Blogging can be a hobby, a passion, a side hustle and it can even be someone’s job where they earn an income. Although taking your blog from passion to hobby means there are a few things you need to be aware of and start focusing on. Then your blog can perform well and you can start looking at earning some money from something you love doing. Blogging is a very personal thing so whatever you do, still keep your personality shining through as that is what your audience wants. So what are a few things you need to focus on?

Domain Authority Score

Well, firstly you will need to start thinking about how your rank on Google searches. One of the ways you can do this is by keeping track of your DA score which means domain authority. This is how well you rank in google searches when people search for certain things. This score can determine if you can get paid jobs and how much you get as a greater score means greater pay. There are a few things that contribute to the score but it changes all the time. The basics are how long the website has been live, consistency in your activity on the page as well as external links that connect to your page from other sites. The more, the better. 

Google Core Web Vitals

This is another ranking system that Google introduced during 2020. This means that Google core web vitals would become a ranking factor in their SERPS (Search engine results page). The core web vitals which are new are designed to measure the user experience on the site. Focusing on the load time, speed, and visual stability. A few ways you can look to improve this is by focusing on optimizing your images, setup page caching, maybe changing hosting providers, and using a content delivery network. There are so many other things you can do to help improve this so make sure you do some research and start implementing this into your schedule. 

Search Engine Optimization

Search engine optimization or SEO is something you have probably heard quite a bit. Bloggers are focusing on this more and more to make sure each individual blog post they write meets these set rules so that the blog post performs the best it can. Search engine optimization is the process of improving the website traffic quantity and quality to your web page from search engines. It focuses on unpaid traffic rather than paid or direct traffic. There are a few things that need to be included in each blog post for the search engine optimization to be good quality including internal and external links, an image, and is a minimum of 300 words. There are certain things you can use to help you determine what search engine optimization score each blog post is. On WordPress for example there is a plugin called Yoast, this has a traffic light system where it ranks each blog post, aiming to get to the green and will give you set things to do to make sure you get there. 

Those 3 things are how to think about the behind-the-scenes things to focus on and what you need to do but there are other things you can do which can help improve your blog. A big one is people’s images, they are what attract people to reading the page and if you have bad quality images it can deter people from reading. If you are unable to take a good quality image by yourself for a piece you have written you can look to use royalty-free images. These images are free to use as long as you credit the original owner of the image. They can take your blog from drab to fab in a matter of seconds! 

Another and very important thing is to remain consistent with posting. If you post sporadically your audience may never know when to expect new content from you, if you have a set day or set amount of times you post each week they will know what to expect. It will keep your content fresh, give your audience new things to read and engage with all the time as well as improving all the scores mentioned above. 

So there are a few things you can start implementing into the blogging tasks that can help you go to the next level and start looking to turn your passion into a career. You don’t have to do them all at once but they are certainly handy to be aware of and to look into.