It’s easy to create your own blog, but it’s not easy to create a successful blog. With over a billion active sites on the internet today and more than 300 million of them being blogs, you can get lost in the crowd.

Having personally gone through this process and having 20 years of experience in the online marketing space, I know what it takes to create a new site from scratch and scale it into something pretty amazing.

If you want to create a successful website or blog on the internet today, you need to do more than just “follow your passion” or “create great content.” Passion and content are still a huge part of the process, but without the necessary pre-planning, outreach and monetization in place, your site will just be another lost in the mix.

Here are three expert guides to help maximize your blogging efforts:

“How to Start a Niche Blog (And Why You Should)” by Julie Neidlinger

Before even starting a new website or blog, you need to know why you are creating one, who it’s for and how you are going to provide value to your audience. All of these are important decisions, as you’ll be going up against potentially hundreds of thousands of sites within your selected niche. Another important part of the pre-planning process is finding the right niche for your site. If you go too wide-scale, you’ll have a hard time focusing on the right content and hitting your exact target audience. By zoning in on your exact target audience and knowing what they’re looking for, you can create better content, provide more value and eventually become the authority within your space.

“7 Proven Strategies to Increase Your Blog’s Traffic by 206%” by Neil Patel

Getting traffic to a blog is something many site owners and content creators struggle with. The general concept of “traffic” is quite misleading in itself, as the value of a visitor can vary heavily based on their interest in your site and how they are going to use it. Focus on your niche when trying to increase traffic back to your blog. When creating content for your site, keep articles extremely focused and use long-tail keywords so you attract the specific audience searching for that solution in Google. It’s also important to utilize other traffic sources like guest blogging, social media and infographics for pulling in visitors from other locations.

“How To Make Money Blogging: Lessons from 23 Successful Bloggers” by Authority Hacker

There are many different ways to make money with a website or blog (some of which I outline in this article), but knowing your exact audience and their needs is crucial to maximizing your site’s earnings. By keeping your site as niche-focused as possible, not only will your content provide more value, but your site’s advertisements will too. The most common and effective ways to start monetizing a blog are through Google AdSense, banner advertising and affiliate marketing. Once a blog has enough traffic and authority, it can also start selling its own CPM-based direct advertising, products and services at a premium rate. Not only does this reference guide cover everything mentioned above, it also goes into fine detail on how top bloggers are making money with their sites through content creation, custom services and testing different monetization methods.

As mentioned earlier, starting a blog is one of the easiest things you can do online. All it takes is a domain name, web hosting and a quick install of WordPress. Once all of this is in place, you can start publishing content right to your site. But this is where most site owners stop. If you want to find success with blogging, you need to realize it’s not going to happen overnight. Treat your blog like a business, follow each of the expert guides above, and soon enough, you might just have a high-traffic, revenue-generating blog of your own.