How To Create a Theatre 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 theatre blog today.

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What Is Your Blog About?

Since you are here and reading this article, there is a strong chance you already know - at least generally - what you want your blog to be about. You are writing a theatre blog! It is important to go a little deeper and decide what, exactly, you want your blog to accomplish, though. Are you writing a Broadway theatre blog? A blog about theatre costumes? A theatre lighting blog?

By going deeper and deciding on a specific subject, you help yourself to choose a tone for your blog and give direction to your upcoming content.

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 the Broadway Blog all at once, you are unlikely to make much headway and may quit in frustration.

Your goal is to find a niche that is not too broad and not too narrow - something that hits a sweet spot in the middle. “Theatre” is too broad. You will never stand out in such a niche. “Hats used on Broadway in 1955” is too narrow. You will run out of things to write about.

Some examples of niche theatre blogs are:

• Playwright Interviews Blog - 1000 Playwright Interviews
• Parody of Playwright Interview Blogs - I Interview @ssholes
• Community Theatre Discussion Blog - 2AMt

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 passionate theatre lovers who have been going to plays all of their lives, or are you writing to teens who are just discovering theatre? There is a big difference in the voice you would use to reach each audience. Regardless of your niche, you need to know your audience to ensure you write in a way that will appeal to them.

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 theatre 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 theatre blog may include:

• TheBroadwayBlog.com
• TheProducersPerspective.com
• Playscripts.com
• Playbill.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 theatre 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.

An excellent option for evergreen content on a theatre blog is how-to articles that cover the basics and fundamentals of your niche. You know that the fundamentals do not change much from year to year. That makes them a perfect topic for evergreen content. Determine what topics are likely to remain consistent in your niche and then begin writing quality blogs that cover those topics. Eventually, you will have a solid library of blogs that readers can appreciate and gain value from - both new readers and readers that have been with you forever.

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 a good jumping-off point for video content on your blog. They do not require great video production skills to pull off, and they are always appreciated by your audience because they give them another way of learning what you are trying to teach. How-to articles and how-to videos can go hand in hand. You can base your videos off of your articles if you have already written on a topic. Don’t worry too much about making a perfect video. With time and practice, you can improve your video skills and come to make videos that you are proud of.

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.

There is always news in the world of theatre, something you are probably well aware of. You likely come across news regularly as you research your niche. You can take advantage of these news topics by writing your own news-type blog posts about the same subjects with your own unique perspective. Just make sure you get the blogs written and posted as soon as possible. Old news is not going to achieve the desired effect of driving lots of temporary traffic to your blog.

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.

You have several options for image-heavy content on your theatre blog. Some bloggers lean more towards using existing images they find online, whether stock photos, press photos, free photos, or photos they pay for. Others lean more towards taking their own photos. You can do one or both, depending on your niche and your preferences.

If you do want to start using your own photos but don’t have a lot of photography experience, don’t worry too much about perfection to begin with. Many, many bloggers start with mediocre photos and improve over time as they get in more practice. Your audience will appreciate your progress and will love the personal touch that your photos bring. And if you want to accelerate your improvement, you can always take a class in person or online.

Mix and Match

Your blog can use a wide variety of content delivery styles. In fact, your blog should use different types of content because you want to reach the biggest possible audience. Some people love reading long articles, others love looking at beautiful images, while others only watch videos. It is normal to have a type of content that you prefer creating, but as a blogger, you will need to stretch yourself and try out new methods of content creation. Try taking photos, making videos, and so on. Your blogging will be more challenging, but also more interesting - for you and your audience.

How To Make Money From A Theatre 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 theatre 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.

Most of the affiliate programs for theatre bloggers focus on ticket sales. You can also find programs that reward you for recommending products related to theatre. Which affiliate programs you wind up using on your blog will depend a lot on your niche and your personal preferences.

Vendini is a big ticketing affiliate program. You can sign up for the vertical that makes sense for your blog - like live events - and then encourage your audience to purchase their tickets through Vendini.

For theatre-related products, Amazon Affiliates is an easy sell. Amazon offers just about everything, so you can usually find a way to link to products on the site.

One thing to keep in mind as you move forward with affiliate programs - long-term success for a blogger is often heavily influenced by audience trust. Only make recommendations that you want to stand behind. That way, you minimize the risk of pushing your audience to spend money on something that they will later regret and possibly resent you for.

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.

A great example of a digital product that a theatre blogger could sell is an online course teaching the elements of theatre production. You can even conduct a survey of your readers to find out what questions they want to be answered most and use those answers to help guide the design of your course. It will take time to make a quality product, but the financial rewards can be significant. A well-produced course in this niche could sell for $200 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.

It may seem difficult to sell products through a theatre blog, but you do have some options that are relatively simple and easy to try out. Branded products, like apparel, stationery, notebooks, stickers, and so on, are only a few dollars a piece and you can mark them up significantly for sale to your readers. If they love your blog, they will probably love sporting something that shows their appreciation.

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 through your blog will need to be based on your niche, your skills, and your audience’s demand. If you teach writing for theatre, you could sell your scriptwriting services or you could teach seminars on scriptwriting. If you write about costume design, you could offer your design services or you could teach seminars on the topic.

Since you have positioned yourself as an expert through your blog, you can likely charge a premium for your services. Try to be careful to avoid overcommitting, though, which can be easy to do when you are offered good money and demand is high. Your blog is still the driving force behind your business, so you need to keep it going strong even if your services are selling well. You can learn to balance the services you offer and your blog - and you can make a good living in the process!

Next Steps To Get Your Theatre 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!

Free Course: How To Start A Blog

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