2020 is coming. What are your new year resolutions as a blogger?
Are you confused what resolutions to follow to build a profitable blog in 2020? You’re in the right place.
It doesn’t matter what niche you are in, if you want to succeed online, you need to follow a strategy to start making money from online. For that, new year resolutions for blogging can come in handy. Now without wasting more time, let’s discuss about the new year resolutions for 2020.
Top 10 New Year’s Resolutions for Bloggers in 2020
1. Create a profitable blogging strategy
Whether you’re launching a new blog or already blogging for awhile, there’s one thing you need to make money from your blog which is a “blogging strategy”.
If you’re just creating contents day in and day out without a strategy, you’ll be definitely going to experience failure in the long run or you’ll burn out really sooner.
That being said, here are few quick tips for you to create a profitable blogging strategy that you can use to start making more money from blogs in 2020 and beyond.
Create an editorial calendar for your blog’s content
For years, we had struggled with one thing: blogging consistently. Not only us but there are a ton of bloggers fail to build a profitable blog simply because of one reason: inconsistent blog posting frequency.
That said, the #1 way to build a successful blog is this: BE CONSISTENT.
So how can you be consistent with your blog posting schedule? The answer is simple: create an editorial calendar for your blog’s content.
Here are few great benefits of using an editorial calendar for your blog.
- Easy to keep track of your blogging schedule
- Easier to come up with a ton of blog post ideas
- You can easily handle your breaks (such as weekends, holidays that might influence your blog topics)
That being said, here are few quick tips to create an editorial calendar for your blog.
- Determine how much you can dedicated to your blog in a week (make sure you spend at least 10 hours a week to see better results)
- Determine your blog posting frequency (is it posting twice a week or twice a month and start working on it)
- Create a list of blog post ideas that you can work
Quick tip: If you’re a WordPress user, you should install this awesome plugin called Editorial Calendar (which is also free) which you can use to plan your contents well in advance. You can also drag and drop to move posts, edit posts right in the calendar and manage your entire blog from your dashboard, so easy and highly effective.
Create a blog sales funnel
What’s the point of publishing new blog posts or more articles without having a blog sales funnel?
A blog sales funnel is what you can use to turn random website visitors into email subscribers to repeat customers. If you want to build a profitable blog in 2020, you must need a blog sales funnel.
Here’s how a blog sales funnel looks like;
Here’s how you can create a blog sales funnel for your website in 2020.
- Create a landing page
- Create compelling CTA (call to actions) that define your target goal (which can be either building email list, making sales, offering your products or services etc)
- Provide freebies (freebies such as eBooks, videos, plugins, tools, free trials etc work like a charm to convert first time website visitors into leads)
- Build trust (you can use an email list or your videos or articles)
- Start pitching your products or services (after a week or so to get people to buy your stuff)
2. Work on a NEW promotional channel
There’s no point of putting all your eggs in one basket as you can NEVER trust one traffic source. Google might penalize you or you don’t know when you get content strikes from social media sites like Facebook as most of the social networking sites are promoting more “paid stuff” to make more money.
So it’s always a smart strategy to come up with a new promotional channel for your blog or website in 2020 to be able to drive more traffic and sales. That said, here are top 3 promotional channels you shouldn’t ignore in 2020 as they are going to send you a TON of traffic in the long run.
YouTube: Whether you know it or not, on mobile alone, YouTube reaches more 18-49 year-olds than any broadcast or CABLE TV network. That’s the power of YouTube and here are few more interesting stats about YouTube.
- 6 out of 10 people prefer online video platforms to live TV.
- By 2025, half of viewers under 32 will not subscribe to a pay-TV service. In an average month, 8 out of 10 18-49 year-olds watch YouTube.
- In 2015, 18-49 year-olds spent 4% less time watching TV while time on YouTube went up 74%. You can navigate YouTube in a total of 76 different languages (covering 95% of the Internet population)
Recommended: SEO tips you need to follow to get top rankings for videos on YouTube
Instagram: Instagram is another rocking marketing platform you should be focusing in 2020 as it’s an image based sharing network where mostly you can target millennials. Here are few surprising stats about Instagram you must know.
