How To Start a Relationships Blog

Starting a blog is one of the best ways to build an audience, get your ideas out into the world, and possibly make some (or a lot) of money while doing what you love. 

Getting started and taking the first steps can feel like a huge challenge. Building a website, planning your content, and finding the right business model are just a few of the tasks you’ll need to do to succeed.

Don’t worry! By the end of this article, you should have the knowledge and tools you need to feel confident and prepared to start your relationships blog today.

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What Is Your Blog About?

Since you are reading this article right now, you probably have a good idea of what you want your blog to be about - you are starting a relationship blog! But you will want to dig a little deeper to determine what you want your blog to really be about. Are you starting a relationship blog for divorced dads? A relationship blog for teens? Or a blog about platonic relationships?

You need to know on a deeper level what type of content you want to create so that you can focus and ensure that your hard work helps you stand out from the crowd.

There’s a quote that fits this situation perfectly:

"If you try to be everything for everybody, you will be nothing to no one."

Establish Your Niche

When creating a new blog, you need to find your niche. This is the corner of the market that you have the most knowledge about, the place you can establish yourself as an absolute authority. If you try to take on Gottman Relationship all at once, you will wind up overwhelmed and may quit in frustration.

The key is to find a subject that is not too broad, like “relationships”, but not too narrow, either, like “relationships at 25”. A subject that is too broad will be too difficult to establish yourself in, while one that is too narrow will leave you without enough to write about or with an audience that is too small.

Some examples of niche relationships blogs are:

• Find Love in 90 Days Blog - Love in 90 Days
• Repairing Relationships Blog - Love and Life Toolbox
• Relationship Blog for Women Blog - Relationship Reality

Name Your Blog

Once you’ve found your niche, it’s a great time to start brainstorming a web domain name for your blog. You’ll want to pick a name that’s brandable and available. Use our domain name tool to check if your name is available. If it is, scoop it up before someone else gets to it first.

Brand Your Blog

The strongest and most memorable businesses are built on a solid brand. When developing your brand, think about what your business stands for. Customers and clients are looking for companies that have a compelling brand, as much as they are shopping for high-quality products and services.

Creating a logo for your business is vital for increasing brand awareness. You can design your own unique logo using our Free Logo Generator. Our free tool will help you brand your business with a unique logo to make your business stand out.

Finding Your Audience

Having a good sense of who is going to be reading your blog is one of the best ways to know what type of content to create, how to shape it, and, ultimately, how to grow your following. With a clear understanding of your niche, understanding your audience should come more naturally.

Finding your target audience - the people you want hanging out on your blog - isn’t only statistics and demographics. It requires a deeper understanding of who these people are and what they want. Your target audience is the people you’re writing to when you write your blog.

Are you writing to people who have never been in a serious relationship before or people who are trying to improve their existing relationships? No matter what the core focus of your blog is, you need to consider the people you want to read it so that you can tailor your content to them and their needs.

Create a Persona

One way to understand your audience is to create a persona of your perfect target audience member. This essentially means creating a mock-up of the ideal person you hope to reach with your blog.

Here is an example of a target audience persona:

Having a persona for your perfect audience member helps you to visualize and understand who you are writing for and provides important direction to your content.

Be Your Own Persona

Another popular way to find your perfect target audience is to be your own persona. Many of the best products and services come from scratching your own itch. It’s possible you’ve searched for the perfect relationships blog to read, came up short, and decided to create it yourself. This makes you the perfect audience member for your own blog.

This can be a great strategy for creating highly effective content. If you’ve noticed a meaningful omission in blog content, chances are you are not alone. By writing personally satisfying content you are likely to reach an audience in search of the same things.

Where Is Your Audience Hanging Out?

No web content exists in a vacuum. While you should strive to create uniquely entertaining content for your blog, your target audience is almost certainly already out there reading other blogs, engaging on specialized forums, and using social media. Finding the sites where your audience already mingles is a great way to discover what topics they are most interested in, what language they are using, and what valuable content you can add to that mix.

Some examples for your relationships blog may include:

• Gottman.com
• ModernLoveCounseling.com
• AliciaClarkPsyD.com
• RelaxedRelationships.com

Visiting these sites is also a great way to begin engaging with your audience before your blog has even gone live. Jump into conversations on forums and in comments sections and get to know the people you’ll be writing for. This is a great, organic way to build relationships and direct people to your blog in its early days. Sharing your passion with like-minded people will make them more excited and passionate about supporting you in your blogging endeavor.

How Will You Present Your Work?

Traditionally, when most people think about a blog they picture written content on a page. However, there are several different ways to present your ideas on your blog, depending on your subject matter and target audience. Every blog will thrive with different formats, so it’s important to think carefully about how to best showcase your content before you start.

