Here’s everything you need to know to become a professional blogger
If you like writing and you think you know something other people ought to, you are already one step ahead. Now, what are the tools that can help you be a professional blogger?
Are you good at something? Are you passionate about something? Do you think there is a market for people wanting to become good at what you are doing?
If your answer is yes to all the above questions, you will be able to make a career out of blogging. I've been running my blog DigitalDeepak.com for more than six years now, and it is my primary source of income. Blogging has also helped me launch my own digital marketing startup PixelTrack.
With today's tools and technology, anyone can make blogging a full-time career. There are a lot of steps in setting up a blog, building traffic, and eventually monetising it.
This might not give you all the information that you need to become a professional blogger, but should be more than enough to get you started. You will eventually overcome obstacles with the help of free or premium video tutorials that you can find around the web.
What we have here is a roadmap for becoming a professional blogger through my ten years of blogging experience. Let's get started!
1. Choose your niche
If you are just going to blog on the side without considering a full-time blogging career, there are no restrictions. You can have a personal blog, and you can blog about anything. I also have a personal blog, and I don't worry too much about how it will be known in the market. I don't make any revenue from this blog.
If you want to be a professional blogger to earn a full-time living, you should choose a niche and stick to it. For your blog's brand to grow, you need to be known for one thing. You might have expertise in three different subjects but you, as an expert and a blogger, should be remembered for one thing.
I chose digital marketing as my niche, and I've always focussed on branding myself as a digital marketer. The brand "Digital Deepak" is now well-known among the startup community in India because I have an email list of more than 300,000 subscribers and 100,000+ new users to my blog every month.
Be a master of one trade, and with time, you will be known for it. If someone else wants to become a digital marketing expert, it would be a better idea to brand themselves as an expert in a sub-category of digital marketing. It could be SEO, Analytics, or Conversion Rate Optimisation.
Six years back, when I started my blog, no one branded themselves as a digital marketer so I had the opportunity to brand myself in this category. Now, the market is crowded with many "experts."
You should choose a niche that is neither too narrow nor too broad - where the marketplace is already not crowded with "experts" in a specific category.
To help you understand, let me give you another example. If you want to blog about fitness, you will never be able to get traction by being a fitness expert because there are so many fitness experts in the world. However, if you create a blog in a specific category, say, ‘Fitness for busy professionals’, ‘Fitness for pregnant women’, ‘Fitness for 50+ men’, then you have a chance to dominate in that niche.
I would recommend reading Al Ries and Jack Trout's 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing and the books they've written about positioning if you want to learn more about how to select a niche.
Your niche should be a combination of your talent, passion, and marketing opportunity. Find your passion, strengthen your talent, and write about a topic, which has a demand in the market. If you get all three right, you will be able to become a financially successful professional blogger.
2. Choose a domain name
You have to choose your domain name that will also become the name of your brand. Sometimes people register their name and start blogging. Sometimes it's a generic brand name, and sometimes it is a combination of both.
For example, James Clear, the author of Atomic Habits, blogs at JamesClear.com. My friend Sorav Jain blogs at SoravJain.com. James Clear is known for his wisdom on the topic of habits and Sorav blogs about digital marketing.
ShoutMeLoud.com is run by Harsh Agarwal, where he blogs about online marketing and blogging.
It doesn't matter what the name is as long as it is brandable and memorable. Don't register domain names with a hyphen and try to get the .com version as much as possible. I used to blog about motorcycles at BikeAdvice.in but as the blog grew to more than a million pageviews a month, the .com version of the name started getting a lot of traffic, and I could never acquire that domain.
I acquired a few premium .com names for future blogging projects like TechBlogger.com, ReachCustomers.com, and LearnBlogging.com. It might take a long time before I start blogging on these domain names, but I would like to grab the .com when they are available as they are becoming scarce day by day.
