Growing your blog to a successful and monetizable condition is a prolonged pilgrimage that demands your dedication and efforts. Most novice bloggers do not realise their initial objective of developing an earning from the blog. But that’s quite natural! By learning each and every step you will be able to understand what it takes to earn a fully sustainable living from your blog. It may take a year or a couple of years- time is the most critical factor. And during this long drawn journey, your blog will pass through four distinct stages.
#1. Establishing your blog: The first stage of growing your blog is simply establishing it. Your focus at this stage should be primarily setting up good content from the best possible sources. Most of your efforts should lead to creation of sufficient quantity of good quality content for launching a sustainable blog. So it would be a great idea to launch around 20 to 50 articles before you publicise your blog.
Basic blog setup jobs such as plugins and Search engine optimisation is also an integral part of this stage, but it takes much lesser time than drafting the actual content. You would definitely want to ensure that your blog gets enough backlinks so that the blog gets indexed by the search engines. Blogging experts recommend to achieve this by the natural way of getting the backlink and allowing the search engines to neutrally discover the blog instead of submitting it to be added to the search engine.
It would help in the more quality indexing of the content through the natural process. Sometimes newbies focus on monetization instead of developing the blog. But it is nearly impossible to earn a penny in the first few months, so its better to ignore it.
#2. Growing your blog’s traffic:
Once you have established your blog with good quality content, your blog is ready to enter the stage of traffic growth. You may have got a handful of loyal readers and a few comments along with some traffic from the search engines based on the indexed content.
The stage of growth is marked by growth of traffic, growth of subscribers and the beginning of some income produced by your blog. At this particular juncture, traffic growth is much more important than income growth and it is what you must focus on. The traffic growth is created by continuous supply of top class content as well as addition of quality backlinks.
#3. Maturity and monetization of the blog:
The stage of maturity in almost all business cycles is usually marked with levelling off of growth. Nonetheless, in blogging, maturity doesn’t always mean disinclined growth. It rather means achieving the same rate of growth doesn’t really demand as much efforts. Because of this, you can now endeavour to refine the monetization of the blog. It may involve optimising performance of Adsense, signing advertisement deals, trying out some affiliate programs provided you are continuously supplying your blog with quality content. During this period, you can see significant income and savour the fruits of your efforts of the previous times.
#4. Maintaining your blog’s reputation:
This stage is very critical because there are so many blogs out there that did so well in the beginning but started to deteriorate in terms of blog posts as time passed by. The main reason for this may be that those bloggers thought there’s no more need of producing the same quality content in order to grow and drive enough revenues. But they fail to understand that it would be easier to grow further if they didn’t let the quality slip. But this is a natural tendency of giving in at this stage.
But not everyone is like that. They understand that the amount of efforts required in this stage is much lesser than it was needed in earlier stages. In this position, there is decent income potential but the problem is only a little percentage of blogs reach this stage because most of them start give up along the way.
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