Step Two: Be on the Mission to Discover
It’s good advice to blog on a topic your have interest, knowledge or passion for, but your mission should be to discover what your audience really crave for – audience interest.
This is where you start examining your blog, and top blogs in your niche to discover what makes your prospective audience tick; their concerns, needs and interests.
What do they want more of that they don’t get enough of elsewhere? What brings them more to your blog? What part of their problem can you solve?
This is how you discover the focus of your blog within your niche. It’s where you will build credibility and demonstrate expertise.
The strategy is where you’ll;
- learn how to attract targeted audience to your blog and get them to liberally tell you what they want from you
- discover how to uncover a hidden niche within a niche – and what you should should do when you make this observation
- learn how to get in the head of your target audience to know what they are actually looking for – even before creating your blog or writing your first post
This step is more powerful than you think. It could be the difference between a blog destined for success and one doomed to fail.
Step Three: Focus and Build an Audience Around Your Discovery
Without an audience who knows, likes and trusts you, you’ll struggle to achieve that state of consistent and steady growth. You’ll find yourself hustling non-stop to get the word out, spending way too much time spamming on every Facebook group and pages and praying that you get a handful of site visitors, some ad clicks or product sale.
Fortunately, you don’t have to suffer through that if you work on building that fan base right now.
To build an audience that trusts you enough to help grow you business, you’ll want to use these key strategies:
- Go where people flock together and grab irresistible attention. (this will save you months of starting from scratch and let you build your fan base rapidly
- Write Razor-Shape Blog Content that lets your readers see you as an authority (and gives Google the chance to send you some highly profitable search engine traffic).
- Get to know your audience through the interactions and feedback that make digital publishing such a powerful medium
- Respond to your audience
Your blog can tell you everything you need to know about your market, and what they want. It lets you do market research, create content and build a fan base – all in one.
Step Four: Capture an Email List of Target Audience to form Your Traffic Powerhouse
“The money is in the list” is a common saying. And true.
Your email list is the single most effective tool for converting readers to fans and then customers. That also applies to Adsense bloggers.
- When someone signs up for your email list, they are actually making a psychological decision to want more from you.
- Emails have more psychological ‘weight’ than blog posts. We all feel a greater pressure to address things in our inbox than anywhere else on the internet.
- Email lets your fans feel more closely connected with you. They can hit reply and give valuable feedback. They can get exclusive, in-depth content you don’t offer on your blog. And if you position your list rightly, you can make them get just a little more access to you than your blog readers.
Don’t think a blog is enough. A blog has a fraction of the money-making power that an email list does. Experience in every niche and every industry under the sun proves it: email subscribers become loyal fans and then customers when you run your list effectively.
If you’ve been putting off building a list, every day you do that, you’re leaving money on the table and making it that much harder for you to grow the kind of audience you want.
Step Five: Discover and Maximize Your Blogging Strength to its Full Potential
The full detail of the first four steps will put you in a powerful position. You’ll know exactly where you are going with your blog. You’ll have a loyal audience who spread the word about you. And you have a list of highly motivated fans who want access to more of what you have to share.
You can make a living from selling eBooks, selling advertising space (Adsense, sponsored posts and direct ads), training and/or affiliate programs just for getting to this point. But there’s no reason to stop here. You blog is capable of much more.
Make Your Blog Work for You… not the other way round.
Most bloggers fail to build a profitable blog because they focus on converting effort to immediate result.
Successful bloggers focus on building a blog that will eventually work for them effortlessly like full time, devoted employees.
They see their initial blogging effort as investments that will pay them big time sooner than later.
For instance, I have published a lot of traffic pulling and income minting blog posts that individually attract hundreds of thousands of page views and make N80,000 to N300,000 each and every year (from Adsense alone). Excluding affiliate sales, ebook sales, business and partnership opportunities that come from these posts.
Some of these posts are up to four years old, but they keep working for me round the clock. I put in the time to do the work, and reap the rewards years to come.
So how do you continuously attract an endless flow of traffic and income to your blog?
Here’s how:
- You make your blog posts work 9x harder on search engine and social media for you than they already are. Yes, you can do it.
- Then make the posts convert more visitors into regular readers and then money whether through direct sales of eBooks, info produces/services, advertising or any method that work best for you.
This is actually a greatly simplified version of the full How to Build a Profitable Blog in a Crowded Market downloadable Book. But just by working with the five points above, you can easily double the traffic and income you would have had before reading this far.
In fact, this is a “back of the envelop” summary of how I’ve personally been able to generate millions of page views, built hundreds of thousands of regular blog readers and over 5.5 million naira from one blog.
And I realize I’ve been talking to you this far without even introducing myself. How rude. Let’s take care of that right now, shall we?
Who Am I and Why Should You Even Listen To Me?
My name is Ikenna Odinaka and I’ve been doing this thing, called blogging, full time for a living since 2010. I’m the Chief Editor of a Popular Financial Aid/Scholarship blog attracting millions of visitors and over 200,000 combined regular readers from over 51 countries in the world.
And I sleep VERY well at night because I don’t do any of the sleazy, ethically questionable things that many online hustlers do these days.
I play the game fairly with the consciousness of keeping a clear conscience. I’m not going to waste your time with get-rich-quick hype or “quit your job today, be your own boss tomorrow” kind of promises.
But I’m going to tell you without any hesitation that putting these strategies to work can give you an audience that grows large month after month, year after year and convert into continuous growth in your income and business.
This isn’t ‘the more you look, the less you see’. Or some magic secret formula you don’t have access to.
It’s a smarter way to build an online audience from search engines and social media that will grow your business effortlessly. And it’s been working for me since late 2010 till today.
Google Panda, Penguin and Hummingbird updates has come, like an epidemic sweeping many bloggers out of the game. But the strategy I’m here to share with you has been working even better till date.
I make a full time income from Google Adsense, sales of online courses, publishing eBooks on Kindle & Blog and Blog Marketing Coaching & Consulting.
Before I go any further, permit me to commit ‘sales page suicide’ and tell you that…
… You don’t have to actually buy my Book to boost your blog traffic or income.
I’ve already given you more than two thousand words of free consulting if you’ve read this far
You could take that and be better off. And you have every right to do that.
Seriously, building your trust for the long term by giving you rock-solid information for free is a lot more important to me than making a sale today.
But if you keep reading, you’ll have a chance to get two very important resources plus value-added bonuses that could take you blog much higher and give you more freedom to build your business the way you really want to.