Tips for New Bloggers

 

Blogging can be a tiring work, especially when you don't have your basics covered. Simply put, blogging is means by which you share what's in your mind with the wider world by having it put on the internet.

Traditional blogging using the internet is done through perosnal website or platform. New Age Blogging is done on social media platforms and as well as on skill based platforms like Upwork and Fivver.

This blog will give for the first group, i.e, folks or companies who have their own websites or use some blogging platforms for blog writing.

As the field has matured, these days nee bloggers struggle with almost every aspect of blogging. This starts from their content to getting it to a right type of audience.

To help new bloggers, I'll share and mention some blogging tips and tricks that I have used and have worked for me. These blogging tips, won't be a Expert tip or advice but they'll surely help you be motivated and help your blog in a practical way.

1) Prelude : Know Thy Nieche

Perhaps the most important and impactful blogging tip that you'll be given is to choose a suitable nieche for you.

A nieche is a specific category in which your blogs will be written. There are hundreds of blog nieches out there, like entertainment, personal fiance, lifestyle, job related, gaming, heath related just to name a few.

You have to select a single nieche and work on it for six months, you'll surely start seeing results. Select a niche according to your preferences, market , skills and stick to it. Sticking to a single well defined niche will make your life easier because you'll have a vague idea of what type of content you'll be writing about.

Nieche will give comfort and your audience an idea of what to expect from your blog and this goes for your advertiser as well.

Once you've figured out your nieche, don't change it. Changing it will only make life more difficult for you as a blogger. You don't want to be in a negative feedback loop with unwanted headaches this early in your blogging career.

2) Make First Interaction Worthwhile

Remember, people will first interact with your website, the theme of the website and your content later, so it's very important to have as much as user friendly interface in your website as much is possible.

You can make your website user friendly by making its colours, it's theme more pleasing to the eye. Get rid of all the extra and non working links, lists from your main web page, make way for a navigation icon that will in navigating your website, add in images and videos that are related to your content.

Aesthetics are all about visual satisfaction.
The images you'll be using in your blog heading or in middle should be all high definition images.

Add in a 'share icon', by using which your audience can share your blog with their social media freinds.

Improving Aesthetics on a website or a platfrom can learned through YouTube or various dedicated groups on several social media platforms like Reddit or Facebook.

3) Work On  SEO

Doesn't matter if your looking for blogging tips in 2021 or tips in 2022, you'll be told to work on SEO. SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. SEO refer to methods and techniques that bloggers deploy so that they're blog is easily searchable using a search engine.

SEO for a blog can be achieved in two ways. First is Website SEO, which simply means working on things like plugins, page loading speed, HTML code, reducing bounce rate just to name a few.

I'm writing here about the second kind of SEO which is Contents SEO. Contents SEO can be done through usage of Keywords and alt image description,these countless  resources can be accessed and used on the web for free that will help you to achieve easy searchbility and thus wider audience.

These days without using SEO techniques and methods its almost impossible to have organic traffic to your blog, thus limiting your audience to few social media platforms. Using a SEO technique and methods you'll get a sustainable and long term audience that can be monitized at a later point.

Keywords can be found through various free websites/resources from the Internet and in addition these websites/resources will give you more blog topic ideas.

4) Write For Humans Not For Search Engine

Given the importance and advantages of SEO, your main focus should be on quality of your content and what value does it hold for your audiences. I'm not saying or advicing to completely ignore SEO, I'm just trying to say that with SEO try your focus on reliability and value factors too.

Blogs written for Search Engine don't have genuine human feelings or relatibilty factors, a single blog with a good SEO will bring you many audiences but it won't be able to sustain it and there value factor come in. Make a blog that has some useful information or the information in your blog should be of value to your audiences.

This is particularly important for small businesses that are trying to compete.
Blogs for small businesses, should be targeted to a customer rather than a search engine. Use emotional, cultural connectivity to get the trust of your customers and start working on SEO later.

Alot of new bloggers use artificially generated writing. I'll recommend not to do this as this is not genuine to yourself or your audience.

5) Start A Email List

In simple words, an email list is a alert notification of a content, blog, video that is send to your contacts in your email.

There are numbers of webites, resources and companies that provide a paid email list for, charing very little money for their services.

Starting a email is essential as is it send a single blog to numerous people at a same time without having to send them individually. Importance of a email list is its now almost a cultural phenomenon that most people only open their email and not other messaging apps. This gives you a easy way to boost audience and grow your blog's audience.

