1. Consistency

Consistency is one of the most important qualities that your blog needs to develop that engaged following. Consistent publishing not only drives more traffic but also increases leads.

A recent HubSpot study found small businesses posting content more than 11 times each month had three times the visitors of sites publishing once monthly — and twice as many leads as businesses posting 6-10 times. An editorial calendar helps build a consistent publishing schedule and motivates you to stay on track.

2. Content Arcs

Compared to posting on whichever topic comes to mind, an editorial calendar is far more strategic. By planning out your content in advance, you can build a sense of progression that walks with customers through each stage of the buyer’s journey, while telling the story of your brand.

An editorial calendar will also allow you to build smaller content arcs into your strategy, such as a weekly interview or current events roundup. This kind of connected content will keep your readers returning so that they don’t miss an installment.

3. Future Flexibility

Along with structure, an editorial calendar also provides flexibility to your blog strategy. A content plan lets you see the larger picture, from now into the future, allowing you to more easily refine next week and next month’s content based on the results of past content.

You’ll quickly discover the topics that drive the most traffic and that most resonate with your followers. You can then adjust your future content pieces based on the content proven to be the most popular.

4. Tracking and Analysis

Naturally, in order to take advantage of insights from your content and your audience, you need to be tracking the performance of your content pieces. The specific metrics you track for your content should be based on your overall business goals, but in general, you should be paying attention to the content themes and individual posts that drive the most traffic.

Some editorial calendars also include built-in tools for promoting content on social media and tracking that engagement as well. An organized content and promotion schedule makes it easier to track and analyze your results.

5. Meeting Business Objectives

An editorial calendar also makes it easier to ensure that your blog content and practices are focused on meeting overall business goals. Digital marketing specialist Stacy Jackson suggests ranking each content idea for alignment with specific business goals. At the very least, you should be evaluating each topic for whether or not it will contribute to your marketing and organizational objectives.

Resources to Get Started

There are great benefits in adding an editorial calendar to your blogging strategy — and there are many tools available to help you get started with an effective calendar. HubSpot offers free digital editorial calendar templates that you can adapt for the specific needs of your blog or business, while CoSchedule provides a series of free printable worksheets for strategic planning, along with their flagship digital calendar.

To help you out further in building out your content base, check out our article on planning a year’s worth of content in just one day. These resources will help you quickly develop an effective blog and blogging process that will grow your audience.

Build an Audience for Your Blog

First, in order to make good money with ads, your blog needs an audience. Advertisers will be less likely to work with you if your website is brand new and has no significant traffic (which means no potential customers).

So the first step is honing your blog idea, audience, creating consistent content, and sharing it. Here are some resources to help you grow an audience from scratch:

• How to Start a Blog in a Day
• How to Plan a Year’s Worth of Content for Your Blog in a Day

Building your audience is painstaking and takes a long time, but it pays off. To start off on the right foot, you should have an audience in mind, a topic that’s as specific as possible (remember it’s important to be in a niche that isn’t too saturated with other blog content), and publish regularly at the best quality you can.

The more traffic and loyalty you can muster, the better your ads will perform and the more you’ll make.

Find Advertising Options that Work with Your Content

Even if you don’t have an audience yet, there are some options such as Google AdSense that will let you start hosting ads right away. Just don’t expect them to perform very well without any users.

Regardless, there are 3 basic avenues you can go down for advertising:

• Affiliate marketing networks
• Creating relationships with individual companies
• Blog advertising platforms like AdSense

Affiliate Marketing Networks

What is affiliate marketing? It’s basically when a blogger references, reviews, or promotes a product for another company, and shares in the profits if a sale is made from their referral.

So in this scenario, you’re part of an affiliate program for a company and they provide you with ads and trackable links that you can host on your website or integrate into your content. Ideally, these products are directly related to your content and interest your audience. When one of your readers clicks the link or ad, the affiliate marketing network tracks that interaction and logs that it was a referral from your site. When the purchase is made, you get paid a commission.

The affiliate marketing network provides the technology and the interface for affiliates and companies to find each other and create advertising strategies. Many networks offer a variety of link building tools and advertising widgets.

