You’ve likely heard before that “content is king,” and it’s true. Quality content is what will build your following and bring opportunities for profit and expansion. You want the posts on your blog to provide value to your reader and to be interesting to read. It should also be professional and free of distracting errors. Readers will usually forgive the errant typo or verb disagreement, but it’ll be harder to convince your reader to trust you if you consistently have issues with English mechanics.

The spelling and grammar checker on your word processor will catch most errors; even if you’re confident in your writing ability, run it on every post before it goes up to eliminate silly typos and errors. If you know, spelling and grammar are tough for you, get a copy of The Elements of Style by William Strunk and E.B. White. Give it a read then keeps it at the desk where you’ll be working, to consult when needed.

The ideal length of a typical blog post is around 300-700 words. It should have a headline that makes the reader want to click on it (though be wary of “click bait” style titles that are intentionally misleading). The content should have a logical flow, with major ideas clearly highlighted in bulleted lists or separated paragraphs. 

When you first start your blog, all of the posts you put up should be directly related to your niche. You want to convey your brand from the start, so readers know what to expect from you. You also want to demonstrate your knowledge about the field you’re writing in—to establish your expertise with the topic, and show readers why they should care about your opinions. 

Your first 10-15 posts should be directly related to your niche. Some very successful bloggers do occasionally go off-topic, but that should wait until you’ve established your identity. 

Core content

Blogging expert Yaro Starak talks about something called a “pillar article” in his advice columns. Chris Garret calls it “flagship content,” while Brian Clark calls it “cornerstone content.” All of these experts are describing the same basic thing: the articles that give your reader a clear conception of your niche and your opinions about it. 

Core content articles should be on the long side—around 500-1,000 words, depending on the format. These posts should not be time dependent; a reader who sees the post a year from now should still find it to be relevant. These posts are the most likely to receive backlinks from other websites and ideally will continue to bring in new readers long after you initially post them. 

So they don’t get buried in your archives, it’s a good idea to list these posts in a separate area, whether that’s a drop-down menu or links in a sidebar—this lets new readers easily access the most useful content. You can also reference these articles yourself in future posts to help new readers find and read them.

The more of these core content posts you include on your blog, the better. Five is a good minimum, and you should include at least two in your first ten posts. The ultimate goal of any good core content post is to teach your readers something, whether it’s a skill related to your niche, an explanation of a concept, or an opinion piece that will help them see your niche in a new way. If you’re not sure what kind of article to write, some core content options are listed below, and might help give you an idea of where to start.

Glossary pages are lists of terms related to your niche that you define for the reader in your own words. Glossary pages are often a useful tool if your niche is related to technology, finance, law, or any other field that has very specific or esoteric terminology. They’re also a great format for getting backlinks because other blogs might reference your page if they don’t have glossary pages of their own.

Step-by-step how-to articles teach your reader how to do a task or make a product, often with pictures at key steps. Recipe posts on cooking blogs fit into this category and are probably the most familiar example, but this article style applies to almost any niche. Think of something in your industry that you know how to do and your readers might not—the key thing here is sharing your knowledge of something with which you’re experienced. 

Whitepapers are similar to how-to articles but go into more depth. A whitepaper is typically a 2-10 page document that teaches readers about a concept or topic related to your industry. It should be an all-encompassing solution to a common problem in your niche. Rather than being a single long blog post, it’s often best to present whitepapers as PDFs readers can download. You could also type the content into several blog posts and link them together in a series.

List articles are excellent core content because people love to read and share them, and they can be good for stirring up a conversation in your comment section. They can take a few forms. Advice lists give readers tips on how to accomplish tasks (“4 ways to get better sleep” or “5 things to do before you get a mortgage”). Ranked lists are ideal for pop culture or product-based blogs, which can also link to products sold by an affiliate to increase the article’s profitability. Informative lists share knowledge with the reader (“most under-rated horror movies” or “surprise benefits of green tea”) and can be useful in any niche.

Opinion pieces and editorials are most often seen in political and social commentary blogs, and can be especially useful for stirring up controversy in your comments section. These pieces should start with a clear thesis statement, whether that’s a theory, an opinion, or an argument. Back up your argument with well-presented arguments and make sure the thought is unique—remember, you want to add new value to your industry, not rehash the same ideas presented elsewhere. Also, make sure your opinion reinforces your established brand.

