The Best Advice For New Bloggers
The journey of launching and managing a successful blog can be exhilarating and intimidating. You will feel lost and frustrated, especially when you do not get the views, shares, and likes other bloggers get.
Also, the competition realm of blogging is a formidable one. With millions of blogs on the internet now and hundreds more being set up each day, it is not unlikely that you will get overwhelmed by the existence of many competitors trying to outsmart one another.
Spend a huge amount of time studying how your blog can attract the crawlers of these search engines (Google, Yahoo, Firefox, Bing, etc.). That means thinking about how to create informative and engaging content and using the keywords your target audience uses when they search for information on the internet.
But do not lose heart. You can be at the top of your game if you do it right and take the necessary steps carefully. It will be smooth sailing for you if you follow the tips, tricks, and advice from those who have been blogging successfully for years and reap the benefits of effective blogging.
Blogging tips for new bloggers
What Is the Best Advice for Blogging?
It is not difficult to start a blog, but it is hard to build a blog that drives hordes of traffic. According to experts, for a blogger to achieve such a feat, they need to master building traffic using proven tactics that work for search engines and their target audience.
The following are three traffic-building strategies from experts:
Target an audience likely to share your content.
Consider the interest and ability of the audience you are targeting to share your content. Study the actions your readers did in the past.
Some of them could have actively done the evangelizing of the work that you do. Invest your time and energy to encourage them to continue to support you. Ask yourself these questions:
- Who are these people, and what is their demographic?
- What writing and content type do they share with their friends
- What are the topics they consume and share?
What content type strikes a chord with these people (videos, Infographics, stats, how-to articles, etc.)? Consider all these questions to guide you in creating your content.
Meet your audience where they are on the web.
Even before you start writing your first blog post, you should have already figured out where to find your audience so that it will be easy for you to place your content right in front of them. These web places are forums, blogs, websites, and social media pages where your target audience posts content and participate in discussions that cover your topic.
Be an active web citizen, and you will reap the reward of enormous traffic ready to engage with you. Avoid trolling or spamming because if you don’t, you will eventually get a reputation as a blogger no one wants to do anything with.
Be SEO-friendly
As a new blogger, you might still be unaware that search engines are massive opportunities for driving traffic to your blog.
Spend a huge amount of time studying how your blog can attract the crawlers of these search engines (Google, Yahoo, Firefox, Bing, etc.). That means thinking about how to create informative and engaging content and using the keywords your target audience uses when they search for information on the internet.
In 2014, Google recorded 6 billion daily searches, and you only need a small portion of that to successfully put your web pages on the first page of search results. Much of the marketing side of blogging, such as search engine rankings and finding the perfect keyword to use in content, comes via consumer web searches.
For that fact of the matter, SEO should also be a primary focus for bloggers to succeed.
More on SEO
SEO for blogging is about composing substance to rank on the first page of web indexes like Bing and Google. This strategy involves investigating keywords, creating top-notch content that matches the target audience’s expectations, and constructing headers for simple content slithering.
Pay attention to employing the following techniques:
Do keyword research.
Keyword research allows you to identify the best keywords to use in your content. Such “best” keywords will help you lead web searchers to your blog and, ultimately, get higher positions in search rankings.
More benefits of keyword research include:
Helps you know what is trending and what consumers are looking for
Helps you identify primary and secondary keywords. These keywords act as the springboard for writing suitable content for the people you want to attract.
Helps you attract the right audience so that you will not waste resources on people who you otherwise cannot turn into buying customers
Insert your keywords on your pages, preferably somewhere at the start of the article’s title. Use keywords, related phrases, and keyword modifiers in your content a couple of times, but without compromising on writing naturally. It should read well to human readers and not sound robotic.
Write intent-based content.
Aside from ensuring your content is grammatically correct, factual, and engaging, you should also make sure that it is constructed based on your audience’s intent. Creating such content is possible if you understand the intention of searchers behind their queries.
If most queries use the word cheap (cheap construction material suppliers near me, etc.), then you ought to show in your content things like:
Cost-effective ways of constructing a home
How to keep construction labor and material low
Cost comparison of construction materials from different suppliers, etc.
If you can provide such valuable information, the tendency is for the reader to look for more content and read more on your site, which Google notes and loves, and connect with you for the possibility of closing a deal, which you definitely will like. All these work for better SEO ranking and to grow your startup business fast.
Here, what Google does is try to understand user intent. Google will present different websites based on the user’s intent. Then the user will click a particular website from the list.
If they engage with their chosen website long enough, Google will rank the website high in search ranking. That will pave the way for the website to attract more traffic and create more engagement and business transactions.
Do on-page SEO optimization extensively.
Even if users are coming to your website, you should ensure a good browsing experience for them. If your web pages load slowly, it will cause your visitors to be annoyed and leave your site fast. speed up your WordPress site here
Google takes note of that disenchantment leading to abrupt leaving from your site and records it as a case of a bounced visitor, and every time it happens on your site, Google ticks your bounce rate up, and your ranking suffers.