For example, AvantLink, an affiliate marketing network, offers a custom link builder tool plus a WordPress plugin that allows you to integrate many advertising features into your website.

Each affiliate network has different requirements for publishers, and a different set of advertisers to work with. You can find out a lot by signing up and searching for products related to your content. Here are some great affiliate networks to try:

• AvantLink
• CJAffiliate
• Impact Radius
• Pepperjam

Go Directly to Companies You’d Like to Work With

Another option is to reach out to companies you’d like to work with directly. Just search the company’s name with affiliate program in Google. Here’s an example of an affiliate program page on the Cotopaxi website.

Use Blog-specific Advertising Tools

Just like Google’s AdSense, there are many blog-specific advertising tools available for serving ads or adding affiliate links to your website that are separate from the big affiliate networks.

Here’s a list of options:

• Crispad
• Blogads
• Amazon Associates

Especially if you’re starting out with product reviews on items you’ve purchased, Amazon Associates is a great starting point. You can review anything you buy on Amazon and get paid a commission on products you help sell with a referral.

Placing Advertisements On Your Website—The Technical Part

With WordPress, placing advertisements is about as easy as it gets. You can place image and text ads anywhere on your website that features widgets, such as a sidebar, header, or footer area. You can also place ads directly into your WordPress blog posts or pages pretty easily.

Placing Ads with Widgets

Just about any affiliate ad you’ll find will give you an html snippet that you can copy and paste right into your site. Here’s an example from AdSense.

Here is the AdSense code snippet you’ll copy to implement the ad. Either copy and paste it into a notepad or keep this page open and navigate to your WordPress dashboard. You can add widgets by going to Appearance > Customize.

Next, select Widgets from the sidebar menu.

From the widgets menu, you can choose the area of your website where you’d like the ad to display. Then simply scroll down until you find the Custom HTML widget. You’ll paste your code into this widget, and your ad should preview to the right. When you’re done, click Save and Publish and you’re good to go.

Placing Ads or Links in a WordPress Post or Page

Now, you can also embed most ads into your WordPress posts and pages. When in the post or page editor, you can switch the editor from visual to text to paste in raw html.

The same method works for custom links or image ads. This enables you to add in referrals to products and deals when it’s most relevant, as well as serving more generic ads in your blog’s sidebar.

If you run into issues with placing ads, our WP Live WordPress experts can help walk you through it, and teach you any WordPress tips and tricks you want to learn. Check it out here.

Step 1. Choose an Audience and Subject

The first step is simple but can easily send you down a spiraling rabbit hole of choices: find your audience and subject. The most important part is the audience. Who are they, and what do they want? What sparks interest for them?

The most obvious path forward is to create an audience based on your own interests. In other words, you’re the first member of this audience.

Now, pick a subject. What are you passionate about? What do you want to learn about? This is where you should start, and remember that you can always refine and change things as you go—and you should because your audience will change too.

Example

A great example of choosing an audience and subject can be gleaned from the Succulents and Sunshine blog. We heard this blogger speak at a conference about how she didn’t know much about keeping succulents in general, let alone in a state with cold winters.

She used that interest as an opportunity to learn more about succulents, care and maintenance through blogging. Now, Succulents and Sunshine has a huge audience based on a small niche subject choice.

This story shows how you can really fall into a great blog concept by thinking about the things you want to learn more about. As you learn, you can share your findings and that in and of itself is a great blog concept.

Free Tools

If you’re bursting at the seams with great ideas, you shouldn’t have a problem finding your subject and audience. However, using a free tool like Hubspot’s Blog Idea Generator couldn’t hurt for getting the juices flowing. You may want to do this regardless. Even if you already have a subject idea, you’re going to need content ideas—lot’s of them—to get started.

Step 2. Create a Content Calendar for this Year

Before we get into the details of creating a website for your blog, we should really make sure your idea is appealing to you. There’s no better way to do that then planning out your content for a year. This means setting a weekly schedule and cadence for your posts, brainstorming article ideas and themes and putting it all on a schedule that you can keep to.

