[yop_poll id=”2″]
As a content creator you should have a content creator blog. This allows you to build your online brand, build readership, create opportunities, and possibly earn income from your blog. Niching down is very important when blogging. Make sure to focus your writing on a specific niche or area of expertise. Lastly, setting up your own blog is very easy and can be done in minutes with no technical skills. Using web hosts like DreamHost and their one-click WordPress installation, you’ll be creating your first blog post in no time.
If you’re an entrepreneur, small business owner, journalist, writer, other professional, or anyone else who regularly creates content, you should have a blog. Your content needs to be online where the audience and potential readership is unlimited.
Social networks, purchasing online ads, and other forms of marketing are important, but no marketing channel is more important for those with an online presence than content creation and SEO. By creating content and launching your content creator blog, you can attract dozens, hundreds, even thousands of visitors to your website – for free.
How is that you say?
Creating content and posting it on a content creator blog makes it available to Google and other search engines. The search engines have a robot called a crawler, which is software that swoops by your blog every so often and reads all your content. It then takes your content and processes it through advanced algorithms and determines many things including your article’s topic, quality (high or low), the other articles they link to, and much more.
Your articles (or posts) are then included in the search engines and depending on their quality can be found by users – users that are searching for the kind of content you created. This translates into visitors and readers to your content creator blog.
If you write content and put it on your blog, you’ll attract visitors to your site and readers to your blog, but how does that benefit you? Let’s look at some benefits of having an active audience online.
Launching a content creator blog and posting high quality content will help build your reputation which in turn leads to many opportunities including:
And all these things will continue to build your reputation and further drive readers to your blog.
As a content creator, you should have a newsletter. Newsletters allow you to actively engage with your readership and stay fresh in their mind. This further builds your brand and reputation. Newsletters are also great for including links to your blog, which further drives traffic to it.
With all that said, your content creator blog will be the raw material that builds your newsletter. By posting all your content to your blog, you will begin getting visitors to your articles. From there, you can include a newsletter subscription form within your content. Now, you’ve created a blog that also drives signups to your newsletter.
Who couldn’t use additional income right? You can add advertising to your content creator blog. It sounds intimidating, but content management systems like WordPress have plugins that allow you to add Google Adsense ads to your blog in literally minutes. When a visitor to your blog clicks an ad, you get paid.
Just like your content creator blog is great for funneling readers into a newsletter, it’s also great for funneling visitors into a sales process. Examples are eBook downloads or sales, purchasing a product, either digital or physical, and user or product registrations. The sky is the limit on things to offer your readership once you start getting a steady stream of visitors.
Although you can choose to write about anything, it is best to niche down and focus on a specific area of expertise. This is for a few reasons.
You need to write captivating content that your readers enjoy reading. It needs to be engaging, informed, and full of substance. By focusing on a specific niche that you understand well, you’ll be able to create captivating content that engages and informs the reader.
Secondly, you’re going to have to create a lot of content to start attracting readers and visitors to your blog. You’re not going to be able to write five articles. It’s going to take dozens or even hundreds to start attracting a meaningful audience. By picking an area you know well, you won’t run out of ideas or inspiration for content.
Lastly, search engines like Google have to be able to understand what your content creator blog is about. If you write articles about cars, insurance, cell phone releases, and movies, Google will be terribly confused. They won’t know what your blog is an authority on, reducing your chances of getting blog posts ranked for any of the subjects.
By niching down and writing about say 1950 – 1980s sports cars, you have greatly increased your chances of getting your blog posts ranked. This is because when search engine crawlers visit your site, they will 100% know that your blog is about historical sports cars. They can better depend that if someone queries old sports cars, your site should be considered for showing to the searcher.
Most people start a blog and stop within a few months. This is because contrary to popular belief, it takes an immense amount of work and content to attract visitors to your site. You must correctly choose a niche, know how to research keywords and article ideas, choose ones that you can actually rank for, and then write high quality articles – and lots of them. We mean lots.
Consistency and persistence are absolute musts when building a content creator blog. We recommend using a free agile tool like Trello to create a content production schedule for yourself. You can create columns like backlog, To Do, In Progress, and Complete (see above screenshot). Then, create a story card for each article and label it with how many hours it will take to complete the piece. Next, set a sprint length. For example, if you do weekly sprints, have six hours per week to write, and each article on average takes two hours to write and edit, then you should schedule and complete three articles per sprint.
Take a look at our SEO Copywriting: A Practical SEO Example article. It covers everything you need to know to begin optimizing your blog posts for ranking in Google. Additionally, using the Yoast SEO Plugin for WordPress is free and analyzes your blog posts as you write them. It includes a detailed checklist of what to address in your blog post, and as you optimize the article the items turn green. See the three screenshots below for an example of a high ranking article we wrote using the Yoast SEO plugin.
So you agree you should have a blog, but you’re not at all a technical person. You’re wondering how in the world can I setup an online blog / website in an hour. Well, worry no more. We’re going to show you exactly how right now. You can choose many paths to get there, but for our example we recommend DreamHost and their 1-Click WordPress Installation. Why? Because it’s affordable and easy. I’ve used DreamHost for over 15 years with various websites (not this one) and had no issues.
2. Choose the Shared (Starter) Plan or the DreamPress Plan by clicking Register Now on the respective plan.
3. When you choose a plan from above, DreamHost will ask you to choose a domain name now or later. Choose the Register a new domain option.
4. Search for the domain name you want, choose it, and then follow the steps to complete your setup. The domain name comes free with these plans.
5. Again, follow the steps as DreamHost registers your account. They will walk you through everything, including setting your WordPress admin username and password.
6. Once done and you login to your WordPress Admin Panel, navigate to Appearance > Themes > Add New
7. Choose a new theme that fits your style. There are thousands of free themes to choose from. If you don’t find one you like, you can always visit sites like Theme Forest to buy a premium theme.
H3 Done, Start Writing Blog Posts
8. Just like that, you now have a content creator blog and are ready to write posts, attract readers, and begin building your online empire. Enjoy!