Hey Bloggers! Ideas for Growing Your Blog and Making a Living From It

Whether you are thinking about starting a blog on a favorite hobby or you’ve been creating content for your blog for a while now, there are a few things you can do to help increase the reach of your blog. This is important if you want to connect with readers who will resonate with your blog, and it is essential if you want to cultivate a sustainable income from the work you put into creating your content. Pick one or more of the ideas below to begin growing your audience, engagement, and revenue potential immediately.

Consistency is Key

Many bloggers initially make the mistake of only creating content when “inspiration strikes”. While it can be tempting to tell yourself that you are a creative and therefore shouldn’t push yourself to write on demand, this attitude is ultimately detrimental to your ability to grow your blog.

In fact, one of the key factors in blog growth is consistency. Whether you decide to write once a week, every other day, or once a month, be sure that you follow through on your promise to yourself and your readers. One way to do this is by creating an organizational system to help you stay on top of your blog ideas, themes you want to explore, research, and schedule. An easy way to do this is with an organizational tool like Trello.

Image of Editorial Calendar in Trello Dashboard

Consistency is critical for several reasons. First, it builds trust with your audience. They know they can expect to hear from you at certain times and will begin looking forward to the interaction. This builds loyalty that can later be leveraged when you have a product or service you want to sell.

It also helps you learn to trust yourself. When you commit to creating content on a regular basis, you will eventually become accustomed to doing so whether you’re in the mood to write, busy, sick, or would rather be at the beach. This dedication will allow you to build a sustainable living from your blog.

The Power of Consistent SEO

Search Engine Optimization, or SEO, isn’t just a marketing gimmick that tricks people into visiting your blog. It’s the science and art of using language to communicate with your ideal reader with the words they are using, and doing so consistently. For example, let’s say you’re a professional astrologer and you created a blog to help get your work out into the world. While you might think of weekly overviews of astrological aspects to be a good way of describing what your weekly blog is, most of the people you want to reach as potential fans and customers would never use that phrasing.

Instead, they’d say horoscope. If you’re writing about the Capricorn Eclipse you might decide to title the blog post as such, but not many people would find it. The average person would be looking for ‘December Eclipse 20XX’.

Screenshot of Google Trends 

These are the types of details that make SEO incredibly powerful. To optimize your content and your blog to be found on a search engine, you must think about phrasing your titles, subheadings, and image tags with the words and phrases your ideal reader would be using to find your content – not the phrasing you’d naturally use or even that which is technically “right”.

There are many courses, services, and articles out there to learn more about how to make your blog SEO friendly, but an easy way to start is to use Google Trends.

Choosing Topics Based on Feedback

You may be thinking to yourself that it is your blog and that means you should be able to write about whatever you happen to be interested in on a given day. That is absolutely a valid approach. However, if your ultimate goal is to earn money from your blog, then taking into consideration what it is your readers want from you can be invaluable.

There are several ways to do this. When you send your readers an email to let them know about new content you can ask them to reply with their thoughts and any questions they’d like you to explore in future posts. You could also add a similar call to action at the end of each post with a link to a submission form or invitation to use the comments to offer suggestions.

If you’d rather get feedback at one designated time instead of constantly trying to process it, you could schedule emails to your list a few times a year with a specific request for their ideas and questions and then use them to add topics to your upcoming content creation calendar.

Opt-Ins are Essential 

If all of this talk about emailing your list has you wondering how or why you’d do that, then now is the perfect time to explain just how important building your email list is. The image below is an example of an opt-in that also happens to be useful if you’re not sure how to start and grow an email list. 

While having a huge following on social media or a lot of traffic to your blog is great, it isn’t something you can leverage effectively, consistently, or easily. On the other hand, if you take the time to ask all of those followers to let you into their inbox, you can reach out to them. When you have access to their email, you are able to notify them about new content on your blog. It’s also a metric you’ll need if you decide to form partnerships with brands or if you want to sell a product or service directly to your audience.

Your opt-in offer doesn’t have to be something big like a free masterclass. Most opt-ins tend to be a PDF, webinar, or audio file that has specific value for your ideal reader and that is aligned with the type of content you produce regularly.

Opt-in Samples from Lucky Bitch, Ram Dass, and Kara Loewentheil

Increasing Your Exposure

Once you have all the tools in place to consistently produce high-quality content, help new readers find your work easily, gather their feedback to create more customized content, and collect their email addresses, it will be time to increase your exposure and scale your blogging income.

There are several ways to do this. If you don’t mind being interviewed, you could pitch yourself to podcasts or YouTube channels that have a similar audience. When you do this be sure to outline what you’d be able to offer their audience in the interview. Who knows, if your interviews go well you may even decide to expand with your own podcast in the future which would allow you to reuse your blog content in different formats. Marie Forleo does this by posting her content from Marie TV on her blog and in her podcast so that fans can find her wherever they happen to be.

Your blog is not just a creative outlet or a way to express your views to a wider audience. It can also be the place a tribe of people comes back to, to feel seen, heard, and understood. It can also be a way to financially support yourself if you treat it more like a business than a hobby.