- 1 billion people use Instagram
- 35% of online adults use Instagram
- 80% of users are outside the U.S
- 39% women, 30% men, for U.S. Instagrammers
- 59% of U.S. users are under 30
- 72% of teens use Instagram, every day
- 95% of U.S. Instagrammers use Youtube
Read: How Do I Launch A Successful Blog that Makes Money in 2020
Facebook groups: Facebook is the BIGGEST social media platform which is used by billions of people worldwide. The best way to get more out of Facebook is to start a Facebook group for your business and start sharing useful contents and daily basis to build your community from scratch. Here are few shocking stats about Facebook you should know.
- 1.1 billion Facebook users speak English
- 68% of Americans use Facebook
- Only half of American teens use Facebook
- 35% of Facebook’s ad audience is under 25
- The number of American Facebook users aged 65+ has doubled to 41%
- Roughly 10 percent of Facebook users are American
Quick Note: You can be part of our Facebook group from here.
So what are you still waiting for? Make social media your top #1 resolutions for 2020.
3. Declutter your website
What’s the first thing your visitors see when they first land on your website? Your website design, right? If it’s messy and filled with too much clutter, no one likes to spend more time on it even if your content is good.
- Remove all dead links: You can use tools like Broken link checker, Screaming Frog, Xenu link sleuth etc to easily find and remove all the dead links from your website.
- Remove or update old blog posts: Instead of creating new posts to increase traffic, make sure to first revise your old blog posts and see if you can update them.If you find any topics that are no more valuable to your audience (such as Google+ related contents as Google+ has shut down their operations now), you can simply remove and redirect the URLs to your best performing posts using 301 redirect plugin.
- Declutter your website sidebar: Enough said! There’s no point of using too many widgets that don’t add any value. It also increase your website loading times to a great extent.
Read: How to Quickly Make Your Blog Profitable Starting From Scratch in 2020
4. Start writing more
One of the best resolutions every blogger should follow in 2020 and beyond is to improve their writing.
Why? By writing more, you will be able to create content that actually sells. Write more. But writing is not an easy task especially when you’re new to blogging.
Writing is even harder if you’re a non native English speaker but just like anything else, writing is also a skill which can be mastered.
Here are few quick tips to write more as a blogger in 2020.
Write often: This is the single most effective tip if you want to hone your writing skills. There’s no other shortcut to getting better at writing besides writing more and as often as possible.
We recommend you to write at least 500 words every single day. We recommend you to check out 750words which you can use to write 750 words everyday which definitely improves your writing as a blogger even if you’re a beginner.
Read more blogs: Read blogs like Copyblogger and other copywriters blogs so you will know how to write captivating contents that actually gets read and go viral online.
Read: Adam Connell Interview from Blogging Wizard On Taking Your Blog to The Next Level
5. Start investing money on things that matter
There’s no better investment than learning. If you’re spending money on the right products and courses, you can definitely take your blog to the next level in the coming years.
That being said, here are 2 ways where you can start investing money to get the best ROI in the long run.
- Invest in the right blogging tools: You should be getting access to the right blogging tools such as SEMrush, Ahrefs, Moz, email marketing tools like Drip or GetResponse and web hosting sites like WPX hosting etc to be able to build a money making blog because it takes money to make money online.
- Invest in courses and eBooks that talk about blogging, marketing and growth hacking your way to online success
6. Give a new look to your website
How often do you blog? When was the last time did you change your website design?
If you’re blogging for a long time, 2020 would be the perfect time to make new changes to your website design.
Give a fresh look to your website. Increase the page loading times. Move to a faster web hosting service like WPX hosting. Install a cache plugin. Improve the overall navigation of your site. Your audience will definitely appreciate it.
