Let’s talk about blogging, shall we? The blog as a space about your thoughts and growth has changed drastically since 2014. If you want to know how to start a blog right now, please read our article: A Step-By-Step Guide to Create a Successful Blog for your Web or E-commerce
Back then, if your blog had your journey as the main topic could have been a good idea. Today, not so much. Today, in 2021, people want to hear about specific issues that help, inspire and teach them something.
Topics like personal finance, making money online, health & wellness, fitness, parenting & and lifestyle, beauty & fashion, traveling, and blogging about blogging are some of the most searched keywords to read blogs.
It doesn’t mean you have to write about some of these topics, but you must choose a specific subject. You have to select the main content subject, a niche to focus your writing. The aforementioned is because when you are all over the place with your titles, keywords, and content in general, the audience may get confused, and Google will give you a lousy relevance score. Remember, there is always a couple of thousand people on the internet interested in your niche, independent of what is around. You have to find them or help them f
Is it a good idea?
As evident as it may sound, it depends on your goals. In 2021, if you want to share your feelings and your journey, you have to be ready to face a rigid wall because people are not looking for that (as much as before) unless you have a particularly exciting or rare life story.
If your objectives are digital marketing promotion and monetization, blogging is a perfect match for you, but you have to know that it will take time and a long time to be profitable.
Promote your Business.
Blogging is the perfect platform for promoting your business by boosting your webs traffic, attracting clients, and establishing you as an expert in some technical field. That’s one of the reasons to focus on a niche, subject, or area of business specifically. When you talk about something long enough, people get the impression you know what you’re talking about, especially if you know what you’re talking about.
People are looking for meaning and knowledge; thus, excellent and engaging content will capture the audience’s attention and imagination.
How to start a blog in 2021?
Starting a blog is not a complex process, but it does take time to implement. Not including the time you’ll spend researching and writing; you also have to take care of several points to get your blog starting.
Select a Niche for your Blog.
One of the most important aspects of starting a blog nowadays in 2021 is to select a topic you’re interested in and are proficient in. You’ll be reading and writing a lot about that subject, which better motivates you.
You have to consider that people are looking for answers to specific questions and knowledge. They will probably be coming back for more if you give them that.
It also has to have commercial relevance, and it has to be susceptible to monetization. So no weird stuff. Sticking to your subject is particularly important at the beginning because the audience will want to have a clear image of you and what’s your blog main topic.
Host your Blog.
There are a lot of good blogging platforms out there. Some are for free, and some you have to pay. When selecting a blog hosting platform, the most important thing is to make sure your blog and content will be yours. Most paid blogging sites are like this; your blog can not be disabled or put down for arbitrary reasons. You got to be aware of the free blogging sites, where sometimes they offer good platforms, but they keep the ownership of the site and the content for themselves, making things very delicate for any blogger.
There are many good free options, like WordPress, my recommendation, and you also have Blogger, Wix, and Bluehost.
Create stories
To have a successful blog in 2021, you need to create great engaging content. And what is excellent and attractive content, you may ask? Some will tell you that it is all about the Google Quality Score System and relevance. Is not, not really.
The Quality Score system does define how much you will appear on the Google SERP page and in which position; that is entirely true. But what keeps the audience interested and coming back, it’s the content designed for them, not for a machine. Google’s crawlers look for specific words, phrases, and content hierarchy, but your content will have no soul if you only follow those rules; it will not be a story.
How?
To create a story, you have to make a personal connection with your audience and turn everything into a piece of the story. All the articles, all the events, and processes of your company. What’s your company about? How could it be turned into a character people can relate to. Unlike traditional marketing content, where everything is laughs and pretty people, a story, or at least a good one, has characters, a journey, a fundamental problem to be solved, mistakes and misadventures, and not only triumph.
When creating your content, you have to show expertise in your subject, experience, and growth. No one knows everything, which makes good characters in movies and tv series. People can be empathetic with someone who’s flawed and imperfect but always looks for improvement and betterness.
Educate the community.
