Many people I speak with are interested in starting or monetizing a blog, but don’t know how to get going.
In this article you’ll learn about three stages for maturing a blog, where each stage has different goals for writers.
When I first started my blog, I had a few ideas but didn’t know whether they would be useful to others. I had some writing experience but hadn’t taken the time to translate this experience to writing about niche subjects.
The thought of starting a blog scared me.
I would look at sites with dozens of articles and wonder how I would write that much.
This is a path every writer crosses at one time or another. During those early stages, I realized my first goal had to be to write, not worry about whether my blog would be successful.
If you’ve been thinking about writing and have similar concerns, you’re not alone.
Fortunately the process of writing regularly and publishing articles will shake away the majority of these troubles. When you hit a rhythm with your writing, you’ll find inspiration and writing will become far simpler.
I grew to thoroughly enjoy the experience and, overtime, traffic to my blog grew. At first this happened slowly and then at a more regular trend.
Working through this I saw three stages my writing and my blog went through. Just being aware of these stages helps writers focus their energy on specific goals.
The stages are create, curate and convert.
Create Through Your Blog
During the creation phase the main goal is to generate content.
If you’re starting a blog or in the first year of publishing content, you’ll want to expand a variety of content for your writing niche.
In most circumstances, within any niche, you will chose around seven major categories to write about.
This number is particularly useful as it’s around the number our brains are able to store in working memory, so starting out with this many categories will help your audience understand and recall your subjects of interest. 1)
In the creation stage, publishing quality content on a regular basis is the most important thing you can do.
Whether you publish daily or weekly, it’s important to establish and maintain your rhythm, because every article published is building your main asset – your blog.
Often we feel anxiety at this stage. Are we doing things right? Are we creating value for our readers? Is anyone looking at our site?
I encourage you to to push these concerns aside.
In my own case, my first year of publishing received a fraction of the visits I receive today. But the process of investing in my blog set me up for a rapid increase in visitors further down the track. By going through this process, I learned what I wanted to write about.
If you publish weekly, within 4 to 12 weeks you will start to notice your site being picked up by search engines. But beyond traffic, just publishing quality content is the most important measure you can have.
Curate Through Your Blog
Curation begins when you realize you’ve created a solid number of articles within your categories of interest.
With all this content, now comes the time to help your audience build connections between these posts so they have a logical way to step through your ideas and connect the dots.
The goal during this stage is to build connections between your posts to extract even more value out of your content.
There are a number of ways to do this, including:
- building summary pages of the most popular articles
- creating posts that build a step-by-step guide of which posts can be read in which order
- elevating your most popular content in list posts
- going through previous posts and building links or meaningful tags to create context between your articles
Each of these tactics builds internal links within your site.
Applying strong curation at this stage will help attract more visitors, have them view more pages of your blog, and stay longer.
According to SEO expert, Neil Patel, internal linking does three things: aids in website navigation, defines the architecture and hierarchy of a website, and distributes ‘page authority’ (an important SEO metric) and ranking power throughout the site. 2)
Because curation helps search engines build greater contextual links between your content, it will also give your site a nice performance boost in traffic.
Convert Through Your Blog
Having worked through the two previous stages you’ll likely be attracting thousands (maybe even tens of thousands of visitors every month).
This is the time to consider if you want to monetize your traffic and, if so, how.
There are many different strategies to do this. A few common ones include:
- email list building
- running Google Ad Sense advertising on your site
- generating affiliate revenue by positioning third party products
- selling your own products (physical or digital) to your audience
- generating leads through your website for offline businesses
Macro and Micro Conversion Points
When thinking about conversion, it’s important to think about your macro and micro conversion points.
Macro events are those that we traditionally think of within e-commerce, such as a product purchase and shopping carts.
Micro events are all of those actions that occur before these macro events, which contribute to the macro events. These events represent a user’s potential desire in your product and, overtime, may accumulate toward a macro event.
Examples of micro conversion events can include:
- growing repeat traffic
- traffic from social campaigns / postings
- subscribing to a newsletter
- spending a certain amount of time on an important page
- following a specific pathway from one page to the next
- adding a comment on an article
- adding a product to a wish list
The great thing about micro conversion events is you can establish these even if you’re not selling anything on your site, as a way to measure engagement of your audience.
A Word About Monetization
Many people think that the ultimate goal of a blog is to directly monetize it. But that’s not necessarily the case.
I’ve seen a lot of people rush to monetize their site, only to crowd their pages with advertisements, which put off their readers.
There are many ways successful blogs also generate indirect gains.
For example, blogs can build credibility and expertise in a specific niche, allowing the writer to reach hundreds of thousands of people they otherwise wouldn’t have access to. While this isn’t direct revenue, the indirect benefits can be significant.
And there are other goals connected with blogging – learning, self-expression, creativity, etc – that might not have a direct commercial aim.
You’ll find lots of articles online about how to monetize your blog.
My advice would be to carefully consider these relative to the purpose of your site and your audience, because it’s easy to lose an audience and far more difficult to build one.
Apply The 3 Stages
In all of the three stages above – creating, curating and converting – it’s possible to jump between all three at the same time.
For example, there’s no reason you couldn’t think about monetizing your blog (stage 3), while you are creating content (stage 1). You’ll just have fewer raw materials available to you until you progress more fully through each stage.
And I’ve found thinking about each stage helpful in focusing my goals each year.
I hope this advice is useful to you. If you are thinking about starting a blog or doing writing in general, you have my full encouragement.
It is one of the very best ways to learn about what interests you. You’ll be amazed by how readers reach out to you. You may even discover a new career in the process.
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