How Much Should You Spend Developing Your Blog?
Many people love to blog to share their expertise with an eager audience. While blogging can be fun on its own, you can potentially turn a profit if you take the right measures. Yet, how much should you spend developing your blog?
Set Your Goals
When you blog, it is very important that you set your goals beforehand. For example, if you want to create a blog to generate extra income, you will need to set goals that will help make you money. While it is important to aim high, you should always take baby steps so that you do not discourage yourself too early in the game.
Some questions you may want to ask yourself when developing a blog include:
- Do I want to use a free blogging service like WordPress or buy my own domain?
- What web hosting service should I get?
- How should I monetize my blog?
- How much money do I have to make to consider my blog to be a success?
Conduct Market Research
If you are in it to win it, you absolutely need to put time and effort into conducting market research. With market research, you will be able to discover if your niche:
- Has buying power
- Has strong competition
- Is trending up or down
With market research, you will also be able to create an “avatar” of your ideal client. To create your ideal client, you will need to learn about the demographics for your target audience. You will also need to learn all about their problems, what they value most, if they are followers or leaders, and more. Once you have the ideal client established, it will be easy to create content for your target audience as a whole.
Luckily, there are a lot of free tools available to help you research your niche and audience. Such tools may include:
- Google Analytics
- Google Trends
- Google Keyword Tool
- Google Alerts
- Boardreader
- Omigili
Utilizing different social media platforms is also an excellent way of conducting market research. However, depending on what method you use, you may have to pay for the service.
Ask Your Readers What They Want
Since content creation can cost a lot of time and money, it is essential that you know exactly what your audience wants. Although you can learn a lot through market research, actually speaking directly with your audience will yield great results as well. For example, if your audience does not really care for podcasts, you will know to invest your money elsewhere instead.
By asking your readers what they want, you will also build a better relationship with the audience. Once this relationship is well established, you should be able to generate a profit when you start to promote products or services.
When developing a blog, it is important that you know exactly where all of your money is going. By doing the necessary preparations beforehand, you will learn where your money needs to go to convert best.
