Ultimate Guide on How to Start a Successful Entertainment Blog

So you want to start an entertainment blog right? Great idea!

Here, I have good news for you…

The first good news is that some years ago, there are people who wanted to start an entertainment blog like you.

Most of them were not sure they could get started, get popular or even make money with their blog but all these happened to them over the years.

Talk about people like Perez Hilton of Perezhilton.com, Arianna Huffington of Huffpost, Linda Ikeji of Lindaikejisblog etc.

These guys are super bloggers that became both rich and popular because of their blogs.

So right now, not only can you start an outstanding entertainment blog, you can start it, grow it, get popular and even make money online.

Yes! Because entertainment is not just one of the biggest industry around in the modern times…

It is also one of those industries everyone can relate with. Notwithstanding your faith, tribe, status or even sex.

Entertainment is one language all humans can relate to. Yes!
Because we all need entertainment every now and then…

So being that getting entertained is something everyone craves, there’s a huge market for it. And a good chance to stand out and get known

You can always get fans and readers for your entertainment blog. And they can keep growing by the day.

However, you must know there’s work involved. And you’ll need time and effort to get your blog around.

In fact your success will definitely depend on you.

But one thing is certain …

If you’re passionate about building a successful blog in the entertainment niche… Then this ultimate guide on how to start a successful entertainment blog is all you need to get started…

Especially if you’re in Nigeria, Africa or any part of the world that’s a bit disadvantaged when it comes to blogging.

Alright. let’s go into the real deal…

How can one really start an entertainment blog in Nigeria, Africa or any part of the world?

To start a successful entertainment blog, here are some things you’ll need to put in place…

Develop a Business Mindset.

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

So you want to ask yourself…

“Am I in here for the long run or do i want to make a business out of this?

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

After this, you can get started on setting up your entertainment website be it in the US, Africa, India, China, or wherever you are.

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 population. With a niche, you can choose to target a certain level of entertainment blogging that appeal to a particular audience.

When it comes to entertainment blogging, many bloggers choose to blog broadly about entertainment as a whole without focusing on any specific subset of the niche.

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, Gossips, Hollywood, Nollywood or Bollywood News, Religious entertainment, Sports etc…

You can micro define your niche as much as you want.

Doing this streamlines the process for you. Helping you Focus on a certain kind of readers with a particular interest.

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

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

After finding a niche for your entertainment website, you’ll then need to evolve a brand that will reflect with this audience.

A look at your target audience can help you fix your brand…

Before yu build a brand, you want to 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 help you come out with a brand for your entertainment blog.

Build a Platform

After building your brand, the next thing you want to do is build a platform. As an entertainment blogger, one of the most important platform you want to build is a 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.

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

Like Nollywoodnews.com, Hollywoodgossip.com, religiousentertainment.com etc.

With such names like this, any new reader will immediately understand the niche that your blog is focusing on.

Also it 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, you can also consider using your business name as a domain name for your entertainment blog.

Hosting

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

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

PS: Besides Smartweb, you can host your blog with any web hosting company of your choice.

Although Smartweb is one web hosting company i recommend a lot because i host most of the blogs and websites i design with them.

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

There are so many blogging platforms to start up your entertainment website. But the number one blogging platform is WordPress.

According to research, 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 people without much tech experience…

And yes, WordPress is always my best recommendation for bloggers.

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

Or you can contact WordPress experts like us at Victor Winners and we’ll get your blog designed, set you up and train you on blogging so that you’ll get started and achieve your blogging dreams without wasting time.

Alright! After setting up your entertainment blog on WordPress as we also discussed here, there are certain other things you’ll want to do as well…

One of those things is building a strong social media outlet.

Build Social media Platforms

Having a solid 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 etc.

After that, edit the Social Media page. Make it “on brand” and then go about adding friends.

On a Facebook page for instance, you can start with your friends. Invite them to like your page.

Before inviting your friends over, be sure to have updated the page details together with some write ups on the page. Stuff that relates to your niche.

After that go ahead, invite people to like your Facebook page. You can also promote the page via Facebook ads and other freebies or Facebook contests where possible.

The same strategies can be repeated for the other social media platforms and tweaked where necessary to suit with the particular platform.

Grow Your Platform

After setting up your entertainment blog, the next thing you want to do is build up and grow the blog.

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

Create Great Content

So after setting up your blog, to grow the blog effectively, you’ll want to go about creating great content for your entertainment website.

The best way to go about this is to first of all, create a content strategy.

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 instance, you may decide to be writing entertainment news articles 3 times in a day, or once in every single day. Be sure you stick to a clear schedule that can be followed through.

Also, indicate the different categories of entertainment stuff you’re writing about. If it’s entertainment news for instance, there are different aspects to it. Indicate when and how often you’ll be writing about that in your content strategy.

Follow the content writing schedule as much as you can.

It will help your readers. 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’re going to build a successful entertainment blog.

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

For the paid promotions, one of the popular options is Google Adwords. Where you have the resources, you can use Google Adwords to promote your blog.

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

Joining the program gets your entertainment blogs promoted across Google Search results for some specific search keyword (s).

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.

For the free marketing, you can promote your blog and get it among popular entertainment blogs though guest posting, offline promotional events, user generated contents etc.

Evolve Growth System 

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

This system could be build around creating fresh and quality content regularly, building an engaging and loyal audience, solving your audience’s need or a blog promotion strategy that works etc.

If you look around, you’ll realize this is what successful entertainment bloggers do. Some will even update the news around the clock, evolve an audience that keeps their blogs engaging etc.

Being that you’re just new in the entertainment blogging niche, you might not be able to update your blog around the clock but you can aim to update a certain number of post each day on the different categories of entertainment you’re writing about.

You can subscribe to google news for entertainment information around the world or streamline it to the specific area you want to cover.

Important tip:

As you know, the entertainment blogging niche is heavily populated. So to stand out, as a newbie, there’s going to be something spectacular about you.

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

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

So instead of copying posts from other website and updating them to your blog, you can decide to rewrite the text and add a fresh dimension to it.

Don’t get confused. Depending on your branding and audience, you can add fun to it, 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 to what’s there in a way only you can do it.

Build a loyal audience

Building a successful entertainment blog thrives on building a loyal audience. So beyond your blog, you’ll work on building a loyal audience across the social media

Especially on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and Pinterest etc.

Your social media platforms will be one important traffic points for your blog.

You can grow the social media platform by being very active on the sites, updating content regularly and following a social media strategy that reflects content that works with the particular platform and following through to create trending content.

You can also grow your social media platform easily by using promotional codes, 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 Your Entertainment Blog

Just like most other blogs using the journalistic blogging model, there are many ways to monetize your entertainment blog site.

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 when visitors click on 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 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 Adverts and Promotions

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

This can come 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 the biggest deal as compared to building a decent traffic to the blog.

So as one of your most important tasks, you’ll want to work on creating content, building your blog to a certain height and then making money out of your effort.

As we wrap up on this guide, it is important you know that sometimes at the initial stages, your effort might not bring in commensurate results. This might get you fed up and all set to quit blogging.

Understand, it’s not too difficult to build a successful and profitable entertainment blog.

Other people are doing it. And with effort, proper strategies, skills and time, you will build a formidable blog others can recon with, if you don’t give up too soon.

You can also fast track your blogging journey by joining blogging communities and training like the Smart Blogging College this will help you build and grow your entertainment blog in a shorter time.

You want to start an entertainment blog?

Let’s help you design, give you strategies to grow your blog and achieve your goals.