Blogging Made Simple: Powerful Strategies For Blogging Success!

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Think of competition as your friend and motivator. The blogging community is full of groups that network with and help one another. They use one another to bounce ideas off of, and to help promote their own blogs. If you need guidance to do these steps, check out this video from Joshua Fields Millburn, one of the creators of TheMinimalist.

He goes through some of the basic steps of how to set up a successful blog; he even whips out his credit card to purchase hosting! This advice is based on tips that popular bloggers share for how to start a successful blog:. Select a full-featured platform. Some are more feature-rich than others, though. Look for a platform with SEO plugins , email newsletter sign-up options, easy image uploading, content tags, and the ability to schedule your posts in advance.

Sketch it out first. People often underestimate the importance of thinking through their site design before they start actually tinkering with all the bells and whistles. Include an About page with your photo. An About page is a key way in which you can connect with new readers right off the bat.

Check out this article for tips on what to include in your About page. Include a Start Here page. Similar to your About page, a Start Here page is an opportunity for you to highlight what your blog is about, as well as links to some of your most popular posts, downloadable PDFs, and e-courses.

Put the Start Here page at the top of every page on your blog so that new visitors who enter your site through specific blog posts not the home page can find it easily. A common mistake that many new bloggers make is writing short, brief blog posts. If you write a provocative post title that draws readers in, you need to deliver on the promise with fully fleshed-out content. When trying to choose topics and types of posts to write, you should review and reflect upon the questions that people ask you in your everyday life, as well as the comments, questions, and concerns that your readers post on your site.

This is how you determine what your readers will find valuable. Remember that your competition is already out there publishing great content that you can use for inspiration. Putting your own unique spin on a topic covered in a competing blog is a common practice in the world of blogging. Not just time to build a long list of posts and followers, but also time to make each post worthwhile to the majority of your readers.

Reading other blogs for inspiration is one thing, but when it comes to writing your actual posts, you need your own writing style. Developing a writing style that is distinctly your own accomplishes two important things:. One of the reasons that people read blogs is that they crave variety. Variety of opinion, information, and expression. If you want to turn new visitors to your blog into loyal followers, you need to show them through your writing how you are different than the other bloggers out there. Focus on your uniqueness, not on out-doing the competition.

Showing your personal self. Readers can tell when a blog post is written just for SEO purposes or to capitalize on recent events.

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This blog explains what you should be aiming for when you write a post: Most articles about developing your writing style have one tip in common: Check out this clever post we love the incorporated infographic about writing styles for a blog. Successful bloggers know that writing the same type of post over and over can result in lost readership and fewer subscribers. Keep readers interested by writing different types of blog posts. Each post should still maintain your signature writing style, but present tips and information in a different style than the post before it.

Do some research on what types of posts are successful in your niche. Scan other blogs, or use a website like Buzzsumo. Mix it up on your own blog and analyze the results of each post type so you can give your readers more of what they like. Successful bloggers all agree on one thing: Popular bloggers will tell you that their best-performing blog posts are the ones that they post on a schedule that their readers expect. Think about the blogs you follow religiously; the ones you look forward to reading, from bloggers you respect.

Visit their sites and look at the dates and times of their most recent posts. Not all bloggers publish their posts on a strict schedule, but many do feature their most popular post types on a specific day. On the flip-side, following a schedule can turn your blog-related activities into a well-oiled machine. The deadlines will keep you accountable. The social media promotion will be predictable. Blogging should be fun, and maintaining a blogging schedule can help keep it that way. To ensure that your blog posts are hitting the right nerve with your readers, you need to engage with them.

You may have heard of website builders , like Weebly or Wix. If you only a very simple website, website builders may be a good solution. WordPress is much more powerful, scalable, and flexible than other website builder. WordPress the ability to do almost anything you want: If you are terrified by the idea of WordPress, website builders may be worth a look. But our advice is to stick with WordPress, if possible. Learn more in our rundown of the top options for website builders for bloggers.

Website builders require you to use their own proprietary apps to build your websites and blogs. Luckily, installing WordPress is very simple once you have a web hosting service. The only decision you need to make at this stage is to give your blog a name. The WordPress login page looks like this: But there are three simple housekeeping tasks you ought to take care of before you publish your first post:.

Check that your email address is correct, for when you need to reset your password in future. They help search engines, like Google, find and understand your blog posts more easily. Whatever permalinks you choose, be prepared to stick with it: In Settings option of the left-hand menu, go to Permalinks. We suggest you use: Your choice of WordPress theme allows you to get creative, and make your blog look and feel just like home.

