7 Essential Steps to Creating a Successful WordPress Website

Even with the rising popularity of online video and live streaming, a successful blog can be a profitable venture. Blogging remains one of the oldest and most popular forms of content marketing, retaining its charm. Compared to other marketing methods, blogging is more cost-effective and easier to manage. This article will explore how to build a successful blog.

Why Blogs Succeed?

If you search for articles titled “How to Build a Successful Blog,” you’ll likely find many focusing on obtaining a domain name, purchasing hosting, and so on. While these aspects are necessary for running a blog, they aren’t the sole determinants of its success. Of course, it’s also advisable to avoid free blogging platforms like WordPress.com and Blogger, as their limitations can hinder your blog’s growth potential.

Instead, we should focus on the elements that make a blog successful and determine how to incorporate them into our own. Generally speaking, a crucial metric for blog success is blog revenue.

The reason is simple: if a blog doesn’t generate income, it’s merely a hobby and hasn’t achieved monetization. On the other hand, how much revenue a blog needs to generate to be considered successful depends on your expectations and the expenses required for your business. Basically, success is achieved when you have money left over after covering personal and business bills.

Other metrics for success may include traffic, user engagement, social shares, and the number of email subscribers. However, it all depends on your business goals. Do you want to sell more of your own products through your blog? Your success criteria will include revenue from those products, as well as a growing email subscription list and high user engagement. Do you want to generate more revenue from the blog itself? Then high traffic and increased user engagement are also important measures of success.

The Path to Blog Success

We can simplify the path to blog success into seven steps. But first, let’s look at the common path taken by most successful blogs. It starts by addressing a problem and offering a product or affiliate product. Ideally, the product is designed to solve the problem. Next, the blog provides free, valuable, high-quality content and uses SEO, social media, UGC (User Generated Content), and even paid advertising to increase website traffic.

The blog then needs a well-designed user experience, social sharing buttons, a comments section, and an email subscription list to improve user engagement. Finally, it accumulates a following of users, acquires the rest of its customers through the email subscription list, and cultivates them into paying customers.

#1: Define Your Niche

When you discuss a topic too broadly, it’s difficult to establish a core focus. A thousand visitors may have a thousand different problems to solve, and it’s challenging for your blog to cater to everyone. Therefore, you need a niche market – a specific market segment within a broader topic. It’s crucial to define your niche before you start writing your blog or in its early stages.

Don’t simply start a blog about weight loss. You can target people trying to lose weight through the keto diet, those who don’t have equipment for exercise, or those interested in strength training. Don’t directly start a blog about gardening. You can create a blog about urban gardening, growing your own food, or cultivating specific plants. Basically, consider the broad topic you want to blog about and find a targeted niche within that topic.

For example, one blog’s niche might be WordPress-related, specifically providing WordPress themes, plugins, and knowledge for website owners.

#2: Audience Research

This step should follow defining your niche. Once you know your target audience, you can start researching all the personal problems they encounter and identify their pain points. Why is this important? People read blogs, watch videos, and buy products to solve the problems they face. You can simply publish blogs about what you think is most popular and create products you believe are most profitable, but ensuring that the content most relevant to your audience is the best way to succeed.

In fact, you can start understanding your audience before launching your blog. You can gain in-depth knowledge through social groups. Try tailoring forums based on your niche, Facebook groups, Quora, Reddit, Stack Exchange, and similar websites. You can also try to form close relationships within your niche. Once you start blogging, take the time to understand the problems encountered by email subscribers and commenters.

You can also gain deeper insights into the characteristics of your website audience by installing website analytics code (like Google Analytics), including gender ratio, age distribution, education level, occupation distribution, and interests, as shown below:

#3: Have Something to Sell

This isn’t something you necessarily need before starting a blog, but you should implement it as soon as possible. “Selling something” can refer to your own products, affiliate products, or even sponsored products. As long as it generates revenue for you, it doesn’t matter who the product belongs to. It’s worth noting that affiliate marketing is the most direct way for new and established blogs to start generating income.

Having something to sell allows you to strategically plan your content marketing and email marketing efforts. Suppose you want to sell a complete cookbook on the keto diet. Articles like “Top 5 Key Points of the Keto Diet for Weight Loss,” while offering visitors a seven-day keto breakfast plan to market related products, attract subscribers to your email list. You can also send breakfast recipes to your potential customers over seven days and promote your book at the end. A series of operations are all very necessary.

