Most bloggers focus all their efforts on building an initial readership and generating revenue for the first time. This is an admirable goal, and a great one to get started with. But once you start generating steady revenue, what do you do next?
Maintaining Your Existing Audience
Your highest priority should be maintaining your existing audience. The people visiting your website and reading your blogs are responsible for your revenue, no matter which monetization strategies you’re using. If you alienate these readers, or if you do something to offend them, they’re going to leave, and your revenue stream is going to dry up with them.
So how do you maintain your existing audience? For the most part, you just need to keep doing what you’re doing. Keep publishing new content at regular intervals, maintain strict adherence to your brand voice and your core values, and continue engaging with your audience members on social media and through other platforms to keep them interested.
Cultivating an Emergency Fund (and Investing)
You may have a lot of revenue coming in, but how long is that revenue going to last? Even the best bloggers and content creators can’t rely on their stream of income to last indefinitely. Eventually, you may lose your audience members because your topic becomes obsolete, because a new competitor threatens you, or because you’re no longer able to produce the quality content you once were.
That’s why one of your priorities should be financially protecting yourself, and setting up safeguards to protect your money in case something terrible happens to your blog. But a good first step here is to create an emergency fund – a sum of money designed to provide you with a cushion in case you ever fall on financial hardship. For most people, an emergency fund of a few thousand dollars is plenty.
From there, it’s a good idea to start investing. Try to take advantage of retirement plans like IRAs when possible, so you can reap the tax benefits. Otherwise, make sure you diversify your portfolio by investing in a variety of different assets, including stocks, bonds, and real estate.
Some aspects of investing will take a long time to learn, like mastering candlestick patterns and technical analysis, but you can get started with the fundamentals after just a few hours of studying the topic.
Growing Your Audience
You’re already generating significant revenue from your existing audience, so why not try to generate a little bit more? Most bloggers, after achieving some degree of consistency, spend most of their time and energy growing their audience.
There are many strategies you can use to accomplish this. For example, you can spend more time on social media, networking with influencers and reaching out to individuals while promoting your best work.
You can also invest in targeted advertising, link building, offsite publishing, or even guest speaker opportunities. The sky’s the limit when it comes to marketing your blog.
Expanding to New Domains
If you feel like you can’t grow your audience any further, or if you just want to expand in a different direction, consider starting to write content and develop audiences for additional domains. A new domain provides you with a blank slate you can use to appeal to the audience you’ve grown to know and love while reaching an entirely new audience. You can also use additional domains as completely separate entities for revenue generation, or as a way to funnel even more people to your central blog.
Expanding to new domains can also be beneficial for search engine optimization (SEO), allowing you to optimize for a different set of keywords and capitalize on even more organic traffic. If you decide to go this route, start small, with only one or two domains, and make sure your main blog remains your highest priority.
Backups and Your Plan B
No matter how confident you are in the future of your blog, it pays to have a career backup plan. You already have an emergency fund and some investments to provide you with financial assistance if you fall on hard times, but you’ll eventually want to generate more income on a steady basis.
Consider learning a new skill or going back to school to equip yourself with the abilities and knowledge necessary to forge a new career path. You can keep this in your back pocket until you need it.
Getting to the point of generating steady revenue from your current blog is already a major achievement. If you manage to follow these strategies and continue refining your work, you’ll set yourself up to become even more successful. Try to take things one step at a time so that you don’t overextend yourself and you continue to retain your audience.
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