The stepping stones of online entrepreneurship starts out with baby steps before making big leaps. Almost every CMS site started out either as a WordPress, Wix or Drupal blog at some point before scaling up to become an online business.
Let’s delve deeper into this topic and see how this works and why the end goal should always be to look at your website as an online business.
Before Launching a website
Most people who seek to launch a website with their chosen domain name and hosting provider do so not out of curiosity but because its one of the many ways to make money online. But despite this desire, a majority of them will no see a single penny arriving in their bank account any time soon.
How come?
The truth of the matter is that simple blogging can no longer compete in a saturated market with 1.14 billion websites in 2022. Of these only 17% are active, but this still takes up a huge chunk of every market you’d like to enter. In order to mitigate this problem, you need to improve your blog an turn it into a full-scale business.
Starting from the Basics
The basic idea of launching a blog is this. Think of a blog when launching it as a business and yourself as an online entrepreneur.
Being a newbie blogger, will no longer be sufficient as competition and user experienc around content creation is becoming gradually more strict. One has to be an expert in the field of SEO and SEM practices to be able grow their blog from scratch. Most importantly you need to know how to brand your website and carry the burdens of PR activities to launch your digital products or services to actually make real money.
The basics of blogging is to set up a website with the assistance of a hosting provider. That much is simple enough, something even a child can do. But creating rank-worthy content is the next step of the way. Following SEO best practices might be a good way to improve the visibility of your work, but you need to put in more effort.
This would include website design and lead generation. Your website needs to sell itself or its provider or service to a page visitor. In order to do that, you need to establish cater to page visitors needs and provide a business plan for your page visitors once SEO works its magic.
Creating a business plan
When rolling out your content in any niche, you need to look at your business plan as a funnel. You need to narrow down your interest and niche and write about informative and evergreen content. That is the first step to help you set your website’s business plan. But building an entire funnel requires more than just content.
Lead generation and demand generation through service is the best way to turn in some real cash where your website provides value to your page visitor, turning them into a customer. This could be done by either providing a service associated with the page visitor’s problem or redirecting them through an affiliate program to churn in a commission.
Scaling up an online business to new heights
Once your website has taken off and your business model in a narrow niche is established its time to scale up your blog into a business. This is where you need to start outsourcing your work. As an online entrepreneur and business owner, you will not have time tinker with every single detail. This is where hiring an outreach specialist for link building, PR and SEO should be one of your concerns and later a content writer to help you keep up with writing demands.
As your business grows you will have a chance to hire more people and distribute tasks between them to help you launch new projects and improve the user experience of your website.
Final Remarks
Building up a blog and scaling it up into a business is a long journey. Through different online marketing practices one can turn a simple CMS blog into a self-made entrepreneur. The true challenge will be to continue creating and improving content and various services for page visitors and turn them into customers.