Recommended Reading: How to build a membership-based WordPress blog website. There are many excellent membership themes available.

#4: Develop a Content Marketing Strategy

Obviously, this step focuses on articles. It’s almost impossible to copy what another more successful blog is doing and expect to achieve the same results. What you should do is identify your target audience, find their biggest pain points, and determine what products you want to use to address those pain points. A content marketing strategy will help you plan more effectively.

Regarding content planning, I recommend ensuring that you create a content publishing schedule and stick to it. You don’t need to publish frequently, but if you publish once a week, make sure it’s on the same day each week so that your audience knows your routine and can easily check your articles instead of “coming away empty-handed.”

In addition, you should push your latest updated content to various search engines as much as possible to ensure that search engines can process your website content in a timely manner (tips for quickly getting your website indexed by search engines).

#5: Go Vertical

This is related to content marketing, just like social media. You may see top blogs publishing blog posts, YouTube videos, and podcast episodes every week. But what you may not know is that the blogger may be full-time or working with a team.

In other words, as a new blogger, you shouldn’t be too greedy and try to directly replicate a huge blog’s content. Instead, you should focus on one topic to concentrate your efforts, and consider other categories after perfecting one vertical category. For example, you’re reading this article because you’re interested in independent blogs. This means you shouldn’t be thinking about doing video marketing or podcasts at the same time. Doing so will only be counterproductive and exhausting.

Tips: Having content that is too comprehensive is not conducive to updating and maintaining your content. Secondly, website visitors will find your website’s content too scattered. Finally, search engines will not be able to determine your website’s core theme.

#6: The Way of Free

Some bloggers sneer at giving away freebies, but it’s actually one of the most effective ways to cultivate an audience. This is because most internet users won’t directly purchase products recommended by a blog they’ve just started following unless the blog is persuasive enough. Instead, you should provide free content on your blog, acting as a “free sample” for selling products or affiliate products.

When starting a blog, provide plenty of free, valuable, high-quality content for readers to access without subscribing to your email list. When it comes to your email list, it’s best to provide free content in the form of e-books and courses.

Tips: Everything free is a preparation for better charging!

#7: Independent Pages

This is an important reason why I recommend building your blog with an open-source CMS system. This gives you more independent control and the ability to customize a fully functional website according to your needs, rather than just a blog with a few simple pages. Open-source programs like WordPress allow you to build beautiful pages designed to attract and convert readers. You can use page builders, email marketing plugins, plugins that help you manage and hide affiliate links, and more to achieve this.

You can create essential website pages such as Home, About, Blog, and Contact. You can also create independent pages containing links to your most valuable and worthwhile content. For example, a “Resources” page can be used to build a list of links to tools you use in your niche (including affiliate links), as well as any other content you think is useful to your audience, such as books and courses.

Summary

Rome wasn’t built in a day, and a successful blog also requires enormous effort. Summarizing the steps to a successful blog into seven steps is, by itself, an oversimplification, but these seven steps are essential for building a successful blog. This is intended as a starting point, and I hope it helps you.

via www.wbolt.com

Key Takeaways

• Define a specific niche for your blog to attract a targeted audience.
• Conduct thorough audience research to understand their pain points and needs.
• Have a product or service to sell, whether it’s your own or an affiliate product.
• Develop a content marketing strategy with a consistent publishing schedule.
• Focus on one vertical category at a time to avoid spreading yourself too thin.
• Offer free, valuable content to attract and engage your audience.
• Create independent pages like “About,” “Contact,” and “Resources” to enhance user experience and provide valuable information.

FAQ

1. What’s the most important factor for blog success?
   Generating revenue is a key indicator, but it also depends on your specific goals, such as selling products or increasing brand awareness.
2. Why is defining a niche important?
   A niche allows you to focus your content and attract a specific audience with targeted interests.
3. How can I understand my target audience?
   Engage in social groups, forums, and conduct surveys to gather insights into their needs and pain points.
4. Is it necessary to have a product to sell when starting a blog?
   Not immediately, but it’s recommended to have a monetization strategy in place as soon as possible.
5. How often should I publish content?
   Consistency is key. Choose a schedule you can maintain, such as once a week, and stick to it.
6. Why should I offer free content?
   Free content attracts new readers and builds trust, serving as a “free sample” for your paid offerings.
7. What are some essential independent pages for a blog?
   Home, About, Blog, Contact, and Resources are crucial for providing information and enhancing user experience.