Blogging is a good career option for women. Here’s how you can make money from it
Blogger Puspanjalee Das Dutta tells us why blogging is a good career option for women and how to be good at it - using search engine optimisation.
In India, unconventional careers that do not involve going to an office for at least eight hours a day are often looked down upon. But every year, a large number of highly qualified Indian women willingly or unwillingly leave their jobs, and decide to work from home. Lots of these women are new mothers who take a break or leave their jobs permanently to look after their children. However, as they find their feet as new mothers and realise they have more time on their hands, it also becomes tedious to stay at home and not do anything.
Five years ago, I was in the same position when I had my baby. I left my job and was desperate to do something of my own. I understood that all the online work from home jobs are mostly scams or ridiculously underpaid. It was then that I turned to blogging.
Blogging: a lucrative career
Blogging is fun and the best thing about it is that it can be turned into a lucrative career. It gives the liberty to share your passion with the world. There are many women who have made it big as bloggers such as Melyssa Griffin who used Pinterest to get more traffic to blogs. Melyssa earns $1 million per month from her blog. Similarly, Ruth Soukup has Living Well, Spending Less, where she shares her ‘comfortable within budget’ life and teaches how to maintain one. These women are bloggers and have turned their love for Pinterest/budget to thriving online businesses.
Making it work
In India, blogging is still in the ‘endorse to get free product/free food’ stage for women bloggers whereas our male counterparts are doing really well. The one thing that Indian male bloggers are doing better is the search engine optimisation.
Blogging is lucrative, there is money. But to get the money, we need to understand a blog’s purpose and how to attract money. Blogs were essentially created to share information/knowledge. With the internet boom and people starting to search online for answers, blogs rose to prominence and then began to thrive.
According to Chitika, a popular ad network, 3.5 billion people search for something on Google every day. Almost 90 percent of those people visit sites listed on the first page of search results. Now consider that amount of traffic to your blog every day. This traffic also stays for longer period and take action like clicking your affiliate links, buying your products or joining your email list/WhatsApp group. More traffic also means more ad revenue and sale of your services or products. It also means economic freedom from the comfort of your home.
SEO for bloggers
To grow a blog, we must understand what SEO is and how to use it. SEO has helped me to grow my blogs into online businesses. It has the power to turn a small blog into a giant one. If you need to take just one step for your blog, then learn SEO and implement it.
SEO or search engine optimisation refers to the method of optimising our blog’s posts so that search engines find it and show it to people who may find it relevant.
People search for lots of things on Google. Why? Because they need information or they have a problem or question to which they need answers. So, they click links Google shows on its first page of search results. Mind you, more often than not, they don't even bother to check the second or third pages. Users know that Google is trustworthy and will always show the best ones on the first page.
And to make it to the top, a blog needs to be fully prepared.
To implement SEO, we need to know our audience and what they are searching for. To understand them, put yourself into the readers’ shoes and think what will you search for a topic? Suppose your niche is quick breakfast recipes. You target mothers who need to make breakfast real quick and with easy steps. So, you need to think about how those mothers will search for the topic. The best way to know is to search the topic yourself. Google is smart and it will offer you suggestions of what other people are searching. The suggestion may come in ‘easy quick breakfast recipe in 10 minutes’ or ‘quick veg breakfast recipes’ or ‘breakfast recipes in microwave oven’.
Now you know what you need to write. You can be more specific and write about easy and quick breakfast recipes on the blog. If the content is fabulous and you have put all the information the person who is reading needs, that content is search engine optimised.
Of course, there are lots of technical aspects to SEO but as a non-technical person, I have found that well-written content is always search engine optimised. Before you move to link building aka getting backlinks or image optimisation, make sure that the blog posts are well written, comprehensive, and easy to read. Google prefers content, which is fresh, easy to read and grasp, and has all the information a reader needs.
Before I leave you to go to the blog and optimise it for search engine, here are some tips that will help you with On-Page SEO
- Do your keyword research thoroughly and choose long-tail keywords
- Now write down the blog post in easy to understand language and put all your effort into it to make it valuable to your readers
- Use the keyword to define a title for the blog post
- Use the keyword in meta description, URL, and alt text for images
- Use the keywords in the body of the post but don’t overstuff it
- Link to your existing blog posts that are useful and other external sources
- Make sure your site is light and loads quickly
SEO is a powerful tool. With just a few tips, we can leverage the huge traffic of online users to our blogs. Blogging is a good career option for Indian women and SEO can really help us to grow a blog and make a career out of it.
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(Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of YourStory.)