For any blogger, the sheer variety of options out there with which you can empower your business can be tough to work out. With such a wide variety of options out there, you can find that it’s tough to get the right kind of blogging investments each time.
If you are serious about running a blog that has the chance to succeed, then you should look to make an investment in three key areas. Once you cover these key areas, you can begin to invest in other areas. These, though, will be essential to your blog’s success. What matters, then?
Blogging investment 1 – Your education
One of the most essential blogging investments you need to bear in mind is spending time learning about blogging. You should be investing as much of your income as you can into bettering yourself. Standing still will see you overpassed and no longer as interesting as you once were. Even if you are a veteran blogger, you still need to keep up with the latest and greatest developments in the blogging world.
Start learning about the best way to blog, using blogger conventions, webinars, eBooks, courses and the like to help augment your learning. Just be sure that you get this is a long-term experience; it would be very hard indeed to learn everything in a short space of time. Always be sure to read into comments from other bloggers, speaking to them to find out what is useful and what isn’t quite so useful for you to learn from.
The more work that you can put into self-improvement and education, the more time that you can spend looking into long-term improvement. You might think you don’t need to learn about SEO or blogging marketing strategies, but we can assure you that you certainly do!
The more time that you can put into developing your blog, the better. You should even look to master the art of basic photography; it can be the difference between success and failure in a variety of ways. Learn about photography or photo selection (and copyright) and you can find it much easier to become a blogger who sees genuine improvement and gains in the long-term.
Is blogging hard? Yes. Is it difficult to learn everything that you need? Very. Does this mean that you shouldn’t try to be the best version of yourself that you can? Not a chance!
Blogging investment 2 – Your imagery
The next part of this process that we want to look at is images. While many blogs get by either using selfies of themselves or generic stock imagery from the web, you can do so much better than this if you are willing to put in the effort to get there. First things first – high-quality images are not a recommendation or a suggestion. They are 100% mandatory if you wish to start seeing improvement over a short space of time.
The fact that social media marketing means you need eye-catching images to sell your story, too, means disregarding image quality is foolish. If you intend on making your own photos (which is by far one of the most essential blogging investments), then it would be a good idea to invest in a good quality camera, lens and editing software. You don’t need to use Photoshop, though it is the best on the market and can be purchased for a pretty fair cost.
If you don’t want to take photos or you have a lack of ability/opportunity to do so, you should hire someone. If you are serious about your long-term growth and prosperity as a business, then you should look to invest in the image side of things by getting a photographer in to help you out.
You could go to the local college and try to find some photography students, seeing if they will help you to build a good collection of images without the fees attached. So long as you give them the chance to get credit and portfolio boosts from doing so, most will be happy to help.
At the very least, invest in a good camera on your phone and hire a freelancer to help optimize the image, improve the lighting and generally make the photo look much nicer than it does presently.
Blogging investment 3 – Branding
The last one of the blogging investments you need to make if you want to grow and improve is to invest in your branding. Your business and blog need to have a good brand image, and the easiest way to do that is to invest in high-quality branding. You need a good quality logo, a smart graphical design and a color choice selection that works across all pages of your blog, and matches the theme/topic of your blog itself.
The blog should always use a design or a theme that is clean, clinical and sleek. It should give your branding the chance to play center-stage, without anything like the issues that you might expect of it.
It’s vital that your social media branding meets up with that, too. Do not choose a design of themed scheme until you know that it 100% aligns with your blog and social media at once. Uniformity is vital in building a new brand, so take the time to ‘get’ this and it should be much easier for you to retain complete control over how your blog is perceived and used.
Make your branding future-proof, too. Spend time looking at how you can make sure that the image, style and theme generally matches up with your business and its ambitions. Practice your skills if you need to, investing in tools like Canva and start to see how your artistic skills come to life and how you can best make a positive difference to how you work, think and feel.
Of course, you could always hire a designer to help you stay on-point with your general brand and its overall framework. If you are looking to try and save some money, then you should try out one of our blogging WordPress themes.
Get to building a visually impressive blog!
With all of these blogging investments in mind, you should find it much easier to begin building a branded blog that is visually impressive, consistent in its message and managed by someone with knowledge of what they are doing. The end result? A blog that people will actually want to take the time to read!
