How to blog in 2021. 8 blog tasks with the highest ROI. If you are not focussing on these tasks, you are wasting your time.
As much as I enjoy sharing Instagram stories about what I had for dinner, I know that I should focus on blog tasks with the highest ROI (return on investment).
Return on investment is a performance measurement used to evaluate the efficiency of an investment.
In blogging terms, ROI refers to tasks that are the most efficient use of your time.
More specifically, blog tasks with the highest ROI are tasks with the biggest impact on increasing blog traffic and growing income.
By the end of this post, you will understand what blog tasks to focus on. You will know what blogging tasks are worth your time and what tasks to spend less time on.
Let’s get to it.
How to Start a Blog
This section of the post includes affiliate links. I receive a commission if you make purchases after visiting Bluehost or BizBudding links. If you already have a blog set up, skip this section.
Of course, you must already have a blog to be able to focus on the most important tasks.
This post will mainly focus on blog tasks, so I will only touch on starting a blog briefly.
To start a blog, you will need to choose a domain name, host, content management system, and blog theme. I would recommend that you consider these steps before you start your online business. Once you have your domain name, target market, and blog niche figured out, you can set up your website.
To set up your website, you need to set up your website domain and choose a host for your blog. For hosting and your domain, I would recommend Bluehost, which is the host I use to run this blog. They offer cheap hosting and the best customer service through chat. It’s really helpful when you’re new to blogging.
For content management systems, I would emphatically recommend WordPress.
Once you have your hosting and domain set up, and they’re connected to your content management system—Wordpress, I would recommend that you choose a premium theme. It’s worth it to pay for a premium blog theme, because a great looking theme can be the difference between getting subscribers or not. I would recommend themes from BizBudding, which is the theme I use to run this blog.
After you set up the domain and hosting through Bluehost, connect it to WordPress, and set up a premium theme, you are ready to blog.
From here, blogging depends on your goals.
Blogging Depends on Your Blog Goals
The first point is that your blog strategy should depend on your blog goals.
If you are a hobby-blogger, by all means, focus on blog tasks that are the most fun to you.
However, if you are a blogger that is looking to grow traffic and make money, you have to be more conscious about what tasks are worth your time. And you must prioritize the most important tasks to be successful.
So, if you blog for fun, keep doing what you are doing.
But if you are looking to grow traffic and make money from blogging, these are the blog tasks with the highest ROI.
8 Blog Tasks with the Highest ROI (Return on Investment)
1. Write Search Engine Optimized (SEO) Content Regularly – One Post Per Week Minimum
The single most important part of growing a blog is creating great content.
What is great content?
Simply put, great content is content that people want to read.
Great content is content that readers are actively searching for daily on Google.
So, create the best content about specific topics that people are searching for.
Furthermore, you should create new SEO content at least once per week if you want to become a successful blogger.
Without content on your blog, there’s no reason for readers to visit your blog, especially when you are new.
At the end of the day, successful blogging is about getting page views and sessions.
To put it bluntly, there’s no better way of generating page views and sessions than writing search engine optimized content regularly—at least once per week.
The downside is that SEO can take a while to start ranking in Google. But it’s definitely worth your time.
So, learn how to SEO optimize your blog content. Write content that people are searching for instead of what you want to write. Use the Yoast SEO plugin. And make sure you have quality blog hosting and an SSL certified website.
Resources
2. Pinterest – Create Aesthetically Pleasing Pins With Canva and Use KeyWords Properly
Pinterest is a visual search engine that I am only beginning to use correctly.
Depending on your niche, it could be the best way to generate traffic.
In fact, Pinterest drove more traffic to the RTC blog than any other social media channel in 2019.
For new bloggers without a large social media following, Pinterest might be the fastest way to generate a lot of traffic. It’s not like SEO which takes longer to rank.
If you use the right keywords, create nice images, and pin to the right boards, it can generate a tremendous amount of traffic to your blog.
Pinterest is a very valuable tool worth spending your time on.
To create aesthetically pleasing pins on Pinterest, download the Canva app and start designing. To choose keywords, use Pinterest as a consumer by searching for the topic your blog is about to understand it.
One of my personal blogging goals for the year is to improve at Pinterest.
3. Market and Promote Content Daily on 1 or 2 Suitable Social Media Channels You Are Proficient At
Social media is a valuable tool to market your blog.
But it’s important to focus on the social media channels that make sense for your blog.
Furthermore, it’s better to focus on only one or two social media channels that you are proficient at.
If you focus on too many at once, you won’t be that good at any of them. It’s better to be the best at one.
With that said, social media is a fantastic tool for bloggers to promote their brand.
In my early days, Twitter accounted for 80 to 90% of my blog’s traffic. In December 2020, Twitter accounted for 44% of my social media traffic, which is 42% of my overall traffic.