If you’re thinking about budget, you don’t need to hire a designer and spend thousands of dollars to create an appealing and unique design for your websites as you can get access to Elegant themes where you can get access to over 80 premium looking WordPress themes at just $80.
If you want more details about it, you can go read the Elegant themes review post where you can find every feature and why you need them.
7. Build that email list
The money is in the list. If you’re new to blogging or blogging for some time and still not building an email list, this new year is the right time. As building an email list can be one of the best resolutions for almost all kinds of bloggers.
Whether you know it or not, an email list gives you an ROI of $40 for every $1 you spend on it. That’s a lot of profit, right? So why do you ignore?
If you’re still wondering about the email marketing importance, here are few quick email marketing stats to spice up your strategy for 2020 and beyond.
- In 2017 alone, 269 billion emails were sent and received each day (Statista, 2018). Not just that, but this figure is expected to increase to over 333 billion daily emails in 2022 (Statista, 2018). That’s insane amount of emails sent, right?
- For every $1 you spend on emails marketing, you can expect an average return of $32 (DMA, 2018)
- 81% of small businesses still rely on email as their primary customer acquisition channel, and 80% for retention (Emarsys, 2018)
- 49% (Statista, 2017) of consumers said that they would like to receive promotional emails from their favorite brands on a weekly basis
So what are you still waiting for? Go build that email list and here are few easy and quick tips to build an amazing list that actually makes money.
Read: 6 Steps to Make Money from A Food Blog Even If You Are Starting from Scratch [2020 Edition]
8. Define your target audience
New year is the best time to define or redefine your target audience to be able build a better blog. Without knowing your target audience, it’s harder to create the RIGHT content that generates results.
Here are few questions to ask yourself to define your target audience better.
- What problem or need does your website or products solve?
- Create a perfect customer (or “buyer persona”) profile of people affected by the problem or need, including demographics, goals, values, interests, motivations, lifestyle etc
- Think about your market (competitors and analyse their websites)
- What makes you unique compared to your competitors websites?
9. Research your competitors
One of the best way to take your blog to the next level both in terms of traffic and sales is to research your competitors websites.
Competitor research helps you easily find their strengths and weaknesses so you’ll know what works well for your website. That being said, here are few ways to use competitor research to your advantage.
Step 1: Build a list of at least 10 to 15 of your competitor websites. You can either use Google or tools like SEMrush to easily find who your competitors are.
Step 2: Do a quick analysis of the following tasks for each one of your competitor websites.
- Backlink profile analysis: Make sure to keep an eye on the backlinks and their sources of your competitor websites so you’ll know how to get those links and where to look for link building opportunities.
- Content analysis: Do you know what are the top blog posts of your competitor websites? If not, you should do a content analysis to find out what are their most shared blog posts and popular blog posts. You can use tools like Buzzsumo for content analysis.
- Traffic source analysis: Find your competitors top traffic sources using tools like SEMrush, Ahrefs and so on. By estimating your competitors website traffic, you’ll know where to focus your efforts on. Are they getting more traffic from search or social or email or paid traffic? You can also use these tools to check any website traffic.
- Keywords analysis: What keywords your competitors are ranking for? You can use SEMrush for detailed keyword analysis of your competitor websites so you can save a ton of time targeting the RIGHT keyword ideas and topics to increase your organic traffic and sales.
- On-site SEO analysis: Go to your competitor websites and do an audit of those sites. Find out their backlinks and see how they are optimizing their blog posts and pages for various keywords to rank higher in Google and better conversion rates.
Step 3: From the above 2 steps, you can implement the strategies to improve your overall website’s traffic and sales.
10. Start small, act fast
Last but not the least: you need to start small and act really fast.
No matter how big your resolutions for 2020 are if you want to succeed as a blogger, you must know how to start taking action.
You don’t have to write 10 blog posts every single day but you need to start small. Start with writing 500 words every day so you can easily publish a 2000 word blog post twice a week which is enough to build a profitable blog within a year.
The same thing applies for all other marketing channels to including SEO, email marketing, content marketing and so on.
