What You Should be doing within Your 1st to 5th Year of Blogging.
This is a critical question every new blogger must answer to avoid putting ones’ self under undue pressure.
Blogging can be lonely. It’s stressful and many times, the people around you will not understand what you are doing. Blogging is a business. It’s a business of writing, mostly, and if not taken seriously, will yield nothing.
The strategies applied to growing a physical product business should be applied here.
I once wrote to you about creating a blogging business plan to help you navigate the beginning of your blogging journey.
What I suggest below does not mean that you will never attempt doing things in year 3 while in year 1. The goal of this post is to help you create a focus, so as to effectively measure your growth.
Here is a checklist of what you should be doing to stay afloat and ensure you are doing the right thing at the right time. Don’t know how to setup a blog? Start here.
Your First year
→ Ensure you publish a minimum of 25 posts. This is very important for helping your blog grow. A goal of publishing 2 posts on a monthly basis will give you 24.
→ Secure an Ad agency for monetization. For a new blogger with fewer posts and much fewer traffic, getting into big ad agencies for monetization such as SheMedia, Mediavine and Raptive is monumental. Focus on getting the less complex ones with fewer requirements such as AdSense, Adsterra, etc.
→ Never get tired of taking blogging courses and more, whether free or paid. However, do your due diligence before taking any paid blogging course. You don’t want to be paying for fluff.
→ Get in on Pinterest traffic. It takes loads and loads of patience to see this start yielding.
→ Setup your posts for Google Discover. This works very well for your mobile readers. Ensure your images have a certain length and width as prescribed by Discover. You don’t need to do much here. If your blog is considered helpful by Google, Search Console will pick up the data for you.
In Your Second year
→ Continue publishing more posts and doing everything from the previous year.
→ Go hard on Affiliate Marketing. Find products you have used and absolutely trust and market them in your blog posts or anywhere on your blog. Remember to use the disclaimer message, informing your readers that you are an affiliate.
→ If you were never serious with SEO practices, now is the time to gradually go back to every post you have previously made and update them. Manually requested a new indexing for each post link to make search engines crawl your updated posts faster.
→ Guest posting and backlink like never before. You may have tried this a little in your first year of blogging, when you had fewer posts. Now that your blog posts are increasing, keep on with the blog outreach for quality backlinks.
In Your Third year
→ Continue publishing more posts and doing everything from the previous years.
→ You may have setup an email collection button on your blog, but you had little traffic at the beginning. You have been interacting with your readers and you can see their pain points. Create a lead magnet, solving one of those problems. In the lead magnet, add the link to a paid offer to the solution of a much higher problem. Market the lead magnet and grow your email list.
→ Start working on your social media handles. You might consider hiring a staff or two at this point to assist you with your growing blog activities.
In Your Fourth year
→ Continue publishing more posts and doing everything from the previous years.
→ You have tried and failed in a few things while growing your blog. Time to give back to the society. This you can do by creating some courses around what you have been blogging about. You could setup a company around the services you are providing with your blog.
In Your Fifth year
→ You can reduce publishing more posts and focus on doing everything from the previous years.
→ Expand your social media presence to other platforms. This could require more staff hiring. Try adding a new arm for the blog. It could be a video series or anything.
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In the upcoming years, you can be looking at expansion or creating another blog or selling the blog for a huge price.
Read Also: Blogging Metric Tools.
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Happy blogging…
