If you are looking to make income from your blogging, you need to turn your efforts online into dollars by readers consuming either your products and services or the products and services of others that you are affiliated with (or both).
By targeting a buying public, you can maximize your profits and insure a high conversion rate on your blog. We all want to be able to turn words into dollars right?! Often wonder how some blogs can make a killing without an enormous amount of traffic? Well…you better make sure you are attracting the right audience to accomplish that…so let’s break it down for real success.
The Beginning Blogger Trap
Before we jump into the exact groups you want to target, let’s talk a little bit about a route that beginning bloggers take that is the completely wrong road. I see a lot of beginning bloggers striving for approval from the pros in their field. If they are blogging about blogging, they are trying to get top bloggers to comment on their articles. If they are blogging about home improvement, they are writing articles that would even make Bob Vila drop his jaw. This is a trap you need to avoid!
When you are jumping after the approval of top pro’s in your niche, you are tailoring your articles to a group of producers…not consumers.
For your blog to be successful, you need to be impressing a group of readers that will actually pull out the plastic and consume products and services…not ones that are creating their own.
Stop writing over the top, complicated articles to inflate your own self worth by trying to gain the approval of professionals if you want to make money with your blogging.
The 2 Groups You Should Be Targeting With Your Writing
There are two groups of people that you should be targeting with your writing style and language in your blog articles.
- Beginners
- Intermediates
Why? Because they are looking for solutions to their problems within your niche. They need to buy your information and services to bring their game to a whole new level. When you start delivering on those promises by providing high quality recommendations and products, they will become repeat visitors and consumers of your recommendations and content. See how the cycle works?
How Do I Attract That Audience With My Writing?
There are several ways you can attract the beginning to intermediate audience, but here are a couple of sure fire ways to get you up and rolling.
1. Talk Simple But Not “Down”
When I write my blog articles, I try to make sure that 90% of my readers will completely understand everything in the article. If there are terms or ideas that are on a more advanced level, I go out of my way to either explain that point further or provide a resource where that explanation can be found (most likely on my blog). When you let the ego jump in and try to sound too much like an expert, you lose your target audience. Your blog articles should teach and inform, but also be careful not to sound condescending. No one likes to be talked down to but 99% of readers love to learn something new.
2. Provide Static Resources
Are there complicated terms within your niche? Is there standard/staple content that everyone should know within your niche (even if you take it for granted)? By creating resources through blog articles or static pages, you are helping those readers that may not completely understand the concepts and ideas within your niche topic. When you solve this issue for your beginning readers, you become their resource online. As a bonus, when you need to point your reader in the direction of an explanation of complicated terms or ideas in your articles, you are pointing them to a page on your blog instead of an outside resource.
3. Provide Most of Your Information for Free
Beginner and intermediate readers of your blog are going to be gun shy of paid content and products. Chances are they have been down a bad road or two online, so there defenses are up on why they shouldn’t spend any money on what you have produced or what you are promoting. By providing high quality content for free via articles, ebooks and newsletters, you can build up your own reputation to insure that your paid products convert well in the long run. Your reputation with your new readers starts from day one. Get started on the right foot with over the top, quality content for free. The conversion down the road will be much easier.
The #1 Reason Why Blogs Make Money
They solve the problems of people within a given niche and do so in real time with a developed relationship. If you are constantly on the search to impress the pros…you will never end up being one.
Blogs make money because they fulfill a need.
When you start tailoring your blog and content with the idea of making money online, keep in mind your target buying audience. After all…they are the ones that generate the dollars.
9 comments
Funny I started bogging and writing “simple” posts, because at the time thats what I knew, and now I still do that because thats what my readers like, simple str8 to the point posts that help them with a specific thing, and if I can throw in some funny thats a bonus..lol
Pros dont need your advice or services, they have been there done that..
I chase people that don’t even have a blog yet, that way I can offer help and support on every task of starting and growing a blog.
Throwing in a little bit of humor is something I need to do more of. It is how I am in real life…but for some reason…I stay really serious in my writing. Thanks for the reminder!
This is very specific for bloggers who write for other bloggers or beginners. And there are blogs like mine, for all kind of people, who are interested with succeeding and learning of other people’s success.
My blog is written for beginning bloggers, and the truth of your post recently was demonstrated for me. Even though most all of my posts are written with beginners in mind, when I specifically wrote a post that talks about how blogging gets easier if you just keep going, many readers I’d never heard from jumped into the conversation. What I got from this is that beginners are hungry for hope and encouragement because things like self-doubt, discouragement, fear, overwhelm, etc. are very real problems to them.
Absolutely. It’s funny what kind of articles will bring a lurker to commenter status isn’t it?!
Nice article… Very well explained, Thanks for the post mate!
-Deepu
Great stuff man. So much of this information rings true especially in light of some the new things we are introducing on our website/blog. I think creating a conversation is one of the most key points in writing. Keeping it simple can really help in accomplishing that.
I’m so glad I chanced upon this site. This article is very honest, very straight to the point, and of course, helpful again.
I couldn’t agree more, if you want to make money with a blog you have to fill a need, and you have to have useful content. Without it you’ll just be drowning in a sea of similarly un-useful sites that can’t figure out why they’re not making any money.