The good news is WordPress makes it super-easy to chop and change your WordPress theme. You can change it every day of the year if you want to! For new bloggers, free themes offer total freedom to experiment.

Happy Blogging!

WordPress has its own repository of free themes. Premium themes often offer a more stylishlook out of the box. Our favorite sites to buy premium WordPress themes include: Plugins are extensions that add features and help unleash the power of WordPress. Popular plugins do things like add: Go ahead and install these for your blog right away. There are a handful of premium WordPress plugins that we think every blog should have.

Plugins are a critical part of WordPress. We use them extensively on Blogging. But you need to be careful when adding plugins to your blog because: Remember to keep your WordPress plugins up-to-date!

Even personal bloggers should have a good idea of what they want to write about before they dive in. You need to be clear about what you want to say, and it helps to imagine who your audience will be. Blogs exist on more or less any subject you can think of under the sun, from trading cryptocurrency to rearing chickens. Some big websites, magazines, and newspapers can target huge audiences because they have massive amounts of content and a stable full of writers to create it. By narrowing your focus to a niche, you stand a chance of building the best blog on that topic.

I can also tell stories about my own pets, start an Instagram or Twitter to feature pet photos, and review toys. Once you choose a niche, it should be a bit easier to come up with a good name for your blog. High-quality content is critical to gaining traffic for your new blog. But if your content is merely average, you may not attract much traffic — or even none at all! There are a million blogs on the internet. You need to make yours stand out from the competition.

Next, write some content in the body of your blog post. The length of content on the internet is a hotly debated topic. Word-count is a key contributor to your search ranking results. Longer content typically ranks higher on Google. In fact, the longer the better when it comes to search ranking. This is because longer articles will contain more keywords, more topics, headings, links, and pictures. At the very least, your blog posts should be more than words for Google to rank it.

Just make sure that your long posts are extremely easy to read and to skim. Avoid walls of text at all costs! But feel free to experiment and find what works best for you and your audience. If you want to add an image , click on the Add Media button. This will bring you to the Media Library where any images you have downloaded onto your site are saved for use in blog posts. You can also add a caption if you want a short description to appear on your blog explaining the image to readers.

Categories and tags help organize your blog so readers can find what they are looking for Look to the right-hand side of your editor and notice the two boxes, Categories, and Tags. Categories describe the topics that can be found on your blog.

For example, if you have a personal blog, you may choose categories such as Music, Travel, and Food. Tags are more specific descriptions of your posts that help readers drill down to smaller topics. When you write a blog post, you first choose a category. Simply click the category you would like to use for your blog post, input tags you want to assign and click on Add.

After you have created your blog post, you can preview how it will look when you publish it by clicking on the Preview button in the Publish box. This will open the public face of your blog, and show you what site visitors will see when they visit your website. If you are happy with your blog post, head back to the WordPress editor and locate the Publish section. Here you can either click on the Publish button and post your blog immediately, or schedule to publish it at a later date.

How To Start A Successful Blog: Proven Tips & Strategies

If you choose to publish it at a later date, simply choose the date and time and save your changes. My brainstorming helped me come up with these post ideas around handmade pet toys:. You can probably think of lots of examples where humor, style, or oddness make a particular blog memorable. Readers will connect better with my personal stories if they come from my authentic voice. It depends on your niche, and what your passion is.

And it depends on what your readers are looking for. Some blogs focus on breaking news or viral stories from the web. These blogs can gain a lot of traffic very soon after publication. The articles tend to have a short lifespan. These articles tend to be longer, more detailed, and aim to attract traffic for many years — or even decades!

Look at other blogs in your niche and look at the things they do well. Try to find gaps in their strategy, and capitalize on those opportunities. Setting a schedule for your blog will help you build traffic — and keep it up over the medium and long-term. WordPress lets you schedule blog posts in advance.

This gives you the freedom to plan a complete blogging schedule, write the blog posts ahead of time, and then publish them at regular intervals. There are many routes to blogging success. That last one is probably the most important one. Experiment to see what both you and your readers like. It can help to take a look at your favorite blogs with a critical eye to figure out why they succeed.

What do other blogs do that stops you coming back? Are they sending out regular emails to their readers? Do they offer merchandise? Do they have ads? Is there a pop-up newsletter box every time you click? Do they update frequently? How do they interact with commenters?

What are they doing on social media? Most bloggers rely on four key sources of traffic: Search engines like Google add new blogs to their index when they discover them mentioned in the form of links on other websites. Effectively, the more links your blog has from high-quality, popular sites , the higher Google rank you. There are some basic SEO skills you can apply to any blog post you publish that will help improve your search engine rankings.

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