How to Start a Successful Entertainment Blog from Scratch in 9 Easy Steps

Starting a successful entertainment blog is one of the most powerful ways to build outstanding influence, grow a phenomenal brand, get recognized and earn a decent income online.

You don’t have to believe me. Successful bloggers like Perez Hilton, Arianna Huffington, Linda Ikeji etc. are clear proofs that thousands of ordinary people are building successful entertainment blogs.

More so, every day; millions of other bloggers are aspiring to build their own successful blogs, just like you.

Good thing is, there’s enough space and a great deal of opportunity for anyone who’s ready to put in the work, to actually build the next successful entertainment blog.

But, what’s not much available out there are the secret guidelines, the strategies and experiences that can help you to build and nurture a very successful blog for entertainment.

This, is exactly what you’ll be reading in this guide; the secret recipe to build a formidable and industry leading entertainment blog that will set you apart in the industry.

How to Plan an Entertainment Blog

Before setting out to build a successful blog, you need a plan that can deliver specifically, the kind of success you want to achieve. The following are key steps you can take to plan your blog from the scratch…

Evolve a Business Mindset

The first thing you’ll need as you work on starting an entertainment blog is to build a business mindset.

You want to realize that to make your blog successful, you must run it as a business.

Meaning that you’re going to identify why you’re starting this blog, what’s going to set you apart and the exceptional value you’re going to offer your target audience.

With this mindset in place you will then come up with a business plan that will include your brand description, blogging goals and strategies you’ll use in attaining your set out goals.

Choose a Niche

After developing a business plan, the next thing you’ll want to do is consider the entertainment niche you want to build your blog around.

A niche is a specialized area of an industry that appeals to a specific audience.

Instead of covering all aspects of entertainment at the start, with a niche, you can target a certain section of entertainment blogging that appeals to a particular audience.

It’s very important you set up your niche before getting started because when you do that, you’ll streamline your blog to a particular area of interest and this further gives you a well defined set of readers over time.

So you can decide for instance to focus on Entertainment news, Industry Gossip, Hollywood, Nollywood or Bollywood News, Religious entertainment, Sports etc…

You can micro define your niche as much as you want. And broaden it up much later as your blog grows.

Getting a targeted niche reduces the competition, helps you to streamline your content and build your brand and thought leadership much faster, along the line.

In the long run, this can also help you target a particular kind of advertisers when ever you are ready to advertise on the blog.

Create a Brand

To build a successful entertainment website, you must evolve a brand that will leave lasting impression on the minds of your audience.

There are many ways to build a brand for your blog but before getting started, ask yourself the following questions:

Who am I targeting?
What’s their demographics?
What kind of entertainment matters to them?
How do they communicate?

By the time you finish answering these questions, you would have evolved ideas that will get you to evolve a brand for your entertainment blog.

Steps to Build an Entertainment Blog

After creating your brand, the next thing you want to do is build your blog.

The following are step by step plans you can take to build an entertainment blog…

Choose a Domain Name

As a blogger, your domain name is what people will use to access your blog on the internet.

You could decide to call your domain name anything you want.

In the early years, a good number of bloggers preferred to call their entertainment blogs by their personal names, pet names, nicknames etc.

Although gradually, a lot of bloggers have evolved to choose domain names that relates with or reflects what they blog about etc., there’s no strict rules about what you should call your blog…

It is not wrong to call your blog by your name. Or whatever you want. It only matters if you’re intending to sell the blog in the nearest future. In that case you don’t have to attach it to your personal brand.

There are also other people who have been able to call their blog specific names that depicts their target niche.

For example, you could have bloggers use domain names like Nollywoodnews.com, Hollywoodgossip.com, religiousentertainment.com etc. Naturally, any user who sees such domain names will automatically guess what the blog is all about.

Also using these domain names can help the owners of such blog a lot when it comes to Search Engine Optimization.

So you’ll have to choose both a Domain Name that reflects your entertainment blogging niche and your business goals as a digital entertainment media.

If you intend to create an entertainment blog around your personal brand then you can definitely use your name as domain name.

Also if you already have an established entertainment business offline, consider using that existing business name as a domain name for your entertainment blog.

Get a Web Hosting Plan

After choosing and setting up your domain name, head over to get a hosting plan a reliable web hosting company..

Choose a web hosting plan that reflects your blogging goals and then head over to setting up your blog.

Smartweb is one web hosting company that’s been reliable for building websites and blogs of all sizes. You can try out their hosting packages to see if it works for you.

