4 Essential Elements to Making Money Blogging

Jul 21, 2014
3 min read

1. Be a Kick Ass Writer.

Excuse me for swearing but it’s the truth.

It may seem like an obvious assessment but it’s funny how sometimes we forget the most basic things. Luckily, you don’t need to write Shakespeare or James Joyce but you should at least understand the basics of grammar and sentence structure.

Keep up with the industry and what is expected of you. If you write about technology or finance, you should know what those bloggers are writing about. Bloggers are the first to spot trends and even though you might not want to write about these trends you should at least be aware of them.

You should also read blogs about writing and how to improve your skills. Blogging is not like writing that grade 12 English essay, it’s more like a conversation with your best friend.

Studies have shown people almost never read an entire blog but instead skim through. You need to make it easy to skim through with plenty of white space and lots of paragraphs and subheadings. That’s one of the reasons why blogs with lists are so popular. It’s easy to skip large chunks and not lose the gist of what is being said.

2. Headlines are Important

Don’t judge a book by its cover? Readers always judge a blog by its title. People often just tweet and retweet articles with interesting headlines without even bothering to read the article.

You should spend a considerable time thinking about how to best entice your target market through engaging and exciting headlines. You need something catchy, something that makes people want to read your blog. Did I mention lists are popular?

3. Know Thy Business Goals

Each blog has a specific goal. Ultimately it’s to sell something, whether it’s a product or a service. Usually the selling process is several steps and the blog is the first step to get the customer to sign up for a newsletter, an evaluation or to buy an ebook. Sometimes these are incorporated directly into a blog, sometimes not.

You need to understand the business goals of the organization you are working for before you commit a single word to the paper.

I read about a famous writer, I think it was Arthur Millar, who stuck a post-it note to his typewriter with the theme of the story he was working on. I would suggest you do the same for the goal of the blog. It’s so easy to get side tracked with wrong messaging or a funny story and you need to make sure each word goes towards that business goal.

4. Understand SEO

Search Engine Optimizations is a finicky, mysterious thing. It is changing all the time and there are gigantic companies that sole purpose is to improve a website’s SEO. Those companies will tell you that there is no clear cut formula to improve your SEO.

Luckily, you don’t need to be an expert but you should at least know the basic principles of how to get a higher Google ranking.

Once upon a time a time a blogger could load up on all sorts of key terms and you could get yourself a high ranking but that is no longer the case. Google got smart, realizing people don’t care about keywords. They want quality content so Google started shifting their algorithms to reflect that.

The best thing you can do is to have great content on your site and link it to other great content. Usually that takes time to build up, but if you chip away at it day after day, you’ll eventually get there.

written by Joel Mark Harris

I’m an award-wining freelance writer, editor and consultant. I’ve written two novels and produced and wrote an award-winning film that was sold to Shaw Cable. I write about marketing, finance and healthy. Email me at contact@joelmarkharris.com to hire me whatever your writing needs are.