Blogging: The Difference Between Blogging For Fun And Business

Blogging Definition

Blogging is no different than playing any sport. If you are playing in your backyard, you can create your own rules and play as frequently as you like.

Whatever makes you happy!

However, the moment you change the perspective from playing for fun to playing to make a career, everything changes with it.

What you need to learn or practice about blogging depends on your blogging goals.

Blogging For Fun

Want to start a blog for fun?

That’s great! You can make your own rules and schedule to blog.

You can:

• Choose any blogging platform.
• Write about any topic you feel like it.
• Follow any writing style.
• Afford not to promote your blog
• Avoid the hassle of improving your blog regularly.

However, if you want to be a professional blogger, then it gets demanding, and you’ll need to get into the routine of doing quite a few things to compete with other professionals in your niche.

Blogging for Business

I’ve started to realize (mainly because of my own failures), that there is a pattern that is so evident in all blogs that are dominating search engine top rankings, no matter what kind of niche it is.

What is this pattern, and how can you benefit from it to create a successful business blog?

Let’s talk about it now.

A few critical areas of today’s successful business blogging pattern are:

• Niche authority: Google’s business is to offer the best answer to any query their customers search. It is no rocket science that they do their best to prioritize the master of one over jack of all trades.
• Quality keyword research: The moment you choose a specific niche, chances of finding keywords, which resonates with your target audience increases significantly.
• Detailed but scannable content: It is a big challenge, detailed content perceived to be of high value. However, it does not give you a licence to include fluff.
• Quality over quantity: If you can manage quality with volume would be even better.
• Consistency: This is alone so valuable that it has the power of making you the better blogger than most. Successful bloggers follow a blogging schedule religiously.

They “say success leaves clues” however, it is hard to copy hard work.

How Business Blogging Works

Google rank pages in search results, not just the homepage of your website. Most websites usually have or require only following pages for their business website:

• Home
• About
• Services
• Portfolio
• Customer Reviews
• Contact

That means a handful of chances for your website to get found in search results. Even if you would be lucky to cement few search engine rankings; these pages usually have commercial intent and often very hard to convert visitors into leads and sales.

The soul of blogging is how can you “help” more to your prospects in their buying journey instead of how can you “sell” more.

Therefore, blogging helps you enormously to:

• Build rapport by creating more informational pages to explain your products and services.
• Help your prospects make an informed decision by reading your blog posts.
• Create unlimited blog posts to target more keywords, which results in more chances to get found in search results and increase website traffic.

According to Content Marketing Institute’s Content Management & Strategy Survey 2017:

91% marketers use content marketing as a strategic marketing approach focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly-defined audience—and, ultimately, to drive profitable customer action.

Blogging Platforms

There are several blogging platforms. However, my favourite is WordPress.org with your own hosting because of the following reasons.

• Open-source & Free: You can use, edit and redistribute the code freely.
• Content Ownership: Using WordPress.org, you own your data fully.
• Customization & Flexibility: You can customize your website or blog without any limitations. You don’t get this freedom with most hosted platforms such as Medium or WordPress.com.
• WordPress Themes: Because WordPress.org is popular, there is a vast selection of themes available to choose. You can design your blog at a fraction of the custom design cost.
• User Friendly: This might be debatable. However, once your WordPress website is all set up correctly, it is as easy to publish content without the need of any technical support.
• Google Loves WordPress: Because it is quite SEO friendly out of the box, and most of the premium themes are highly optimized for SEO. On top of that Yoast SEO plugin makes the doing on-page SEO a piece of cake.
• Responsive: We are in a mobile-first world now. Most of the premium themes are by default comes as mobile responsive, and you don’t have to do anything extra to make your blog fit on all screen sizes.
• Plugins: There are over 50,000 plugins available on WordPress.org plugin repository, which you can use to extend the functionality of your blog with only a few clicks, and most plugins are free!
• Specialized WordPress Hosting: Because of its popularity, many WordPress hosting companies offer one-click WordPress installs.
• Regular updates: A massive WordPress community is always working on updating the software to improve performance and make it secure.
• WordPress Support: Because of the massive WordPress community, it is easy and cost-effective to find WordPress support should you need it.
• Scalable: Most importantly, WordPress.org can handle your growth and is competent to handle your growth needs.

According to W3Techs, WordPress is used by 63.6% of all the websites whose content management system they know, which makes it 37.8% of all the sites on the entire Internet.

Blogging Business Plan

“Every minute spent in planning saves as many as ten minutes in execution.” Brian Tracy – Author of over seventy books.