If you've have your own website and your selling a product of any kind, its inevitable for you to have a fucationing email list. As a newbie, this method is probably the most easy and most effective form of marketing out there.

6) Outline And Heading

Before you have started writing the blog but you've a topic to write on, make a small '10-15 line headings' list. The practical advantages of adopting this practice are immense and plenty-fold, as this saves time, keeps your attention on heading at hand, will give you much needed mental peace.

In addition to writing heading beforehand, I try to write their rough outlines too. My Rough outlines normally include rough description of the heading, how it relates to the topic that I'm writing a blog about.
For making outlines, understand the basics of whatever topic your writing about and write it down in the form of bullets or points.

For my heading and outline, I typically read upwards of 3 or more blogs, articles or posts related to the subject that I'll be writing about, this gives me much needed clarity of thought, ideas and language that I'll be using in my blog.

You can easily and freely do this with a single search on the internet. While doing this, beware of plagerism and to avoid this in your writing practice checking for plagerism before publishing on a website or blogging platform.

7) Proof Read

Proof Reading is a practice of reading your blog/article/writing again so that if you've made a grammatical, spelling or a mistake of punctuation, it can be corrected before you publish that said blog.

No one wants to read a blog that's has numerous mistakes, this makes a blog unattractive, hard to understand and just a poor content piece. So Proofreading is essential for good and essential communication so that your message can be brought to the world in a manner as you intended it to be. This practice will make your blog more pleasing to read.

To improve your spellings, your grammar and your puncations, take up a English language course or listen to videos on this topic on platfroms like YouTube.

Personally, I use Grammerly and my mobiles inbuilt keyboards autocorrecter.

Continue to improve your writing skills by You can use free or paid services to improve your writing skills. Improving your English language skill won't only help you in blog writing but it'll be great for you in number of ways as English is a defacto Universal Language.

8) Make A Practical Schedule

Early on, posting a blog everyday might be useful way to establish you presence. But doing this over a period of time will lead to a burn out and loss of productivity.

Making a practical schedule will help you overcome this hurdle by giving your mind some time in between every blog that you post. This will bring much needed consistency while not affecting your efficency or quality of your blog.

Making a schedule would help you to make blog writing part of your daily routine.
In the long run, it will reduces stress makes your brain more adaptive to this habit easily. Practical schedule also makes blog writing or any other work more sustainable.

Personally I write blog twice a week meaning I publish blog after two days.
Experts and Industry leaders advice to publish atleast a single blog every week.

To make schedule, you can use your phone calendar or specialized schedule apps. I don't use any apps, I remember to write a blog after every two days.

With a schedule, keep patience with you.
Keep your immediate expectations low and
don't look for immediate results beacuse in blogging very few people get them. Focus on consistency and you'll start getting result one day.

9) Relatablilty Is The Key

Doesn't matter what your writing about or what your nieche is, as long as there's someone who can relate to content that you've written, you'll succeed.

For relatibilty, use perosnal experiences, practices and habits as an example.

Relatbilty and Credibility go hand in hand. To maintain and get yourself that reliability, first practice credibility in your writing. Before writing any fact, quotation or date double check on its original source. Without credibility there's no reason to believe or validity in your argument.

If someone among your audience finds your content relatable, they are more likely to visit your website or blogpost again and again, thus giving you genuine orgain audience.

I use fact checker and other websites to verify any fact that I'll share in my blog. In addition to that I use photographs or charts where need be to establish credibility.

You can use some free or paid service for this type of task.

10) Write Detailed And Descriptive Blogs

Don't write blog that have less than 1,500 words. This is one of the common mistake that new bloggers make. I've made this mistake myself but quickly understood what the problem was with my blog and changed the course for better.

Write blogs that have 1,500 in them. The best and ideal length of the blog is between 1,500 and 3,000 words. To increase the word count, use descriptions  explanation and examples of whatever your writing about

I try to keep my wordcount more than 1,500 words but if you could write upwards of 2,000 of words, it would be good.

In order to increase the word count, don't add gibberish or useless information, always use information that's related to your blogs topic and your heading. Adding quotation is another easy way of increasing the word count in your blog.

To check wordcount, I simply put my blog draft into Microsoft Word and check number of words from there. You can check number of words in your blog by this way or by using any number of ways like website or online resources.