Blogging for retirees? If you're a senior citizen, you might be thinking that blogging is a young person's game. Of course, the typical stereotype of blogging involves some sort of millennial sipping coffee at Starbucks, typing out a blog post and checking all sorts of gadgets.
Well, you need to look past the stereotype to discover that a lot of older people who blog actually make money from their activities. The great thing about blogging is that it produces passive income. To get a clear understanding what passive income is, I want you to remember what it's like to work for a living.
Typically, you would have to show up at a physical location, punch the clock and sit your butt down for 8 hours. It doesn't matter whether you're pushing paper around or you're actually getting up to do physical things for work. Your time is locked in in particular space for 8 hours.
If you don't do that, you don't get paid. Welcome to the world of active income. It can simply be reduced to the simple formula of no work, no pay. It's like you're a chicken. If you don't scratch and peck on the ground, you don't eat.
It gets old quickly. Wouldn't it be great for you to work once, but earn money many times over from the stuff that you worked on a long time ago? This is called passive income. Of course there are many different variations of passive income.
You can publish software, you can create an app, you can write a book or, if you want something lower impact and more in line with your experiences, you can blog for cash.
The secret to blogging success
It's very tempting to just jump into blogging. I mean, after all, how hard can it be? There are all sorts of free blogging tools like medium.com, wordpress.com and blogger.com. You don't have to spend money on a domain name, you don't have to spend dollars on a hosting account. It's absolutely free.
It is no surprise, however, that given the low barrier to entry, most bloggers fail. I don't say that to depress you. I definitely don't share that to discourage you. But this is a reality check. If you don't know what you're doing, don't start.
What follows is a quick guide on how to do it right. The reason why people fail at blogging is because they just blog about anything that they're interested in. On a personal level, this is fine. But the problem is your blog is not a personal diary.
You're trying to make money from your blog. You're trying to turn your time into dollars. If you want to do that, then you have to have a plan.
As the old saying goes, if you fail to plan, you are really planning to fail. Given the ridiculously high 90 percent failure rate of most blogs (whether they launched 10 minutes ago or 10 years ago), you really have to have a plan coming in. The good news is that your plan only needs to have 3 parts: niche selection, monetization plan, and content strategy. By thinking strategically and knowing these key planning elements ahead of time, you pave the way for your eventual success.
“The first thing you need to decide when you build your blog is what you want to accomplish with it, and what it can do if successful.”
RON DAWSON - blogger
Blogging Retirees 3 Step Plan For Blogging Success
Step #1: Find the right niche
A niche is a subject matter category. For example, you can blog about coffee tables and that is a niche because people looking to buy coffee tables would go to your blog. If you want to blog about how to pick up chicks, that is a niche because people are interested in figuring out how to meet women.
A niche is really all about subject matter categories and within this subject matter category, there are many different sub-topics. So when you say you want to blog about coffee tables, everything that will be included in your blog will have something to do with coffee tables.
Maybe it's about design, maybe it's about how people can use a coffee table, so on and so fort. Now, just because you are interested in a topic doesn't mean it's going to make money. This is the central point that you need to master when trying to blog for cash.
You have to pick the right niche. How do you know? Well, first, you need to find something that you are personally interested in. Or a subject you really would like to learn to become an expert in. In which case you will have to learn as much as you can about the subject in a short amount of time.
Make no mistake, if you don't have passion for something that you're writing about, eventually, you will fall out of love and it will always be about the money.
Unfortunately, love for money can only take you so far. You have to have an emotional connection. There has to be passion there. So the first thing that you need to do is to list down all the topics that you are so passionate about that you would talk about them for absolutely free.
Next, filter your list of topics based on how much advertisers are going to pay for them. You can easily find how much advertisers are going to pay to advertise on content focused on those topics. You can easily find the commercial value of niches by using the Google adwords keyword planner tool.
Type in your topic and it will spit out some keywords. And when you look at the dollar value of those keywords, then you will get a rough idea of how much advertisers will pay per click of ads connected to those keywords.
Obviously, you should delete low value keywords and you should also delete very high value keywords. The reason why you should delete keywords that earn $50 per click is the traffic is filtered really well and there's really not that much demand for those.
The high dollar value is definitely exciting, but let's get real. You probably won't make that much money from those topics unless you're some hyper expert on them.
The next step is to filter your list based on average monthly search volume. In other words, there has to be enough demand for these topics. If you like underwater basket weaving, for example. It may be a strong personal passion of yours, but if only 2 people look for that information every month, you're not going to make money from your blog. That's the bottom line.