SEO

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization, and how important it is to getting good results in search engines is still up for debate in the blogging community. The idea of SEO is that by using keywords in the course of your posts, you can get higher rankings on results lists when users search for those terms, meaning you’ll get more visitors to your site. Nobody debates that this is something that will help you; what blogging experts disagree on is how much you have to focus just on your keyword density. 

If you are writing good content that’s strongly related to your niche topic, your posts will naturally be very keyword-dense without you putting in any special effort. An over-emphasis on keyword density can make your posts feel repetitive or stilted. Putting way too many keywords in your posts also makes you look like a spammer (called “keyword stuffing”) and makes search engine spiders ignore you if you’re guilty of it.

The most important places to emphasize keywords in your posts are in the page header and the title tag. When you’re naming your pages, make them search engine in a friendly way by giving them names that clearly express what the page is about rather than an in-house classification system. Keep the content itself focused on the idea and don’t worry so much about getting terms shoved in there—if it’s on the topic to your niche, it will come up in search results naturally. A better way to optimize your search engine ranking is to link back to your own pages periodically. 

The more links a page has to it, the more likely it is to show up higher on the search result list. Just like with the keywords, don’t over-do it. Reference past posts when it’s logical to do so, not just for the sake of SEO.

Finding your voice

Many people make the mistake of wanting to present a perfect image of themselves to their readers. While you do want to present yourself as someone the reader can trust, you also want to show them that you’re a real person. There are thousands of blogs out there about every topic imaginable, and ultimately your personality and opinions are what will make your blog the one readers want to read.

Be willing to share your failures, challenges, and struggles. It will make you more relatable, and the reader will ultimately trust you more if they know you’re the kind of person who can admit to your mistakes. 

A good blog post should have the tone of a conversation between friends. If you’re not sure just how to do this, there are a couple of tricks you could try. Try imagining that you’re talking to a person in your life, like a sibling or a friend, when you write your posts. How would you explain concepts in your field so that your sister can understand them? Use the same language when you’re writing that you’d use out loud in friendly conversation.

Especially if you’re not a trained writer, terms like “voice” and “tone” can sometimes be hard to wrap your head around. What does a “friendly tone” mean? Imagine yourself again speaking to that same friend about the topic you’re covering in your post, but instead of going straight to your keyboard, record yourself answering the question out loud. Listen to the recording. 

Transcribe the sentences you’re especially fond of, then fill in around those lines trying to match that tone. Once you’ve written the post, read it out loud again, then go back and change the places that feel awkward or too formal. As you get more comfortable with the writing process, you’ll be able to get that conversational tone straight on the page.

Consistency and trust

One of the most important things is to build the reader’s trust. Make sure your content is always factual and original. If you make a habit of parroting or even outright copying someone else, your blog is adding no new value to your reader’s life. Your opinions should be yours, and you should be prepared to stand by them. If your readers feel like you’re reliable, they’ll be more likely to give you their loyal readership. 

You can also be dependable for your reader by posting on a regular schedule and not missing posts when you can help it. Some bloggers post daily; others post on select days of the week. Twice a week is a good frequency when you’re just starting out. You’re posting often enough to give people a reason to keep coming back, but you still have time for the other aspects of your blog, like finding advertisers and communicating with your readers, without making you feel overwhelmed.

Blogging success story: Hero Brown

Hero Brown is the founder of MuddyStilettos.co.uk, “The Urban Guide to the Countryside” for rural areas in England. Brown started the blog as a hobby in 2011 when she moved to rural Buckinghamshire and couldn’t find any good information on the area. By 2013, it had become her full-time job, with 5,000 subscribers, 6,500 followers on Facebook and Twitter, and 15,000 unique readers every month. 

Brown’s background was in magazine editing, and she brings that into her personal style on the site. In an interview with Forbes contributor Hester Lacey, Brown said of her blog, “I think of Muddy Stilettos as an online magazine. It’s well-researched, well-written and I’m constantly thinking about my readers. Lots of blogs by their nature are a kind of stream of consciousness. I came at it more from an editorial angle.”

Brown is also very dedicated to being trustworthy for her readers, especially in whom she chooses to have as advertisers on her site. “I could earn more money from advertising if I was less fussy,” Brown says later in that interview, “but if I don’t keep that high-quality bar, the whole reason for reading Muddy Stilettos disappears.” By thinking about her audience and keeping their needs in mind, Brown has made a very successful product with Muddy Stilettos that only continues to grow.