3. Install a self-hosted WordPress blog
Now that you have chosen your niche, and your domain name, it is time to get started with blogging. There are many blogging platforms on the web, some are free, and some are premium. I will not recommend blogging at an open platform like Blogger.com or WordPress.com. Most of the free platforms do not allow commercial use, and you will not own your web-property.
WordPress also has an open source content management system which you can download and install it on your web-server. As soon as I say this, many people get uncomfortable. You might have a question in your mind right now, "Do I need to learn coding or programming to become a blogger?". The answer is no. I am a civil engineer, and I don't know how to write code, yet.
Many web hosting companies now come with a 1-click install option for WordPress, and you can get a self-hosted WordPress up and running without needing to touch a single line of code. Many hosting companies offer cheap WordPress hosting. One I highly recommend is ResellerClub.com for beginners, and if you have a blog that gets more than 1,000 users a day, I would recommend WPXHosting.com, which starts at $25/month.
Explaining the entire process of setting up a WordPress blog is beyond the scope of this article. However, you will be able to learn how to set up a self-hosting WordPress blog by watching a few YouTube video tutorials.
4. Get a custom logo and theme design
A self-hosted WordPress blog right out of the box is not going to look great. The standard design template that comes with the installation is not going to help you get love from your readers.
If you have a budget, get a logo and a custom theme designed for your blog. You can head to places like 99designs.com and get a fantastic logo and theme designed for your blog.
If you don't want to invest upfront, head to Fiverr.com to get a logo designed for as low as $10. There are plenty of free themes available in the WordPress repository as well that you can choose.
Do not worry about the design and logo so much as it can be changed later on. Just focus on choosing the right niche and the right domain name because that is more difficult to change later.
Sometimes, worrying about design can become an obsession, and repeated revisions are not going to satisfy you either. Remember that there is no such thing as a perfect design. A design that looks colourful and appealing to the eye might not be the best for readability and might increase the page load speed, affecting your SEO.
A design that looks plain without fancy colours and zing might be a better option for readability. At the end of the day, it is the content that matters, how it connects with the user, and what kind of value it adds to the user's lives. If it adds value, it will spread among others, and your users will come back to your blog for more.
5.Install essential plugins
One of the benefits of running your blog on WordPress is that you get plenty of plugins that can add functionality to your website. Even huge sites like TechCrunch are powered by WordPress.
As soon as you install your blog, I recommend adding a few great plugins, as mentioned in this list.
- Akismet: To prevent spam comments on your blog
- All in One SEO Pack: To optimise your blog for the search engines
- Mashare Social: To show the share count of your articles and add social share icons to your blog.
- OptinChat: Helps you add a chat module, which will automatically chat with your visitors and collect their email IDs to help you build a subscriber list.
- CSS and Javascript Toolbox: Helps you add Javascript codes like Google Analytics and Facebook Pixel that will load on all the pages of your blog.
- WP Time Capsule: Backs up your blog's content and files every day and stores it on Dropbox or Amazon S3. It makes sure that your blog is safe in the event of a crash, security compromise or file corruption.
- W3 Total Cache: Helps you create static pages of your web pages so that your website loads faster.
- Google XML Sitemaps: To develop sitemaps in XML format that has links to all the pages of your website. This is monitored by search engines to make sure all your web pages are indexed. These get automatically updated with links as you publish new posts. You can have a look at my sitemap here at https://digitaldeepak.com/sitemap.xml
Most of the plugins mentioned are free. WordPress also has premium plugins to help you enhance your website further.
6. Publish your first post
For a non-tech person, reaching this point can be quite an anxiety-inducing thing. However, if you have reached this point, don't stop.
Blogging is a marathon and not a sprint. And you have to keep the motivation going. According to the law of diminishing marginal motivation, the longer you take to get your blog up and running, the less likely you are to succeed as a professional blogger.
It is time to publish your first few posts and pages. Let's get started with the ‘About Me’ page.
