Creating a personal blog is still a viable opportunity to build your own audience, and if that audience becomes large enough, your little personal blog could very easily become a professional endeavor.
There are so many modern-day celebrities and online personalities who got their start by creating their own blog where they could write about whatever they want.
When blog writing is passionate, informative, entertaining, or a combination of all three of these qualities, readers connect with that content and might even feel a sense of attachment to it.
That said, the sheer number of blogs was enormous ten years ago, and it has only grown since then. This means that competition to attract attention to your own blog can be very difficult.
Your blog needs to stand out from all the rest if you want to build an audience that will keep coming back week after week.
Let's look at how to get a blog noticed online so that you can increase the size of your audience and potentially monetize your content.
On the face of it, you might think it's a great idea to create an all-purpose blog that talks about anything and everything. After all, shouldn't that mean that almost anyone can enjoy your blog when they happen upon it?
Well, yes and no. There's certainly value to posting easygoing content that is of general interest. But for a small blog, there are a few key problems with this approach.
For one, there are already many large sites out there, blogs or otherwise, that already execute this approach to perfection. Just look at any major news site as an example.
Modern-day news websites don't just offer breaking news to their readers and leave it at that. If that were the case, only a select few kinds of people would return to the site on a regular basis. Other readers who might not want to confront the news so frequently might not visit at all.
So, instead, many news sites today don't stop at coverage of current events. They also offer travel writing and recipes and movie reviews and tech reviews and editorial writing as well.
In other words, if you try to compete in this area, you probably won't have the time or the resources to draw viewers away from those big sites.
Another key problem with the all-purpose approach to blog writing is that of marketing. Only a few major brands can successfully market a product to all demographics in existence.
Your product, your blog, will perform much better if it's a boutique product, meaning it should appeal to a specific audience.
For example, maybe you like to write on your blog about fashion, cars, and cooking. You might get some viewers who are interested in one of these topics, but the chance that they'll be interested in all three and want to hear your take on all these subjects is much slimmer.
Take a look at your blog and ask yourself this question: does it have a clear identity?
If the answer is no, it doesn't mean that your site is doomed. There's always a chance of finding success. But it does mean that the branding of your blog is less than ideal.
If you focus your content on specific subject matter that a specific audience will really connect with, then it will be much easier to grow your audience.
Even if writing for your blog isn't your main source of income, the growth of that blog is largely dependent on your ability to provide content and to provide that content consistently.
It's hard for people to connect with a brand when they only hear from that brand on a sporadic basis.
Think of this dynamic like a friendship. If you have a friend who only reaches out to you once every three years, you probably won't be thinking about that friend very often in between those moments of contact.
But if you have another friend who calls you once a week, you're probably going to think of that friend pretty frequently and maybe even look forward to your next conversation.
Your blog should have that second kind of relationship with its audience. Rather than only posting every once in a while, when you really feel like it, try to set a steady schedule for your posts.
In fact, if you're using a publishing platform like WordPress, you can even schedule out a lot of content in advance so that you don't need to manually post each one on a steady basis.
If your audience finds new content every time they visit the website, then they're more likely to keep coming back, lest they miss out on a fun new post.
Now wait a minute, we were just talking about making content for a specific audience. What exactly do we mean by providing a variety of content? Isn't that a contradiction?
Not exactly. Actually, what we mean by a variety of content is content that's not just text-based posts.
Sure, blogs have always been mainly about written posts, but it's now easier than ever before to add to the variety of content on your site.
For example, recording audio versions of posts or other audio-based media for your blog is extremely easy, both to create and to post online.
In fact, if you want to make your blog more accessible to more people, you could create audio versions of every one of your posts.
You could also create videos that support your normal content, even if they're very short.
Not only does offering a variety of content keep viewers engaged in your website and motivate to visit again, it also gives an impression of overall quality and production value.
Having a variety of different content immediately makes your blog stand out from many others that are still offering only long text posts and nothing else, and online, standing out is everything.
