Comprehensive Blogging Guide for Schools: from Contents to Monetization

Thinking on how to blog as a school? This post is a comprehensive guide to blogging for schools

In seeking to pursue a global relevance, human capital development and wealth-building strategy for today's schools, one thing that must not be left out is blogging. 

Unfortunately, this is the last thing in the thinking box of many school managers and policy makers, especially here in Africa.

The opening of the global space and the advancement in the information communication technology have given everybody voice, which is the ultimate goal of globalization. And the best and the most effective platform for finding a voice in a world of over seven billion persons, is blogging.

One may want to know how schools can benefit from blogging. Think about these few points among many others:

1. Blogging helps a school to create a brand visibility for itself
2. There is no better way to connect to the global community than through blogging
3. Blogging can be another source of lifetime income for schools.

Everybody is actually blogging (thousands of blog sites launched every month since the turn of the century), except possibly, African schools and teachers.

In this post, I challenge schools to go into blogging- they have all it takes to blog as well as all to gain blogging- and here I show you all you need to know- from creating your first blog contents to monetizing it.

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The 3 Key Components for Blogging Success

To succeed in the business of blogging, there are three key factors that must be considered:

-         Contents: There must be something to talk about. This could be an academic topic, instructional guide, news report, name it. But the problem is this: there is nothing you want to talk about that has not been possibly addressed by others.

So what do you do? Find a way to make your contents unique. In seeking for unique contents, originality is key.

-         Promotion: Every webmaster knows that the major aspect of blogging is not just producing content, but letting it out to the target audience.

Remember you started blogging because you wanted to lend your voice. So if you finish writing those unique contents and yet no one reads it, it makes no sense writing in the first place. In blogging, traffic is key! You must find a way to let out your blog post out to the world.

-         Monetization: Monetization may not always be the primary goal of every blogger, but it’s definitely the ultimate goal. A lot of persons started blogging with the primary aim of simply promoting an event or product. Some even decided to just write and feel good writing. But ultimately, the thought of being paid for their passion gradually replaced the initial goal- they now want to monetize their contents- a move in the right direction of course.

But the question is: in what simple ways do you monetize your blog contents?

Guide for Schools on Content, Promotion and Monetization

-         Content creation for schools




     For schools, creating a unique and regular contents for blogging purposes is never a big deal. You can draw your blog contents from classroom tips for success, academic subjects etc. This post shows you 10 possible blogging areas for schools and teachers.

If a school decides to blog on academic subjects, it might be a holistic thing-that is, blogging on all major subjects they offer-say Mathematics, English Language, Sciences, Business-related subjects, computing and ICT etc. At some other times, it could just be on one subject.

In whichever case, all you need to do is engage all your staff members or selected few to submit articles in that area once in a week or fortnight.  

Think about it. If you have say, ten teachers each producing contents every fortnight, it means you have nothing less than five blog post each week. That is quite massive!

As school manager or one in charge of your school blogging platform, all you need is to get everyone involved. There is no niche area (think of these selected niches fors chools) where you can’t have your teachers producing enough contents each week for your blog site update. All you need is proper planning and scheduling.

Another way to produce contents for the school blog site (mostly on niches related to general and technical knowledge) is to assign your students to write on these topics as part of their continuous assessment test.

From the foregoing, you can see that the issue of blog contents is an easy ride for schools, if proper planning is made in that regard.

-         Promotion/Traffic




     When it comes to driving traffic to blog posts as a promotional target, schools stand in a huge advantage.

However, everything boils down to proper planning and scheduling. Let me show you how to go about it. Today, virtually every member of your staff, including your senior students, are on social media (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram etc). Imagine the flow of traffic your blog site will enjoy when almost the entire school community is involved in the business of sharing your blog post to reach out to their followers and friends!

As a school manager, you’ve got to find a way to motivate them do this regularly, though in a way it won’t appear spam and irk the anger of these social media administrators.

It can also form part of the school social media policy for teachers and other members of staff to be regularly involved in sharing the school blog posts.

Another aspect of blog promotion is engagement. Staff and students should not only visit the school blog site regularly, they should as well engage properly, by spending few minutes reading articles, navigating to other related posts and also making relevant comments.

Students can also visit to answer questions on academic subjects in form of comments.

These unique engagements are what help to propel your blog to Google’s top search result.

-         Monetization




     The ultimate goal! How do you go about achieving it? For the average blogger, Google Adsense offers the best monetization leverage for blogging profit as an ads network. But you need to do a great work in your blog before your site can be approved.

Of course, there are many other ads network out there doing the same thing- Propeller ads, Chitika etc.

Other ways to monetize your school blog site outside the ads networks include:

** Affiliate marketing: There are many educational-related brands running affiliate program. Simply register with them (it’s always free) and then embed your affiliate banners and links to drive sales and earn commission.

** Sell your own digital products: This could be in form of e-book or any other form of digital download.

** Advert space: If you’re driving an appreciable amount of traffic to your blog, you can create an advert space on your blog site to monetize those traffics. Companies are ready to pay you huge, while using your blog site as a market place to reach out to potential customers and clients.

The list is quite endless. But starting off with the above listed platforms is a great way to begin.

Frankly speaking, schools that are not blogging are wasting both human and financial resources. We are ready to collaborate with you to make it happen.

Join us in the School Blogging Challenge!