Let’s cut to the chase! Below you’ll find the five basic steps you need to make your blog a successful one.
1) Think about who your audience will be
It’s always better to target your blog for a particular audience. You can then focus to write something which could help your audience immensely. For example, if you are well-versed into internet marketing, you should target people who are just new to the world of internet marketing and eager to learn from scratch. But try to choose a niche which is expandable so that you can find more and more topics to write on. Don’t shy away from sharing all your secrets. Write every bit of useful information, you can think of, to make your blog stand out. It’s an old saying that “Knowledge grows, the more you give away”. So give away everything like a good teacher and you will get much more in return in the form of ever growing audience.
2) Engage your readers
Write your content so that it perfectly makes sense to reflect the title of your post. In other words, you should not go off topic while writing, otherwise, users may leave your blog. Also, think of what other topics you can write and link internally from the existing post so that it is highly likely that the user will click on that internal link. This is important to do to engage your reader for a longer period of time on the site. You can also use external links (links given to third party websites) on some texts which need more detailed explanation. This way users can click on the external links to find the required information related to those texts. Whether the users click on external or internal links, both are signs of user engagement and so good for SEO (search engine optimization).
3) Take care of your content
You should be honest in your approach while writing. Simply publishing the duplicate or re-written content is not going to help, as search engines like Google already have the technology to filter out the duplicate content pages from their search results, and so the duplicate content won’t give you any organic traffic . Another important thing is to provide an evidence of whatever you are writing, by referring to the original source in the form of an external link. This is specifically important if your content is based on some research work and requires authenticity. Content based on your imaginations and personal experiences, however, will not need any authenticity. Also, make sure you know about emotional intelligence while writing, else you may face the criticism in the online community.
4) Participate in online communities
So what are online communities? There are numerous other blogs, forums, discussion boards, FAQ sites, like Stack Overflow, where users can interact with each other to discuss their problems and also share their knowledge and experiences. All such platforms are a part of online communities. Just keep flooding your website with content is not going to help much to generate traffic. Just like you link to third party websites from your own blog, other websites should also link to your blog pages so that your blog can rank better in search engines like Google. This is how Google’s technology works to rank different websites in their search results but user experience (as already mentioned in step 2) is more important for Google than getting links.
You should put all the great efforts so that more and more websites or blogs link to your own blog pages. It doesn’t matter which blog page they link. This is only possible when you participate in online communities to popularize your content and then someone could link your content as a good resource for their website or may be out of sympathy if you requested a link to them. Someone may even ask for money to link your website but then paying for links is against Google webmaster guidelines and so that should be avoided.
5) Take care of the technical aspects
Professionalism is very important to impress anyone you want to. Most of the bloggers make use of readymade templates to create their blog using WordPress. This results in a similar kind of design (like other WordPress blogs over the internet) which doesn’t look professional. If you have money to spend, you should not use these open source website creation tools like WordPress.com or Blogger.com and get the blog done from scratch with your desired design from some individual web designer and programmer or some web developer company who does this. You can hire a lot of such web developers on sites like freelance.com and upwork.com.
It’s also possible to create a blog without CMS or publishing tools. The guys from People HR Blog have done that. For every post, they have used a unique graphic or image which is not copied from anywhere. It’s easier to get links for your blog with a professional design and content.
Also, make sure to get your blog done with responsive design so that it is compatible with all the latest devices and browsers. Also, make sure to ask the developer to make the site load faster by eliminating all the errors (if any) as mentioned by PageSpeed Insights tool by Google. Hope that helps.
Original post: Five Basic Steps for a Successful Blog
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