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7 Crucial Blogging Tips You Don’t See Often
I wish someone had given me these blogging tips years ago
Writing a blog can be frustrating.
And it shouldn’t be. It should be a fun experience. Something you look forward to every day.
It should also provide you with a considerable income.
If writing isn’t fun, you’re doing something wrong. So let’s correct it. Let’s make writing fun again.
Tip #1: Don’t Do SEO
You want traffic to your blog, right?
There are three main reasons why you shouldn’t do SEO:
- It’s boring AF.
- It takes months for Google to react.
- Google changes its algorithm all the time.
Instead of SEO, you should use CS.
Never heard of CS before? It’s Common Sense. Let’s take an example.
Let’s say you run a blog about toys from the late 90s. And for this blog post, you’ve picked the Tamagotchi.
Now… using common sense, without knowing anything about SEO, where would you put the word “Tamagotchi” in your blog post?
Spoiler below. Put your hand over the text and think about it for a few minutes. I would put it in 7 places.
Did you find seven places?
Here are mine:
- Headline
- In the introduction
- Image file name
- Image alt attribute
- Image title
- Sprinkled out throughout the text
- In the meta description
“But Britt, that’s SEO.”
Oh? Right, then there must be some sort of common sense to SEO. I like that. But some will recommend that you do crazy stuff like:
- Stuff the keyword into an H2 and an H3 sub-header no matter what
- Have the word bolded in the introduction
- Have an outbound link with the keyword as anchor text
- More…
If it falls naturally from your writing to link out and use the keyword in the anchor text, then great. Do it. But don’t do the other SEO things mentioned here with bullet points.
Tip #2: Don’t Trust Keyword Research
“But Britt!”
“In The Bloggers Guild you tell your students to use Keywords Everywhere. Why?”
Keyword research tools aren’t precise.
Just try the same keyword in different tools. You’ll get completely different results. And top bloggers agree…
Even if a tool says “there are only 100 monthly searches for that keyword” you can easily get 1,000 visitors monthly for the same keyword.
Why do I recommend this keyword tool?
Because it’s easy and fast. And you get an overall idea about things like competition, monthly searches and most importantly, what people also are searching for.
That’s where the real gold lies.
Tip #3: Stop Worrying about Visitors
You worry that if you create a blog, no one will visit it.
You’re worried. That’s understandable. But what would happen if you didn’t get any visitors to your blog?
Think about it for a minute.
Consider the worst-case scenario. You’ve spent hours writing the blog posts, adding ads and affiliate links. And nobody shows up to read.
No visitors.
How much would you have invested at this point? In money and work? Ten to fifteen hours? $50?
There’s a simple way to avoid that waste.
You could test the topic first in many ways.
- By writing about it on Medium to see if there’s an interest.
- Or just by writing about it for yourself to see if it holds YOUR interest.
And then start small — with what I call an Atomic Blog (you can get my eBook for free with the coupon code MEDIUM). (Clicking this link takes you away from Medium.)
Buy a domain name, get web hosting. Hosting can be $3.95 for a month. Often, if you buy for a year, you’ll get the domain name. Otherwise, it’s around $11 for that.
You could start with a free theme.
And 15 published articles all above 1,000 words. Use a bit of keyword research. Use Pinterest for traffic.
If there’s still no traffic, I would be surprised, but otherwise, you’ve lost maybe 20 hours to set it all up and write the blog posts.
And maybe $50 for the domain and hosting. Where else can you test out a business idea that cheap?
Tip #4: People Don’t Care about You
This is great!
All the time you thought they were staying at you when you stumbled while walking. Or when you’d forgotten your purse in the car and a whole line of unhappy customers in the supermarket had to wait for you to run to your car and back to pay. So it could finally be their turn.
Sure, those customers were annoyed that day.
But they won’t remember. Because to them, you’re not important. They don’t care about you.
They only care about themselves.
That’s why you should write your blog posts — not for you. But for them.
Always have your reader in mind when you write a blog post.
Tip #5: Writing Should Be Fun
Print out this article.
Cut out “Writing Should Be Fun,” frame it and hang it on the wall next to where you’re writing.
If writing isn’t fun, you’re taking it too seriously. Make it fun. Enjoy the process.
How can you make it fun?
Oh, in so many ways. Write words you think are funny (like splanchnopleure — darn hard to place in a sentence but fun to write) or queue (as in “line”). Try to type queue. Q-u-e-u-e.
Do it fast.
Fun, right?
Speed-write. Compete with yourself. See how fast you can type 100 words.
Oh, and don’t forget: Write about a topic you enjoy.
That alone makes it fun.
Also, it helps to be weird. 😉
Tip #6: Stick to a Pinning Schedule
Wait, what?
“Now we were just having fun, and now you’re talking about work?”
Sure am. But pinning every day is fun. Here’s what I do every day.
- Pick a blog post
- Create 3 pins for it on Canva
- Go to Pinterest
- Use the pins from Canva and post one today to a board
- Schedule the two other pins to two other boards
“But Britt! What’s fun about that?”
Seeing your stats after less than two weeks… that’s fun.
Tip #7: Wear Down the Return Key
When I wrote essays in school, I used the return key frequently.
I learned that it was wrong. You should have long paragraphs with lots of words. Keep all of the same meaning together.
Bo-o-o-ring!
When I was finally released, I wrote in my own style again. Ha! Take that, teachers! You can’t tame me.
No, maybe not. But the editor from my publishing house could.
Sigh…
Back to writing long paragraphs.
Until I began blogging, writing articles and indie-publishing books.
Yay for me. Now I was the boss. And I perused the Return key often.
For a while, I rarely had more than one sentence in each paragraph.
Now I use a method where I vary the number of sentences in each paragraph. And ha, I don’t always stick to the pattern. I’m a rebel.
Because being a rebel is also fun.