There are several effective methods of presenting the material on your relationships blog. They include:

Evergreen Articles

As the name suggests, evergreen articles are composed of content that lasts. These articles are designed to have a long shelf life and continue drawing readers to your blog over time. They are typically long-form, text-based articles that delve more deeply into a particular topic.

A great way to create evergreen content on a relationship blog is to write articles about the basics of relationships - things that do not change dramatically over a short period of time. Communication, respect, consent, and other topics are ideal for evergreen content because good advice in these areas remains good advice year after year. Figure out what topics lend themselves to evergreen content in your niche and get started blogging!

Videos

While the video format is not new, the explosive growth of YouTube and the advent of new and innovative video-based tech like Snapchat and TikTok have shown the true power of video as an online medium. While you may think that creating video is much more difficult and expensive than writing your content, you have access to all the technology you need to make high-quality video content right on your smartphone.

Video how-tos are excellent for relationship blogs because they give you a chance to demonstrate your ideas “in-person”. You are already writing blogs explaining how to do things based on your niche, such as teaching your audience how to introduce themselves to strangers. You can make videos where you roleplay with another person. Go through the roleplay, show how your ideas work and things to avoid, then post your videos for your audience to enjoy. Don’t stress about getting it perfect - you will get better at video as you make more videos.

News-type Articles

News articles or other “announcement” type content can be a great way to gather new readers. One benefit of news content is the short-term but powerful increase in search volume during an event. While this bump may be temporary, it can be a great tool for grabbing new readers who end up coming back for more.

Writing about current events or new happenings also means there will typically be less competition for readers. Other blogs and media sources are all getting the information as it develops. Since the base of knowledge available is smaller, this gives you a good opportunity to add your own flavor to the article.

The downside to news-type articles is that they tend to lose popularity much more quickly than evergreen content. While the interest for an event may be very large one day, the next day people may already be moving on to the next shiny object.

The kind of news-type blogs you write will depend on your specific niche. If you write about celebrity relationships, you will have no shortage of news stories to cover as gossip comes and goes. If you write a blog about attracting a mate, you can write news stories about the latest research results on the topic. One good tip for finding news-type topics is to keep an eye out for promising ideas while you are doing your regular research for blog topics.

Image-heavy Content

While most people expect to be reading when they visit a blog, image-heavy content can be very appealing and break up your text-focused posts to keep people’s attention. Depending on the topic of your post, displaying multiple images per page on a single subject can give your audience a better sense of what you are trying to convey.

While some topics may take to images very easily, like a car blog or a celebrity gossip site, others may require some deeper thinking to make this strategy work.

Including images in your relationship blogs is important because readers tend to identify with images. However, you may find it easier or more difficult to develop an image strategy depending on your niche. Celebrity relationship blogs have it easy - while blogs about good communication habits might struggle more.

Many relationship bloggers pull images from stock photography sites to fill out their blogs with images. You can find a wide variety of images on these sites, some you can use for free, others require you to pay a fee to use them. When you are writing about depression and relationships, you can use images of people looking sad. When you are writing about the excitement of a new relationship, you can use images of people looking ecstatic.

Finding images to use for your relationships blog should not be difficult - but you may find it challenging to produce image-heavy content for certain topics.

Mix and Match

You do not need to use a single content delivery strategy on your blog - nor should you. To make your blog appealing to as many people as possible, you need a variety of content, including videos, long-form, and short-form posts. You are probably going to have one or two types of content you are more comfortable creating. That’s totally normal. However, try to stretch yourself by creating different types of content regularly. Try your hand at making videos. Push yourself to include more images in your blogs. You and your audience will benefit from your efforts.

How To Make Money From A Relationships Blog

One of the main reasons people start blogs is to generate some sort of profit. Whether you’re looking for a few hundred dollars per month or a job-replacing income, blogging is still an excellent way to make those dreams a reality.

There are a few great ways to make money from a relationships blog:

Display Ad Networks

Display ads are the simplest way for websites to generate any sort of income. Ad networks, like Google Adsense, are fairly simple to be accepted into, and implementation onto your site is streamlined and clean. If you’re just beginning to see some traffic to your blog and want to turn this into dollars, display ads are where most people start.

There are a few downsides to display ads, however. The first is that some feel they detract from the user experience on your blog. Most people have been to a site where large ads pop up and block the content in the middle of reading. This can be distracting, frustrating, and even drive people away from your blog. While it’s possible to clean up and control the type of ads you use, it can be a constant battle to balance effective ad placement with aesthetics and readability.

The other main downside is that they don’t pay a lot. These networks generally use a pay-per-click (PPC) model which, depending on the niche, can pay anywhere from $0.01 to $1.50 per click, most on the lower end.

While display ads are a great way to make your first dollars, you’ll want to make sure any negatives they bring are worth the profits they provide. Once you develop a solid following, you can consider moving on to more lucrative and effective profit-making options.

Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing programs like Amazon Affiliate have become much more popular over the past few years, as they take the payment model from pay-per-click to cost-per-acquisition (CPA). This means you can refer as many users to an advertiser’s product as you want, but will only get paid when the user makes a purchase.

Both advertisers and publishers benefit from an affiliate marketing setup. The advertiser pays nothing until a sale is made and the publisher enjoys much higher commissions than the pay-per-click model.

You have many options for affiliate programs as a relationship blogger - the key is to find the ones that you like and that make sense for your niche. Many affiliate programs center on a particular topic, such as date nights, rebuilding marriages, and so on.

There are affiliate programs for strengthening marriages from numerous sources, including “Reclaim Your Marriage Program from The Dating Divas” (50% commissions) and “Married and Happy - A System for Men” (40% commissions). Programs for date nights including “175 Best Date Ideas” (50% commissions) and “MELT: Couples Massage Course” (25% commissions). The list of options goes on and on, so you have plenty to choose from.

Remember, when it comes to affiliate programs, long-term it is better to participate in programs you are excited to offer your audience - not just programs that promise to make you more money.

Sell Digital Products

Digital products are an online entrepreneur's dream. You create the item once, then sell it as many times as you can, with little to no cost of reproduction. This means that you can scale your business to infinity.

Examples of digital products are:

• Ebooks - A piece of writing, generally in PDF format. These can contain literally anything that your audience would want. They can either be true book-length all the way down to a few pages of content. Depending on your niche, audience, and subject, these can run from $1 to $100 per sale fairly easily.
  
  
• Gated Content - This is content that is served on your website just like any other article, except that is behind a “paywall”. If you are creating content that you don’t want to be released to anyone but your true followers, you have them sign up for an account on your site and charge them a subscription fee for access. Generally, authors charge anywhere from $5 to $200 per month for access to gated content.
  
  
• Online Courses - If you can teach a skill that your audience wants to learn, you can create an online course to sell to them. These courses can be formatted in whatever way makes the most sense to you, but most nowadays are video courses. Online courses can sell from $10 to well over $10,000 per course, obviously depending on the subject matter and audience.

As a relationships blogger, you can come up with numerous digital products to offer your audience based on your niche. For example, you could create a digital course on how to set up the perfect date night. You could ask your audience about the struggles they experience when trying to impress their partners and offer solutions in your course. A well-produced course in this niche could sell for $50 or more.

Sell Physical Products

Selling physical products is the original money-making strategy. You gather an audience that is hungry for something, you sell it to them, and everyone wins. You don’t have to be an inventor, designer, or manufacturer to sell products. Sites like Alibaba and AliExpress import already-made items into the United States and sell them for a markup.

The two main methods for the distribution of these items are: dropshipping and self-fulfilled.

Dropshipping is a method where you advertise a product on your site that you do not own. Once you make the sale, you inform the manufacturer, who will handle the shipping and handling to the end-user. While this is simple because you don’t have to worry about storing or shipping any items yourself, you’ll find that the margins can be quite slim.

Self-fulfilled sales are much more of a hands-on approach to sales. You buy the item from the manufacturer, store it, then ship it to the end-user once you have made the sale. While there is much more work involved, you’ll find that the margins per sale are much higher.

Product sales through a relationship blog may seem difficult, but you can start small and adapt as your audience grows. Many relationship bloggers sell relatively inexpensive items to begin with, such as branded stationery, journals, and other similar items. You can purchase these items for only a few dollars apiece, then sell them for a considerable markup. As your blog becomes more popular, you can choose whether you want to sell more expensive products - like writing your own book.

While it can be very profitable when done well, selling products is not generally recommended for the beginner blogger. It’s best to secure an audience that you know will be receptive to the product before making a large investment in product development or acquisition.

Create A Service

Providing a service is another very basic money-making plan. If you can provide a service that you know your audience needs, you have a viable business on your hands.

Whether this service is delivered through one-on-one interaction with the user, through a piece of software that you develop, or by directly completing a task for the user, this is a great way to monetize your skillset and your blog.

The services you offer on your relationships blog will depend on your niche, audience needs, and your personal skills and experience. You may offer one-on-one relationship coaching, group coaching, or some other type of service.

The most important thing to remember when offering a service is that your time is valuable - since you have positioned yourself as an expert through your blog, you can charge a premium. However, you will need to avoid overcommitting yourself. In the end, it is your blog that drives your business. You need to keep up with your blog to keep your business going strong. Learning to balance your services and blogging will come with time!

Next Steps To Get Your Relationships Blog Started

Now that you have the strategies in place to build and grow your own blog, check out our free course: How To Start A Blog.

This course includes all the essentials on how to get your blog out of your head and onto its own website. Starting a blog is simple and inexpensive, so there’s no reason that you shouldn’t start today!

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