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When someone’s getting ready to start a brick-and-mortar small business, he or she are often advised to come up with a business plan before he or she even find funding or look for a location. Because of the amounts of money involved, investors want to know that the owner has thought about every aspect of their business—and most importantly, has planned out how it will make money and grow—before they are willing to back the concept. 

While you don’t need to hustle for investors when you’re starting a blog, a bit of goal-oriented planning is still the best way to make your blog a profitable venture instead of just a hobby and time-sink.

Remember that overnight successes are very rare, not just in blogging but in every area of life. The work you put in at the beginning of the process may not begin to generate returns until a year or more has passed. If you’re not ready to play the long game, you’re likely to give up too soon and never see your blog reach its full potential. 

You won’t need to invest much money in starting a blog, but you will need to commit your time consistently enough to be seen as dependable by your readers. Schedule yourself at least an hour to work on your blog every day. Commit to it as much as you would shift at your place of employment. If you don’t treat your blog like it’s important, you can’t expect the readers to feel any differently.

Setting realistic goals

Everybody would love to be making a six-figure income from home talking about one of your passions. That’s not an unrealistic goal in the long-term. The problem is that a lot of people think they’ll start a blog and within a few months make enough to retire. When they don’t achieve this pinnacle of success right away, they get discouraged and give up.

Setting realistic goals doesn’t mean you can’t dream big. It instead means breaking those big dreams down into pieces and figuring out what short-term steps you can take to achieve long-term success. 

First of all, you should determine just what your long term goals are. Where does blogging fit into your ideal future? Is it something you eventually hope to use as your primary source of income or do you see it as simply one part of a larger whole? The amount of effort you’ll have to put in to build a blog into a full-time job is very different than what will be required just to make some spending cash on the side. 

If you own a small business or product line, a blog may be more your way of communicating with your customers than it is your primary source of income—an integral part of the entire package, but not your main income stream. If you do hope to make blogging your full-time job, you should treat it like a part-time job from the outset; if it’s intended as a side project, you can take more time to let it grow.

Once you’ve thought about your long-term goals, do some research on other blogs in your niche. Start by looking at the most successful and most popular ones. How many page views and comments do most of them get? 

How often do they post? How many followers do they have on Facebook and Twitter—and how long has it taken them to get to this point? If the top blog in your niche has 3,000 followers, setting a goal of 5,000 followers in your first six months would most likely only set yourself up to fail. Set smaller milestones. If you want 1,000 subscribers, you first have to get 100 subscribers. Then you can go for 500, and so on, giving you benchmarks of achievement to hit along the way.

Scheduling your posts

There are two levels to consider here, and you should sketch out a plan for both before you start writing your content. There’s the week-by-week scheduling of when you want your posts to come out, and there’s the monthly and yearly scheduling of points or events you want to hit.

A lot of bloggers just post when the spirit strikes them. They might have four posts in three days and then a two-week gap until the next one. That’s fine if you’re a hobbyist or if the blog isn’t your primary income stream, but to make your blog profitable, it’s better to keep a regular schedule on which your readers can depend. Exactly when you post will depend on your niche. 

News-based blogs may need to be updated daily to feel current. For less time-sensitive topics, you could choose select days of the week. As always, consider your target audience. A business blog might want to have a post in their subscriber’s inboxes every weekday morning; e-mails sent over the weekend would be less likely to be viewed. 

A blog about nightlife in the city might want to put out a big post on Thursday when subscribers are making plans for the weekend. Whatever your niche, a weekly schedule lets your readers know when they should expect to hear from you and will more effectively build a strong subscriber base. 

The yearly scheduling will be more useful for managing your content and identifying the times interest in your niche will be highest. Some of these things will be universal—any blogger who sells products should make note of the Christmas shopping season on their yearly calendar—but many will be more individual to your niche. 

A gardening blog might want to time a new product release to correspond with late winter or early spring when lots of readers will be planning their gardens. A parenting blog could have special content for back to school season. By writing it all out, you can more clearly see what points in the year you want to build toward and where you might have a harder time coming up with content, allowing you to plan accordingly.