Let’s explore what must be part of your blogging plan.

1. Blogging Goals

SMART business blogging goals are the key to your blogging success.

SMART goals mean:

Specific

What does blogging success mean to you?

For example:

• Publishing 52 blog post a year
• 10,000 monthly blog traffic in a year
• 1000 email subscribers in a year
• Establishing authority in your niche in 12 months
• Building a personal brand in 3 years
• Generating X amount of leads every month
• Achieving X amount of sales every month

Whatever your business blogging goal is, the more specific you’ll be the better you’ll able to measure the results and plan your resources accordingly.

You can choose to have one or multiple blogging goals.

Measurable

How will you measure your blogging success?

10,000 monthly blog traffic by the end of the 1st year is an easy to measurable goal compare to just more traffic. It will help you measure your progress regularly against a specific goal.

Attainable

Is your business blogging goal is realistic to accomplish based on allocated blogging resources?

Over 70 million blog posts are published daily on WordPress alone. If you are planning to achieve your 10,000 per month targeted traffic with a 500 words blog post without providing massive value, most probably it will be lost in the content ocean.

For example:

If you are competing to rank for a keyword of best WordPress hosting, which is highly competitive, running a paid ads on Google at the time of writing this post estimated cost per click for this term is $36.63.

Yes, you read it correctly. It will cost you $36.63 to acquire one visit through paid adds from Google if you bid for best WordPress hosting keyword.

Let’s do some maths to clarify this point further.

Assume you are planning to compete in a similar market then your 10,000 per month blog traffic will have a value of $366,300 ($36.63 x 10,000) every month.

Have you allocated resources to create content proportionate to the market you are competing?

• Time
• Funds
• People
• Learning & development
• Promotion

Creating a quality blog post is no different than creating a movie. It requires a diverse skillset:

• Keyword research
• Blog post plot creation
• Post title selection
• Writing
• Formatting
• Image creation
• Promotion and link building

Cost of $36.63 per click is quite high because of the high competition in the WordPress hosting niche. I used this to give you an idea so you can do the exercise based on the keywords you are looking to rank.

Setting attainable goals will set yourself up for success!

Relevant

All the examples of specific goals I mentioned above are usually dependent on creating quality content.

Definition of quality content varies widely based on the competition in your niche. However, the one common thing, which I find in all pieces of quality contents regardless of the niche is that it helps your readers achieve their goals.

For example, to achieve your 10,000 monthly traffic in your niche usually dependent on the following crucial aspects of blogging.

• Having a niche
• Creating quality content consistently
• Content promotion
• Acquiring links to your content
• Building an email list

Google has a sophisticated ranking algorithm, which takes over 200 factors into account before assigning rankings to any page in the search results.

However, if you are doing the above things with mastery, you’ll be in a good position to achieve your monthly traffic goals sooner or later.

Are your efforts align with your blogging goals?

Timely

“Build systems, not goals. When you set a goal, you can fail to reach it. But with a system, you always win.” Scott Adams

I’m a fan of building systems to achieve goals, which makes it less stressful to attain any goal and always works.

All successful blogs follow some sort of routine when it comes to business blogging.

It varies from posting:

• Daily
• Weekly
• Bi-weekly
• Once a month

Again it depends on your blogging goals, and you should choose what you can sustain as per your blogging resources.

Generally, any goal without a system is wishful thinking.

If you are just starting blogging, aiming to publish one post per week is an achievable goal and the system for that can be writing one hour a day worked great for me.

By following this system, even if I missed to complete a blog post every week, I’m not staring at the white page after a week, at least.

Systems help you build momentum, which I believe enables you to achieve your blogging goals consistently.

2. Blogging Resources

Blogging is a marathon, not a 100-meter sprint.

Review your blogging goals along with your blogging resources—plan accordingly and what you can sustain over a more extended period.

For example, if you:

• Are you blogging in a low competition niche?
• Do you have all the blogging skills?
• Can spare the time it requires?

You might be able to make it work as a one-man-band. However, if you are competing in the medium to high competition niche, you’ll most probably require a blogging army to see any results.

3. Keyword Research

Being unique and valuable can be 80% success in blogging, and
keyword research is the key to that.

iPods were unique and extremely valuable at the time, which was supported by a fantastic marketing message—one thousand songs in your pocket.

Keyword research helps you figure out the answers; how can you be unique and valuable before you start writing content.

Following are the few ideas you can use to explore, how can you be unique and valuable in your blogging.

Unique:

• Review the competition
• Can you add value to the topic?
• Can you produce 10 x better or unique content?

