Blogging is a life-changing business for many of us. We learn from the mistakes we have done in the past & change yourself according to our mistakes. In this article, I will share some amazing blogging tips that will help you to become a successful blogger.
Even though I have faced many difficulties in my blogging journey and they taught me a lot, that’s why we are successful now.
So based on my learning, I have created a stunning checklist for new bloggers which help them to not make these silly mistakes and become successful in blogging fast.
If you have not yet started a blog: How To Start A Successful Blog And Make Money?
You must treat your blog like a business you’re doing.
I have categorized these blogging tips into 7 sections and make it easier for you to grasp everything from this article.
Basic Blogging Tips For New Bloggers
1: Choose A Reliable Hosting
Before starting a blog or website you need a reliable hosting where your websites’ files and data will get stored physically in the computers that are connected with the internet.
These high power computers are called web servers. Web hosts are companies that physically store several web servers in one location. We also call them data centers.
Your websites will be stored on these servers and your hosting provider will provide all the essential things that you need such as software, security and bandwidth to connect your site with the internet.
These servers will be provided to you according to your need. It totally depends on the space you need on the server and how much traffic your website will get.
The more space you acquire the more you have to pay. So as a beginner you don’t need lots of space on the servers.
As your website or blog grows you can extend or upgrade your plan.
For now only get these things in mind that whichever hosting you choose it must be-
- Fast
- Secure
- Trusted
- Reliable with 99.9% uptime guarantee.
2: Choose A domain name
Your domain name is a critical part of your online identity. A domain name is a unique internet address that helps to find your website in a little time.
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Your domain name must be-
- Shorter
- Relevant to your business
- Easy to memorise & spell
- Never add hyphens, dashes or number
It must be simple and clear like mine “myhackersguide.com”.
Suppose if you have a business related to cleaning windows. So your domain must reflect your business identity. Your domain name must contain all the keywords in your domain name.
Because these are the words people will search while finding a “window cleaning service”. If your domain matches with their keyword query, they will surely find you.
Always use .com extension because this is the most widely used extension in the world. It is less complicated, easy to remember and use.
It’s not important to always go with .com but make sure it matches with your brand. There are various types of domain extensions are available like .in .net .co .guru .actor and many more.
3: For CMS: Only Choose WordPress
There are many different types of platforms available like Bloger, WIX, Tumbler etc. But choose only WordPress for starting a blog or website.
WordPress is a software you use to build your website and publish it on the internet. It was created in 2003 and since then it has become one of the most popular website publishing programs.
WordPress is open source, free to use & powers 30% of the internet. There are more than 10,000 themes are available to use that can make your website more professional.
Also you don’t need to code a single piece of line in your online journey due to the availability of thousands of plugins that can do this for you. So wordpress is a best choice to use.
WordPress also allows you to create a free website & blog without choosing a different hosting.
But there’s a catch: you don’t have the power to install plugins and premium themes. Also you can’t put your own domain name, they can down your site if you don’t follow their rules and regulation.
Read: How To Start A Successful Blog And Make Money?
So using any free platform is totally a waste of time
4: Determine Niche & Focus on It
Now the most important part comes in. Do not only choose a niche on the basis of what you love to write.
Blog is not a long term plan. You must need a plan for at least 2 years. So for this, think deep and ask yourself a question: do I have enough content to write for 1 to 2 years?
It’s not like you write 5 to 10 articles and now get out of content. This really makes you frustrated and you will end soon.
So instead of focusing on a niche you love to write, find a niche that can get you a long far away.
Also, don’t choose a niche just because it’s profitable. You must know about it and have interest in it.
5: Add Important Pages
After creating your blog it’s important to set up your important pages. These important pages are About Page, Privacy Policy, Contact Pages & Disclaimer.
These are pages that show to Google and your audience that you are real business not faking someone.
Also whenever your visitor has a query in their mind they can contact you easily. And through your page he can understand you better.