Outside that, there are a number of other web hosting companies that you could choose to host your website with.

Whatever you settle for, you need reliable hosting to keep your blog running so, be sure to look out for the hosting company’s pedigree, customer reviews and uptime limits.

Create a Blog

After choosing your web hosting plan and the hosting company, head over and choose a blogging platform.

There are so many blogging platforms to start up your entertainment blog. But the number one blogging platform you should consider using is WordPress.

According to statistics, more than half of the blogs on the internet is powered by WordPress, the world’s leading blogging software.

As a matter of fact, not only is WordPress popular with bloggers, it’s pretty easy to use for beginners and just about anyone, regardless of the level of their experience with tech.

You can set up your blog on WordPress and start blogging right away, if you understand the technicalities involved.

Or you can reach out to our team and we’ll get your blog designed, set you up and get you trained on how to launch out successfully as an entertainment blogger.

Now, after setting up your blog and creating posts for your readers as we also discussed here, there are certain other things you’ll want to do to promote the blog and attract new readers. We’ll be discussing these in the following paragraphs.

Build Social Media Handles

Having an engaging social media channel helps a lot in building up an audience for your entertainment blog.

And right now especially when it comes to the entertainment niche, so many of your readers are definitely going to be on the social media so you’ll need a good strategy to key into this audience.

The first step you’ll take towards growing a social media platform is building the platform in the first place.

So you go ahead choose at least the first three Social Media Platforms for your blog. It could be the popular Facebook, Twitter, Instagram or Tiktok etc.

After that, edit the Social Media page. Make it “on brand” and then go about creating content and engaging with your followers.

Upon creating your social media handles, there are certian steps you can take to promote the page and attract new followers.

For example, start with posting valuable, engaging and trending content consistently. Also, optimize your posts with the right hashtags and also, consider using paid promotions if you have to.

How to Grow an Entertainment Blog

After setting up your entertainment blog, your next game plan right now is to make effort to promote and build the blog into a formidable entertainment platform.

The following are steps you can use to grow your entertainment blog:

Create Great Content

So after setting up your blog, to grow it into a platform with a massive audience and influence, you need a combination of different strategies. And one of the most effective of these strategies is creating and posting valuable content.

Now, that this has been cleared out, you want to go ahead and create a realistic content strategy that will work for you and your audience.

Your content strategy should reflect the kind of posts you want to be updating on your entertainment blog, based on the particular niche you’re blogging on.

It should also be streamlined to meet a particular posting timeline. For example, you may decide to be posting entertainment news articles 10-15 times or more every day or less.

Whatever you decide to go with, be sure you stick to a clear schedule that can be followed through.

Also, on your blog, indicate the different categories of entertainment posts you’re writing about. If it’s entertainment news for example, there are different aspects to it.

Indicate when and how often you’ll be writing about that in your content strategy and then, follow through the content writing schedule as much as possible.

Doing this will create a level of consistency your audience will get used to. And when your entertainment blog has consistent fresh content, your readers will come back again and again.

Promote Your Blog

Marketing and promoting your blog is very important and you’ll have to give it serious attention if you plan to build a successful entertainment blog.

There are many ways to promote your blog. Some are paid others are free.

For the paid promotions, one of the popular options is the use of Google Adwords.

Google Adwords is Google’s advertising system where advertisers bid (and pay) for keywords that will help them make their adverts appear on Google search results.

Where you have a decent budget, you can use Google Ads to promote your blog. Joining the program gets your entertainment blogs promoted across Google Search results for some specific search keywords.

To get your blog even faster among the top entertainment blogs, you can do both Google and social media ads if you’re on a good budget.

As another aspect of paid promotion, you can pay to promote your entertainment blog on other popular blogs and websites, using either sponsored post or banner ads.

For the free promotion options, you can promote your blog and get it among popular entertainment blogs through search engine optimization, guest posting, link building, offline promotional events, user generated content etc.

Evolve a Growth System 

One of the biggest growth hacks for building a successful blog in the entertainment niche is evolving a clear and repeatable system that works for you.

This system could involve things like evolving content creation templates, editing and promotion templates, marketing templates and audience acquisition templates.

With a workable growth model, you will clearly identify the number of posts you have to make over a certain period of time, in order to achieve a certain number of visits to your blog.

Having these systems in place is very essential in getting you to create fresh and high quality content regularly while building your blog at the same time.

Create a Unique Selling Point

Naturally the entertainment blogging niche is highly saturated. To stand out as a newbie, you have to be able to offer a very unique value your audience can hardly find elsewhere.