Suppose you want to have a companies blog about your business area of expertise. In that case, you should aim to “tell” and share about it, educate the community, and share your mistakes, so others don’t fall over the same stone. Not only give but also receive from the readers. Remember that a blog is a two-way communication channel, as is everything in web 2.0. They will be grateful for your effort, don’t doubt it.
You should communicate this clearly, so your audience knows what to respect in your editorial line.
Promote your Blog
There are several ways to promote your personal or your company’s blog, but the best is undoubtedly the SEO and all its tools. SEO means your content is optimized for Google to be easily recognizable and categorized, your blog’s main topics, content, keywords, and pretty much everything you do in a blog.
If you want to be ranked high on the Google Search Engine Result Page, you have to match your content with what users are searching and which keywords to find the content they’re looking for.
Monetize Your Blog
Like everything in life, there are many alternatives to monetizing your blog. The most beneficial options are always those that less affect your credibility and blog design.
Ads on site: Google AdSense is a Google platform to monetize web or blogs by several methods. One of them is via advertising apace inside your blog pages. Ads on site are risky because you’ll lose relevancy, credibility, and aesthetics on your blog if you don’t show relevant ads. No one likes those pesky ads all over the place on the internet.
Affiliate Marketing: Another example of blog monetization is Affiliate Marketing. That means advertising a product in your blog content via a backlink to that product, usually to an e-commerce product page. Again, you have to take special care of the product’s relevance to your blog content. The best way to profit from Affiliate Marketing is using Native Advertising, so the ads are “embedded” in the content and not “added” to it.
Subscription: Charge a fee to access the content. The most classic method to monetize your blog is to charge a periodic payment to access your blog’s content. That may not be the best method to monetize your blog in 2021 because you have to be a trendy blog and have a lot of authority on a subject for people to be willing to pay for your content. If you are starting, you can forget about this method for now.
Training: Charge for training knowledge of some specific technical area. You can offer downloadable content, webinars, ebooks, or videos. The important is to let the users proceed n their own pace.
Passive Blogging Rewards
Once you have a well-established blogging platform, you get to harvest the rewards. These are the passive benefits it brings you.
Most of your articles will continue attracting visitors to earn you money well after publication, months after. Plus, you can maintain your old articles optimized, so you receive the most benefits from passive rewards from your old content. The same thing happens with Youtube, for example.
In this stage, you can begin improving your blog’s efficiency in a way you couldn’t before, like paid link building or search engine marketing. Also, you can improve your content by hiring writers or paying for specialized content from an expert on the matter.
Blogging Tips and Tricks
Keyword Research: You should always research relevant and competitive keywords, which means writing for your users, not yourself or the search engine. Look for the actual words your target audience is using, and explore its competitivity, so you know if they are in your reach or not.
Of course, the best keywords always have relevant, helpful, and paid content, so maybe for your little blog, those are just illusions. You have to look around those keywords, maybe look for long-tail keywords or less popular ones.
Linkbuilding: It is always good to get along with your neighbors. That is also true in online blogging. One of the most profitable methods to improve and monetize your blog is the link-building strategy, but not the paid ones. Agreeing with either blogs or specialized websites is an excellent opportunity to strengthen your web statistics without paying money. Generate networks of bloggers and webs, so you always have someone to make a link exchange when writing about something. You can even share your content on other blogs or write specialized content for them, all of this backlinking to your blog. Of course, this method takes a lot of time.
Guest Posts: Once you have established your place in the market and among the audience, you can begin to accept guest posts. Many writers, websites, and businesses are looking for space to publish their content. Some writers only publish third-party’s platforms and create content departments willing to pay for a backlink to their sites on a well-established blog. You should do it if you suddenly start to receive emails from people ready to publish in your blog.
Be sure to always take care of your blog’s integrity and your audience’s trust in you. Don’t publish off-topic pieces, and be very vigilant of the backlinks they’ll be sure we’ll be placing on the content. The best practice is to generate a good guest post policy and make it available for everyone.