Collaboration

Collaboration with another blogger can be an easy way to keep the site running smoothly while at the same time spreading out the pressure and the workload involved in maintaining it. It lets each of you take time off when you need to, and can also help to add more perspectives to the blog’s content, expanding its appeal. Just make sure you choose your collaborating partners carefully.

It should be someone you get along with, but also someone you can count on to do their fair share of the work. Ultimately, the goal is for this to be a profitable business venture, and you should make sure from the outset that everyone involved is on the same page and committed to that cause. Even if the person is a family member or close friend, it’s a good idea to write up and sign an agreement together just to make sure the expectations are clear.

Blogging success story: Lance Nelson

When Lance Nelson decided to start his blog, he picked an extremely detailed niche. Banskoblog.com is in the Bansko ski resort in Bulgaria. Nelson turned this relatively limited niche into a full-time job that brings in over 60,000 euros per year in income, and his successful branding had a lot to do with the speed and degree of his success. 

Everything on his site, from the mountains on his logo to the weather tracker widget and menu options, clearly tells the reader just what he is about, and this precise branding paid off for him in a big way.

Being a skiing blogger means that Nelson has to think very carefully about the scheduling of his content. His readers are going to be most interested during the skiing season, and he has a ready-made audience in the winter; his challenge was how to sustain his readership in the summer months when there’s no snow for skiing. 

Nelson posts about other topics in the summer that are of interest to his readers. He travels throughout Bulgaria and shares his travels with his readers (who might themselves be looking for something to do during the summer, since they can’t ski). Even if you’re not in such a weather-dependent niche, thinking about what your ideal readers will be doing throughout the year can help you figure out the right content for the moment.

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Your brand is the foundation of your blog’s identity and purpose. In his article “7 rules of successful bloggers,” Robert Pagliarini defines your brand as “the emotional reaction someone feels when he or she hear your name.” You have a brand right now, even if you don’t realize it—in fact, you probably have several. 

You have a certain brand when you’re at work, another with your family, perhaps even different ones with various groups of friends. For many new bloggers, that’s part of the problem. Your real-life brands are too diverse and scattered to make for a compelling blog; you need to narrow and craft your brand into a salable package.

A brand is a combination of your persona and your reputation. Your persona is the way you try to present yourself to others; your reputation is formed by the way you interact with them. When you’re first starting out as a blog and haven’t yet built a reputation, you’re going to be working off of the strength of your persona alone. It’s necessary, then, to decide what your brand will be before you start writing your posts, and then to reinforce that brand consistently through your content.

Play to your audience

Imagine your ideal reader. Think about how they spend their time. Are they single, or do they have a family? Where do they live? What are their values? Tailoring your brand to your audience can help give you a better focus for your first few posts and help you to establish your identity more quickly. 

Of course, you shouldn’t take this too far, either. Don’t pretend to be a new person just to attract more readers. You’re not changing your personality, just identifying which aspects of it will be the most appealing to your target reader. Consider it this way: when you’re at work, you probably dress differently, have a different bearing, and use a different vocabulary than when you’re hanging out with your buddies at the bar or watching TV with the kids at home. 

All these versions of yourself are “you,” you’re just tailoring them to the situation. Most people do this subconsciously in response to the non-verbal cues and clues of their surroundings. With blogging, you can’t see the people you’re interacting with; without those context clues, it’s necessary to construct the persona you want to use rather than letting your subconscious do it for you.

Think about your ideal image. Do you want to be a friendly confidant? A knowledgeable expert? Think back to the “why me?” question you answered in chapter 1. If the reason you chose your niche is because you’ve studied that topic and have a lot of knowledge to share, your brand might be aimed at educating your readers. 

That branding won’t work if you’re a relative novice in your topic area; maybe instead your brand would be learning how to become a better chef, or finding the best attractions in your city, and bringing the reader along for your discoveries. 

If you’re having trouble thinking of what you want your brand to be, some old fashioned brainstorming may just do the trick. Get out a blank piece of paper and a pen. Write “I want my blog to be…” large at the top of the paper, then write down whatever words come to mind. Link these words together into concepts and sentences, rearranging and connecting them until you feel like you’ve gotten to the heart of what you’re trying to represent.

You’ve probably heard the term “elevator pitch,” a description of your product or idea that could be conveyed in the time it takes to ride in an elevator—about thirty seconds, if you want to put a number on it. Before you start blogging, you should be able to give an elevator pitch of your brand and topic. Once you can do that, you should have a clear enough concept of your brand to stay consistent through your early posts.

