33 Blogging Tips for Building a Successful Blog
Starting and running a successful blog is a highly rewarding experience. However, with millions of amazing arts, technology, and creative blogs out there, how do you make your blog stand out? How do you drive more traffic to your blog and make loyal followers?
While there are millions of blogs out there, it is difficult to copy the styles and strategies of another blogger, as the journey of every blogger is unique. Since every blogger has a unique path, it is different to get one-size-fits-all blogging tips and tricks for new bloggers.
Nevertheless, there are some basic blogging tips that every blogger should know if they want to build a successful blog. In this article, we will be sharing 33 blogging tips to help bloggers build a successful blog.
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33 Blogging Tips for Building a Successful Blog
Get Started by Choosing the Blogging Platform
To build a blog, the first thing you need to do is to choose the right platform. Choosing a platform is the first step, and it is a major challenge for many new bloggers. When it comes to blogging platforms, you have different options to choose from such as WordPress, Blogger, TypePad, and more. Some of these platforms have free themes and plugins that you can start with.
Find a Niche
Finding the right niche is one of the few steps to creating a successful blog. A blog can only be successful when it provides relevant content for the right audience. Try to find a niche when you want to start a blog. The blog should be about something very specific. The niche you choose should be able to please both your readers and search engines.
You should avoid being too general and be more specific. When you find that specific thing you want to talk about, you should always stick to it. However, when looking for a niche, you should choose a niche you have knowledge or/and passion for, as this would ensure you never run out of what to say.
Write Consistently
Another great tip that will help you to build a successful blog is to write consistently. Consistency matters a lot in any field, and the blogging industry is not an exception. When it comes to making your blog successful, there is no shortcut or hack, you must work hard and consistently as well.
Writing and publishing regularly will help to grow your blog significantly. You do not need to be uploading content on a daily basis, but you need to be consistent in your schedule. If you can, publishing every day would also help to grow your blog much faster. However, what is more important is for you to choose the frequency of your publishing and stick to it.
Do Not Strive for Perfection
To build a successful blog over time, you should avoid striving for perfection. When writing, do not obsess over perfection. Making mistakes in your journey of building a successful blog is normal, provided you fix them. With time, you will gradually build perfection.
Be Honest
One of the things that help your blog to become successful is honesty. Many bloggers today fill their blogs with all sorts of lies just to get the attention of readers. Most times, they succeed in driving traffic to their blogs because of their lies, but those lies can never help them to retain those viewers as followers. When running a blog, you need to be honest and make sure you share only quality and reliable content.
Stay Focused and Dedicated
If you want to become successful at anything, you need to remain focused and dedicated, and the same rule applies to blogging. When building a blog, you need to forget every other thing and focus on the project for about two to four months. Be dedicated like a monk and focus only on your blog. While doing this, you have to learn, practice, implement, and improvise until you start seeing your desired results.
Set Defined Goals
As with any endeavor or project, defining your goals will give you purpose and vision. Setting and defining your goals will help to achieve massive success when building a blog. Have a clear understanding of what you want to achieve, as this would help you to connect better with your target audience.
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Invest in the Design and User Experience of Your Blog
No one would like to revisit a website that is difficult to navigate or looking unorganized. As a blogger, one of your major focuses should be the design of your blog. You want to make sure the blog has a professional design. In addition to looking good, the blog should have an excellent user experience. It should be easy to navigate and your visitors should be able to get what they want without having to go through rigorous processes. Make sure you hire a professional web developer to handle the project or you can work with a CMS if you are tech-savvy.
Use SEO to Drive Traffic
Search engine optimization (SEO) is very important if you want to drive traffic to your blog. SEO is the act of optimizing the content on your blog for it to rank higher in search engines such as Google and Bing. SEO includes link building, keyword research, and a wide range of actions needed for best performance. In general, SEO is pretty large but you have to dedicate a lot of time studying it if you want your blog to rank high in search engines.
Opt for Quality over Quantity
This is one area where many bloggers, especially newbies, are getting it wrong. When building a blog, you should go for quality rather than quantity. While it is good to post regularly, even on a daily basis if possible, you should make sure the contents you post are of high quality. Posting high-quality content is sure to get to the top faster than posting many jargons on your blog. Creating quality content is also part of SEO, as it would help your content to rank higher on search engines.
Use Internal Linking in Your Blog
Internal links make it easy for Google and your visitors to navigate your website. When starting a blog, internal links are very important. They help to interconnect the content on your blog, ensuring every page gets visitors. Internal linking is also important to SEO. One of the major benefits of internal linking is that it would help your visitors to get around your blog and see your previous posts. If you have old content that you want readers to see, internal linking will help you achieve that.
