When blogging, it is important to understand what your potential reader wants. In the old days, it was a case of setting up a blog and it being successful with little work. But now, with tens of millions of bloggers out there, and with the increasing celebrity bloggers, it has become much harder.
A lot of people make the mistake of starting a blog to increase revenue. When you start a blog it should be about providing the best blogging experience for you and your readers, earning money comes later.
I have put together some blogging tips for beginner bloggers to avoid common mistakes and learn the basic tricks of the trade.
Tips For Blogging Beginners
Niche down
There are more than 31.7 million bloggers in the world and that means you need to come up with a blog that stands out.
Don’t worry too much about how many bloggers are out there because it is not just about the topic, it’s also about your style of writing and what you bring to the table.
One very important blogging tip is, you need to make sure your blog is the best blog out there. Make it stand out, and make it unique.
So, what do we mean by go niche?
If we look at business blogs, you will see there are millions of them out there. However, if you look at writing a business blog about people working from home, or freelancing, then you could stand out from the crowd. You could even start a blog about stay-at-home parents earning money in their spare time.
Once you have gained a following, you can then move into other business topics using the same blog.
Write about topics people are interested in and searching for
According to recent figures, 51% of all website traffic comes from people searching the Internet (organic search). So, to attract organic traffic you need to write about things people are searching for. On 31st December 2020, that topic could be Boris Johnson Brexit Deal.
So, how do you find topics that people are searching for?
It may sound like hard work to find what people are searching for, but by using some popular tools out there, it can be easy.
One of the best blogging tips for beginners I can offer you is to use a keyword research tool and search for keywords such as staycations in the uk to see how popular it is. A good tool to use to find out what people are looking for is AnswerThePublic, which is a free tool. It will show you when you enter keyword related questions that people are searching for in Google.
There are plenty of other keyword tools out there, but AnswerThePublic is one of my favourites
Some advice. When looking for keyword research tools, always look for free tools. The paid tools do nearly the same as the free ones, so there is no point in wasting money.
Have a look at your competitors’ best-performing topics
A good way to attract traffic to your blog is to look at what the competition is doing. Have a look at what topics they are writing about and see what article and topic attract the most traffic. One way of doing this, and sadly it is a paid tool is SERANKING. This paid tool is expensive, but it is also popular. It allows you to spy on the competition and see what their best ranking pages are.
Write content that people will share and provide a backlink to.
Content is King and has always been King. If you can write great content, then you are on your way to becoming a successful blogger. You should be writing content that people will share on Twitter and on Facebook, and content that people will reference and provide a backlink to.
You can do this by using some of the tips above and providing facts and figures in your article.
Make your content easy to read
Another great blogging tips for beginner is to make sure your content is easy to read. One of the biggest mistakes some bloggers make is writing content that some people can’t follow. Some bloggers like to write to show how intelligent they are and use words that a lot of people don’t understand. It is vital that you write content that is easy to understand by all.
Here are some beginnger blogging tips to write great content
Use short paragraphs.
Break up long sentences.
Insert multimedia.
Use formatting.
Make your headlines stand out
Headlines can make all the difference to a blog post. A lot of people discover your latest blog post via Google search or social media. If they like the headline, then they will click the link to your blog. However, if they don’t like your headline then it will be ignored.
Some tips on a great headline:
Have a look at some of the best bloggers out there and see how they write their headlines. You will see how they design headlines that grab attention.
Write a great introduction to your blog post
It is vital that you write a grabbing introduction for your blog post. If people don’t like the first paragraph of your post, then the chances are they will leave your blog. It is so important to grab the reader within the first paragraph, so they carry on reading your article.
On-page SEO is very important, and you should always practice optimizing your content to rank higher in Google. You can use tools like Yoast to write the perfect optimized content.
The best practices for optimizing your content are as follows
Placing your target keyword in the title, meta description, and H1 tags.
Using short, descriptive URLs.
Build an email list
Out of all the beginner blogging tips I can offer an email list is one of the most important. An email list is a vital tool for driving traffic to your blog and promoting it.
There are lots of tools out there that provide you with subscription tools. Using these tools will help you collect email addresses and allow you to send them your latest blog posts.
Write a guest post for other bloggers
This might sound easy, but bloggers receive hundreds of emails each week asking if they can write for the blog. It is important that you write to them in a personal way instead of a bog-standard example you find on the Internet. Share with them the type of article you would love to write and explain to them why their readers will enjoy reading it.
Update older content
A good way to increase traffic to your blog is by updating older content on your blog. By updating the content, it will send signals to Google that you have made changes.
Update content is also important for the reader of your blog. You may have new information to share which makes the post more relevant.
Write a blog post at least once a day
The more blog posts that you write the better. It will allow readers of your blog to see that you are always updating it and giving them a reason to return. Updating your blog on a daily basis is a great way to increase ranking in Google. When you write a new post each day, it will send signals to Google that they need to visit your site more often.
I hope you enjoyed these beginner blogging tips, and hopefully you have a wonderful blogging experience.