One of the most visited pages on my blog is the ‘About Me’ page. People want to learn from people, and when they visit a blog, they want to see who the author is. Make sure the blog connected to your brand rather than making it look like a publication.
While writing your ‘About Me’ page, put yourself in the shoes of your readers, and write accordingly. You might have accomplished a lot in your life, but no one is interested in your resume. Write about yourself but talk about how you are going to help your readers.
In my page, I talk about my experience in digital marketing, but I also talk about why they should read my blog - because they have a lot to learn about digital marketing from me. You shouldn't be boastful but at the same time, you need to talk about your credentials.
Think about what you would expect when you read the ‘About Me’ page of a fellow blogger. You can also read the ‘About Me’ page of a few bloggers you follow. There are no strict rules, but keep it personal, unique, and make sure to put yourself in the shoes of your reader.
This page shouldn't be a post. It should be published as a page inside WordPress with a link on the navigation bar of your blog. People should be able to reach your ‘About Me’ page from any page of your blog, and it is essential to build a strong personal brand.
After you publish your ‘About Me’ page, publish your first post. There are no rules or guidelines on it should be. It could be a welcome post for new users, or you can dive right into some value creation.
7. Install Google Analytics and configure search console
Web analytics tools were not easy to purchase and implement before the release of Google Analytics. When Google Analytics launched, it gave the power of enterprise web analytics to every blogger and website owner.
Sign up for a free account at Google Analytics. You need a Google account to sign up, and it only takes a few minutes. Once you have signed up, you will get a javascript code, which you have to deploy on all the pages of your website.
In a previous section, I listed out a bunch of free plugins for your blog. You can either add your analytics account code to the ‘All in One SEO Pack’ plugin and let it do the job of deploying the javascript code for you, or you can take the code and add it on the CSS & Javascript toolbox so that all the pages of your blog are tracked.
Once you install Google Analytics, you will be able to track the daily number of users, sessions, and pageviews of your blog. You will also be able to track the source of this traffic. The primary sources of traffic will be direct, social media, and search engines. Search engine traffic can be from paid search or organic search.
The next thing you might have to do before you start building traffic is to configure the search console. The search console gives you essential data and insights about how your website is performing in Google Search. You will be able to see the keywords that people search for when they come to your site.
Once you have all the above in place, the next step is to start building your traffic sources.
8. Build your social media presence
The initial set of visitors to your blog will mostly come from social media. If you have a few years of work experience, I'm sure that you have hundreds of Facebook friends and LinkedIn connections, if not thousands.
Start sharing your articles on these channels and the initial trickle of traffic will start to flow. You will be able to see the traffic in your Google Analytics dashboard, and you will have your initial motivation.
The first time I saw traffic on my blog, I had 22 visitors. Since then, I have seen as much as 44,000 visitors on a single day.
Apart from optimising and frequently posting on your Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn, you can also start maintaining a Facebook group. I started my Facebook group "Learn Digital Marketing" in 2016 as a way to build an audience for my blog. As of now, the group has more than 130,000 members.
Every time I publish a new post, I share it on my group, and I get thousands of visitors. I also get ideas for new posts by running polls and asking open-ended questions on my group.
9. Have a good SEO strategy
40 percent of the traffic I get comes from search engines. And without search traffic, I would miss a lot of high-quality visitors who could become my subscribers and followers.
When you are getting started as a blogger, it is essential to have a good SEO strategy. Search engines send you free and high-quality targeted traffic, which you shouldn't miss. But don't worry, you don't need anything too technical to have a good SEO strategy.
The good news is that WordPress, a content management system that I recommend, is optimised for search engines by default. With a good web-hosting, lightweight theme and SEO WordPress plugins, you are all set for getting traffic from search engines.
What you should be focussing on is researching the demand for various keywords related to your niche. After a keyword research, you should publish articles to fulfill the request of those keywords that people are searching for.