Choose the Perfect Blog Name
The name of your blog also has a role to play in the success of the blog. Hence, you need to take some time to pick the perfect name for your blog. The name of your blog is usually the first thing people will see when they visit your blog. As such, you want to make sure the name of the blog grabs the attention of your visitors.
Choose the Best Blog Hosting Service
One of the secrets of building a successful blog is choosing the best blog hosting service. This is very important because the last thing you want is to be experiencing a lot of downtimes. You can use WordPress.org to build your blog free of charge. However, you would need a blog hosting service for your blog to be live on the internet. One of the best blog hosting services out there is Bluehost. This web hosting platform is highly reliable and user-friendly.
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Take Inspiration from Your Close Competitors
Regardless of the niche you choose, chances are you are not the only one in that niche. Hence, you should identify your close competitors in your niche and learn one or two things from them. Look at what they are doing right and take inspiration from them. You should see your competitors as your major source of learning. Hence, you should find successful, close competitors and learn from them.
Provide Only Relevant Content
If you want your blog to be successful in the long run, you should only write on things that your target audience wants to read. Most times, there is a huge difference between what your audience wants to hear and what you want to say. If you want to be successful at blogging and make money off it, you need to put your audience first and provide them with only what they want to read. Focus on their convenience, preferences, problems, and more.
Be Patient
Patience is one of the most important keys to building a successful blog. Building a successful blog is a gradual process; you will not see the entire results of your activities in one day. You have to give it some time. While giving it some time, you should not give up in the process. It might take a couple of months before your hard work pays. One thing that blogging has added to the lives of many bloggers is patience. You need to be patient to see the results and enjoy the benefits.
Learn to Take Criticism
One of the best ways to grow faster is to listen to your audience. Nobody is perfect, and the sooner you accept that, the better for you. While many criticisms might be harsh and unfriendly, you need to take them calmly and learn one or two things from them. You should avoid picking a public fight when you get some harsh feedback. Rather, you should see every feedback as a chance to improve your content.
Your audience will point out places where you missed it or where you need to make improvements. Taking all these criticisms will help you to improve much faster and this would help to make your blog more successful than anticipated.
Write Catchy Headlines
Headlines are also very important, as they are what sells the content. If you want to drive more traffic to your site and make people read your content, you should do your best to write catchy headlines. Headlines determine your read-through rate and SEO ranking, so they are very important in every content. When writing your headlines, you have to consider several things such as the length, rankability on search engines, wording, and more. You need to make it very attractive and inviting.
Pay Attention to Marketing
Without any marketing effort, do not expect your blog to go anywhere, especially when you just launched it. You need to be proactive and deliberate about the marketing of your blog. Fortunately, you can market your blog in different ways.
You can start by talking with other bloggers by commenting on their blog posts. Leaving valuable comments and your blog link on other blogger’s posts will help to drive traffic back to your blog. You can also write about popular and trending topics to make search engine ranking in order to drive more traffic to your blog. For that aspect, you would need some knowledge about search engine optimization.
You can collaborate with other bloggers to reference your blog in their posts. Whatever idea you have, make sure you market your blog aggressively, as marketing has a key role to play in the success of your blog.
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Encourage Comments and Interactions
Another fascinating blogging tip for building a successful blog is encouraging engagements and interactions. You should engage with your readers and get them talking on your blog. After every post, ask the readers to leave a comment. Create a room for questioning and interactions and ask for feedback.
While creating room for interaction and engagement, make sure you are available to interact with them. You should respond to all their contributions and answer any question they ask. You should also be nice in your responses, as this would help you to build a large community. People like to interact, so make sure you give them what they want. You should also be welcoming and friendly while doing that.
Make Commenting Easy
While you create room for interactions in your articles, you should make sure the process of leaving a comment on your blog is not complex. Many people do not like commenting on blogs because of the rigorous process they have to go through. To prevent this, you should make commenting easily accessible on your blog.
Easily Readable Content
This is one of the most important things you need to consider when running a blog. According to research, many people view and scan web pages instead of reading every word of them. Hence, you should make your content as readable as possible. Your articles should be quick and easy to read. Readers should be able to scan through them and understand what you are talking about. You should add bullet points, use headings, short paragraphs, and more.
Photos
Pictures make a great part of many blogs today. People like seeing pictures, especially when the image portrays what they are reading. If you are writing a creative or art blog, then you need to deal with a lot of imagery.