So, there has to be a healthy volume. Now, here's the thing. You should cut out low volume key words, but you should also cut out very high volume keywords. Why? Chances are everybody in this dog are blogging about those popular topics and you'd have too much competition.
Finally, you should plug in your remaining keywords into Google's search box. When you do this, Google will tell you how many websites target that keyword. This gives you an idea regarding the overall competition level of the potential topic for your blog. Once you've gone through this, you would have a good idea of which niche to focus on.
"The first thing you learn when you’re blogging is that people are one click away from leaving you. So you’ve got to get to the point, you can’t waste people’s time, you’ve got to give them some value for their limited attention span".
Alex Tabarrok - blogger
Step #2: Reverse engineer your competitors
I've got some great news for you. If you're a senior citizen, you probably don't have the time or patience to try to come up with something new or something revolutionary. You just want to make money. I get you. I understand where you're coming from and that's why I have a quick and easy solution for you.
Type in your keywords into Google to find high ranking sites in your niche. Once you find these websites, reverse engineer them. That's right! There's no need to reinvent the wheel. Just copy top players in your niche.
Figure out what they blog about, figure out their format, figure out how they make money off their blog. In other words, what kind of ads do they show? Once you have figured this out, copy the most common topics, format, layout and ad choices.
"The first thing you learn when you’re blogging is that people are one click away from leaving you. So you’ve got to get to the point, you can’t waste people’s time, you’ve got to give them some value for their limited attention span".
Alex Tabarrok - blogger
Step #3: Create your own brand
Once you have put up a website that reverse engineers existing content strategies without copying the actual content, the next step is to make your own brand stand out. You make money doing this by actually listening to your blog visitors.
Create surveys, conduct polls, actively ask them for feedback. Once they give you this information, you can then craft your blog so it has a unique identity. If you want to make real money blogging, click here for a comprehensive guide on how senior citizens can use the internet to make real money.
It's not only possible, but it's probable with the right plan and strategy.
Using WordPress To Manage Your Blog Content
WordPress is one of the many options available to bloggers who are looking for free software online which makes it incredibly easy to publish their own blog. This software is easy to use, provides a variety of templates and offer excellent support to bloggers. There are many options available to bloggers and other blogging programs may be better known and offer slightly different features but many bloggers are quite pleased with WordPress.
This section will offer some useful information for bloggers who are considering starting a blog with WordPress such as reasons to choose WordPress, tips on starting a blog and information about the support offered by WordPress. Based on this information as well as their own research bloggers can decide whether WordPress is right for them or whether they should seek out a different blog network.
Reasons to Choose WordPress
There are many great reasons to choose WordPress to start a blog. Some of these reasons include a great variety of templates, the ability to categorize and tag posts easily, features such as spell check, previews and autosave, the ability to post text, audio files and video files, a variety of privacy options and the ability to track statistical data related to the blog in addition to other great features.
Some of these features may be more important to some bloggers than others so deciding whether or not WordPress is right for you will largely be a matter of personal preference. For example bloggers with little or no programming experience may enjoy the myriad of templates available on WordPress while bloggers who are concerned about privacy issues may be more interested in the privacy options available through WordPress. Carefully investigating these features will help bloggers determine if they should start a blog with WordPress.
Starting a Blog with WordPress
Bloggers who opt to start a blog with WordPress will certainly not be disappointed by the amount of time it takes to start a blog. A blogger can literally start a blog with WordPress within minutes. This is tremendously important to bloggers who are eager to get started and do not want to deal with a long process to start a blog.
The only requirements for starting a blog are a valid email address and a username. The blogger enters this information into the signup page and receives a password almost instantly. Next the blogger simply has to check his email, follow the activation link provided and use the password provided and the process is complete. The blogger can start blogging immediately.
Support Offered by WordPress
For many first time bloggers the type of support offered is very important. This is because first time bloggers may have quite a few questions about the process of starting a basic blog and once they establish a basic blog they may have additional questions about using advanced features and customizing the blog. WordPress offers a great deal of support for bloggers of all skill levels. The support offered by WordPress includes the ability to contact the support staff as well as the ability to receive support from other members through online forums. Although the support staff is incredibly responsive some bloggers enjoy the ability to communicate with other bloggers in forums. This is because the forums are active 24 hours a day and bloggers can find support from peers at any time.