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6: Be Consistent with Blogging
To grow your blog from zero to something, stay consistent. Always posts at least once a week. The more blog posts you publish a week the more you grow.
When you have many blog posts on your blog, then chances are more that your audience will find you easily.
Blogging is not all about organic traffic, but also Pinterest & Twitter traffic. So the more you post, the more traffic you get on your blog.
Also when your blog has more relevant pages then Google will also start ranking you higher.
So stay consistent at least for one year.
7: Find Inspiration To Stay Motivated
For staying consistent in Blogging in need motivation and inspiration by other successful bloggers.
Read others peoples’ success stories and quotes to keep you up on the track.
Always remind yourself why you started blogging, this will really help you. Write down why you started on billboard or in your diary and read it everyday.
These motivations will only need you in your early states and once you start seeing your results from blogging. Then these results will become your motivations.
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8: BackUp Regularly
Suppose you have lots of photos on your phone that you have taken on the vacation with your family.
And one day your phone stops working and the only way to repair it now is to re-install its software but this re-installation process can delete all your photos from your phone.
How do you feel? All your lovely photos will get deleted.
So in this case it’s better to take backup of all of your stuff.
The same rules apply in blogging. You spent lots of time designing and writing blog posts. And one day you accidently deleted them or they were irretrievably corrupted by a virus.
So before waiting for it to happen. It is important to take backup regularly of your website.
You can use software to do this for you or you can take backups manually.
These were some of the general blogging tips, now we will talk about website layout.
Blogging Tips: Optimize Your Website Layout
1: Add Search Box
Search box is important but not necessary. It helps you visitors to search for any content with ease.
They don’t need to navigate through your website to find any particular content.
So place a beautiful lightweight search box on your website.
2: Use Navigation
Navigation are menus, important pages on your website that users can use. It’s important they are always placed on the top or bottom of the website.
With this you organise your website for your users on different topics.
It’s the same as the table of content in the book so you can directly jump to the chapter you love to read.
3: Use Responsive Design
In simple words, responsive design means write once and use it everywhere. People use smartphones and tables more than computers. They don’t always sit on the computer and read.
So make sure your website is responsive and adapt according to the types of device people use.
It’s 2020, every theme comes with responsive design, so it’s not a big problem.
But it only takes 10 seconds to check if your website is responsive or not by going to this URL.
4: Pick The Right Color Combination
Colors can affect the whole mood of your visitor. This is the easiest way to catch your visitor’s attention.
Colors convey your brand’s personality. Choosing the right color can either discourage your visitor or supports your overall message.
So choose your website color wisely.
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5: Custom 404 Page
404 is an error page on every website. It is shown to visitors when the server can’t find a page that was requested.
So if this happens on your website you can lose your visior. To don’t let this happen you can edit and design your 404 page according to your own.
My blogging tips is to you that Instead of just only showing 404 errors you can add links to the pages on your blog that are popular. So rather than losing your visitor, you can direct them to pages on your blog.
6: Use BreadCrumbs Wisely
Breadcrumbs enhance the user experience. In addition to this the other advantages of having breadcrumbs on your website, it decreases the bounce rate.
Whenever a visitor lands on the webpage, if he likes he stays otherwise try to bounce back. Here breadcrumbs can reduce this risk by having links on your page.
These are also helpful in SEO, Google loves them. Bredacrumbs do appear in search results and increase the chance of clicks.
7: Select Themes that fits to your Brands
Themes are really helpful in engaging your user with your blog. Choose a theme that supports your messages through the blog. If you created a blog for writing content then themes may vary.
For creating a store website you have to choose another theme and for contents you need a different one.
8: Display Most Popular Posts
Displaying the most popular posts on your blog decreases bounce rate which really helps you to rank better in Google.
On the other hand they also help users to find the most popular posts on your blog that are trending now.
9: Display Related Posts
Displaying related posts to your current posts keeps the user engaged with your blog. It’s ultimately helpful in the bounce rate metrics but also gives you more page views.
