By Christine Hull
New to blogging? Here are 8 tips for starting a successful blog.
1. Know Your Audience
Really get clear on who your audience is for your blog. Is it moms? Young people, who like to garden? Entrepreneurs? Women looking for fashion advice? The better you know the interests and behaviour of your audience, the better you’ll be able to write content that attracts their attention. Download a Customer Avatar Worksheet.
2. Niche It
Finding a niche will help you with #1. If you’re writing for everyone, it’s going to be hard to:
1.) Focus and 2.) Develop a good relationship with your readers. Tightening your niche will also help you gain targeted traffic and position yourself as an expert in your field.
3. Be Consistent
Throwing up a blog post here and there with weeks in between will not help bring traffic to your blog very quickly, if at all. You don’t have to blog every day, but you do need to be consistent. Three to four times a week is a great goal. Creating an editorial calendar is a valuable way to be strategic and plan your post topics ahead of time. WordPress has an excellent plugin in for this called, you guessed it, “Editorial Calendar”!
4. Be Personable
People relate to people. The more you can weave in your own personal stories or experiences into your blog posts, the more your readers will connect with you. It’s helpful to use “you” in your posts so your readers feel like you’re talking directly to them. Remember, be real!
5. Be Passionate
It’s going to be very hard to write blog posts consistently if you don’t like the topic you’re writing about. Be sure and chose a niche and/or an angle of your topic that you enjoy.
6. Check Out the Competition
Find blogs that talk about a similar topic and see which of their post topics are popular. You can do this by seeing the number of comments that are left and by how many times the article has been tweeted (often you can see this with a social icon next to the blog post). This will tell you which topics are hot and which ones you should also be writing about – without copying of course!
7. Get Involved
To get more traffic to your blog, you need to leave your blog. Leave comments on similar blogs, not spammy or salesy comments, but ones that add to the conversation. Use Facebook and Pinterest to get to know other bloggers in your niche. Get out there and get involved! It’s not enough just to blog anymore.
8. Guest Post on Similar Blogs
This is a highly effective way to get traffic to your site and/or blog. Find high quality blogs that reach a lot of your target audience and request to do a guest post for them. Write a fabulous post (must be unique and not a post recycled from your site). Be sure and write an author bio with a link to your site and a compelling reason to come visit.
To become a MAWB Guest Blogger, learn more here.
Summary
We’d love to know which of these tips you will implement today? Will you work on identifying your ideal client (Know Your Audience), decide on a specific niche (Niche it), create a blogging schedule (Be Consistent), get vulnerable with your audience to get to know them better (Be Personable), focus on topics that you are most passionate about (Be Passionate), research other bloggers in your niche and learn about content, audience, and blogging style (Check Out the Competition), book time in your day to read and comment on other blogs (Get Involved), research blog sites and offer to write for their audience (Guest Post on Similar Blogs)? Share your comments below.
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One Response
Great points!