10 More New Year Resolutions Every Blogger Should Follow in 2020
Here are 10 more resolutions every blogger should follow to succeed in 2020 and beyond.
1. Believe In Yourself, How You Can, What You Can
This stand will not only help you in blogging but also in your real life. Up and downs in blogging is also a feature of blogging and we should accept it.
Many people start blogging to make some money, but this is not so simple. Every thing requires proper efforts and guidelines.
One thing I have observed in my blogging career is newbie bloggers quit blogging once they get rejected by Google Adsense. But dear friends you don’t need to be sad as Adsense is not the only way to make money online. You can even check our Make Money Online category which can be helpful.
For this new year we should make a stand that we will never lose hope and believe in ourselves. Every person is born with unique quality and we should find and develop it.
2. Act Professionally In Your Work
I think I make this resolution every year, but as the year passes down, it literally gets ignored:(. But readers if you really want to be more productive in your work, you should be very professional.
So Acting Professionally during work hour can also be a great resolution or stand you can take for this new year. Acting professionally may include you working for hours, replying to comments you receive on your posts, interacting with readers etc..
From now itself make resolution that you will be more professional in your work. Trust me guys this will really help you in your life as well as in blogging.
3. Social Media Etiquette
Discipline is very important in every field you work. And when it comes to blogging it is of special importance. You should maintain discipline with your blogging efforts.
Social media is great source to reach out to millions of people. So I think Social Media Etiquette should also come in the list of resolutions every blogger should follow this year. Many bloggers forget giving respect online and this terribly affect their reputation.
Social media discipline can be maintained by not spamming all around. When you are chatting online with your readers always be polite and humble to them. When you are sharing something on social media be sure that it does not give any negative message to your fans.
4. Come Up With New And Creative Ideas
Always giving the readers more than their expectation shows how much hard work you are doing for your readers. We can see large number of posts already written on the same topic, but what will make your post more attractive to readers ? Isn’t that a very important question !
Yes, because until and unless you give some value to your readers, they will not return to your site. So, let’s take a stand that we will always try to come up with unique ideas which will be helpful for our readers.
If you make this resolutions and maintain in your blogging journey, no one can stop you from becoming a successful blogger ;).
5. Increase Network Among Bloggers
Learning the things which you don’t know is very good practice. This is exactly what I want to say here. Online marketing or blogging is a field which is continuously changing. To be in the race, it’s very important to have learning attitude all time.
Making more and more blogging friends can help you simplify this process. I personally work on this and now I have lots of friends in blogging community. This helps me find solutions to problem I am facing. Many times we friends support each other by sharing content etc..
So from now start building your network of bloggers. This will always make blogging simplified to great extend.
Read: Blogging Tips and Tricks for Beginners
6. Get Rid Of All Excuses
Not only in blogging but also in real life this will help you a lot. This is also a success mantra told by many successful people.
You can apply the same thing in your blogging. I have found many newbie ignoring the frequency of updating their blogs. They seem to be making various excuses and this just kept them away from their dream of becoming a pro blogger. So this will be a great resolution for you.
Now overcome all the excuses and start working. I would like to share the great Indian proverb –
Rise, Awake And Stop Not Till The Goal Is Reached ~ Swami Vivekanand.
7. Start Reading More
This habit is bombarded on us from our childhood. And why should not ? Reading is a very good habit and it adds more to our knowledge. For blogger here I mean to say, start reading famous blogs, understand them and aim at writing much better contents than them.
From this new year we will together take stand of reading other blogs. Reading leads to creativity and develops new and creative ideas. So take a resolution of reading more blogs in this coming new year :).
If you seriously follow this, worries of coming with new and attractive post titles will also disappear from your mind. In all ways reading more will only help you become a better blogger.
Read: 35 Ways to Get 5x More Traffic To Your Website
8. Organize And Plan Your Work
First planning and then work accordingly has always helped to become more productive in work. Here I would like to say, plan your work and strive to work accordingly.
