How to start a successful Blog — Beginner’s Guide for 2016
How to start a successful Blog
Before you start blogging, pay attention to these essentials tips to be successful.
If you consider these tips you will save yourself a lot of time and valuable energy, and most importantly some cash.
Blogging can be fun but it comes with a whole lot of demands and challenges. But if you are able to overcome them, you will live the remaining days enjoying the fruits of your efforts and investment.
If you have friends who followed their passion and began blogging, and at some point felt some wrong decisions have been made or they have spent more than they should; this article should be a wake-up call for you.
Over the past weeks, I have personally heard, witnessed and faced some challenges that I do not want the wannabe blogger to go through.
NOTE: This post on how to start a successful blog contains some affiliate links. If you purchase a service through one of my links I will earn a small commission at no extra cost to you. Thanks for the support! It means a lot.
In this tumultuous era of blogging you have to be very strategic to standout.
Before we embark on this exciting adventure to elucidate the mystery behind the secrets to building a successful blog. Let me take time to explain the concept of blogging to you.
What is blogging?
Blogging is simply an act of creative writing around one’s passion or interest based on their opinion, and the knowledge of skills like Writing, Search Engine Optimization, Social Media Marketing, maintaining and designing the look of CMS based websites like WordPress (most popular and preferred for blogging), Joomla, and the rest.
It is essential to have the above skills in order to be successful as a blogger.
You don’t need to be a professional writer, journalist, or author to be able to blog. However, you need to have the ability to write a complete sentence in English. *smiling*
Who is a blogger? A blogger is the person involved in the act of blogging.
I know you will be asking why you need to have the above skills to be able to blog. You can honestly blog without having them. You only lessen your prospect of becoming successful.
To be a successful blogger you need to be a good writer to write unique and relevant content. Unless you are planning to plagiarize content from other websites; this approach will not bring you any good result in the long-term.
You will need to have basic SEO skills to be able to optimize the content you publish to enhance your chances of your articles appearing in search engines results which can lead to organic traffic to your website. This is fulfilling because this traffic is free, consider it as a reward from the search engines for posting a relevant content on the web.
In order to stay relevant and attract people to your website on social media. It is essential to have good social media marketing skills to help you develop the strategies you need to either engage people or run online ads to draw visitors to your website.
You can actually hire the services of SEO or Social Media Marketing professional but this will cost you. It is better to try to acquire the basics and start something on your own. Feel free to contact me if you need assistance with SEO and Social Media Marketing.
Now that you know what blogging is about it is essential to know that although blogging is fun and rewarding, it can also very demanding and frustration sometimes. I hope you don’t lose your personal life (just saying)
To be able to survive as a blogger, aside having the passion, you need to have money.
You need to see this as a business and all the seriousness will have to be accorded to make this successful. You need to consider blogging as a long-term investment.
With these points established let us dive straight into the most important things you need to pay attention to if you want this blogging thing to work for you.
Let the journey begin:
Deciding on your niche
The best way to manage the demands and frustrations associated with blogging is to identify yourself with the right niche.
A niche is simply a topic area that you will be writing on.
To be able to be dominate in whatever niche you pick, you need to make sure that it is either something you know ( work related) or are passionate about (a hobby) . This makes it easy for your to write and maintain your blog even when other things are competing for your time.
When you blog about what you’re passionate about, several things happen:
- You’re more likely to put the time and effort into your blog to make it shine.
- You’re less likely to abandon your blog in the future.
- You’re less likely to run out of ideas.
- It shows through in your writing, and your readers can feel that. This, in turn, will lead to a larger following.
If you go the other route and choose a niche solely because you think it’s profitable, you’re bound to run into burnout and dissatisfaction
Niche blogs are popular for one reason: they solve one problem. Either the blog is talking on Fashion, Entertainment, etc strictly and nothing else.
For instance, if you want to stay up-to-date on Entertainment trends, you’ll follow Entertainment blogs such as www.xbitgh.com because you trust that they’ll continuously solve your problem.
This is why the blogs that talk about anything and everything are mostly not successful.
Most internet users are out there looking for solutions to a problem. When readers are looking to solve a problem and your blog is nothing but ramblings on random topics, how is your blog going to solve their problem? Take a cue from this.
I will expand more on this area in another post.