To market and promote your content on social media, choose one or two social media networks. Create an account and then start doing a micro-version of your blog on social media. Follow other accounts in your niche, engage, share links to your new posts, and find creative ways to get followers to visit your blog.
Although social media can be viewed as a time waster, it is a valuable tool to drive traffic to your blog or website.
And even if you write the best content in the world, it doesn’t matter if no one reads it.
Resources
How to Market a Blog on Social Media
4. Grow Your E-Mail List
Having a supportive audience that checks out your blog every time you write a new post is a tremendous honour.
Frankly, it’s also one of the highest ROI moves you can do.
If you can build an e-mail list with a relatively good open rate, it can create a boost to your traffic every time you publish a post.
Even a 30% open rate and click-through rate drives 30 users to each new blog post that is e-mailed out to every hundred subscribers. So if you have 200 subscribers, there are 60 users for every new post published. If they click 2 blog pages per visit, that’s 120 page views per post right there, without SEO or any of the other marketing strategies.
Furthermore, an e-mail list is usually an engaged audience that already likes what you do. So traffic generated from this list is usually engaged.
Another point worth mentioning is that e-mail subscriber traffic is not susceptible to an algorithm change like SEO or Social Media search engines are.
In my early days, I refrained from adding an e-mail popup. Now I regret it.
Since growing an e-mail list is so important, I would recommend that you set up an email popup to gain subscribers as soon as possible. I have generated most of my subscribers with a popup.
In addition, put a subscribe option at the end of posts and on your sidebar.
If your blog looks nice enough, you will gain subscribers. In a year, you will be happy you did it.
“Email has an ability many channels don’t: creating valuable, personal touches – at scale.” –David Newman
5. Update, Optimize for Search, and Repurpose Old Content
Once you have been blogging for long enough, you are humbled by how awful your old content was.
As such, you go back to improve it.
If you are like me, you will find that a lot your original content was absolute garbage. In those cases, the content can be deleted and the link should be redirected.
But for posts that were moderately good, a high ROI blog task is to update them.
By updating, I mean add to the post, optimize it for SEO, edit it, or just make it more modern.
Surprisingly, this is an excellent way to get posts to rank higher in Google.
6. Guest Posts, Mentions and Features
I have been fortunate to be featured on Personal Finance Blogs and Camp FIRE Finance. I also published a guest post by Sure Dividend which was featured in their Newsletter to 100,000+ subscribers. In 2019, I did an interview for Route to FI and I wrote a guest post for Dividend Power. Furthermore, I have been mentioned on many other blogs that I admire, such as My Own Advisor and This Online World.
Although it takes time to network and it can seem tedious to write articles for free for other sites, building backlinks will help you rank higher in Google search results.
If you guest post on other websites, you will get exposure to a new audience and backlinks to your site.
If you continue to create great content, your content will get mentions and features.
7. Create a Product.
Admittedly, I have no experience with creating a product for this blog.
But creating a product is starting to look like an intriguing long-term opportunity.
And based on my research, creating a product or service has the potential to have the highest ROI of all.
If you create an Ebook, after a small initial investment, it can easily be reproduced and sold for a high profit margin.
If your ultimate goal is to make money from blogging, creating a product is probably the best way to make the most.
8. Take a Blog Course to Learn Something You Don’t Know Faster
Another high ROI idea for bloggers in 2021 is to take blog courses.
To be honest, I learned blogging the slow, difficult way by failing and making mistakes.
Instead of taking 4 years to figure out blogging, I could have taken courses to speed up my learning process.
So, take a blog course on one of the most important blog tasks. It will have a high ROI because you will save time.
One of my blog goals for 2020 is to take a course on either affiliate marketing or Pinterest marketing.
Final Thoughts
If you are looking to advance beyond hobby-blogging, you must focus on blog tasks with the highest ROI.
Sometimes it’s tempting to waste time on the wrong tasks, so hopefully this posts helps to clarify what tasks to work on.
Personally, I plan on circling back to this post through the year to remember how to blog properly.
Ultimately, focusing on these 8 blog tasks will lead to the highest ROI.
In the long term, prioritizing these tasks will lead to faster blog traffic growth and more income than other tasks.
Simply put, if you are not spending time on these tasks, you are likely wasting your time.
Related Posts
Blog Theme Review: (Mai Theme by BizBudding) – Why it’s Worth it to Pay for a Premium Blog Theme
How to Market a Blog on Social Media
I am not a licensed investment or tax adviser. All opinions are my own. This post may contain advertisements by Monumetric. This post may also contain internal links, affiliate links to BizBudding, Amazon, Bluehost, and Questrade, links to trusted external sites, and links to RTC social media accounts.
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Email: graham@reversethecrush.com
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