You need not worry about your SEO and keyword strategy for the first ten articles that you publish on your blog. After ten articles, as long as you have posted something that people want to learn about, you will start getting some search traffic, even if you haven't had an SEO strategy for your blog.
You will be able to see keywords that people are searching for and arriving at your blog from the Google Search Console (previously known as Webmaster Tools).
You will also be able to see on your Google Analytics dashboard that you are getting some visitors, which are tagged with the source as search engines. This can be seen under the ‘Acquisition’ tab.
These keywords will give you an idea about what people are searching for, and you can write more articles based on the findings. Apart from Google Search Console, you can use the following tools to do keyword research:
- UberSuggest: A free keyword research tool
- Ahrefs: Keyword research tool for advanced users and agencies
- KeywordTool.io: A premium keyword tool
- Google's Auto-Suggest: If you type in a keyword in Google, it will automatically show you suggestions for longer tail keywords. These keywords are showing up because people are searching for it, and there is a demand for it.
Don't worry about it too much when you get started. Keyword research and SEO are advanced blogging strategies that I wouldn't recommend to newbies.
The most important thing with blogging is to get started and get that momentum going. Once you have that flow of regular writing and a habit of publishing posts, you will be motivated to learn more.
Don't do too much of a technical analysis of what you are going to do in the future. It can hamper your motivation and make it look like it's more complicated than it is. It would make sense to invest time, energy, and money in learning advanced blogging skills when you have a blog to apply those skills on and learn from the results.
Do not try to learn everything about blogging right from the get-go. It's impossible. Learn the basics and work on it. Once you act on it, you will have some results, which will motivate you to learn more. This is the hardest part of blogging.
10. Build your email list
Email marketing is an essential part of digital marketing and blogging. It is one of the most reliable ways to reach out to an audience without having to go through a middle-man.
You see, when you have a huge Facebook fan page with millions of "Likes," it might look like you are building an excellent distribution asset. But the reality is that you do not control the distribution. Facebook does. Its users are not your users. They signed up with their email on Facebook. Your "Likes" just hit the ‘Like’ button - they did not give you their email.
Earlier, Facebook used to give brands and pages a lot of organic reach who were able to reach out to a significant portion of their audience by posting an update on their Facebook Wall. But lately, the company has changed its algorithm, to show more ads on the news feed and fewer posts from brands that have pages and followers.
Since brands did not own the email list of their audience, they were not able to break through Facebook's barrier to reach their users. Building a massive following on social networks is nice, but they can never be a replacement for an email list.
With emails, there is no one between you and your audience. Even though a small percentage of your emails might end up in the spam folder, and some go to the ‘Promotions’ tab on Gmail, you will still be able to reach almost all your audience through an email broadcast.
I have mostly grown my blog using email marketing, and investment in email list building has given me the most returns.
The first step to getting started with email marketing is to have a lead magnet. What is a lead magnet? You see, people like to read content on your blog for free. But they will leave your blog and never come back. To encourage your audience to share their email ID, you need to give them something of value - an ethical bribe.
A lead magnet is a content upgrade for your blog's audience — something of value that motivates them to give you their email ID. In my blog, I am giving away a free digital marketing course with 25 videos to collect names and email IDs of my subscribers. As of today, I've received more than 300,000 email IDs, and that's the best traffic generation asset that I've got.
Lead magnets can be videos, ebooks, an email course, access to a report or a tool, a free worksheet or a calculator. You have to learn what your audience would want and value in your niche and develop a lead magnet. Once you have your lead magnet, get a premium WordPress plugin like OptinChat.com or OptinMonster.com to start collecting email IDs.
OptinChat uses an AI chat module to talk to your visitors, get their email IDs, and deliver the lead-magnet. OptinMonster uses exit popups that interrupt the user when they are exiting the website. Both these plugins help you collect emails from your visitors.
You will be able to convert two to five percent of your visitors into email subscribers. If you get 1,000 visitors a day, you will be able to convert 20 visitors into email subscribers at the least. This will help you grow an email list of 600 people within a month and 7,200 people within a year.
