If there’s one thing you’re passionate about, it’s cars. You love to sit and talk with your friends about the best cars for racing, and whenever anyone needs a DIY repair, you’re always the go-to guy. You spend hours on forums talking about different cars and how to best optimize them for the road, and you’re in a few Facebook groups and follow vloggers, too. And lately, you’re thinking about taking your passion and turning it into a business. After all, if so many people are making online from blogging and creating logos for businesses, why can’t you? It’s 2018, and the Internet is the real marketplace of the world.
The fact is, you can start writing a car blog, and you can make money from it–fast. It’s all about choosing a specific topic, setting up a great website, and connecting with your readers. If you’re ready to start a car blog and make a business out of it, read on.
1 Choose your niche
The first thing you need to do as a blogger is to decide what you’re going to write. If the subject is too broad, you aren’t going to draw in a particular audience. But on the other hand, if you get too specific, then you’ll probably only have a few followers, which isn’t going to earn you any money. Start by making a list of what interests you most. Is it car repair? Is it the best cars out there for racing? Vintage cars, and fixing them up? Whatever subject you’re passionate about, make sure it’s something you want to learn about, too. Readers will pick up on your curiosity and get curious, too.
Additionally, study up on what’s trending in the car world. Visit forums and Facebook pages, and pay attention to what people are talking about most. What do people want to know about? Additionally, don’t forget to take a look at popular blogs, and think to yourself: “What’s missing? What could I add to the conversation?” This will help you come up with the right niche for your blog, and start getting the right readers.
Considering that 53 percent of marketers say blogging is their number one inbound marketing priority, knowing what to blog about will make a huge difference to your business.
2 Know your audience
Speaking of your readers, it’s important to know your audience in and out. In the past, many bloggers could simply start blogging and their readers would come to them because of their shared interest. But now that there are plenty of car blogs out there, you need to get creative. Once you’ve chosen your niche, create a reader persona of your ideal reader. This will help you understand what topics to write about, how to design your website, and what social media platforms to use.
There are several steps you need to take to create a persona: draw the outline of your perfect customer (gender, age, job, etc.), dive deeper into this persona to identify problems or challenges they’re facing you can help them with (e.g., car repairs), and understand where and how your persona consumes content (Reddit or Youtube?). Using free analytics tools is also helpful–and in 2018, will separate you from your competitors. There’s plenty of them out there, and you can take a look at this list to get started.
Small businesses with blogs get 126 percent more lead growth than those that don’t–so knowing your audience is huge.
3 Be smart about SEO
Now that you know your audience, you can start building a Search Engine Optimization (SEO) strategy, which is one of the most important aspects of blogging. Most importantly, you’ll know what keywords to use. According to Moz,
“Keywords are ideas and topics that define what your content is about. In terms of SEO, they’re the words and phrases that searchers enter into search engines, also called “search queries.” If you boil everything on your page — all the images, video, copy, etc. — down to simple words and phrases, those are your primary keywords. As a website owner and content creator, you want the keywords on your page to be relevant to what people are searching for so they have a better chance of finding your content among the results.”
As you can see, SEO strategy determines what you write about, and much more. So study up on it before your site goes live. Including images–which were used 30 percent more in 2017 than 2016–and optimizing them is hugely effective.
4 Have a strong online presence
And once you are ready for your site to go live, you want to have a strong online presence. This means creating a beautiful website, optimizing it for mobile, and following the most recent web design trends. Additionally, you’ll want to get on social media and optimize its use, too. For example, if you want to do well on Instagram–where 80 percent of users follow at least one business–you can use these Instagram Tools to get more followers.
Now that you’ve followed these steps, you can start getting more followers and turn your car blog into a successful business. What topics do you think you’ll write about in your car blog?