Knowing that blogs get 94% more views than websites that do not have blogs, and the number of bloggers in the U.S. is set to reach 31.7 million this year alone, it is clear that blogging is not only popular, but lucrative.
For me, blogging has always been a part of my career. I never focused on blogging for the sake of having fresh content for search engines, but more out of passion around entrepreneurship and digital marketing. It has also been a nice creative outlet for me where I can share experiences I have faced in running a business and learning from my colleagues.
Blogging also provides a creative outlet that enables me to showcase my expertise around digital marketing strategies and tactics that other businesses can harness for growth initiatives. Despite the fact that most start a blog to make money, my main motivation has lied more in the fact that I was really passionate about my particular niche.
In this blog post, here are the top three things I’ll address:
- Why I started a blog
- What my goals are
- The niche I am targeting
Why I Started Blogging
Back in 2012, I decided to build out a personal website that branded my expertise and allowed me to blog about marketing and entrepreneurship. When I first started, it was purely for the passion.
Truthfully, I didn’t take it seriously and wasn’t publishing regularly. Instead, I made a personal goal of blogging 2x a month and would write about things that inspired me based on the happenings at my full-time job.
As I continued writing, I began to repurpose my evergreen content over to LinkedIn Pulse so that I could get more eyeballs on my content. In addition to Pulse, I was also sharing my content in the following places: StumbleUpon, LinkedIn Groups, Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn Updates. I did this because the most I was doing from an SEO perspective was on-page and technical site – I wasn’t really focused on keyword research or search intent.
What changed?
I started hearing from actual CEOs who needed marketing help. I took on some side consulting work here and there to fuel my passion for marketing. Then the work started scaling contract-wise. CEOs weren’t interested in one-off consulting projects with me anymore — they wanted me to take on a more active role in helping them do the following:
- Generate quality leads
- Drive traffic to their website
- Align marketing and sales initiatives
- Act as if I was an in-house team member to build out their marketing strategy
As the requests from different companies grew, I realized how important and effective my blog had been with positioning my expertise, authority, and credibility in the marketing world. I showed that I had a voice and real-world experiences running successful marketing strategies that other businesses could benefit from.
What Are My Blogging Goals Now?
Early on, blogging was more just about having a creative outlet for me to showcase my expertise. Fast-forward to the present day, and things have changed quite a bit for me. Now, I am more intent on building out my blog and personal brand to position it more around helping others start on the path to entrepreneurship.
In January of 2020, I began blogging more seriously for the following reasons:
- Even though I’ve successfully built a boutique marketing company, I knew that in order to begin monetizing my blog, I’d have to take it more seriously and methodologically.
- I wanted to diversify my income. Depending on one source of income wasn’t something that was sustainable in the longer-term.
- I had a vision of making blogging more of a full-time gig because eventually, I’d want to transition out of the agency life and gain more freedom to spend time with my children.
- I became a mom. That was huge and gave me a whole new perspective on life and work. My purpose in life is my kids, and in order to be present and also live the way I truly want (freedom), taking my blog more seriously just made sense.
- I love writing and I love blogging about entrepreneurship and digital marketing.
That said, my top goals are the following (though note that if any of this took place sooner, I’d be ecstatic):
- Grow my blog traffic
- Build up my subscriber list
- Really connect with my audience and add value
- Increase my blog revenue
What’s My Niche?
Entrepreneurship and digital marketing are my two favorite topics to write about. I have extensive experience in both, and strongly believe that others can benefit from the knowledge I have to share.
One of the biggest things I’ve learned is that just because I’ve started and continue to run a successful business venture, doesn’t necessarily mean that anything else I start up will follow the same path.
For instance, blogging will absolutely take time, dedication, and a ton of effort before yielding the results I’m hoping to achieve. It can be easy to get impatient, but what keeps me going is the fact that I’ve become very disciplined in making sure I publish a new piece of content every single day.
As I continue publishing new content, I’ll collect more data, and from there, be able to shift my blogging strategy to what’s going to work best — meaning if it makes sense to go from publishing every day to publishing longer-form content pieces that have 5,000 plus words per blog post, I’ll do that.
Final Thoughts
Being in the field of entrepreneurship and marketing, you’d think I could just figure all of this out on my own, but the motivation for me is in the process of still trying to navigate the world of blogging. Of course, the ultimate goal is to generate revenue such that it becomes one of the main sources of revenue for me, but I am also enjoying the grind and hard work I have to put into building my blog.
For me, it’s about being open to constantly learning and understanding where I can make improvements along the way. And as I said before, just because I successfully built one business doesn’t automatically mean it’ll happen as quickly as it did before.
That being said, I hope that those who subscribe to my blog find value as they venture into the path of entrepreneurship and digital marketing for themselves. This is about taking on the journey, being able to provide my readers with lessons I’ve learned so they don’t make the same mistakes I’ve made, and providing helpful tips where I can.
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