The importance of design

The layout and design of your blog will give your reader their first impression of you. On the practical side of things, you want to make sure it’s both easy to navigate and easy to read. Important posts should have a prominent place on the page, and the color scheme shouldn’t interfere with the legibility of your writing.

A pre-made template like those available on WordPress can be a good place to start when you’re designing your blog, but you should customize at least a few elements of it to help it stand out from the thousands of others that use that same layout. The design you choose for your blog should in some way reflect your brand or niche. Ideally, a reader should be able to glance at your page without reading a word and get a basic idea of your blog topic. 

Layout and color choices have some role in this; if you run a photography blog, you should choose a format that emphasizes images, for example. Consider specialized features. A financial blog might find it helpful to install a live tracker of the stock exchange on their front page; a sports blogger might have a ticker of scores and match results. 

A great way to clarify your brand is to design a logo that reflects both your niche and your personality. You can do this yourself if you’re artistic, but for many people, it’s worth the financial investment to hire a freelancer to design the logo for you. The logo will come to represent your brand in most readers’ minds, and the initial investment you make hiring a designer will be repaid many times over by the boost to your brand recognition. 

Though this is most important with your logo, it can also be true of other aspects of your blog design. If you want customized images or a unique layout format but don’t have the design or coding background to make them competently yourself, don’t be afraid to look for a freelancer to complete the work for you. A well-designed site will be more likely to attract visitors and will ultimately be worth the initial financial investment.

Blogging success story: Nicola Lees

Nicola Lees had already built a successful career in television before she started TVMole.com. She developed a strong brand based on her expertise, helping people with ideas for TV shows to pitch those shows to TV executives and producers. 

The content on TVMole all reinforces this strong brand, giving helpful advice that readers can’t get anywhere else, allowing her blog to grow and expand into multiple income streams. She does consult and contract work, speaks on panels and sells books and courses that help her readers. 

Having worked with major industry leaders like the BBC and Discovery Chanel meant Lees’ obvious choice was to base her brand around her expertise. Her insider perspective makes her a trusted voice in the niche of television production. 

But even though she had the credentials, it was still Lees’ high-quality and trustworthy content that reinforced her brand on her blog and helped her generate traffic and opportunities.

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It can be tempting when you first start your blog to put it on a free site. After all, it’s still a blog available on the internet, so why pay more than you have to set up? Free blog services are fine if you’re a hobbyist, but they have major disadvantages that can make your life much harder as a professional blogger. 

Free sites, in general, don’t rank as well in search engines as paid domain names. They also don’t give you as much control over your design, making the page look unoriginal and less professional. Some free services also run their own ads on your website, limiting your chances of making ad income.

Domain names

A domain name is your address on the internet (the part of the site that goes between “www” and “.com”). A new domain name can be claimed through a variety of different online services. A domain that has been registered may not be off limits; some people will buy domains to re-sell them though these are often far more expensive options.

It’s not expensive to register a new domain name—doing it with GoDaddy can cost you as little as $10 a year, and other services offer domain registration in the $20 to $40 range. Some domain names are more expensive than others. 

For a while when the first internet business boom was happening, investors would buy domain names with the intent of reselling them at a higher price, with some going for thousands or even millions of dollars (sex.com sold for $13 million in 2010, the current record; investing.com sold for $2.5 million in 2012). The bubble on this industry has burst, however, and even the most in-demand domains have seen their prices fall back down to earth.

If possible, your domain name should match the name of your blog. It doesn’t have to; once you own your domain name, you can put whatever you want on that site. Matching the web address to the blog name, though, will give you more name and brand recognition and make it easier for readers to find you. 

Think of some words and phrases related to your niche and your perspective on it. Once you’ve found a combination that you like, check if it’s available through an online registration service. Generally speaking, single-word titles (especially those related to popular fields) are more likely to have been purchased by a domain investor and to cost extra money to obtain. 

Let’s use the example of the vegan comfort food cooking blog from chapter 1. Cooking and vegan are common words that are likely to be already used or, at least, to have been purchased by an investor. Think about the next level of your niche, then—the comfort food angle—and brainstorm possible combinations. 

