How To Create an Entertainment 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 entertainment blog today.

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What Is Your Blog About?

The fact that you are reading this right now means you have at least a general idea of what you want to blog about - you are starting an entertainment blog! Entertainment is a huge category, though, so you will need to narrow down your subject a bit to stand out. Are you writing a blog about heavy metal music? A blog about Hollywood stars? A blog about Bollywood stars?

Thinking more deeply about what you want to accomplish with your blog will help you set your tone and decide on what content you need to produce.

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 Entertainment Weekly all at once, you will find yourself squarely outmatched and very disappointed.

There are many niches to choose from, some too big, like “entertainment”, and some too small, like “hairstyles in 1913 Hollywood films”. A niche that is too big will be impossible to differentiate yourself in. One that is too small will not give you enough to write about. You need to find a sweet spot somewhere in the middle. 

Some examples of niche entertainment blogs are:

• Film Lovers Blog - Film School Rejects
• Hair Metal Blog - Hair Metal 101
• Audiobook Blog - Mary Burkey

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

logo gen linkThe 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 hip hop music lovers who have been following the genre for decades or elderly people who love classic movies? Regardless of what your content is about, you need to determine your audience so you can choose which voice you want to write in and speak directly to that audience.

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 entertainment 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 entertainment blog may include:

• 9Gag.com
• Cracked.com
• Pitchfork.com
• TMZ.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 entertainment 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.

Reviews make for great evergreen content. Your opinion is unlikely to change in the near future, and people are always interested in reading the reviews of the things that they love. Although it may seem like you need to focus purely on new releases, your audience will increase more if you mix it up with reviews of older releases as well. Yes, people do look for modern reviews of classics, and you can attract those readers by producing your own reviews that look at people’s favorite pieces of entertainment.

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.

Depending on your niche, it could make a lot of sense to produce video reviews of releases in your particular niche. You could do video reviews of movies, music, or any other type of entertainment that your niche covers. There are plenty of people who prefer video content to written content, and your video reviews will put you in a position to attract those people to your blog. You can even make video reviews based on your written reviews if you already have written reviews of specific releases. Your audience will love seeing you talk about the things you are passionate about on video.

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.

Entertainment news is one of the most popular news categories out there - which means there is never, ever a shortage of topics to write about. You are probably keeping your finger on the pulse of the entertainment news cycle in your niche anyway. Now, all you have to do is write blog posts covering the news that you find most interesting or the news that your audience is likely to find the most interesting. Just make sure you get your blogs up quickly because old news does not attract a lot of traffic.

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 good options for image-heavy content on an entertainment blog, depending on your niche and your preferred way of collecting and/or creating images. 

Many entertainment bloggers take advantage of the constant stream of images released by entertainment companies to fill out their blogs with celebrity pictures, album artwork, and so on. You can also take your own photos if you are interested in doing so. You may be great at photography or you may have never tried it before. Whatever your skill level, you can always improve with practice - so if you want to take photos to use on your blog, you might as well start now.

Mix and Match

As an entertainment blogger, you need to give your audience a variety of content to keep them coming back for more. It is totally normal to have one type of content you feel most comfortable creating, whether it’s writing, taking photos, making videos, or something else. However, you will get better results from your blog if you branch out and try making different types of content over time. Try making videos, taking photographs, and anything else you think will appeal to your audience. They will appreciate the effort and you will gain skills that will serve you well as a blogger.

How To Make Money From an Entertainment 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 an entertainment 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.

The Amazon Affiliate program is the perfect fit for an entertainment blog, especially when you are just getting started. The program is extremely easy to integrate into your blog and you are not going to have any difficulty finding products that you want to link to. It’s Amazon, after all, and they carry pretty much everything.

When you link to a product on Amazon and you are part of the program, you get a small commission if your readers buy the product. Blog audiences expect links to products. The links you provide make it much easier to find the product you are writing about and if you are recommending the product, your readers are probably going to want to buy it. Once they do, you get paid. It’s not a lot, but it can add up as your popularity increases.

Many entertainment bloggers start with the Amazon Affiliate program and stay with it for years. It might pay out a few dollars a month for a small blog, but when the blog grows in traffic and many purchases are being made, the amount can increase to thousands of dollars a month.

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.

You can come up with some good ideas for digital content on your entertainment blog - you just need to identify what your audience wants and needs. If you write a blog for movie lovers, you could create an Ebook that brings together your recommendations and analysis of all your favorite films. You could sell the Ebook for $20 or more, depending on its size and complexity. If you teach readers how to review movies, you could create an online course of instructional material and sell it for $100 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.

The easiest types of products to start selling on your entertainment blog are relatively inexpensive, branded products - like apparel, notebooks, stickers, magnets, and patches. If your audience is passionate about your brand, they will snatch up these items even at the considerable mark up you offer them at. If your blog becomes really popular, you can possibly partner with a company you like to offer more expensive products designed by you.

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.

If your entertainment blog focuses on writing reviews you can offer a seminar that teaches the process. If you write about the best new music, you can curate music for events for a fee. It all depends on your skills and the things that your audience are likely to get excited about your offering. 

Your blog positions you as an expert, which means you can charge a premium for your services. However, you will need to be careful to balance your blog with your services to keep your business going strong. Your services are in demand because of your blog. You can learn to balance blogging and offering services, it may just take some time to perfect your workflow.

Next Steps To Get Your Entertainment 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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