Whenever you publish a new post, email all your subscribers - they will visit the website, and they might link back to it or share it with others on social media. This will help you bring a new set of audience into your blog, and some of them might become your email subscribers.
All traffic sources feed on each other, and this leads to compounded traffic growth over time. That's how my blog has grown to 3,000+ visitors a day in the last six years.
After you capture a visitor's name and email ID, you need to add them to a CRM. An Email CRM tool is an essential requirement for email marketing, and they don't come cheap. Almost four percent of my startup’s revenue goes into the cost of my email marketing CRM.
You can check my article about the top five email marketing tools for startups. They are ActiveCampaign, MailChimp, ConvertKit, Aweber, and Drip. You will be paying based on the number of subscribers you have, not based on the number of emails you send. To start with, a basic plan costs anywhere from $29 to $49, which should be more than enough.
As your revenue grows, your subscriber base will grow, and you can invest more on your email marketing tools and subscriber growth. Speaking of revenue, let's talk about the next step in your blogging journey - generating revenue from your blog.
11. Create multiple revenue channels for your blog
This is the most important step in your blogging journey. And making revenue and profits could be the only reason we started blogging in the first place.
Many bloggers think that they can make money from their blog using display ads (Google AdSense). Unfortunately, display ads are no longer a viable way to monetise the traffic that you get.
Internet users have developed ad-blindness, and many popup blockers block ads, meaning most people never see them. Display ads pay the lowest revenue per visitor to your blog, and it is not going to be worth your time in creating content for your blog in the first place.
It is crucial to have a revenue strategy for your blog because even if you are not investing money into your blog, you are investing time in creating content, and that needs to be monetised. If you cannot monetise your blog, you will not be able to fund your content creation, and you will not be able to grow your blog.
There are multiple ways to make money from your blog, and I will list the top methods that have worked for me.
Courses
Selling an online training course is one of the most important revenue channels for my blog. I sell premium courses like the 100-day blogging course, Digital Marketing Mastery Bundle, and so on. These courses are priced between Rs 2,000 and Rs 5,000, and most of the sales revenue is profits. Since the digital delivery of an information product doesn't have any production or transportation cost, we can make significant revenue from the sources.
You can also understand what your audience wants and give them premium content and training. The sale of these products will become your primary revenue channel. You can also sell offline goods that are shipped to people's home, and you can sell training as well.
For example, if you have a blog about martial arts, you can sell a video course or a training programme on martial arts. If you have a blog about cooking, you can sell a course on cooking. If you have a blog about coding, you can sell a video training course on teaching people how to code.
To host an online training program, you need an LMS - Learning Management System. Just like you use WordPress as a content management system for blogging, you need to use an LMS for delivering training videos. I use Teachable.com that helps me host my online training programmes on my blog. You can check it out at learn.digitaldeepak.com.
You also need a payment gateway to collect payments. If you are selling internationally, Teachable has its payment gateway, and they charge two to five percent, depending on the plan you are in. If you are selling in India, you can use payment gateways like Instamojo or Razorpay.
Consulting
This is another excellent way of making money from your blog. Though it is not as scalable as selling online courses, you can start making money from consulting even if you have low traffic.
A friend of mine - Siddharth, Founder of CardExpert.in, sells consulting services for Rs 1,000. The visitors of his blog who book his consulting services get a 15-minute call to clear their doubts about credit card points and rewards. People have said they've saved lakhs of rupees because they learned how to use their points efficiently.
He gets an average of at least two consultation requests per day and makes more than Rs 50,000 from his blog by working less than one hour a day.
Workshops
As an expert, author, and consultant, doing workshops can be a great source of revenue. Workshops lie in the grey zone of a product and a service. Since it is predominantly a service, it is not very scalable, and rests on your personal brand.
