The blogosphere consists of a large number of people who are already involved in publishing and content marketing.
But don’t let that discourage you – if you’re passionate about something, and you’re willing to put in the hard work, you can absolutely start a successful blog. Although it is an amazing experience to start a blog, it can also be very intimidating. There is a lot of hard work that goes into starting and maintaining a blog, and there are many potential problems that you may encounter. However, don’t be discouraged. If you are passionate about something and willing to put in the effort, you can definitely create a successful blog.
There are a few key resources that can help you blog more effectively. Learning to use these resources can help you to create and improve your content.
1. Online communities
Different groups of people interact with each other across political boundaries and geographies. These groups are similar in their interests and quite possibly their goals.
We gather on a website instead of meeting in person at a coffee shop. We post messages to each other instead of talking to each other face-to-face. We don’t have to worry about when and where to meet, because online communities are always available.
2. Other bloggers
The successful bloggers have learned to connect with other bloggers and create relationships of give and take. New bloggers may feel intimidated by bloggers who have been blogging for longer or who have more success. However, other bloggers are actually your best resource. You might feel nervous about connecting with them at first, but that’s normal. The difference between successful bloggers and beginners is that successful bloggers have learned how to create relationships with other bloggers by exchanging information and help.
More experienced bloggers are more likely to be willing to help you and have already written guides or other resources for newbies and returning bloggers. These people are resourceful and have the technical knowledge you might need.
3. Use SEO to drive tens of thousands of visitors every month
SEO is the process of optimizing your content to improve your ranking on search engines like Google.
SEO includes improving your search ranking by acquiring links from other sites. Other actions needed for best performance include keyword research and a variety of other factors.
3.1. Find keywords with a fairly low ranking difficulty around your niche
You can find out how many people are searching for a keyword and how difficult it is to rank for that keyword using a tool like Ahrefs, Moz, or SEMrush.
Make content that is better than anything else on the internet for the topic and keyword you have chosen.
When starting a blog, target specific keywords that are relevant to your content. Do not simply guess at what keywords to use; put thought into which keywords will attract readers to your blog.
Both difficulty and popularity are important factors to consider when choosing keywords. You want to pick keywords that are popular with people and ones that you’re also able to rank for. Some keywords will unfortunately be above what you can target in your first couple of years blogging.
Make sure to spend as much time promoting your content as you did creating it.
You should promote your content in various ways, such as social media, email outreach to influencers, guest blog posts, and paid promotion.
4. Build links to boost your rankings
Google uses backlinks as one of its main indicators for ranking a website higher.
Although it requires dedication and effort, it is not complicated or difficult. The key is to network, create strong relationships, and produce content that appeals to people who can provide links.
No one will agree to link to something that is not good, it does not matter if you have just started blogging or have been doing it for a while.
Brian Dean believes that it is more effective to create content for the people you want links from, instead of focusing on keywords. This approach has worked well for him.
If you want your article to be successful, reach out to anyone you linked to in your article. These people are likely to share and link to it because they have a stake in it.
5. Go for quality over quantity
It is always better to have fewer, high quality blog posts, than many low quality posts.
You don’t need to post every day or even every week. If you do things right, you only need to post once a month. That gives you the whole month to focus on promotion.
Google used to, and still does to some extent, give preference to sites with fresh content.
After sites began publishing large numbers of low-quality articles, Google took action to restrict their visibility.
6. Use internal linking to help Google navigate your site
It is important to have internal links on your site when you first start blogging. Internal links are links that go from one page on your site to another page on your site. External linking is when you link from a page on your site to a page on someone else’s site.
Internal linking is important for several reasons: it helps with SEO by improving your site’s Crawler accessibility, it helps guide your readers through your content, and it can also introduce new readers to older content on your site.
When a blog post of yours ranks highly in search engines and gets a lot of backlinks, the internal links from that page to your other pages will help boost those pages’ rankings.
7. Guest blog for more traffic, better SEO, and brand awareness
If you want to get more traffic to your site, try guest blogging. You can borrow traffic from other blogs by writing posts for them.
You’ve probably seen or heard of this before. It works like this:
You first need to identify a blog in your field of interest. Look for bloggers who are well-respected in your industry or a closely related one.
Domain authority is a score on a range of 1-100 which reflects how trustworthy a site is. It is based on their linking profile, age and many other factors. A higher score is preferable as it gives a greater boost to SEO.
8. Use social media to drive thousands of converting traffic
Social media and blogging are both important. You can’t have one without the other.
There’s nothing more frustrating than spending four hours writing a blog post only to see zero engagement.
Most people use social media incorrectly by treating it as a platform to simply share their blog posts. Social media is not meant to be used as an RSS feed.
9. Create amazing images to increase shares, backlinks, and subscribers
It’s easy to create high-quality images, it’s affordable and fast, and it’s something you need to have to be competitive in today’s world.
Here are all the tools you need:
Canva
A design tool that is easy to use for people who are not designers, with some free icons and a paid version that is $10 per month that has added functionality such as being able to resize images instantly.
