Blogging as a Career Option
Have a particular interest that you are extremely passionate about? Then blogging is the perfect way to start exploring your interest. Blogging is a hobby or a way to build your brand. It is a powerful tool, which can be a great PR for you and your brand. A blog is a simple, easy-to-use platform for connecting with and sharing timely and relevant information with customers. It’s your direct communication channel.
From an online journal at 1,000 words per post to a simple 140-character Twitter feed, blogging has taken centre stage largely because of how useful it has proven itself to be in almost all areas of business. If successful, blogging can be a good way to make money and a full-time career path as well. However, before we start talking about making a career out of it, the first step is to determine a topic of interest and set up the blog.
Top Blogging Platforms
To set up your blog hardly takes 30 minutes. If you are planning to start the blog, then here the various top blogging platforms that you can use.
- Word press
WordPress is one of the most popular free blogging platforms that is excellent for the bloggers. It has numerous templates to choose from. Apart from this, have the option to go for the WordPress customization to personalize the blog with your own designs.
- Blogspot
Blogspot is an extremely convenient platform and it is also one of the most common one that people use. It has few template designs at your disposal, but the good thing here is that the Blogspot allows you to customize the blog and create splendid fonts, images and lots of other important things
- Tumblr
Yet another free blogging website, Tumblr has gained a significant amount of reputation over the years simply because of its user-friendly interface and easy to understand features. There are plenty of stunning blogging themes and awesome features that help you to create a fine blog. The best feature though is the fact that you can synchronize Tumblr account with the various popular social networking websites such as Facebook and Twitter to update your feeds made in the social sites at a distinct location.
- Weebly
Weebly comes with a drag and drop feature to create a website. It’s simple and easy to understand interface makes Weebly one of the best blogging platforms. A very unique thing about this particular website is that you can also use it as a content management system that provides you with an opportunity to earn some money by designing the websites for the other clients.
- Livejournal
A service for journals and blogs, that also offers privacy controls, photo storage, publishing tools, style templates, and online communities for many interests.
Driving Traffic To Your Blog
Once you have finalized on the topic and template, you need to concentrate on increasing traffic and your following. For a blog to be successful, you need more than great writing. You need to market your blog to the right audience and generate traffic to your blog. So how do you build that traffic? Here are a few tips you can follow.
- Participate
Commenting on other blogs and participating in social media networks and groups is vital to building traffic to your own blog.
- Marketing
Even a great blog post in useless without a little bit of marketing and promotion. Promote your blog on social media like Facebook or twitter and post links more than once to get some attention. Whatever method you choose for your blog, take it seriously and don’t leave marketing your own blog up to chance.
- Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Get your blog SEO optimized by using common search queries throughout your writing. This will move your blog closer to the top of search engine result pages, and make people more likely to read your posts. You can also access the traffic by using website traffic statistics software Google Analytics or the simpler traffic statistics software that should come for free with your hosting account.
- Guest blogging
Guest posts are the articles, which a blogger writes for some blog/websites other than his/her own blog. Such guest posts have a link-back to the author’s blog, this helps in getting recognition, reader’s attention and search engine’s attention as well. Writing on other’s blogs is a great way to tap into their audience and introduce yourself to new people. Find blogs you enjoy would be able to write great content for.
Monetizing the Blog
The blog is now popular? So how do you make a living out of blogging? A common misconception is that bloggers in India cannot make substantial income via blogging alone. However, this is not the case. There are many leading Indian bloggers who are making lakhs of rupees from blogging. So if you have a blog and have not monetized it yet, now is the time! There are a number of things you can do that will help. Here are a few tactics that you can use to monetize your blog:
- Be an influencer
Influencer marketing is a new concept that is picking up in India, where brands connect with popular bloggers and influencers who promote products by creating original articles, reviews, videos & social posts to over their followers. With increasing internet penetration and digital spending, influencer marketing is all set to grow in the near future. According to a McKinsey study, marketing-inspired word-of-mouth generates more than twice the sales of paid advertising, and these customers have a 37% higher retention rate. Bloggers have become important influencers because they are seen as authentic and have loyal followings. When a blogger recommends a product it seems more trustworthy than traditional advertising. Websites like influencer.in lets you register as an influencer and be part of their campaigns.
So keeping this in mind, brands are willing to pay influencers to promote their product. There are bloggers who work for free as they are passionate about writing, but there are bloggers charge a huge fee and we most brands are willing to pay for them.
- Freelance
If you have a popular blog running for a while now on a particular subject, then a lot of websites, paper or magazines will be willing to let you write for them and pay you for it. Freelancing is a way of earning money through your skills and expertise. For example, if you have a fashion blog that is doing well, you can write for fashion lifestyle websites. You will be amazed at the number of people willing to pay you money for your advice, which you were probably giving out for free until now! To implement this, you can have a landing page on your blog and have a catchy title like “Hire me” for potential recruiters to find you.
- Direct ads on your blog
This is a great way to make money out of your blog. How it works is that you get to choose which ad will be displayed on your blog and you also set the price for the ads. In this method advertisers get in touch with you directly to place ads on your blog, thus eliminating the middleman. When a reader click on the ad, you get paid a commission or you can choose to charge a flat fee to the advertisers on a monthly or weekly basis. Advertising networks such as Google AdSense, BuySellAds, TribalFusion, and BlogAds have made it relatively easy for bloggers to monetize their work.
Looking for innovative ways to make it big in life by following your passion? Subscribe to our YouTube channel Arrear Irundalum Career for tips and tricks to make the right choice. Here’s a video to get you started. Don’t forget to check out the Arrear Irundalum Career website for more interest career guidance tips in Tamil.
Trending
Related Posts