I've done digital marketing workshops for big brands like Mercedes-Benz, but I've slowly grown my workshops into a brand called Marketing Masterclass and I've introduced other trainers into the workshop through my personal brand.
The best part about personal branding is that, if you work strategically, you will be able to rub off your personal brand and help other personal brands grow. I constantly invite other experts in the digital marketing space to my workshops, events, and meetups. Though they are my competitors, and some of my personal brand rub off on them, their personal brand also rubs off on me and I gain from it. We all grow our authority through branding by association.
To conduct workshops, you need to rent a space that can hold 20-30 people and invite people to your workshop through email and social media. Keep the cost of the workshop low for the first cohort of participants. Build some authority and social proof about the value of your workshops. Once you have packaged your service as a product, you will be able to get more people interested and this can become a consistent source of revenue.
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Get a high-paying job
I have landed many well-paying jobs in the past five years in my digital marketing career, and I could attribute most of the job grabs at my desired salary to my blog.
When you apply for a job with a blog in your resume, your resume stands out, and the conversion from a job application to an interview is easy. The conversion from a job interview to getting an offer letter is also easy because you have a blog, and it proves that you can take action and get things done.
If you are a digital marketer, your blog is your resume. In the process of setting up your blog, you would have executed SEO, content marketing, social media marketing, email marketing, and an encompassing digital marketing strategy to grow it.
If you are applying for any other job, you still have a fantastic opportunity to showcase your skills and expertise through your blog. And it remains your career insurance for inbound job opportunities. Continue working on your blog even if you are in a job. All you need to do is publish one high-quality article that adds value to your readers every week.
Your blog will keep making money on the side, and you will also be able to get your personal brand out there in the market as an expert in a specific field. You can work for a year or two, make enough money to sustain yourself for another few years and get back to professional blogging.
Most of the jobs I've been to in the past few years have had breaks in-between where I worked on my blog to grow it, did consulting on the side, and had enough time to create and launch courses on my blog.
Publish a book
One of the most challenging tasks you will face in your blogging career and personal branding journey is to publish a book. It takes a lot of time, energy, and money, and is not the same as writing a blog post.
Blogging is the first step in your journey to becoming a published author. Some of the best books in the world have their roots in blogging, where the author used to blog about the book’s topic. For example, James Clear, author of Atomic Habits, first started blogging about tips on growing habits on his blog.
Having a blog helps you have a set of audience who will give you feedback on your content. You can learn what your audience wants through the readership that you build from your blog.
When you release your book, you will be able to get your first hundred or thousand sales from your blog's readers, who will, in turn, spread it to a broader audience. You first fans will also come from your blog.
Establishing yourself as an expert in a specific field through your blog also helps you get inbound interest from publishing companies that might want to hire you as an author and give you a book contract.
Manish Chauhan from JagoInvestor.com who started a blog about personal finance got a book deal from Network18 to write a book on personal finance. He was able to publish the book, with the support of the publisher, and it gave him massive reach. This also helped him to spread his personal brand in India as a personal finance expert. He monetises his blog primarily through workshops that he conducts all over India on the topic of personal finance.
Get clients for freelancing or agency
If you want to become a freelancer, your blog can help you get clients for freelancing. I have done freelancing projects related to digital marketing from time to time and I've always been able to negotiate a better price with my clients because of my blog.
My blog helps me establish my authority in my field, and clients are also looking for experts for their projects.
If your freelancing and consulting gigs take off, you can also morph it into an agency. My freelancing work in digital marketing had a good market response, so I decided to start PixelTrack. My digital marketing agency today has big-name clients like HDFC, Nikon Lenswear, and Mercedes Benz. Most leads for my agency comes from my blog and personal brand.
You can start an agency in your niche, and scale it. For example, if you are good at iOS app development, you can write about iOS apps, teach people how to build apps and sell iOS app creation and management as a freelancer or offer it as a service from your agency.
If you have a blog about UI/UX, you can sell UI/UX courses, training workshops, consult brands on their user interface and offer services as a freelancer or agency.
