8 Steps to Grow Your Blogging Hobby into a Career

In recent years, blogging has gone from just a means for you express yourself online in a diary-esque style to a multi-purpose platform where you can market yourself as a brand, engage with a loyal audience, and turn your passion into a career. Whether you’re sharing your travel adventures in vivid detail or giving makeup and styling tips to a rather large niche audience, blogging can really introduce you to endless possibilities to earn money. Here are 8 steps to do achieve that

1. Know what to write about.

Before you create your blog, it is crucial that you know the kind of blog that you’ll be publishing. In addition, you also have to study your niche and target audience. Even if you want to do a personal blog, you want to focus on certain key areas in your life that you want to share with your audience. Staying true to yourself will make this step much easier. If you have a knack for adventure and a burning desire to travel the world, you can create your very own travel blog and inspire a lot of people while you’re at it. But don’t limit your options to the most popular blogging niches. Strive to create something new for more audience impact. You can also now get paid to write from home.

2. Start with a personal blog.

Personal platforms constitute a large percentage of today’s blogging industry. But did you know that almost 39% of these bloggers are in it for the money? These days, you can monetize almost anything, especially with the immense power of the internet as well as social media. With this in mind, trust that you can really take your blog to greater heights if you work hard enough. Once you’re absolutely confident with all the aspects of your blog, including web design, content, and visuals, you may now proceed to the next step.

3. Market your blog.

If you don’t do well in this step, there’s a great chance you’ll get swallowed by your rivals. Whether you’re blogging for yourself or business, you must grab every marketing opportunity you can get in order to get readers and, if possible, traction.

Let’s start with the basics– free marketing –share your blog’s link on all your social media platforms as a way of inviting your networks to your passion project. Let them know about the hard work you’ve put into your blog, and why their support matters to you. This is where your popularity will really come in handy. You may even get your closest friends to share your post without you asking them. Now that is a sign of true friendship.

If you think marketing your blog ends right there, you’re wrong. Your blog should be ever dynamic in terms of publishing content and marketing efforts. As you go through this list, you’ll realize that blogging involves a continuous series of marketing opportunities that you must grab.

4. Tap social media.

A lot can be achieved using free marketing, but if you really want to maximize your reach, go for paid ads. As in any business, you must invest time, energy, and a little bit of money to achieve a great deal of success. Paid ads are a great way to get your blog on the radar of people outside your social media network.

Facebook advertising is one way to start. Using this system, you can easily edit your target reach scale preferences and even attribute certain topics of interest in the formula for a more effective campaign. This means, if you’re marketing a travel blog, your ad will show up on the news feed of travel enthusiasts and adventure-seekers. By investing on ads, you achieve two things that are essential for your blog’s growth: (1) more readers from social media users targeted by your marketing campaign and (2) free marketing from those who shared your ad and posts to their respective networks.

5. Keep track of your successes.

Once your blog is already out there and is getting more followers and activity than ever, take the time to analyze your performance. To do this, you will need the help of third-party website analyzing software such as Kissmetrics and Heap. Know the key performance indicators that will determine the success of certain marketing campaigns.

Keep track of your successes and use this data to for better marketing strategies in the future. You may also take this opportunity to compose your resume, if you want to do the same job for other companies as an extension of your career. You can analyze the hard work you have put into your blog and continue to have that attitude as you build your blog and career.

6. Engage.

In establishing your personal blog or business online, engagement should not be a one-way street. You must value your readers because they played a huge role in your success as a blogger. It’s very important that you interact with them and get to know their thoughts about your blog. Express gratitude to people who have positive things to say and treat every negative comment as constructive criticism.

7. Give credit where it is due.

Giving credit where it is due is actually a marketing strategy in disguise. If you include influential people in your posts, there’s a great chance you’ll receive the same credit back.

8. Build a community. Give back.

Finally, when you’ve finally reached blogging success and popularity as a certified blogger, you’ll want to make a community out of your solid followers. By doing this, you get to interact with your audience and give back the support you’ve received from all of them. When you can confidently and truthfully refer to your following as fans, you know you’re doing something right.

Conclusion

That is how you turn your blogging hobby into a career. This article also reminds you that the success of your blog is synonymous with the hard work you put into it. This applies regardless of whether you’re doing this for yourself or business. If you know someone who is just trying their hand at blogging, you can share this info with them now!