10: Add Sitemap
Sitemap has two purposes: one for the user to navigate through your blog and read your blog posts.
Suppose a user can’t find a page that he is looking for, then he can go to the sitemap section and find the posts they need. It’s really helpful for large sites to break down the posts into smaller sections or alphabetically.
The other benefit of having a sitemap is it’s good for SEO.
Any search engine’s bot whenever lands on your website it searches for the sitemap to index all the pages from your website.
Sitemap makes these two processes easier.
Blogging Tips: Polish Your Content
These blogging tips will you help you in creating a perfect content for your blog.
1: Craft Killer Headline
Headlines matter the most in content marketing. Your headline will get you more clicks if it’s catchy enough to pull viewers attention.
To read your article you need a visitor and to get that visitor you need them to click on your headline first.
So keep your headline length between 6 to 7 words only. Smaller ones don’t get much attraction while longer headlines look overwhelming and cutoff in Google results, hence less traffic.
Use Adjectives, they give you more clicks and also add a year in the title to look it more freshy.
2: Hooking Introduction
Your title, bring a visitor to your site. Now your introduction has to be perfect and hook the people into the article to read the rest of it.
Not only hooking alos tell them what you have covered in this post and how it is beneficial for you.
3: Keep Your Paragraph Short
Keep your paragraph shorter so people don’t get bored while reading it. Your paragraph must be 5 to 6 lines max.
4: Use Subheading
When you are writing an article, make sure it’s easy to skim. No one is here to read a massive number of words.
So to make it easier for people to read you also need to use subheading to break down your content into pieces so it’s easy to read.
Furthermore, subheadings are also helpful in Ranking Your Article in Google.
5: Avoid Content Duplication
Duplicate contents often lead to decrease your ranking in Google. You may also get hit by Google penalty if you copy content from others.
Use a tool like Copyscape to check any type of plagiarism in your content.
6: Adds Relevant Tags
Tags help search engines to understand your content better. Always use 4 to 5 relevant tags within your content.
Blogging Tips: Write Interesting Articles
1: Write Quality Content
Your content must be high quality, original and useful content for your visitors.
Search engines keep track of everything on your website such as how much time users spend on your website, how many pages they have seen and many other things. So they can provide better information to the users.
If your content is natural and original search engines will put your page on the top of their ranking.
2: Avoid Jargons
Jargons are special words used by groups, professionals. These words are difficult to understand by other people.
These types of words can really make your content boring and harder to understand.
Use simple words, instead of using “atypical” use “unusual”.
Provide more examples in your content.
3: Add Infographics
A single infographic speaks thousands of words. Instead of writing tonnes of words a single infographic is a lot more beneficial.
Infographic provides a visual look of informational data which can be in the form of charts, column or images.
4: Offer Freebies
Provide something for free to your audience to keep them engaged. You can take their email address in exchange for giving something useful.
This also helps you to build your email list.
5: Offer Some Interactions
Use surveys, polls and contests on your website or blog to entertain and take feedback from your audience.
6: Use Call To Action
Call to action means asking somebody to do something. It is really important in content marketing to persuade people to take some action after reading this content.
It can either be a simple email newsletter subscription or something you sell. Always use them at the end of your article where it matters.
7: Proofread Your Article
After writing a content you must need to polish it by editing and finding the errors in the article. You can do this on your own or handover to your teammate to find the error in the article.
Also check the grammar mistakes and spelling errors to enhance the quality of the article before making it live.
8: Final Step: Review and Publish
After checking everything, review the article one more time if it needs any type of correction or anything.
After doing all the stuff, hit publish.
Blogging Tips: Implement SEO
Some technical and SEO related blogging tips.
1: Submit Your Site To Google
Google is the search engine from which you can get most of the traffic for free. When you submit your site to Google it becomes available online on the search engines. Everyone can use it and access those web pages and read the information.
