It’s very easy to complicate the act of blogging.
In fact, it’s what most people do.
I should know as I’ve helped over 2,000 bloggers succeed. And it wasn’t without its challenges.
Lucky for both of us I’ve simplified blogging to a couple of repeatable steps.
Blogging made easy. As promised.
These steps have helped me create 8 different blogs across varying niches that make/made (sold them, gave them away to my students) over $1,000 a month.
In this post, I want to show you these steps so you have a better idea of what you can do to make blogging as easy as possible for you while also making money.
Because that’s the big thing.
If you don’t care about making money with your blog then you don’t need to read any further. Just create a blog and start writing.
That’s it.
However, if you’re serious about this and see blogging as a business, then you’ll want to make sure you follow certain steps to give yourself the best shot at success.
Blogging Made Easy in 4 Simple Steps
Some of you reading this will not want to follow some of these steps because you’re set in your ways.
That’s fine, but don’t yell at me and say these steps do not work.
You can’t avoid ingredients in the recipe and then complain that the finished product taste different.
We good?
Awesome.
Let’s begin.
Oh sorry, let me mention one more thing. I’m not saying these are the only steps to follow to create a successful blog that makes money. You can do other tactics but these steps are the easiest path to creating a blog that makes money.
1. Choose a Popular Niche
Right away this is where I can start to lose some people because a lot of people want to write about what they want to write about it.
It doesn’t matter if it’s a popular topic or not.
The reason why I suggest you stick to a popular topic is
If I choose to write about Keto, then I know there are millions of people looking up topics on Keto so I have a good chance of getting a lot of people to my site.
However, if I’m writing about the Kiwi Spinach Diet (I don’t think this exists) then I’m going to struggle to get people and therefore struggle to make money.
How do you find popular niches?
I stick with what is doing well on Pinterest.
The reason why is because Pinterest is a great way to get started with traffic building because there is no wait time. You can start pinning on day 1 and you might start receiving traffic on the first day.
Usually it takes a couple of days assuming you’re doing everything else right, but once things start going, they really start going.
Here is a snapshot of one of my blogs that I work on with my Brand Manager. It’s Party Plan Party:
This is the first full month of the blog’s existence. Almost 6,000 pageviews from scratch which isn’t bad at all.
If all things work out we should get to 100,000 pageviews a month in just a couple of months.
This can only happen because we chose a popular niche on Pinterest and focused our content around that niche.
So how do you find these niches on Pinterest?
It’s pretty simple. You go onto Pinterest and search around for topics. Look at the pins in those topics and see the number of repins a pin gets.
The higher the repins, the more popular the pin and it’s a good sign that the niche is popular as well.
You also need to consider when the pin was published. If you see something with 2,000 repins but it was pinned 5 years ago that isn’t a sign of a popular post.
Looking at the example above you can see that the Pin is only a couple of months old (I’m writing the first version of this post on July 31st 2018) and it already has 5,000 repins.
That lets me know that there is potential in the gardening niche.
I want to look for a couple more pins within that niche to verify but this a good sign.
How many repins should you be looking for?
Well, it’s niche dependent but if you find a niche that interests you and you can’t find pins less than a year old with over 1,000 repins then you might want to reconsider the niche.
Once you find your niche it’s on to the next step.
2. Gather Popular Content
You don’t even have to leave Pinterest for this!
You can simply search for the popular pins in your chosen niche and collect the topics that are doing well.
You can spend hours doing this and come up with dozens or hundreds of topics to write about.
3. Set Up Your Blog and Start Writing
I’ll skip the set up part and focus on the writing.
You have a list of topics that are popular, now you just need to write your version of those topics.
Blogging doesn’t mean you think of original topic.
Blogging means you write the content that your audience wants and it’s much easier to know what that content is by seeing what works for others.
This is another step that some people want to avoid because they truly believe they need the world’s most original content ideas.
That’s fine, it’s just going to make your life more difficult.
I’m all for coming up with original content ideas after you understand your audience.
It doesn’t make sense to write stuff that you HOPE your audience likes.
Stick with the stuff you know
4. Back to Pinterest
Remember Pinterest?
Of course you do!
Well, now that you’ve written the content that you’ve seen work well on Pinterest it’s time to get your versions up.
And that’s it.
4 steps to make blogging easier for you.
Simple Steps for Simple Blogging
As you can see, you don’t need to make blogging difficult. While there are nuances throughout each step, those are the 4 big steps that I follow whenever I want to create a blog that acts as a revenue engine for my business.
If you’re interested in diving deeper into blogging then check out the Blog Simple Guide.