Blogging is good for your career. A well-executed blog sets you apart as an expert in your field. ~Penelope Trunk
Thus, you should always create valuable, informative, and engaging content to make your visitors feel it’s worth spending time on your site.
Other basic elements to work on for on-page optimization for SEO include:
Meta-description
Headings
Image alt text
URLs
Latent Semantic Index (LSI) keywords
Internal linking
Find Ways to Monetize Your Blog
Turn your blog into an income-generating machine!
Sure, you can put up a blog and communicate your passion through it, but for most bloggers, blogging is an income-generating undertaking as well. Many bloggers earn $200 to $2,500 per month in the first couple of years’ blogging.
Established bloggers, on the other hand, can earn as much as $15,000 per month. Top bloggers can get as much as $1,000,000 or more from blogging in their niches.
So, indeed, you can blog full-time and earn money from it. Consider the following strategies:
AdSense
Setting up an account with AdSense allows the platform to place advertisements on your blog. With every click that an ad receives from your visitors, AdSense will pay you money and deposit it into your AdSense account.
Depending on the niche you are operating in, an ad click can give you between a couple of cents and $13. One thing to note is Google does not allow AdSense account holders to show their earnings anywhere on the internet.
Affiliate marketing
While your followers or traffic grows, you can advertise to them another company’s product. For every successful sale you make, you will receive money from the product’s owner. The usual percentage that affiliate marketers get is between 50% and 75% of the product’s price.
The average annual income for affiliate marketing bloggers is within the range of $42,000 and $83,000. The highest estimate ever given is by ZipRecruiter. They said that affiliate marketers earn a passive income of $154,000 per year.
List building
Have a sign-up form on your website and build an email list out of those who will register. The advantage of this is you can organically build a list of users who have already expressed interest in the products you sell.
Blog sponsor
Once you have a significant number of followers, talk with private advertisers to advertise on your blog and charge them for it.
Do paid reviews
This strategy involves charging product sellers who ask you to create a review post for the product they sell. You can also publish their review posts on your blog and charge them for the blog space occupied on your site.
Remember, your blogging income is directly proportional to the traffic you can generate. So, make sure you also focus on increasing traffic to get the most out of your efforts to monetize your blog.
Leverage Blogging Apps
There are a lot of blogging tools that can help you in your work. Five of the best apps out there include:
Grammarly – This grammar-checking tool is excellent and easy to use. With this tool, you only copy-paste your text into the app’s checker, and it will show you all style, spelling, grammar, and other mistakes.
Nordlocker – This tool is a file encryption tool. What it does is encrypt textual, video, and photo data and make these files unreadable for third parties, which is great when you create something new and do not want snoopers to discover your work. Using Nordlocker also means data protection in case your computer gets lost.
Nordlocker is free, and it supports all file formats. At first, the free version may be enough for your application, but if you need a higher limit in the future, you can opt for the paid version. With great features available through Nordlocker, you would not mind upgrading your account to a paid version.
Keyword planner – With this tool, you can check keyword popularity and search volume. It can also give you related keywords that can spark a brilliant idea for you. For bloggers, it has paramount importance, as it means a better ranking for articles.
Check these other helpful tools under the following categories:
Time management apps
My Hours
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Trello
Evernote
Writing apps
- Google Docs
- Linkbait Title Generator
- Blog Title Generator
Keyword apps
- Keywords Everywhere
Search Engine apps
- Google Trends
- Google Search Console
Design and media apps
- Canva
- Pixabay
- Unsplash
- Blog designer plugin
Use Social Media
Use social media platforms, but do not spread yourself too thinly by using all available platforms simultaneously. The problem with new bloggers is they do not focus on the channel where their target audience spends most of their time.
You should focus on one channel until you develop a significant amount of engagement with your audience. Once you have established yourself on a particular platform, you can move over to another and repeat the process.
These platforms include:
It is easy to promote your blog and post your blog articles on Facebook. Click the Create Post button on your Facebook homepage. Write a short intro and the link to the article you are trying to share. Facebook allows users to publish their posts immediately or at a later date.
Here are blogging strategies to do on Facebook:
Use catchy titles.
Include captivating images.
Write appealing ad copy.
Use A/B tests to determine what works best on the Facebook platform.
Use the Custom Audience feature.
Periscope
Create live broadcasts.
Interact with your audience live.
Allows users to chat with other users live.
With Twitter, you can review your blog stats and determine which of your posts have the highest engagement or click rate.
Pinterest is a visual discovery platform where you can post visual and textual content regularly. It is a source of quality traffic for online shops with inspiring products.
Conclusion
These are the things that you can do to get the most out of your blogging adventure. There are so many benefits you can get from blogging, including:
Growing your business fast
Allows sharing your expertise across the world
Building your professional and personal networks
Polishing your writing competencies
Having an opportunity to earn more.