As you start planning out content, it should quickly become clear if you’ll enjoy it or not. Successful blogs put out high-quality content consistently on a schedule their audience comes to expect. If you don’t like what you’re writing about, the quality will inevitably suffer, and your readers will look elsewhere.

Free Tools

Planning a content calendar can be as simple or as complex as you like. CoSchedule offers a free content calendar template to help you format and find topics and article ideas for your blog. I also recommend using CoSchedule’s headline analyzer as a rule of thumb for writing engaging headlines for each article.

Step 3. Create Your Blog Website

Creating your blog website will be one of the most fulfilling parts of the process. Before you start, though, run through this checklist to make sure you’re ready to dive in.

• Know your audience
• Know your subject
• Research blogs with similar topics for best practices
• Create a content calendar/schedule you can handle
• Come up with 3-5 names for your blog (in case one of them is taken)

Website Hosting and Domain Name

A lot of people understand websites, but how websites are hosted is less common knowledge. Basically, a website is a group of files that you access over the internet and load on your computer. Those files need a place to live, and that’s your hosting plan.

Hosting companies have come a long way, and you’re in the golden age of DIY websites. Before you start customizing your website and creating content, you’ll need to get a hosting service and domain name. Many hosting providers offer you a free or cheap domain name with the purchase of a hosting plan.

Install WordPress

Next, after setting up your hosting and domain name, it’s time to install WordPress. With most hosting providers, installing WordPress is as simple as clicking a button and waiting.

A note on WordPress: it’s the platform that powers 1/4 of the internet, and it’s built around blogging. We sell a variety of website CMS, or content management system tools, to accommodate preferences. However, we’ve seen the best user experiences and best results from WordPress sites and tools. WordPress offers you amazing flexibility and expansive options.

Once you’ve installed WordPress on your website, you should receive an email with your login credentials. These will get you into your WordPress admin dashboard, which is where you configure all the settings for your website. You can access this login page any time by typing in your website URL with /wp-admin added to the end, for example: yourdomain.com/wp-admin.

Choose a WordPress Blog Theme

The next step is choosing your WordPress theme. A WordPress theme is a template and user interface for creating your own custom website. Themes vary greatly, from free to premium, and each offers different features and ways to customize.

Installing a good WordPress theme can save you incredible amounts of time and money and give you an up-to-date, functional design without requiring you to code or hire a web designer. Premium themes run about $59 on average, and provide incredible features and customizations that you won’t find with free themes.

Read our guide to choosing the perfect WordPress theme for your project or browse the top selling blog WordPress themes on MOJO Marketplace to get some ideas. Keep in mind that you can try any theme demo and experience all the options and styles before you buy your theme.

Install Your WordPress Theme

Once you’ve chosen your WordPress theme, it’s time to install it through WordPress. Remember that installing a theme doesn’t mean it’s active, so you can install as many themes as you like and preview them with an existing site’s content. When you’re ready to push it live, you can click Activate on the theme you like by selecting Appearance > Themes > Activate (on the chosen theme).

Read our guide to install your WordPress theme.

Import Your Theme Demo and Customize

All WordPress themes come with a demo design, or multiple demo designs. These designs are professionally crafted by the web developer who created your theme and are often designed to the current trends and specifications for specific types of websites, such as blogs.

By importing a design, you can have a fully fledged website up and running in seconds. Then all you have left is customizing the content and branding. Check out these two guides to import a demo and start customizing:

1. Guide to Import a WordPress Theme Demo
2. Guide to WordPress Pages, Posts and Menus

Start Blogging

Now that your WordPress site is set up and customized, you’re ready to start writing content, taking photos or designing images, and pushing it all out to your audience via social media and email marketing.

Before you begin, read our post on writing your first blog post in WordPress. This post will give you a primer on the WordPress content editor and show you how to schedule content to publish in the future (wow technology!). This is where you can start putting your content calendar to use.

After your blog is up and running, check back on our Start a Blog and Grow Your Audience categories to learn more blogging tips and marketing strategies.