simply update their microblog feed with ongoing entries which are no longer than 140 characters in length (about one sentence long).

Meanwhile, for people who don’t like to write, services like Instagram allow people to upload images and include an optional text-based caption, keywords, and location to a photo.

For obvious reasons, microblogging is the easiest to do and requires the least amount of time and effort. Yet there are microbloggers with millions of followers who use their Twitter feed, for example, to promote their company, products, services, or themselves very successfully.

Many individuals as well as companies often use a combination of online activities to achieve their goals. For example, they’d use a blog to promote a company, product, or service’s website, and then use a Twitter feed and/or a Facebook page to promote the blog and/or the website.

YouTube videos can also be used to cross-promote a website, blog, Facebook page, and/or Twitter feed. Thus, the same core content and message is repackaged in several ways, across multiple platforms, to reach a broader audience using different forms of media.

There are no limits as to what topic can be covered within a blog. You can convey thoughts, ideas, facts, or opinions. You can also offer how-to information, share your expertise, spread gossip, or promote a person, company, product, or service. Some blogs are created just for fun—to make people laugh or to share information with friends and immediate family.

These blogs cover topics such as how to build websites, what technologies to try, and what up-and-coming trends to watch. These bloggers alert their audience to exciting news by keeping a constant finger on the pulse of a particular industry, and provide a valuable service.