Two and three word combinations are less likely to have been used already. With a little creativity, you can find an open domain name that relates to your niche and is more quirky and memorable than “VeganCooking.com.”

Hosting

Once your blog has a domain name it has an address, but it doesn’t yet have a home. The files associated with your site will need to be hosted on a server so that your viewers can access them. There are many hosting sites out there. Many places that register domains also offer hosting services, which is convenient, though you should make sure the site has the services you need before signing up. Blue Host is a common hosting site for WordPress bloggers who are transitioning to a self-sufficient site.

The most important thing to consider is how much web traffic volume you can have on a particular hosting site. Bandwidth limits won’t matter when you’re first starting your blog, but if you hope to grow your traffic quickly, you shouldn’t set yourself up for failure by choosing a server that’s too small. A lot of hosting sites offer different tiers of packages at different rates depending on your traffic needs and make it easy to upgrade down the line. 

You can typically pay for hosting month by month and while you usually get a bit of a discount for buying more time at once, paying monthly can let you try a service out if you’re not sure whether or not it will work for you. Moving hosts can be a hassle but isn’t as costly or difficult as changing domains would be; you can change your mind in the future without affecting your reader’s ability to access your pages.

When you’re first starting out, the cheapest option is often a shared hosting account. Prices can start as low as $1-$2 per month. Sites that offer this option include iPage, eHost, and In Motion Hosting. Research the hosting site before you sign up. Are they reliable, or do you see users complaining about their service? You can also check around with other bloggers and see what hosting sites they use.

Site builders and CMS

You’ve got a domain name and a host where the files associated with it can live. Now all you have to do is make your blog and transfer it to the host—and if you’re not a technically-minded person, this can be very intimidating. 

The level of involvement you want to have with the creation of the page code on your site will determine which kind of site editor or site builder is best for you. People use these terms in different ways, adding to the confusion.

A web editor gives you the most control over your page’s design, but also requires some knowledge of HTML and CSS, and probably also things like JavaScript, PHP, and Perl for the kind of components most people want on a blog. The most basic web editor is a plain text program like Notepad. Plain text programs will require you to write all the code, but are the cheapest and most straightforward option. 

Web editor programs like Dreamweaver and KompoZer have a visual interface for the user, making the website building experience more similar to designing a Word document than to writing computer code. 

Once you’ve designed your pages with a web editor, you still need to get them onto your host’s server using an FTP (File Transfer Protocol) program. Both the FTP program and the web editor will need to be installed on your computer, and you have full control over their use—the primary advantage of using this method.  

An online site builder is similar to a website editor except run entirely online instead of through your computer. Site builder services are provided by larger web hosting companies (such as GoDaddy) though often for an extra fee. The online site designer will have a similar interface as a web editor like Dreamweaver or KompoZer. Since you’re building your sites directly on the host, though, you don’t have to worry about uploading them with an FTP program, and you can use any device to edit your website, not only one computer with the software installed.

Even if you’re using site editing software or an online site builder, basic knowledge of at least HTML and CSS will be very helpful in making your site look and feel the way you want. Even if you don’t know how to code them, you should understand what they do and be able to interpret them when you see them.

A Content Management System (CMS) is a piece of software you install directly on your web host (not your computer) that streamlines the addition of necessary site features like tags and categories for pages, search and archive functions, or forums and comment sections. 

When you use site builders or site editors, each of these features will have to be added manually, which can be incredibly time-consuming even if you are a web coding expert. Content management systems also make it a lot easier to redesign the look of your overall site.

CMS software does take up space on your server and websites run with a CMS use more RAM and CPU than those made by a site editor. On high traffic days, this could mean your pages are slow to load or could cause problems with resource limits if you’re using a shared server. 

You also don’t get quite as much creative control over the features and design elements of the page as you would designing it completely on your own. The main advantage of CMS software is that it lets you focus on the content. You don’t have to worry about fixing lines of code or manually adjusting your pages when you decide on a new layout—meaning you have more time to work on the important things.

There are several blogger-specific CMS programs on the internet, many of which you can use for free. WordPress is probably the most common. I know what you’re thinking—isn’t WordPress one of those free blogging sites? It can be (WordPress offers free blog hosting), but you can also download it as software and install it on your domain. 

It’s certainly not the only product on the market, though; take your time and carefully consider what features you’ll ideally need. Just like with changing domain names, changing CMS software can be a headache and a half if you have to do it down the road.

