5 Blogging Tips for Beginners

TechsPlace | Facing difficulties is an integral part of a blogger’s job. Developing a blog to reach its full-scale capacity involves writing skills, SEO skills, and marketing skills. The first outreach of your blog will happen through Social Media, until you blog ranks and starts getting traffic from search engines as well. These blogging tips are to help you in your task and give you guidelines as to where to start.

1. Quality content is your primary concern

Though this is in a way obvious, your content is indeed your primary concern. This means you have to write articles which are useful or entertaining, depending on the type of blog you’re writing. Useful means articles such as step by step guides and top lists of resources or tips. Articles advising the audience on how to do something or how to use something also fall into this category, although the line is never strict. Entertaining usually means writing about trendy topics from a different point of view and having your own unique style. Whatever your niche may be, make sure that you write about the wanted and needed topics. Always check what’s hot and talked about.

2. Viral content is the second concern

The best way to get noticed is to be witty. This is not always easy since some industries one happens to have to write about can be dreadfully boring. Imagine you have to write about screwdrivers. Not a gladly read topic indeed, but if you make a funny screwdriver doodle saying funny stuff, you may make it more interesting. The content that can easily go viral nowadays are videos, infographics, memes, and comics. These are the stuff even people outside a particular niche share, so use it.

3. Do some on-page SEO

Bloggers usually use WordPress. This makes it easier to do some on-page SEO through the use of SEO plugins. The best ones out there currently are WordPress SEO by Yoast and All-in-one SEO. Even if you are not using WordPress you will have to deal with a few things:

• Take care of the meta tags. Set default meta tags if you are using a plugin. Always write unique titles and descriptions for each of your pages and posts, regardless of whether the defaults are set.
• Fill in the data WordPress SEO requires. The Yoast plugin enables you to assess every post from an SEO viewpoint if you fill in all the data it requires for each post.
• Don’t stuff your meta tags and content with keywords. Everything on your website has to sound natural.
• Change the theme if you have to. Your website has to look appealing from a visitor’s standpoint. So if there is too much of everything everywhere, it’s time to change the strategy.
• Be careful with ads. If you have ads or plan to put them on your blog, be careful where you are putting them and how many ads you can put without the blog looking like an ad farm.

These are not the only things to do, but they are a good starting point.

4. Create a Social Media presence

Usually, a presence on Facebook, Twitter, and Google plus will do for the first couple of weeks, while you are too busy filling the blog with fresh content. But as the blog develops, other networks of interest will become increasingly important. Identify the places your audience spends a lot of time on and be there. To begin with, you can use your own profiles for sharing content, but later on, you will have to make separate social media pages or different accounts on the networks which allow it.

5. Create link bait

Although the first two bullet points here speak about creating link bait content, there are a few more things that can be done. You can mention in your articles some of the big names in your niche you learned from or you appreciate. They will probably link to your blog, but only if your article is great and truly worthwhile, and mentioning them in the article has a point.

Also, you can try creating top lists. I already mentioned them, but if you have a clear criterion based on which you create the top list, those who are on it are likely to link to it.

You can also interview someone from your niche whose work is well known. This way you would get a link from him and traffic from his followers.

These are just some ideas, and whatever you do, make sure you do it the right way. If it’s a top list, make your criteria clear. If it is an interview think really hard about the questions you want to pose and structure the interview in a way which will allow you to get as much information as possible, and at the same time taking as little time as possible from your interviewee.

Stephen Leo