SEO Plugins: Many SEO plugins help you manage the SEO necessities of your blog article’s pages. I recommend the Yoast SEO WordPress plugin. It helps you with all you need in SEO, especially if you are not proficient in that field. You can get more visitors from Google, increase your reader engagement and attract more visitors from social media platforms. Plus, it’s free. Of course, there are other options, free and paid ones. Do not slack on your SEO!
Important SEO blogging concepts:
On-page SEO: Everything you do on your page to be SEO optimized. For example, having a good web structure data or schema markup lets search engines know what is on the page.
Off-page SEO: Everything you do to promote your web and improve its score on the search engines.
Backlinks: All the links that link back to your page. The more quality backlinks you have for your web, the more relevant your content to search engines is. It’s not only a matter of quantity but also about quality. Like yours, other websites have their backlinks, which affects the backlinks you have from those pages.
Search Engine: A web browser application used to surface the web. When you search for something on the search engines, they show you a SERP using complex algorithms to categorize the information into a hierarchy of relevance for the particular user’s search query. An excellent example of this is Google.
Crawlers: These are “Machines” used by the search engines to explore the web for new websites or change them. These machines have a “language” they like to speak, so you have to talk in the same language to understand the hierarchy and content of your blog.
SERPs: Is the Search Engine Result Page. When a user inputs a query onto a search engine, the algorithms search the web for the most relevant content related to that user’s specific question to show the results categorized by relevance.
Search Query: It’s an input a user sends to search for content in a search engine. It is composed of the specific words or keywords a user inputs to look for content.
Keywords: These are specific singular or groups of words used in a search query to find information, content, answers to questions, etc. The phrasing you use is essential because the different websites and blogs are “betting” on them by focusing on a specific group of keyword-relevant for their business or activities.
If you want to know more about SEO, we recommend the Yoast Seo Academy; it’s free and very educative.
On the other hand, if you’re interested in more SEO concepts, you can consult our SEO Glossary, which has 300+ concepts!
Big Blogging No no’s
Making it about you: Blogging is not about the author; it is about the audience. It’s a good thing that you want to put your heart about there, but remember to give something relevant to the audience, not relevant to you, like your feelings, what you want or like. It doesn’t mean you can’t talk about those things, but it always has to be relevant for the audience. Make laugh, teach, share your research or experiences on the job, always think about giving value, and then you’ll receive.
Don’t over-optimize: When you’re targeting specific keywords is very easy to over-optimize your content by repeating the same word or it’s synonymous a lot of times. That could be tiresome and un-trustworthy. It would be best to avoid link-spamming in your content because Google considers it low-rating content.
Be careful with the keyword-rich anchor texts. If the text anchor is the same or very similar to the URL you’re linking to, this might be penalized by the search engine because it can rate it as spam linking.
Lousy writing: It sounds obvious but is not as evident as you might think. There are many black hat SEO practices associated with the blogging business. That is amazing the amount of trash content out there, without counting the duplicate ones.
If you start a blog as a business, you have to have good writing. Usually, people that read and write a lot have a great way with words. Be careful if you’re not writing in your native language. You can use apps like Grammarly to help you write in English. Because you’re writing in English, right? Why wouldn’t you? It is better to write in your native language than in a language you are not proficient in, even if the readers’ base is smaller.
If your writing is poor, maybe you can consider reading books in the desired language, hiring a good writer to help you with the content, or writing the articles altogether.
Scalater Magazine
We’re a new company, but we’re hungry. Not in the shark mentality way, but to create good things, to give to the community that’s making us grow. We want to give back, so we’re implementing our own Magazine. We’ll create our content, and we’ll accept guest posts.
Our main goal with this blogging platform is to give back and educate the community. Also, we are huger to express ourselves, not only through our work but also through our words. This blog will have the input of all our team members, and it will be a written testimony of our work and dedication to the community.
Of course, if anyone has blogging needs to be covered, you can contact us here: business@scalater.com.
Final Words
Having a blogging platform in 2021 is worth it, but only if you are willing to put in the time, constancy, and effort required.
It can be an effective tool to achieve almost anything you’re looking for in digital marketing, with its limitations.