As we said earlier, many people scan through web pages and they like seeing images that give them a visual representation of what the blog post is about. If you are writing a creative blog, you should add as many pictures as possible to the content, as this would help your readers to understand the content better.
Establish a Social Media Presence
One of the first things you need to do after creating your blog is establishing a social media presence. As a blogger, your presence on social media is non-negotiable. If you personally do not find social media interesting or you do not like any particular social media platform, you need to keep that feeling aside when it comes to business.
If you want your blog to be successful and go places, you need to establish a strong presence on social medial platforms. You need to create a profile for your blog on different social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and more. These platforms will also come in handy when marketing your blog, as you can share your content on the platforms to drive more traffic to your blog.
Automate Your Marketing
With marketing automation, you can streamline, automate, and monitor your marketing tasks. Marketing automation tools are very powerful and they help to make your marketing process very easy. PenSignal is a very common tool that you can use; this tool helps to auto-tweet links to blog posts.
Update Older Content
Updating the older content on your blog is another very useful tip that helps your blog become more successful. Go through the older content on your blog, add links to new content, add an email subscription form, update the images, add new keywords, cross-check the content for mistakes, and more.
Avoid Plagiarism – Do Not Copy Content
As a blogger, one of the first rules to creating a successful blog is to avoid copying content from other people’s blogs. Many bloggers come into the blogging space and they start by following other blogs and copying their content. Unfortunately, this will lead you to nowhere, as search engines such as Google will be the first and major hindrance you will have.
When you copy contents, you will rank poorly on search engines. Google will flag your content and you will not make it to search engine ranking. When you do not make search engine rankings, your blog will be invisible on the internet and people can hardly find you. Hence, rather than copying content from other people’s blogs, you should create something of your own.
Establish Good Relationships with Niche Bloggers
No man is an island; you need other people to succeed in life. If you want your blog to grow faster and become more successful, you should learn to interact with other blog owners in your niche. You can do this by interacting with them on social media or by leaving a comment on their blog posts. Creating relationships with them will enable you to learn many things from them.
Measure Your Performance with Google Analytics
Keeping track of the performance of your blog posts and entire blog will help you in making the blog more successful. To achieve this, you can install Google Analytics to track, monitor, and measure the performance of your blog.
With this tool, you would be able to know who your customers are, where they are visiting from, the channels from which they are coming to your blog, and more. Knowing where your traffic is coming from will help you streamline your efforts and marketing strategies.
For instance, if some particular type of blog posts are getting more traffic than others, you would know what you did in those articles and how you can apply the same thing to the other articles. Some of the vital site metrics that this tool can help you track include bounce rate, referrals, visitors (returning and new), exit pages, top landing pages, and conversation rates.
Use Blog Topic Generators
You need to post consistently to keep your readers active. When building a blog, running out of content or topics to write about is not an option. This is why it is important to pick a niche that you have passion for, as this would help you to always create the right content. However, chances are you might still run out of topics down the lane.
In a situation like this, you can turn to blog topic generator tools. One of the common tools for this job is the HubSpot blog top generator.
Make Sure You Use the Right Keywords and Phrases for Your Content
If you want your content to make the first-page appearance on search engines such as Google, then you need to always use the right keywords and phrases. This means you have to do some findings and use some SEO tools such as SufferSEO or SEMRush. You can use these tools to find the types of keywords for any content or article you want to write. However, you should avoid bombarding your content with keywords.
Your Blog Posts Should Be a Minimum of 1,500 Words
Quality matters a lot when writing blog posts, but quantity is also important. Google does not rank scanty material, which means you might not make the rankings if your blog posts are scanty. As such, while you aim for quality, you should not ignore quantity. You should raise your word count bar to a minimum of 1,500 words.
Format Your Blog Posts to Make Them Look Professional
Formatting your article will help to increase the engagement and amount of time a reader spends on your page. Formatting helps to make your content look more organized, making it easy for readers to scan through.
A well-formatted blog post is easy to read, and readers will be able to find what they want quickly. This means you need to have headings, subheadings, numbered lists, bullet points, add quality images, bold and italicize some key points, short paragraphs, short sentences, and more.
Final Thoughts
Building a successful blog is not an easy job; it requires hard work. However, the result is highly rewarding and you will forget all the stress you went through to get there. Building a successful blog does not happen by accident, you have to be deliberate about every process. With the blogging tips provided in this article, building a successful blog should no longer be a struggle for you.
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