Do you want to be an efficient blogger who earns money online? Most likely, you’ll say “Yes, I do!”, because this opportunity seems to be very, very attractive. However, making money online through blogging is a real challenge. I believe this challenge can be successful handled by using the ideas of project management.
I think blogging through project management produces quite efficient results. I call it Blog Project Management (Blog PM). In this article I will talk about Blog PM (the planning aspect only) and describe what’s required of you to become an efficient blogger.
What is a Blogger?
A Blogger is a person who owns and manages a website (a blog) in order to produce some desired effect, such as money earned, product/name socialized, other kinds of monetary/non-monetary benefits. This person does not just write posts and maintain the blog but tires to do everything required to promote the website and gain the benefits. It is an entrepreneur that makes money online thru blogging.
Today you can find many bloggers online. On the web there are multiple websites and blogs that describe ways to monetize web traffic. Some of the blogs are really successful, some of them remain more or less effective, and the rest appear to be ineffective because of many factors, including lack of skills, poor SEO, even laziness.
In order to become a successful blogger first you must think twice whether you really want to earn money online through blogging. If after many sleepless nights you finally decide to say definitely “Yes!”, then be ready to work hard because blogging and blog management requires a great portion of effort and patience. As a blogger you must be ready to plan for successful business initiatives that will generate some revenue for you. Careful planning and management will help you get rich (to some extent) through blogging.
As a successful blogger, you need to gain a wide range of skills and knowledge in the different fields, including search engine optimization (SEO), web design, e-commerce, HTML, JavaScript, etc. You should know everything regarding blogging and blog management. Here are the key roles or the areas of knowledge you must understand. I believe that a successful blogger needs to be:
- Sponsor who makes initial investment in the idea (blog)
- Webmaster who realizes the idea by developing the blog and managing website content
- Designer who creates website design
- Copywriter who writes unique, relevant and interesting content
- SEO specialist who optimizes the blog and assures top ranking and high conversion rate (or ROI – return on investment)
- Marketer who knows how to define and reach target audience of the blog
- Community Manager who socializes with online visitors and prospects
Of course, you can hire people who will help you do blogging. For example, you can ask your friend, who is a designer, to help you with blog design (a cheaper way). Or you can hire a professional designer (a more expensive way). Ideally, a blogger performs all the roles. Then this person becomes a successful blogger who knows everything about blogging and who has no need to spend money on hired staff.
At the same time, hiring a designer, copywriter or anybody else saves your time and effort. So I think it is up to you to decide whether you wish to perform all the roles personally or just hire people to do the job.
What is a Good Blogger?
I define a Good Blogger as a person who is capable of managing his/her blog project with efficiency. Such a person is highly talented and well educated, knows a lot about Internet and SEO, gets actively involved in social networking, understands the principles of e-commerce and online marketing, administers the website and FTP, manages link building, and does many other things that are essential in reaching the efficiency in blogging.
When I talk about blogging efficiency, I mean the blogger’s ability to actually produce or achieve desired results (online sales, ad revenue, ranking, blog recognition, traffic etc.) with the expected consumption of available (and invested) resources, including time, money and labor. A blog is efficient if it brings desired benefits to the blog’s owner with acceptable (not excessive) resource consumption. Therefore,
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How to Be Efficient?
So how can you be efficient in blogging? Or what will you do to accomplish desired goals while spending no more than planned? I think that
Project management appears to be effective in any kind of effort. You can regard anything in your life as a project. For example: buying a new car; renovating the kitchen; organizing a conference; shopping; making a phone call; playing basketball; planning a party; running a blog, of course; and so on.
Project management is not so complicated as you might think. You do not have to know all those principles, rules, standards, and policies that are stated and followed by professional project managers. You do not need to know such “terrible” words as PRINCE2, PMI standards, PMBOK, others.
All you need is to understand the major idea of project management, which is to identify and implement necessary change into an environment efficiently. It means you must understand what problem (goal) to address by what solution with what resources under what criteria. There are four key components that define project management in everyday life (we have your blog project as an example):
- Problem: monetizing your blog, 100 USD per month
- Solution: through advertising (TextLinkAd + Adsense or whatever else)
- Resources: your own money (500 USD)
- Criteria: 2000 unique visitors; conversion rate 5%.
Please note all these numbers are just for example.
This particular example says that you will be happy when your blog brings you 100 USD per month via advertising, with 2k unique visitors and a 5% conversion rate. When you accomplish your goal (blog monetization) under the specified criteria, your blog appears to be efficient. This will be your efficient project!
So, fostering the ability of being efficient in managing a blog is the matter of blog project management. You will do your blog projects efficiently if you know how to plan those projects. Project planning appears to be the way to identify and define your project and develop a detained action plan for project implementation.
How to Plan My Blog Project?
First, let’s find out what project plan means. A project plan is a detailed (often hierarchical) representation of activities that are intended to achieve specific goals and objectives of the project within a specific timeframe. It is the primary document that describes the preferred course of action and explains what tasks and processes the team needs to perform to accomplish the goals & objectives and complete the project.
In terms of blogging and Blog PM, a Project Plan means a list of tasks and actions you must undertake to get your blog developed and bringing you money. Project planning means sequencing and scheduling the tasks in order to develop a plan that explains the necessary work effort to be made.
Your plan for your new blog project will include the four components we’ve discussed above. These are Problem, Solution, Resources, and Criteria. When developing your project plan, you must do the following activities:
- Define and describe the problem you wish to solve. Example: I want to earn money online.
- Identify and evaluate solution(s) to the problem. Example: A blog will be the way to earn money online.
- Define and estimate resources. Example: I have 500 USD, 1 month, and a huge desire to make money.
- Identify and set criteria. Example: the blog provides a 5% conversion rate from 2k visitors a day.
The listed items give a simple explanation of the planning process. Sure, you will need to know more information about your future blog, such as purchasing hosting and domain, selecting domain name, choosing CMS (Content Management System, e.g. Drupal, WordPress) and design scheme, building website content and navigation, link building, and many and many other important and critical aspects of blogging and blog management. In this article I talk about general things only; the details will be the matter of my next articles.
So, the four activities of the planning process appear to the basis of efficient blog project management. If you do everything right your blog project will be successful (efficient). If you like this article and want to learn more about blog project management and how to manage blogging, please subscribe the MyMG Website updates. Thank you.