Are you starting your blog for the first time? Well! It is amazing to do that but you would need experience and things to follow. I know how exactly it feels to imagine that people are going to read or even share your blog posts. That’s the next level feeling of imagination, that can’t be described in words.
However, let me be very honest with you, this is not at all the butterflies and the rainbows. To start a blog needs a lot of hard work and there are several pitfalls all along the way. Especially if you are a newbie, it will be very much difficult for you to get along. I really don’t want to scare you or dishearten you in any way. All I am doing is telling you the reality. However, you can always gain success if you keep on learning things and follow all these steps mentioned below.
Yes! If you are starting with your blog for the first time, then you can’t afford to miss out on the Top 13 Tips To Open a Successful Blog. I really hope this article will bring you the success you need to have a blog. So without further delay, let’s start with the article.
Top 13 Tips to Open a Successful Blog
1. Getting Started
Are you thinking to start a blog? Then choosing the blogging platform is highly important and for your knowledge, this will be your first challenge. Well! There are several blogging platforms available in the market to choose from. Some of the most popular ones include WordPress, Tumblr, TypePad, and Blogger.
The best thing about all of them is that they all offer you free design themes. As a result, you will be able to customize your blog as per your choice and requirements. It is very easy to start with and if you are not sure how to get started, then you can easily find several online tutorials to help you.
2. Consider Doing Integration
If you consider the SEO point of view, then it is very much essential to get your blog integrated with your existing website in order to build content. In fact, all these will make the search engines love you even more.
After all, SEO or in full form Search Engine Optimisation is all about GOOD content. But if you’re not able to do this or if you can’t afford to hire a web developer to sort all these things up, then start a free blog. However, you need to make sure you include links to your main website or other links, for example to your artistic portfolio.
3. Search for a Niche
While you think of starting your blog and making it successful, the most important thing you should consider is to find out a niche. Try to make your blog on something that is very specific to a subject and this way you will be able to please both the search engines as well as your readers.
Try not to be that general while writing a blog and focus on one of the specific topics and always stick to that. Hence, go and search for a niche you are comfortable writing and try to remember, you need to stay on topic.
4. Offer Value
This goes without saying anything. If you don’t provide your viewers with what they are looking for, then your creative blog will never be a success. Try to offer people or your readers with something they are looking for and offer them the real value to their web browsing experience.
Well! You must be thinking about what I meant by this? Let me tell you, value is counted in the content you post. If the content you are posting isn’t giving any value to your reader, then they might not return back to read more articles. Really think about what you’re putting out there and give the people what they want.
5. Write What You Love
One of the most important factors to keep in mind while you are starting a blog is to write about what you love. If you don’t write on something you love, you will not have the passion for your writing for a longer period. And if the passion is missing out, you will suffer from low confidence which will turn your blog eventually into a failure.
Hence, it is essential for you to find out a topic that you are comfortable writing on and write about that only. For say, if you are a museum curator, then you can talk about the industry and other emerging trends as well as museums or all other exhibitions that you love. Moreover, for say, if you are a theatre director, then you could easily write about industry people whom you admire or you can share your working day with your followers.
6. Focus on Marketing
If you launch a blog and hope for people to come without doing any kind of marketing effort, then you would get nothing but false hope. In fact, you need to do active marketing of your blog and you can use different methods to do so. Apart from that, you can chat with other bloggers by leaving valuable comments on other people’s blog posts – this will help draw people back to your own site. Or you can make use of the search engines and write about topics that are popular in the searches, like this very feature.
Furthermore, you could even get to contribute to other influential blogs or e-zines that will help you to increase and build your profile. Whatever you choose to do, just get out there and market yourself like mad. There’s really no excuse not to.
7. Make Commenting Easy
You need to be aware of the fact that there might be several other reasons for a person not wanting to comment on your blog posts. This might happen because they might not find easy access to log a comment to write about the negative things where people don’t want to be a part of.
So what is the bottom line? Well! The bottom line is to make commenting easy to access for the readers and this way they can write about all the stuff they want. This will eventually help you to interact with your viewers on your blog and will allow them to keep coming back for more.
8. Images, Images, and More Images
We all love to see images, people love images. In fact, if you see then most of the popular creative and art blogs in the world have a lot of imagery included. This is partly because we love to scan quickly through the web pages and seeing all kinds of pictures and images. It actually helps in breaking up the text as well as visual interest.
While writing any kind of creative blog, it is very much essential to have images as many as possible and it will give your audience a lot of things to enjoy visually. Even if they miss out on reading the entire article, they will be easily able to scan through the images and get the point quickly.
9. Offer Easy Reading
As per the research, it is suggested that people view as well as scan several web pages rather than just reading the entire copy till the end. Hence, you must keep your articles easy and quick to read and scan. Try to offer lists wherever you can and break up the text into small paragraphs.
Talking from the SEO point of view, you will want to write at least 250 words of an article. This would be good to stick to this number for all your readers unless you are writing an in-depth article like this. In the case of longer articles, you can add bullet points, lists, small paragraphs, subheadings, etc to attract your readers.
10. Keep an Eye on Analytics
It is very much essential for you to keep an eye on how many people are landing on your blog and how they like it or not. Once, you are aware of all these, you will be able to tailor your blog posts as per the needs of your readers. In fact, you can make the best use of those external sources that will draw more audiences.
In case, you go and invest in any of the online advertising, the analytics will help you to determine and understand the ROI or the return of investment and you can see whether it is working or not. Hence, it is absolutely mandatory to keep an eye on your web analytics and this will ensure your blog will become powerful as it should be.
11. Keep it Regular
Without any doubt, one of the most important things to keep in mind is to keep your blog updated on a regular basis. Yes! A blog is more or less like an online journal and it needs regular updates. Hence, you must try as well as keep your blog updated with at least more than two articles a week.
Ideally, once you start your blog, you need to post every single day, especially if you are keeping SEO as one of the main priorities. Otherwise, you need to just try as well as keep things going with the flow.
In case, you are going on a holiday, you can make the best use of scheduling tools on your blog. This way you can post your content without any hectic. Yes! They will automatically get posted while you are staying away from your desk. This will be of great help without any issues as you can enjoy your time on your vacation and still manage your blog updates.
12. Get Social
You should never neglect the power of social media especially when it comes to blogging. Always consider social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter or any other platform like them. Hence, you should ensure that you hook these platforms up to your blog’s RSS feed and then update your followers as well as fans with all your latest posts.
There are several amazing tools that will help you in automatically publishing your posts to your Facebook as well as Twitter accounts. However, it is very much essential for you to check and test everything at first before you use those tools. In case, you are happy with the automatic updates as well as tweets, you can use the tool without any delay.
13. Spell Checking and Proof Reading
The final step that you must, must, and must keep in mind while you are about to hit the publish button is to check spellings and do proofreading. Having spelling mistakes will not only ruin your credibility, but it will also entirely damage your SEO as the search engines won’t appreciate a poor copy. Make sure you check everything before you go live.
There are several paid apps that will help you to correct things manually and you will be able to correct and edit your copy as per the industry standard.
Final Talk
I hope you have read the entire article and now you are aware of all the steps to keep in mind in achieving a successful blog. These Top 13 Tips To Open a Successful Blog will help you to get through the journey smoothly. If you have any other tips in mind, you can always share them here in the comment section.
Even further, I would like to hear your experience in your blogging journey as all the journeys will be different. You can check out all the blogs that are your competitor and see how they are doing, what topics they are covering, how regularly they update, etc. All of these will surely help you to get successful with your blog. Till then happy blogging!