Remember, for all these monetisation aspects to take shape, choosing the right niche is very important. You have to keep in mind the overlap of three important things - passion, talent, and market opportunity.
It is no easy task to be writing and growing a blog for five to 10 years before significant wealth starts to come back. If you choose the wrong niche and don't have the patience and perseverance to continue until results come, you might drop the ball somewhere along the line and quit.
ALSO READ
Sell access to a premium tool
Just like content, software code can replicate itself and create value for thousands of people without any cost of replication. The key to building wealth using the internet is to create something of value that has a meagre marginal cost of replication.
If you are a blogger and get at least 1,000 visitors to your blog every day, you can consider launching a tool for your users. Some bloggers giveaway tools for free to attract visitors and backlinks to their blog.
I created a tool called OptinChat.com, which helps bloggers and webmasters collect names and email IDs of their visitors. This tool starts at $29 a month and also has a free trial. Most of the discovery for this tool is driven by the traffic to my blog.
Syed Balkhi, Founder of WPBeginner.com, launched OptinMonster.com, which is now a stand-alone company, bringing in hundreds of thousands of dollars in revenue per year.
Creating a tool and selling access to it might be a long-term blogging strategy that might not apply when you start. But you have to think about the rewards that you might get in the future to keep yourself motivated to blog consistently for the next three to five years.
Sell others’ products for a commission (Affiliate Marketing)
We have already discussed that display ads are a poor source of revenue and selling products and services can be the best source of revenue for professional bloggers.
However, it takes time to create your own products and services. It took me four years after I started my blog to create my first training product.
Selling other people’s products for a commission can be a lucrative revenue source. This sits somewhere in-between display ads and building and selling your own products. It is also called ‘affiliate marketing’ and some like to call it a ‘Partner Programme’.
By selling others’ products and services, you will also get an idea about what kind of products your visitors are ready to buy. If you are promoting others’ ebooks and training products, and if you can make sales, you will be able to understand the buying behaviour of your audience and build your products and services accordingly.
Affiliate marketing is the minimum viable product for your blog that helps you understand how your audience will respond to an offer.
Turn your blog into a business
When you start blogging, you might be lucky to make $100 (~ Rs 7,000) per month from your blog. In my case, it took me four years before my blog started making any revenue.
Now, my business generates more than Rs 1 crore a year in revenue, and my blog has turned into a business.
When you start experimenting with blogging, it is fine to invest a small amount of time, energy, and money to see if it works. What you have read here is just theory and you will not be motivated enough to invest years into growing your blog only by taking my word for it.
Take some action, and you will get results, which will motivate you to do more.
If you are already in a full-time job, your goal should be to generate enough profit from your blog so that it enables you to quit your job and become a full-time professional blogger. Once you become a full-time blogger, you will be able to grow to a point where you are generating more money than what you need to survive. Once you get to that point, invest the extra profits that you have back into the growth of your blog.
You can hire more content writers, designers, SEO analysts, and even developers. I started hiring when my blog hit revenue of Rs 3 lakh a month. Since then, my growth has been exponential and maybe one day, my blog would help me establish the best digital marketing training company in the world, and the largest digital marketing agency. Only time will tell.
Final Words
This is the longest post I've written in recent times as a blogger. I just wanted to make sure that I cover everything that is required when it comes to blogging and make this a one-stop guide for anyone looking for the right direction to become a full-time professional blogger.
If you liked it, share it. If you have any questions, mail me at [email protected]. And most importantly, take some action today to get started on your blogging journey.
Your motivation and inspiration to become a blogger will fade away very quickly, and you might forget about it because of family and work demands that are always around the corner. But do not let it get to you. Start working on your blog for 30 minutes every day, and one day, you will have a profitable blog that will become a profitable business.
Remember, the best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The next best time is today. The best time to start a blog was five years ago. The next best time is today.