2: Check Broken Links
The links become broken and unapproachable when you delete a web page or move your page from one url to another without redirecting it.
In these cases these links become broken. So find the broken links on your blog and fix them.
3: Use Alt Tags On Images
Google is smart but enough to read the image. So Google uses alt tags to identify the image that is about it.
Always put alt tags to every image and use the keyword of your article if it really fits.
4: Use Yoast SEO Plugin
If you are using WordPress then you can use Yoast SEO plugin to improve your SEO on every post you write.
This plugin shows the mark in red if you need some correction on any point and after solving that problem the red mark becomes green.
It is really helpful if you are not tech savvy and don’t want to put every tag manually.
5: Use Internal Linking
Internal linking means linking the other articles from your to the new article.
6: Use Short URLs
Using long URLs is bad SEO practice. Always use short and descriptive URLs that contain only your keyword.
7: Use Google Analytics
Use Google analytics to keep track of everything like users, their country, pages they see, bounce rate of your website and many others important metrics.
8: Speed Up Your Website
Your website speed affects your ranking in Google. More loading time also affects the bounce rate. So diminish the use of plugins and themes that are heavy in code.
Use Google PageSpeed to check your web page speed.
9: Use Meta Tags Properly
Metadata is important for SEO. Keep your title catchy and include your keyword into it and also keep to user 65 characters.
In addition to this, use meta description to describe what your content is about and the characters limit for this is 160 characters.
Include your main keyword in both of these.
Blogging Tips: Go Social
1: Create Social Media Accounts
After or even before starting a blog or a small business create social media accounts and start posting related to your niche.
Social media is a great source to reach a wider audience at the very beginning of your blogging journey.
2: Use Social sharing Button
Use these buttons on every blog post and request people to share your posts on social networks. This can create reach to more people and fast.
Also if you use social sharing buttons, this will make people easier to share your blog posts.
3: Use Pinterest Pin
With a Pinterest pin when someone scrolls your site and finds an image he loves he can easily bookmark it into their pinterest account.
4: Use Social Media Management Tools
Use tools like Buffer or hootsuite to schedule your posts to social media accounts. These can save your lots of time by scheduling a post in advance.
So you don’t have to wait and manually share any of your blog posts or images.
5: Include NewsLetter To Your Site
Add newsletter form to your site. It helps others to subscribe to your blog and get the latest updates from your blog.
This way you can also build your email list of your subscribers.
6: Use Hashtags to Promote
Whenever you share something on social media use a unique hashtag to identify you posts.
Grow Connections
1: Respond To Your Redares
Always respond to your user’s query. It is through an email or through a blog comment section. This really helps you to understand your audience better and convert them into your regular customers.
2: Guest Blogs
Do guest posts on others blogs also. It is the easiest and genuine way to connect with others and gain traffic and backlinks from others’ blogs.
3: Participate in Conversation on Twitter
Hashtags conversation on twitter gets more response then sending a message on facebook.
4: Read other blogs and comments
Take some time to read others blogs and put beneficial comments on other bloggers posts to engage with them.
5: Join Groups
Join groups related to your niche on facebook. Make sure these are most active and professional bloggers are also into it.
So you can ask for help into these groups and get reply from some professional in this field.
6: Create Gravatar Account
Whenever you post a comment on any blog this will attach your image with your comment. Also this image is associated with your email address. This will help you in showing your image also whenever someone mentions your email.
7: Share others Blog Posts
You can easily grow and make better connections when you share others’ blog posts. They will also share yours in return if they found it useful.
8: Join Forum Sites Related To Your Niche
Forums are online discussions groups where various people talk on any topic and answer according to their experience.
Conclusion
These are my blogging tips and tricks for new bloggers to grow their blog from nothing to something. I have included everything you need from beginner to becoming an advanced level blogger.
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That’s it.
In case I have missed anything please let me know in the comments. If you like this post, please add some time in sharing it also.