Understanding the fundamentals for professional bloggers is crucial for the development and success of your blog. In the past, blogs appeared on the Internet as private diaries where bloggers would express their personal experiences and day-to-day activities.
Later through advancement, bloggers began to concentrate on niches, giving services or valuable information to readers, disguising the connection between blogs and traditional websites.
Currently, very specialized blogs such as Lifehacker and MakeUseOf compete directly with conventional media, and the individuals behind such projects earn thousands of dollars monthly.
However, regardless of those success stories, creating money from a blog is not easy and it will perhaps require more hard work, whether it is offline or online.
This post consists of checklist to assess whether you have the fundamentals for a professional blogger. Keep in mind that most of the points can be established; therefore the list should also function as an action strategy to progress your blogging career.
Get enough time for your blog
The first point to consider is time; it becomes difficult to create a profitable blog that generates a better monthly income without enough time. The importance of time is not only for writing content but also for networking with other bloggers, being updated, collecting information, and so on.
Some professional bloggers manage to generate money despite using few hours. These bloggers already had a lot of time searching for online knowledge at first. If you plan to create a full-time income blogging, then you will need to commit most of your time or full-time developing it.
Expertise on a topic is one of the main fundamentals for professional bloggers
Apart from dedicating time to blog you will also require something or topics to blog about every time you write. You should also have some expertise in the selected topic, or else the blog will be unreliable.
Do not misunderstand me here, but you must have a minimum background and be updated with the modern developments in the topic you choose.
Passion for the topic
Even though you understand a particular subject or topic, fully you will require writing about it in an engaging and convincing way. In simpler words, if you hope to create money through your writing, its better you write interesting articles.
Your audience can appreciate whether you enjoy what you write about or not, and if they love your posts, most likely they will become your faithful readers.
Technical Knowledge
Whether you like it or not blogs are developed using content management software (CMS) such as WordPress, which is supported by databases, found on web servers. Free hosted blogging platforms such as Blogger or WordPress lack advanced features and complete customization.
However, if you plan to develop a professional blog, you will need to buy a domain name and run it on a paid hosting service. This process implies that you will require some basic knowledge of DNS servers, MySQL database (mainly for backup and server transfer issues), plugins and scripts.
These features are very easy to learn and only require few hours to master them. I will write a detailed article on steps required to set your blog and make it available online that you will surely enjoy.
Blogging Knowledge
Besides the technical expertise to maintain and run your blog, you will need to understand the structure of a blog. You will also need to know how you can include certain blog features to enhance the visibility of your blog online.
These features include learning how to use ping services, trackbacks, social bookmarking sites, blog carnivals, and so forth. The good news is that all the required information is available online especially from advanced bloggers who give step by step guidelines on how to include these features.
Moreover, you will also need to have a basic knowledge of search engine optimization (SEO) and how to use keywords to rank better on Google.
Some successful blogs obtain most of their incoming traffic from search engines, so ensure your blog is optimized right from the beginning. There are plugin tools available on a self-hosted platform such as Yoast SEO, which can quickly help you to use and include SEO and keywords effectively.
Writing skills
There are some questions you can ask yourself if you intend to make a living blogging. Questions such as whether you can write without grammatical mistakes, or if you have the ability to communicate concepts or ideas through words are great.
Some bloggers lack remarkable writing skills but have compelling content. Normally, if you keep on writing, you will perfect your skill naturally with time.
Business/Marketing Knowledge
If you plan to generate a full-time income from your blog, you will have to consider it as a business entity. Each productive project, whether it is personal or professional, relies on carefully produced strategies.
Professional bloggers usually have objectives and action plans to their blog so you should emulate them. Secondly, you also need to know basic understanding of marketing skills and how specific techniques can promote and advertise your blog across the Internet.
Web Design Skills
Web design contributes a significant role in the authority and success of blogs industry. Content is absolutely king, but an enticing design will make your audience remember your site and make it prominent from the crowd.
If you are willing to invest money on your blog right from the beginning, you could outsource the web design skills, but this is not the usually the case with most experienced bloggers. Most fulltime professional bloggers research on some knowledge such as HTML, CSS, and accessibility of a website.
Innovative and creative Ideas
Being creative involves how you can think out of the box and developing ideas that your audience will find interesting to follow. Creativity includes coming up with a niche or a topic that interests most readers which most professional bloggers had before they started.
Once you establish your niche, you can create interesting topics and publish articles that will attract your readers. If you find you are stuck on innovative ideas, research on how professional bloggers excel on similar niche and you will always have creative ideas to write.
I frequently find ideas to write by studying how experienced bloggers excel on niches similar to mine. Innovative and creative ideas will help you to write quality and interesting posts, find out new methods of promoting your blog, and discover new monetization opportunities.
Network of contacts
When you have a network of online contacts, it makes the difference between your cash generating blog that attracts a hand full of visitors. Contacts include bloggers on your niche, bloggers on complementary niches, web designers, web developers, advertisers and the like.
These contacts are available easily especially if you have business related social sites like LinkedIn.com. Simply follow and get contacts from bloggers related to your niche from social sites and ask them a question on the productivity of a blog in case you get stuck, or you need assistance on something.
In conclusion, following these fundamentals for professional bloggers will boost your blog to excellence and reach a large audience that will convert the traffic into cash.