Blogger success story: Ruhul Amin

Ruhul Amin is the founder of Tips and Tricks HQ, an Australian-based blog aimed at educating other bloggers about WordPress and other technical aspects of blogging. Not only is his site impeccably designed and very successful, but it can also be a valuable resource for new bloggers who aren’t so sure on the technical side of things. 

Amin stresses the importance of a quality domain name in his posts, and has a few tips for readers: use keywords, make it easy to remember, and keep it short. Amin advises, “It is important for a visitor to get an idea of what the website is about just by looking at the domain name…if [visitors] can’t remember the domain name then you run the risk of losing potential traffic.”

One more tip from Amin: remember that you can use hyphens between words in domain names if it helps with the overall readability as he does on his site (www.tipsandtricks-hq.com). Not only can this make the name of your blog clearer to visitors, but it can also be a way to get the perfect domain name if the un-hyphenated version was purchased.

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There is 6 Tips for affiliate Products or services :

1. Identify your Target and Check out Competitors

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3. Off Page Optimization

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   3. Create high quality videos that will display your products and services. Market these videos in popular sites like Youtube.com

4. Update Content

   1. Create a Blog section in your website to educate your customers
   2. Share relevant info about your industry in your blog section

5. Social Media Marketing

   1. Build a social network using Social Media sites
   2. Build Relationships using Social Media Interaction
   3. Provide brief description about your Products and Services through Social Media Sites
   4. Spread relevant content through Social Media Sites even though sometimes the content is not created by your team

6. EMail Marketing

   1. Build your Email subscribe list using Landing pages
   2. Interact with Customers using emails as required
   3. Communicate relevant information about your Products and Services through Email Marketing

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A great majority of successful people are business owners rather than employees. Some business owners are making their money online. How do they do it? Justin Gibbs shared some tips:

1. Think Differently: Most people are prepared by school and by parents to become good employees. Gain a business owner's viewpoint from books and experts. As well as reading, you need to implement what you learn.
2. Take Responsibility: You are responsible for what you have now in your life, no one else. What do you want? What do you have to do to get it? Commit to it and start making it happen.
3. Benchmark: If others with less resources than you can succeed, why can't you? Be prepared to commit long term despite the challenges. Be inspired by other people's successes as examples of possibility.
4. No Compromise: Desperate people care more about themselves than their customers, and it is easy to detect. When you're not desperate, you can do things because it's the right thing to do.
5. Kaizen: Continually improve, especially in the way WA'l you think. Seek to VI-I I become a perpetual g1 I I learner, always moving forward.
6. Do Less: A real business is not about exchanging your time for money. Look for the 4% of effort that delivers 64% of results. Do what you want to do, things where you have a higher impact, and delete, automate or delegate the rest.
7. Stick to What Works: Work with the winning strategies and kill the losers. Keep doing the core things that get you the best results.
8. Give Up: When something is clearly not working, don't be afraid to call your losses. It's better to realize early when you're wrong and seek a different tactic.
9. Observe: You don't have to guess what sells. Just see what people want and need and what they are already paying for. The answers are all around you.
10. Clarity: A confused mind makes no choice - Keep things easy for your customers, whether it's the options you offer, your sales process or how you present your solutions.
11. Own the RaceCourse: Have a website YOU own where you put all your good content. Make it a self-hosted website, on a fast server, with a domain you control. Do not build your business on an external platform like Facebook, Linkedin or YouTube.
12. Rich Content: Post content that answers questions and solves problems. Put it in multiple formats - video, audio, text and images - and do it reasonably often. Let people know via email and social media when you post new stuff.
13. Results, Not Stuff: Less products, more value. It's not about how much stuff you can offer your customers, it about getting the best results with the least possible action. This is especially true for subscription services.
14. Build an E-Mail Database: Your email list is powerful. Set up the right offer, make sure it has value and send it out at the right time. You can automate triggers, abandonment sequences and feedback requests, but keep your newsletters organic.
15. Unsubscribe: From marketing emails. Don't be taken prisoner by your inbox. Be the one sending emails rather than reading them. Also syndicate to where people are, on Facebook, YouTube or Twitter.
16. Value Reach: If you want to make a lot of money, create a lot of value and put it in front of as many people as possible.

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