Blogging is s combination of art and science which means there’s no definite way of blogging. It is one of the emerging career options as it is an interesting and well-paid career. But it is not that easy but neither impossible too. Establishing oneself as a successful blogger will take a lot of hard work and patience. So, here are 13 golden rules of blogging that you should know for a successful career in blogging whether you are a beginner, an intermediate or an advanced level blogger.
1. Dedicate Time
Blogging is more like a marathon than a sprint. So, it takes a lot of time. You should understand the time and availability it demands. You need to be patient and work hard till you reach your targets and ambitions. The competition is high and unless you invest more time and effort over other competitors, success is hard to come by. If you can keep going for years without results while constantly learning and improving yourself, you can achieve something remarkable.
In addition to publishing content, bloggers must optimize for search engines, make time for social media, market their content, network, and engage with readers. Blogging should be regarded as a priority and you need to be totally committed to it in order to achieve success. That's what separates amateur bloggers from the pros. You can’t go halfway and expect to be instantly successful.
2. Be Consistent
You have to be regular and consistent in blogging. You need to schedule and complete your tasks on a daily basis. It’s much easier to lose your traffic than it is to build it up, so you need to publish blogs consistently. A study by Hubspot showed that consistent blogging leads to higher subscriber growth rates. Over a two-month span, businesses that published blog entries more than once a week get their subscribers increased twice as fast as those who added content once a month.
3. Publish Great Content
'Content is the king'. Don't copy from other blogs. Be original and unique and try to add more value on the topic covered than what your competitors have already provided. Cover the topic in which you are interested, comfortable and possess in-depth knowledge. Plan your content prior to writing and collect resources to support your content and make it citable on the web. Analyze your competitors contents and make yours stand out from them. Be unique on your blogs by publishing in-depth articles or videos. Use infographic images wherever possible. Organize your content into small paragraphs to improve readability. Add internal links in your contents if you have more related or relevant posts.
4. Promote Content
Simply publishing blogs won't help. You need to promote your content to your targeted audiences too. Do a lot of research or get help from professionals in order to drive traffic to your blogs. Be active on social medias, create or join groups and pages to share your contents regularly and remain connected to your targeted audiences. This is the cheapest and easiest way to promote your blogs. You can also ask your readers to subscribe to your blog so that you can do email marketing with much ease.
You can find a huge number of traffic sources like social media, email marketing, guest posting, videos, comments, etc. Everyone loves to get a huge number of traffic but spending enormous amount of time on each of these sources would burn one out easily. So, focus on one source at a time. Spend at least a month on one source and then go for the other. This will help you get huge traffic within a year.
You can post your blog to bookmarkig sites like mix, digg, reddit, growthhackers, triberr, bizsugar, etc. to provide great exposure to your contents to the wider audience.
5. Improvize Yourself
Nobody learns anything by birth. You learn everything by doing it yourself and blogging is not different. Keep on blogging, analyze your works and progesses to determine the areas you need to improve on. Make sure that you don't make the same mistakes again. Do a lot of research, read often, gain mre knowledge and add problem solving contents. Regularly update yourself on targeted topics about the latest and trending news.
6. Focus on Audience
Publish posts on topics that you find the most interesting for your targeted audience group. Carry out a research on what they want to read about or ask them to mention such topics on your blogs' comment fields. You can even ask for such topics through social medias. Take time to respond to the responsed you get in your content from the audience. Thank them and help them solve their queries.
7. Add Call to Action
Getting visitors to one of your blogs is quite easy. Simply add a catchy headline but making them return to your blog again is quite tough. You need to have great contents as well as some great call to action interfaces. Adding social media links on the sidebar won't work as most of the visitors ignore them and most of them are not going to search and find you in social platforms either. Add a call to action link at the end of your blog to ask them to sign up for email subscriptions or to follow you on social media.
8. Add Case Studies and Stories
Case studies, emotions and stories are the best mediums of communication. Rather than focussing on being professional or using big words to impress the readers, use your own emotions, case studies or story telling to make the blog more personal.
9. Add Catchy Headlines
A great content can be ignored by a huge number of visitors just because of its headline. A headline must be simple, powerful and useful. People decide whether to click on a link or not depending upon the headline. They must be easy and desirable for people to share it. Test a number of headlines before publishing a post.
10. Keep the Blog Short
Most prevalent myth in the field of blogging is 'Bigger is Better' which is not true. The minimum length of a post required to be indexed by Google is 300 words. Most of the readers don't scroll down the page while generally people tend to read about 60% of the content only. Short posts under one to two minute of reading time are better received and shared by the readers. Present one idea at a time and let others build on it.
11. Monetize Your Blog
Most of the bloggers focus on blogging and driving traffic to their blog first rather than thinking about monetizing. But, in fact, it's the revenue that you generate from your blog that helpsyou keep going for long. Analyze all the ways to monetize your blog and find the best option for you from day one.
12. Guest Posting
Creating a blog won't be enough. Getting involved in guest posting is one of the best method of building your own audience and driving traffic to your site. It will also help you to build quality backlinks and increase your domain authority. It'll also help you to get good search ranking for your targeted keyword. Make sure that your article is well researched and well written.
13. Connect With Influencers
Find ways to connect to the influencers and top bloggers in your industry. It can help you receive a huge portion of their traffic, boost your expertise and generate revenue which will make your blog successful in a short span.
Conclusion
A lot of people stop blogging after some time because it gets boring as they don't get the results they expected. Keep in mind, a successful blog can't be built overnight. Schedule you time for blogging, be consistent and integrate blogging into your weekly workflow. Use these blogging tips as guidelines for producing and promoting well-written, informative content. Your efforts will pay off over time.
There are a lot more great tips out there about building a successful blog. What’s your favorite? What are your thoughts about all the blogging tips shared here? Did you like them? If yes, watch out! I'll be posting few more blogs this month on the same topic and make sure you shared it with your friends so they can benefit as well.
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