This is why besides consistent blogging and promotion, you’ll want to post pretty exceptional content on your blog.

So not withstanding that entertaining news for instance is always similar, you can decide to make yours different.

Instead of copying posts from other website and updating them to your blog, rewrite the text and add a fresh dimension to it.

Don’t get confused. Depending on your branding and audience, you can add more fun, more details or an interesting addition to the post to.

For example, you can choose to add more details, update the news with more pictures, funny memes or video or even make it shorter.

All you want to do here is add a new perspective that will add a distinct value to the blog post, in a way only you can do it.

Build a loyal Audience

One of the major features of a successful entertainment blog is that it thrives on a loyal audience. So, beyond your blog, you need a loyal audience that will be visiting your blog, engaging with your posts and sharing them on social media.

This loyal audience has to go beyond your blog to social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and Pinterest etc.

This is because the social media is one important source of traffic and visibility that will be very useful to you and your blog.

You can grow your social media platform by being active on select platforms, posting content and engaging regularly and also, following a social media strategy that works for you.

You can also grow your social media handles easily by using social media promotional strategies like organizing contests, giving away freebies for comments and shares etc.

Create Content in Different formats

Research suggests that people are entertained in different ways. Some part of your audience could be entertained visually, some through audiovisuals and some just by reading your content.

As a smart blogger, you already understand that Entertainment Blogging is not all about written content so you don’t want to focus entirely on creating written content alone.

You want to also create diversity by creating both videos and audio content as it appeals to your audience.

Considering that video content is recently getting popularity, if possible, work on creating a mix of videos for your entertainment blog. You can host these videos on your YouTube channel and link back to your blog.

Also, where your entertainment blog can work with audio podcast, build a podcast around it.

What you’re doing with a diversified content is to keep your audience on your blog, no matter what blogging format appeals to them.

So if a particular section of your audience prefers Video Content, they can always find it there. Same goes for written and audio content.

How to Make Money With an Entertainment Blog

Just like most other blogs using the journalistic blogging model, there are many ways to monetize your entertainment blog site. Below are some of the popular strategies you can use to monetize your blog…

Google Adsense

One of the best ways to monetize your entertainment blog is through the use of Google Adsense.

Google AdSense is Google’s own advertising program that allows bloggers and Content Creators to run ads on blogs, websites, YouTube channels etc. and get paid, based on the accumulated number of clicks generated from the ads.

Over the years, Google Adsense has become the most popular way for most entertainment bloggers to monetize their blogs and earn passive income.

Read here on how to make money online with google adsense.

Affiliate Marketing

Besides Google Adesense, there are many other ways you can make money with your entertainment blog. One of them is through affiliate marketing.

Affiliate Marketing is another one of the popular ways to make money with an entertainment blog.

It works in three steps. You recommend a product to your audience. Your audience buys the product then you get paid commissions from the sales.

With a sizable audience, you can find a product related to your niche, promote it to your audience and then make some passive income as they get to buy the products.

Paid Advertising and Promotions

Again as part of strategies to make money with an entertainment blog, you can work on getting paid promotions on your blog.

This can come either as banner ads promotion where you charge the advertiser at intervals or a sponsored post promotion where a company pays you to write a post about their product on your blog, link to the product on their website and get paid a one time fee for the promotion.

Besides these, there are so many other ways to monetize your blog including selling your own digital product, writing ebooks, creating online courses etc.

To most bloggers, monetizing their entertainment blog is not as important as compared to building a decent traffic to the blog.

So as one of your foremost tasks, work on creating content, building your blog to a certain height and then making money out of your effort.

Final Words

As we wrap up on this guide, it is important to note that after setting up your blog, in some cases, at the initial stages, you might feel that your best effort in growing your blog is not bringing in commensurate results.

In such a situation, you might feel discouraged and all set to quit blogging. But, should this ever happen, you have to keep it in mind that building a successful entertainment blog will always take time and effort.

And you’re not alone on this journey. You also have to keep in mind that other people have evolved successful blogs of different kinds so you can also do the same by getting the right skills, putting in the effort and evolving your strategies until you hit your goal.

And of course, you can fast track your blogging journey by joining blogging communities and training like the Smart Blogging College, where we take you by the hand, mentor you and get you equipped with all the right skills you need, to build a formidable blog.

So, now it’s your turn! What are the challenges you’ve faced on your journey to setting up an entertainment blog? Drop your comments below.