For this new year I request you to make proper planning of all the work you have to do. Let’s take example of replying to comments and commenting on other blogs. Applying this resolution you can dedicate particular days to do certain things and complete them on time.
This will also bring more professionalism in you and can help you take blogging business more seriously :).
9. Always Think Positively
We know negativity is surrounded all over, but we should always think in a positive way. Best way to bring positive energy around is to meditate every day for about 15 minutes.
Concentrate on your work and never become over confident. Here I can say always be calm and keep working. Some may get fruits for their hard work quickly and for some it may take time.
So never stop trying and sooner or later success will come your way ;).
10. Experiment More And Enjoy Blogging
This is something I really need ;). In this new year, I will try to experiment more with my writing and will also observe the results. Experimenting new things helps us find different ways to improve and if not at least shows the ways which doesn’t work for us.
Another thing is enjoy what you are doing, whether you are a content writer, a pro blogger or anyone else.. When you are doing your work with lots of joy and dedication. you are bound to get lots of success.
I am not saying that if you are not enjoying blogging you should quit rather think on the given proverb –
Don’t Find Interesting Job, Make The Job Interesting !
So guys concentrate on your work and you will automatically start enjoying it.
FAQs
Here are few important questions about new year resolutions for bloggers in 2020.
1. What are the top 3 new year resolutions to follow for bloggers?
If we had to only pick 3 top resolutions for bloggers to follow, here they are;
- Create a content marketing strategy so you’ll know what type of content to create, when to create and how to generate sales and traffic with your content
- Build an email list so you’ll know how to build trust and awareness about the products and services you offer
- Read more (it can be books, taking part in courses, enrolling into membership sites as learning is the fastest way to success)
2. What’s the FASTEST way to make money blogging in 2020?
There are no shortcuts to making money blogging. Blogging isn’t a get rich quick scheme but if you’re looking for the fastest way to make money blogging, we recommend you to start offering services such as freelance writing, offering SEO services like keyword research, backlink analysis, web design services like logo design and so on.
3. What are the best blogging books for 2020?
If you’re looking for the best blogging books to build a profitable blog, we highly recommend you to check out the following books on blogging.
- Secrets To Blogging Your Way To A Six-Figure Income by Darren Rowse and Chris Garrett
- WordPress To Go by Sarah McHarry
- How To Start A Successful Blog In One Hour by Steve Scott
- How To Write Great Blog Posts That Engage Readers by Steve Scott
- ProBlogger’s Guide To Blogging For Your Business by Mark Hayward
Read: Top 15 Free Blog Sites for Creating Free Personal Blogs Really Quickly
4. How to achieve new year resolutions as a blogger in 2020?
The best to succeed as a blogger by achieving your new year’s resolutions for 2020 is to start acting on them. Create a plan for next 1 year, then break them down to quarterly and monthly goals and start taking action. There’s no other way around!
5. How to create a blogging routine?
It doesn’t matter what new year’s resolutions you’ve as a blogger but if you don’t follow a routine, your dreams will just be dreams. So create a blogging routine. Spend at least 2 hours a day even if you’re working somewhere or studying. That’s the minimum time and efforts you need to set up a profitable blog within a year.
Browse more Blogging Tutorials:
Final Thoughts
New year resolutions are meant to be followed and crushed so you can achieve blogging success. Otherwise, your blogging resolutions will be just dreams and don’t let that happen. As said above, start small but act fast.
Please let me know in the comments what resolutions you will be following to improve your blogging in 2020.
Anil Agarwal who owns Bloggerspassion.com, is a full-time blogger and SEO expert who has been helping people build profitable websites for over a decade. Bloggers Passion has been featured on premium online sites like Forbes.com, Huffingtonpost, SEMrush, Problogger, Crazy Egg, The Next Web and so on.
Keep reading the article at BloggersPassion: Learn SEO Blogging with An Expert. The article was originally written by Anil Agarwal on 2019-12-26 00:13:29.
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