Valuable:

• Do you know who your ideal readers are?
• Are you aware of the language/terms they use?
• Common problems they face?

In simple words, search engines are bots and rely on words and phrases (keywords) you use in your content to match your content with the searcher’s query.

However, in practicality, keyword research is quite complicated because search engines have to often choose from millions of competing pages against each search query.

You can check out the answers of 17 industry experts on, how to do keyword research, their favourite methods and tools to do keyword research that works.

4. Blogging Categories

Choosing your blogging categories wisely gives you a framework to become the Consider your blog your book and the categories will be chapters of your book.

Choosing correct blogging categories gives you the framework to become the authority in your niche and build a personal brand.

I would recommend going deep in your niche instead of going wide.

For example, when I started this blog years ago, I didn’t have the clarity, and I created several categories, which didn’t help me gain my writing focus, and I lost interest and ended up abounding my blog for years.

A couple of years ago, I started a business blog in the WordPress niche, which helped me understand the importance of:

• Niche authority
• Power of choosing correct categories
• Going deep in your writing instead of wide

All this research and hard work helped me review my personal blogging plans and regain my focus, which is helping me stay focused and inspired to write regularly about what I’m genuinely passionate.

Consider your blog your ideal book and the categories as chapters.

Below is how I followed this guideline and cleaned up my personal blog.

My book: How inspiration and lifelong learning can help us achieve amazing things in life?

Chapters: Personal Development, Professional Development & Blogging

This framework is helping me significantly to go deep in the categories I’m genuinely passionate about.

Build Your Blog

Building a blog is no different than building a house, and the end product of your ideal blog relies on your blogging plans.

Imagine building a house without complete drawings from an architect.

Your blog without a blogging plan will be as good as your house without professional drawings.

• Domain Name: Your address on the Internet.
• Hosting: A land on the Internet where your blog will live.
• Install WordPress: Your blogging grey structure, an engine for your blog.
• Have a Clear Blog Architecture: How many bedrooms, living rooms, storage rooms etc. are equal to your blog pages and posts. You must have a clear idea of how many pages and posts you need, their purpose and their location.
• Choose Your Theme: Painting and decoration of your blog.
• Create Important Pages: Must-haves like doors, windows, kitchen and bathrooms.
• Setup Email Capture Form: Your contacts diary to contact your readers regularly.
• Install & Configure Must Have Plugins: These are equal to white goods in any house.
• Setup Google Analytics Code: This code works similar to home CCTV, which keeps the record of all ins and outs.
• Add Your Blog to Google Search Console: It is like a car dashboard, which gives you essential performance numbers and turns different lights on if something goes wrong with your car.

Blogging Ideas

If you are genuinely inspired not just motivated for your niche and have a lifelong learning mindset, I believe you’ll never run out of blogging ideas.

Having said this, here are the few things, which can help you write about what your readers want to read:

• Always start with the keyword research with the rough blog post idea.
• Pick the keywords your readers are searching about the topic you want to write about.
• Consider each keyword a question and answer that question as best as you can.

If you follow the above three things, you’ll never be out of blogging ideas.

How to Write a Blog Post

The final finish of your house depends on the quality of your plans, bricks and materials you have used.

If you consider your blog your online home, then the quality of your online home depends on the following:

• Your blogging plan.
• Your words are the materials.
• Each section (title, intro, headings, body, conclusion, images) of your post is equal to bricks.
• Each post/page is equal to your house rooms.
• Your theme is the look of your entire online home.

The better the quality of the above things, the better your online home base will be.

Blogging Tools

Blogging tools are crucial in creating and maintaining your blog.

A few important blogging tools are:

• Blog hosting
• Keyword research
• Image creation services
• WordPress plugins
• WordPress themes
• Email autoresponders
• Blog management tools
• Blog testing and analytics

Having the right blogging tools will save you lots of time and money during your blogging journey.

Promote Your Blog

Business blogging promotion is an infinite game.

However, here are the few profoundly essential things, which every professional blogger consider to see any sort of initial success:

• Must start an email list along with your blog, so you can email your list as soon as you have a new blog post.
• Build a social media following, ideally start with 1-3 channels, which your readers use the most.
• Start a link building campaign.
• Allocate some marketing budget to promote your content on Facebook or Google ads.

There are so many shiny tools out there and easy to get distracted. Don’t spread yourself too thin. Try a few things and orchestrate what works best for the great results.

No matter what blogging promotion channel you’ll try; generally, the success of blogging comes down to the following three things, in my opinion.

• Unique
• Valuable
• Timing

Does your blogging plan pass this litmus test?