Blogging is a fun and most prolific way of turning your passion or rather a hobby into profit. All you need to do is write articles about what you love, then when your blog gains an adequate amount of traffic you start monetizing it.

However owning a WordPress blog comes with its own challenges as many individuals start out excited, with a vision of a brighter future but end up giving up. Blogging has two main challenges – lack of knowledge of what to write and inability to drive high traffic to a blog. Most people tend to give up because they just follow guidelines and tutorials on how to improve their blogs blind forgetting the crucial key elements. That is the ability to create a profitable blog that drives quality traffic and is able to make tons of money.

Here, we are going to discuss the key elements that you need to follow for you to know what to write on your blog, get enough and high-quality traffic and finally use your blog to make money.

Research, Plan and Execute

Basically, proper research, planning, and execution are the key elements in the success of everything. And this goes for the success and profitability of a WordPress blog. These are very important for you as they will help you post high-quality content that has good SEO.

The research comes on top of this list. You need to know what other bloggers and readers are talking about in the niche you have chosen. You can create a document, where you write your ideas, note what other bloggers are talking about in your niche, top headlines about your niche, and any kind of information relating to your niche. After gathering some ideas, you can do your keyword planning using keyword research tools like Keyword Planner from Google. The aim here is to find keywords with not only high monthly searches but also low competition.

After that is done, now it is time to start planning the content to write. For you to succeed you need to provide your readers with unique and high-quality content. This will also influence your search engine ranking. Here is not the place for copy-past, you need to do research and use the information gathered to inspire your content. Use these ideas and keywords you have research to come up with unique topics for your content.

Let us have a simple example, where your niche is – weight loss. Other bloggers in this niche may be writing about a new weight loss pill. You, therefore, need to research a keyword that is closely related to this new weight loss pill, the keyword may or may not be directly targeting that specific weight loss pill. For example, if the pill is called “XY Weight Loss Pill”, you might target this new pill through the generic keyword “weight loss pills” or just target the pill directly by the name “XY weight loss pills”. In so doing, you can use this information to writing unique and original content.

After the research and planning phases are complete, you can now take action. Begin writing your content using the information you have researched and planned on, then publish.

On-Page SEO

Search Engine Optimization abbreviates as SEO is very crucial to your blog’s and content’s search engine ranking. One of the best ways to drive traffic to your blog is through organic search engine traffic. With this, you will not need to pay anything for advertisement. On top of that, you are also able to do SEO on your own without the need for an SEO agency. All you need is to spare some time to do your content’s SEO.

On-Page Search Engine Optimization is crucial for your blog’s ranking. In addition, you need to take care of your on-page SEP before creating backlinks and doing off-page SEO for your blog. This involves first researching your keyword then content optimization by using the focus keywords and even adding more keywords in case the content is long about 1500 plus words. This is easy as you will be doing it when writing your blog content.

Some of the key elements to have in mind when conducting on-page SEO are – choosing a target keyword and including it randomly within your content. On average you should use it about 4 times for every 100 words and should also be included in the content’s title. Your content should also have subheaders and it will be great if at least one header contains the target keyword. On top of those factors, it is also of great importance to use the target keyword at least once or twice in your content’s introductory paragraph and at least once in the closing paragraph.

Another factor is the inclusion of images in your blog content. These images should all have the <ALT> tag. And the target keyword should be used to name these <ALT> tags. This is crucial for the images’ search engine ranking.

The greatest thing about WordPress is the fact that it is rich in plugins that will help simplify your work. So, in case you need help with SEO and on-page SEO, just install the free Yoast SEO, this will simplify and ease your on-page SEO work.

Ability to share mostly on social media

Social Media has one of the largest communities of free readers and traffic. For this reason, you will require this social media traffic and so you will make it easy for your readers to share your blog content. Making the addition of social media buttons very crucial for your blog.  Because whenever they like your content they will most likely share it on their social media handles. This will help in reader engagement and increase traffic.

With WordPress, you do not need to be a programmer for you to add social sharing buttons to your blog. All you do is install a social sharing button. Some of these plugins are Jetpack and SumoMe.

Now it is time for you to implement and execute these 3 key elements of a profitable WordPress blog.