Updated on July 9th, 2022
Define Blogger : A blogger is someone who either writes or curates the writing of others into an online written journal of information (ie. a blog). There are currently estimated to be more than 500 million blogs in existence with more being added every day. So, put simply, a blog comprises a series of written posts in a niche topic, sorted into chronological order. Each of these posts may range from a few hundred words to a few thousand words.
Often comprised within the posts are images, drawings, videos and links to other sites. A comments section is commonly included for discussions on the particular topic-at-hand. These comments are usually moderated by the blogger and questions will be responded to accordingly. The blog is often sorted into categories by topic or date to make your blog more user-friendly.
As a blogger, you may be focussed on showcasing your creative skills in photography or have a community resource helping people find local shopping discounts.
Running a blog as a business promoting products might also be your goal. There are so many types of blogs to consider.
How You Can Make a Living Blogging
Many people might wonder how anyone can make money writing a blog. I used to be curious about this myself.
The reality is that blogging is actually one of the best business opportunities available!
Why So?
Well the advantage of a blog is that it grows over time. This is particularly true if you’re writing evergreen or compounding blog posts. These are posts which remain relevant during the passing of time. They have a tendency to start slowly but over time they can attract a huge number of page views.
If you’re serving your readers well with useful content, they’ll keep coming back and linger on your site. After a while, Google will recognise this and gradually push your posts higher up the search rankings.
By this time, you will be starting to get plenty of organic free traffic to your site from Google and Bing.
Define Blogger: Ways to Generate Income with your Blog
You can use this traffic to generate income for yourself. The three main ways are Google Adsense, Affiliate Marketing and product promotion.
- Once your traffic starts to take off, you can apply to Google Adsense. If you’re approved, Google will allow you to place ads on your site and you’ll be paid depending on how many users click on the ads. This becomes a numbers game. There may be only a small percentage of people clicking the ads, but if you’re getting big traffic, this can still equal big income! As your traffic starts to grow, you can earn greater revenue through advertising networks such as Adthrive, Ezoic or Mediavine.
- Affiliate marketing is a sales method whereby you can recommend products to your audience. If you’ve signed up as an affiliate with the product provider, you can get a small commission when someone clicks the special affiliate link on your blog. Affiliate marketing is used widely on the web including some of the biggest companies. The best way to succeed at affiliate marketing is often to describe how to do something. ie. give your audience the method, Then describe an easier or quicker method of doing the same process using the affiliate product. One of the most popular affiliate programs is Amazon Associates.
- You can earn additional revenue from your other businesses if you promote their products or services through your blog. Obviously, the other product or business needs to be relevant to your blog’s audience.
Define Blogger: How to Succeed at Blogging
Many people get over-obsessed with SEO, but forget the basics.
The number one thing with blogging is that you need to serve your readers! You need to give them as much value as you possibly can. This is the number one way to define blogger success.
Over-deliver if possible! Include useful images and videos in your posts to make them more readable and useful.
It also really helps with your user engagement if you post regularly. It will be appreciated by your readers and keep them engaged. Consistency is one of the key factors.
Listen to your reader’s comments and write posts to answer their questions. Don’t be afraid to delete comments if they’re not appropriate or relevant.
It’s likely that as you start to get more traffic, you’ll also get spam comments. These take time to delete. Your time is better spent developing your site than deleting spam. Accordingly, use a plugin such as Cleantalk to automatically delete spam posts.
Respond to genuine comments as much as possible. This really helps with reader retention.
Build consistency with the style of your blogs. Your readers will engage more if they can always expect the same style of post.
If your blog includes content from other writers, make sure that their work is properly acknowledged. Pay attention to the quality of their work before publishing their articles. This quality control aspect is particularly critical and needs to be ongoing.
Build a mailing list and notify your readers every time you publish a new post. By collecting email addresses on your blog, you’ll have a fantastic way of regularly engaging with your audience.
How Blogging can help you
You can establish credibility and authority in your niche by writing on topics that are currently pertinent or under-served.
This can really help with your SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) because your website is more likely to be regularly updated with new relevant content. Google and other search engines tend to view this favourably, and it should help with your search rankings.
If you are running a business, regular blogging can boost attention to it. By writing about the products that you are selling you can give them more prominence in search results. This can direct extra customers towards your business. A great example of this is MVMT Watches. They’re blog helps to attract interest to their online store.
If you’ve also got a Youtube channel, your blog can direct people towards your Youtube channel and vice versa. Try embedding some of your relevant Youtube videos into your blog posts.
Summary – Define Blogger Success and How to Succeed
Writing content that is super-useful to your readers is the key to how you can define blogger success. Deliver them more value than they were expecting and they will keep coming back. Listen to what your readers want and write about those topics.
The main way to succeed with blogging is to deliver consistent, high quality and useful content to your readers.
Publish consistently and regularly with interesting content and don’t stop publishing!
Frequently Asked Questions – define blogger
How can I publish posts from my blog to Medium?
Once you’ve published your blog article, make a copy of the URL of the post. Go to Medium, create a new story and import the article into Medium using the same URL.
Is there a Google penalty for publishing your blog post on medium?
No, not if you include a canonical link in your Medium article back to your original blog post. Just copy the exact URL of your blog post. Then head over to Medium and go to story settings—> advanced settings. Paste the URL into the field for the canonical link.
Can I publish my blog post on multiple publication sites like Medium?
Yes, this is a form of syndication which is allowed by the search engines. Just make sure to include a canonical link on each site back to the original post. This will stop the search engines penalising you for the duplicated content on the publishing platform.
Is anti-spam software worth the money?
From our point of view anti-spam software is definitely worth the cost. Anything that will get you out of your inbox and focus your valuable time on improving your content is 100% worth it.
When should I start setting up an email list for a new blog?
It’s best to start setting up an email list as soon as you start getting visitors. It’s still one of the best ways to build an audience that keeps coming back to your blog.
Photo by Florian Klauer on Unsplash