How to Write a Good Blog Article

If you are new to blogging, writing a good blog article can seem daunting. Putting yourself and your ideas out there for the entire world might seem intimidating at first. In this article, we will discuss some strategies you can use to ensure that you are putting out high-quality content on your blog that readers will love. 

Why Should I Blog?

Why you choose to blog is just as important as what you decide to write about. Small business owners are usually the ones that pose this question to me. They have heard that they should be blogging and creating content, but they’re not sure why. 

Having a blog achieves several purposes. I believe these apply whether you’re running a business, a charitable organization, or a hobby site. First and foremost, a blog gives you a base of operations. Even if you prefer to make podcasts or videos, a blog represents a website that you can point people to, which showcases your work. It’s a platform and piece of digital real estate that you own. Youtube, iTunes, Facebook, Instagram, and similar platforms can remove your content for perceived violations of their “community standards.” This is why having a home base is crucial to anyone who wants to create content on the internet. 

Blogging also helps you get found through organic search traffic. While this is a slow process, as time goes on and you create more content, the search engines will begin to index your work. With every piece of content you write, your goal should be to rank at the top of search engines for search terms related to the content. Your ability to do this will depend heavily on how much competition there is and your content quality. The algorithms are smart enough to recognize garbage content when they see it and may even ignore your website if it seems you’re trying to game the system. Over the past 20 years or so, many unscrupulous internet marketers have learned this lesson the hard way. There are no short cuts to writing good content. Don’t follow advice from people who say otherwise. 

How Do I Start a Blog?

This part is simple. All you need is web hosting, a domain name, and to install WordPress on your web host service. We use this one, and it’s is incredibly easy. Sign up, buy a domain name, WordPress is a one-click install, and you’re off to the races. Of course, there are different themes and what not you can use on your WordPress site, but worry about that after you’re up and running. A good blog is about quality content. Window dressing is nice, but it’s not the primary reason for the existence of your blog. Every day you wait to buy a domain name and start your site is a day your website could have to age, impacting your search engine ranking.

I think our web hosting and domain registration is about equal to the cost of a nice dinner once a year. You could sign up for a free blog website, but I don’t recommend this unless you don’t intend to monetize it or care much about how much traffic you get. The search engines will not rank free blogs as high as real websites with their primary domain names. You may also be prohibited from doing things like affiliate marketing or selling ad space.

What Should I Blog About?

You have taken the first step by buying some digital real estate and starting a blog. Next comes the more challenging question of what to write about. To determine this, first, decide who you are writing for. Are they like you? Are they a different gender or age? What are their interests and concerns? All the questions help you understand “your avatar” customer. This is a theoretical representation of who is viewing your work. Here at JPCashFlow.com, I assume that most of my readers are in their late 20s to early 50s, middle or upper-middle-class, male, and possibly military veterans or military supporters. They have a day job, but they want to learn how to make money outside of it through business or investing. They dream of achieving financial independence through multiple streams of income and ideally those of a more passive variety. Of course, that doesn’t describe everyone who visits our site, but it’s a general idea of who I am likely talking to. If my avatar doesn’t describe you, please let me know in the comments! I always like to know more about who we are talking to here on our site and what their goals are.

Using Peter and I’s website here at JPCashFlow as an example again, we write for people who want to learn ways to make money outside of a regular day job. Financial freedom and multiple income streams is a passion for us. We’ve learned ways to do this, and we seek to serve others by helping them do the same. Approach content creation from a service-oriented mindset. It will help you write better content and gain more loyal readers. 

Once you know who you are serving and why you are serving them, brainstorm topics that would benefit them. You can still talk about your day and thoughts, but ultimately you want to provide value. What information will your readers find most valuable? Don’t assume that everyone knows what you know. I’m guilty of this sometimes. I make assumptions that everyone I talk to about e-commerce has been studying it as I have. Most have not. Even when I talk to experienced people in my field, I often teach them something they didn’t know. Likewise, I’ll talk to someone who has been doing e-commerce for a shorter amount of time, and I’ll learn a ton from them. Education should be circular. It’s human nature that we teach each other and learn from each other. 

I suggest keeping a running list of blog ideas on your cell phone because you always have it on you. Every time a blog article idea or title pops into your head, write it down. Once you have a good list, go to Google, and start to type searches related to the blog article idea. See what Google auto-populates with its predictive search query. This blog’s title is “How to Write a Good Blog Article” because I know people are looking for it on Google. Perhaps you’ve never been to our site (click “About” to learn more about us), but the search engine saw this content as something valuable for you. 

If you’re struggling to come up with ideas for your list, try visiting other blogs to see what they are writing about. If you’re not already doing this, I suspect you might not be that passionate about the topic and might want to consider a different niche. Ideally, you have been consuming content in your chosen blog niche for quite some time and are now ready to give back to that community. You can also look at social media to get an idea of what people are talking about and what questions they ask. The comments section is a great place to get ideas. Sites like Quora, where people specifically go to ask questions, is another excellent starting point. 

How to Blog if You Can’t Write

First off, this is the wrong mindset to have. Please don’t make assumptions about what you can and cannot do until you’ve given it a try. 

Second, it’s patently false that you can’t write, because I guaranteed you typed something to get to this article! 

