The Champion’s Guide for Starting a News Blog: Everything You Need To Know
Starting a news blog can be a very lucrative opportunity to create a stable stream of income while helping the world share important information at the same time.
If you love writing and helping others, a news blog can be just for you. In this article, we’ll look at 10 steps to start a successful news blog.
1. Discover Your Niche
A news blog can be niche-based or general – giving information on all sorts of stuff. I highly suggest picking your niche, especially if this is your first news blog.
This is because general news blogs are extremely difficult to make successful. The competition is high, and you’ll be in the ring fighting against the biggest news blogs like New York Times or BBC News.
So before you start your blog, think about what you’re passionate about – your niche. Then, right after you have that, it’s time to define your target audience.
For that, we’ll be using the Make My Persona tool from HubSpot.
It’s an easy, 7-step process where you’ll need to fill in all important details about your ideal customers.
After you’re done, you’ll get the ideal persona profile generated for you automatically. It will look similar to the one below.
If you can’t fill in all the details because you don’t know them, you should conduct deep research about your target audience.
I suggest looking on forums like Quora or checking social media groups.
Don’t skip this step. It’s one of the most important ones. If you can’t make your content tailored to your audience, you will only frustrate readers and fall short.
Prevent that by picking the right niche and learning more about your target audience.
2. Pick a Host & CMS
If you’re looking to start a news blog online, you’ll need to invest in website hosting. That way, you can have a website on the internet, accessible 24/7 to everyone.
The key things to look for when choosing hosting are speed, reliability, and price.
I stongly suggest you pick Bluehost, especially in the beginning. It’s one of the most popular hosting sites, and it’s incredibly cheap while providing you with all the features you need.
Hosting plans range from $2.95 a month to $79.99 a month.
After you pick your host, it’s time for the CMS (Content Management System). In essence, it’s a platform that negates the need for complex coding by offering a simple drag-and-drop editor.
The most popular CMS solution is WordPress – every third website is built on it.
On top of that, if you choose WordPress as your go-to CMS solution, you can choose from hundreds of popular news blog themes which allow you to set up your blog in a matter of a few minutes with minimal effort.
My two favorite news blog themes are True News and Stylish News.
Be sure you set up your hosting and CMS correctly. They are the foundation of your news blog.
3. Work on Your Name & Branding
Now comes a fun and creative task – setting up your blog name and branding.
I suggest you make your name memorable – sweet, short, and catchy. Ideally, it should also be relevant to your audience and niche.
If you aren’t a creative person, you can try a blog name generator for inspiration.
Also, make sure your domain name is unique and can’t be confused with some other news blog domain name – it could hurt your traffic.
Right after you have your name, it is time to design your branding.
Make sure you use the right colors that stimulate the emotions you wish to evoke.ÂÂ
Also, go the extra mile and create a slogan too. It can be a great way to make yourself stand out and convey your brand values.
Perfecting your branding can be difficult, especially if you’re not a graphic designer. That’s why I recommend hiring a branding agency to do the job for you.
Branding is vital for making the correct first impression. So be sure to nail it.
4. Produce High-Quality Content
Every successful news blog starts with high-quality content. There are a lot of things that you must keep in mind to make your blog posts top-notch.
The most important thing is to create a captivating headline.
If you fail to do so, nobody will read your blog posts. So be sure to add in a bit of curiosity, use power words and make it benefit-driven. It’s also crucial that you tailor your headlines and blog posts to your audience.
You can easily do that by focusing on the searcher’s intent.
With news blog posts, you mainly focus on the top-of-the-funnel readers, so be sure to adjust your content accordingly. In addition to that, follow the 4C formula.
4C stands for clarity, conciseness, compelling, and credibility. Back up all of your claims and proofread your blog posts because even just one grammatical error can lead to a 50% loss in conversions.
Prevent that by perfecting the quality of your blog posts. Make your posts stand out by making them unique and captivating.
5. Allow Multiple Ways to Consume Content
Most people are busy all the time. Unfortunately, some of them are so busy that they have no time for sitting down and reading news blog posts.
An easy way to fight this and make your content more consumable is by providing your readers with multiple ways to consume your news. The best way to accomplish that is by creating podcasts from your blog posts.
That way, your readers can listen to your news from anywhere – whether they are traveling or taking a shower.
Podcasts are a rising trend and will continue to be more popular in the future.
Just be sure to perfect the quality and find the right podcast hosting (more on that here.) There are also other types of content you can use, like videos or microblogs.
Experiment with various content types and make your news blog more consumable.