Relay That
This is an amazing image creation tool that creates images for you! With this tool, you don’t even need to design it yourself. Get everything you need at the click of a button. The free version or pay $16/month for the basic package.
Unsplash
A directory of free, high-quality stock photos.
MyStock Photos
Similar to Unsplash, with even more photos.
Iconfinder
Get high-quality icons for just a dollar or two.
Tip: Adding charts and graphs can help to make data easier for readers to process, and can also make a post look nicer. Creating charts and graphs with Visualizer is easy to do.
10. Format your blog post to make you look like an expert
Images that are beautiful tend to make readers spend more time on the page, as well as increase engagement. Something that is well-formatted has a similar effect.
A well-formatted post is easy to scan and understand. Readers can quickly see what the post is about and decide if they want to read it.
Here are some pointers:
- Divide long text with headers and subheaders
- Use bulleted and numbered lists to point out key information
- Bold and italicize key points (but don’t use both at the same time)
- Add quality images (rule of thumb is to use one every 300 words or so)
- Use short paragraphs (no more than 3 to 5 lines at most – this helps with skimming and mobile reading)
11. Add “call to actions” to get the most from your audience
If you’re figuring out how to start a blog, don’t make the same mistake I did and forget to include call to actions.
You can use CTAs to encourage your customers to do things like subscribe to your newsletter, read another blog post, or make a purchase. For example, you could offer a content upgrade as a CTA.
Each and every post on your blog, especially when you’re just starting out, should have some kind of call to action (CTA). This could be something as small as asking readers to share or comment on the post, or as significant as making a purchase. Regardless, every post should have a purpose.
12. Academics
Sensible universities and college departments will provide students with the resources they need to succeed in blogging.
Academic resources for blogging can include academic blogs, online blogging courses offered by universities, and college guides to writing for the web. You can also find research studies on the impact of academic blogging, university articles about student publishing, academic writing blogs, digital storytelling initiatives, and studies on the academic contributions of blogging.
13. Online hosting
Your online hosting services can provide valuable resources for technical knowledge about blogging, running a small business, and SEO. Most hosting services will have a blog that shares knowledge based articles and how-tos for your blogging business.
After you have looked at all of these factors, you should check out the affiliate programs for the companies you are considering working with. This is a way to make money from your blog while also helping other bloggers.
14. Blogging platforms
Blogging platforms offer a great way to get more involved with blogging. Experienced bloggers often create their own training materials and online courses to help other bloggers with their blogging journey. Knowing this, many blogging platforms often hold events to facilitate discussions.
Although both WordPress.com and WordPress.org offer ways to get involved with the WordPress community, WordPress.com offers support workshops specifically for women. There are many ways to get involved with WordPress.org, such as their TV channel, the training team, the marketing team, the design team, and WordCamp. These platforms can teach you everything you need to know about growing your online community.
15. Adwords
This tool is useful for bloggers who want to make their site more popular. You can use the Keyword Planner to help you come up with new ideas and see how popular they might be.
The Keyword Planner can be used to research potential keywords to use in articles, as well as to find related keywords that would be relevant to blog topics. This tool provides access to search volume statistics that can be used to help make decisions about which keywords to use. In addition, the planner offers forecasts that can give an idea of how a list of keywords might perform.
16. AdSense
Have you considered using AdSense to monetize your website or YouTube channel? AdSense is a tool from Google that allows you to place ads on your website and channels. If you have a blog on Blogger, you can also easily show ads between your posts. But first, your site needs to meet Google’s eligibility requirements for AdSense.
If your account isn’t activated, it’s probably because there’s an issue with your website—either with the content or some technical aspect that Google needs to optimize. Once you fix the problem, you’ll be able to activate your account.
An AdSense account must be activated before a new site can be added. The site must also comply with program policies. An active AdSense account can be used to monetize more than one website. The account can also be linked with Analytics.
17. Analytics
All the actions you take as a blogger can be classified as marketing. Even if you never considered them as such, they are still marketing. Therefore, Google’s most loved marketing tool should become your new best friend.
The purpose of analytics is to help you improve your website and reach your target audience by giving you a better understanding of your customers. With analytics, you can find out how many visitors you have, what their demographics are, where they come from, what their interests are, and more.
18. Webmaster
The Webmaster tool is essential for all website owners. It allows you to see potential problems with your website and make changes to your code to improve it. You can also check how popular your website is and make sure your content is being seen by search engines. In short, it helps you make sure that your website is running smoothly and people can find it easily.
19. Forms
Google Forms can be very useful for bloggers. For example, you can create a simple contact form to use on your landing page. You can also use it to create a survey to collect information about your visitors, such as their names and email addresses. This information can be used for maintaining a network, for newsletter subscriptions, for downloading freebies, and much more.
Get ready for your first blog
Building a blog seems like a simple task, but it is actually very difficult to do it well. There are many different parts to a successful blog, including WordPress, writing, editing, formatting, hosting, SEO, link building, social media, email lists, networking, and more.