Jokes aside, it’s a valid concern. The simple answer is that writing gets better over time with practice. Everyone who plays the guitar started at a point of having never played the guitar or played it awfully. No one who has a driver’s license flew out of their mother’s womb doing 60mph on the interstate. Look at writing as you would any other skill. The more you practice, the better you will get. 

I do have one secret weapon that I use to improve my blog articles. I use software that gives me real-time corrections and suggestions on everything from punctuation to grammar, entirely rewriting the sentence. This tool goes way beyond the standard spell check or grammar check available in Microsoft Word. You can check it out here, and I think my articles have gotten much better since I started using it. I’d highly recommend it to anyone serious about improving their writing and content. I use the premium version, but I believe there is a limited free option as well.

How Do I Make Money from a Blog?

There are two ways to make money from a blog: indirect and direct. You can indirectly earn money from a blog because it generates awareness, traffic, and followership for your business. If you run an event planning business and write articles about creating fabulous events, people looking to plan events will eventually find you. The more they read, the more they get to know you. People do business with people they know, like, and trust. Your articles showcase your expertise and help potential clients get to know you. The same principle applies to non-profit organizations. Even if you’re not directly soliciting donations in a blog article, you’re building brand awareness about your organization and why the cause you support is worthwhile. 

Directly making money from a blog is a little different, and it’s what we do here at JPCashFlow. Aside from being a passion, this is another stream of income for us. It’s a minor stream of income because most of the money we make comes from doing the things we write about. All the same, it’s still another stream, and we love those. You can monetize a blog through selling products, selling ad space, or selling other people’s products (aka affiliate marketing). Selling your own products is by far the best choice and the strategy that will make you the most money. This is especially true for selling information products like courses, how-to videos, and books. The only drawback is that it’s time-consuming. That’s why Peter and I haven’t developed products of our own. Our other businesses frankly keep us very busy. Hopefully, someday we’ll have a product of our own to offer our audience, but we’ll only do it if we feel it adds massive value. This leads me to another point…

Don’t blog to make money. Make money because of your blogging. 

It’s a significant difference. If your mindset is, “I’m going to start a blog to make money,” you probably won’t care much about anything else. Trust me when I say making money in itself is not a passion and will not drive you forward in creating content. I had a blog before this site, and it failed. Even though I was interested in the topic, I wasn’t passionate about it. I wasn’t passionate about the audience for the issue I was writing about. Don’t make that same mistake. Write for your blog to add value, and money will follow if you’re patient. I promise. 

With that point of caution behind us, let us move on to selling ad space and affiliate marketing. 

Probably the most known way of selling ad space is through something like Google Adsense. You put some HTML code on your site, and Google does the rest. We don’t use it here because frankly, we don’t want Google showing products we haven’t validated ourselves. Pretty much everything we mention on this site is the stuff that either Peter or I personally uses. Could we make more money using Adsense? Absolutely. Is it worth it to us? Nope. If you want to sell ad space, though, I would suggest looking into Google Adsense competitors. They are not the only game in town. You could also sell ad space directly to people to make sure you like and trust their product. I think checking it out for yourself before pimping it to your audience is the responsible choice. 

That leaves affiliate marketing, and that’s how we primarily make money with our blog. Affiliate marketing means that when someone uses your referral code or link, you earn a commission. Your commission does not cost your audience anything. Sometimes you can get coupon codes being an affiliate that you can then pass on to your audience, saving them money by signing up through your link. You don’t need to carry inventory. Your earning potential is unlimited (depending on the terms of the program you’re dealing with). Best of all, you can recommend the things you use. That in itself will help create excellent content for your blog. When doing affiliate offers, pick something that is legitimately valuable to your audience. In this article, I promoted Bluehost and Grammarly. If you use our links in the article, we’ll earn a few bucks, which helps keep this site running. However, I didn’t promote them because of the money. I promoted them because I use their services and love them! I think you will too. 

How you choose to monetize your blog depends on what type of blog it is. If you want to ask me for suggestions about yours, feel free in the comment section. Warning: That is not an invitation to spam your blog in the comment section. Just tell us the niche and what your question is. If you’re interested in exchanging guest posts or something like that, please do so by sending us a private message via the “Contact Us” tab at the top of the page. Spam in the comments will be deleted. 

Conclusion

I hope you enjoyed this article as much as I had the pleasure of writing it. We have been blogging here for about five years and find it incredibly rewarding. Sure, it’s nice to make some affiliate commissions, but my main enjoyment is impacting people around the world with my writing and ideas. 

I’m always surprised when somebody stumbles across one of my articles and tells me that it helped them out or have more questions. It’s a good feeling because I also had no clue how to make money outside of a job when I first became interested in financial independence. I was that guy stumbling on other people’s blogs. 

I didn’t wait until I was an expert to start writing. I just started writing, and I’m glad I did. I’ve gained a lot more expertise in e-commerce and investing in the last five years, but had we not started this blog when we did; then we wouldn’t have content ranking where it does now. That’s the last dirty secret of blogging, and I alluded to it earlier; a blog’s searchability is partly influenced by how old it is and how many pieces of content are up. That should be enough incentive for you to get started today if you haven’t already. 

Best of luck with your blogging and sign up on our email list for content like this delivered directly to your mailbox.