6. Make the World Know
When you first start publishing news posts, your readers won’t be able to find you and that’s why you must be the one to reach out to them.
The best place to connect with your target audience is on social media.
Social media platforms cater to over 3.96 billion active users and are the most common places where people hang out and follow the brands they like.
They are also the best places to build a rapport with your already existing audience.
If you’re looking to be different and accelerate your social media game, use videos as your go-to type of content. Videos are a consumer favorite and super easy-to-consume.
Just be sure to use the right video marketing tools and make the user experience perfect (here are my best picks.)
You can also run social media ad campaigns and 10X your reach. They are a bit tricky to set up and aren’t free, but they are definitely worth every penny if you know what you’re doing.
I highly recommend picking Facebook as your primary social media platform. It has the most active users and is perfect for news sites.
Either way, pick the platform that suits you the most and make the world know about you.
7. Stay Consistent
If you’re looking for the long-term success of your news blog, you must stay consistent and post content regularly – ideally at least once a day. Doing so shows a commitment and that you care about your audience.
It will also help you increase traffic which in turn will help you achieve your goals faster.
It’s also important to make your branding consistent across all platforms. Inconsistent branding can hurt your sales.
Keep that in mind when switching between platforms or marketing channels. Consistency is critical for long-term success.
8. Track Your Efforts
Tracking your efforts is incredibly important to find out where you stand. Measure content effectiveness to discover whether you’re hitting your objectives or not.
Tracking also allows you to get a better understanding of your audience.
There are many tools on the market that you can use. However, I suggest using Google Analytics because It’s free, simple, and reliable.
It can help you track all important metrics and can be very handy if you use it properly. Let’s now look closer at a few metrics you should monitor to stay on top of your game.
Traffic
This metric is critical to monitor the overall success of your news blog.
The more traffic you get, the more readers you get. You should also take a closer look at the sources of your traffic which can help you determine what strategies bring you the most traffic.
They will also do the opposite and help you uncover what doesn’t resonate with your readers.
Also, be sure to monitor the long-term traffic growth to make sure you’re moving forward.
Bounce Rate
Bounce rate tells you how many people visited your website and then immediately exited without taking any action.
If you have a bounce rate of around 50, you have nothing to worry about – it’s the norm. However, anything above 50 suggests that something’s wrong. For instance, there might be glitches, broken links, or videos causing crashing on your site.
Whatever it is, make sure to inspect it and lower your bounce rate as much as possible.
There are many other metrics you should measure, but these are beyond the scope of this article. Learn more about Google Analytics, track all important metrics, and make your news blog more successful.
9. Work on Your SEO Game
If you’re looking to thrive as a news blog, you’ll need to rank high on Google at some point. It’s one of the best ways to get traffic and make your blog popular. If you fail to do so, you’ll probably end up like most unknown blogs – buried on the second page of Google.
And you know what they say about the second page of Google…
The easiest way to prevent that and rank higher is by building backlinks. Backlinks are the most important ranking factor. This is because if somebody links back to you, it signals to Google that your content must be high quality.
If your content were trash, nobody would link back to you, right?
The more authoritative the site linking back to you, the better. A new site will probably have zero backlinks.
A great way to build some is to write guest posts and leverage internal links.
The more backlinks you have, the higher you’ll rank – keep that in mind.
10. Earn Money
Running a news blog takes a lot of time. So if you’re looking to make it really successful, you can’t look at it as a side hustle.
Instead, it will require your full attention and effort to make perfect.
That’s why it’s important to leverage your news blog and make money from it, so you don’t have to rely on additional sources of income.
The following strategies are some of the best ways to earn money.
- Google Adsense
- Press releases
- Direct advertisements
What strategy you choose depends entirely on you. Just be sure it provides you with enough money to live a life of financial freedom.
Pick your favorite strategy and start earning a stable income instantly.
Conclusion
Starting a news blog can be pretty challenging. But if you love writing and helping people, it may be just the right thing for you.
In this article, we’ve talked about 10 ways to start a successful news blog.
Follow the advice above, start your news blog, help the world and create a stable stream of income.
Neal Taparia is the co-founder of Imagine Easy Solutions, a portfolio of online educational services that reached over 30 million students yearly. Neal sold the business to Chegg (NYSE: CHGG), where he stayed there as an executive for three years. He’s now pursuing a new initiative, Solitaired, which ties classical games with memory and attention training.
The post The Champion’s Guide for Starting a News Blog: Everything You Need To Know appeared first on SiteProNews.
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