Blogging 101: Our Top Tips for New Bloggers

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Blogging and running a website is one of the most well-known methods of earning money online, and we’ve already discussed how to create a blog on our previous article (on this link). This time, we’ll discuss our top tips on how to last longer as a blogger, how to become more effective at it, and the good habits that you need to learn as you continue writing for your own blog.

Blogging 101: Best Tips for New Bloggers

The Most Important Question: WHY?

This is probably one of the most important questions you need to ask yourself before you start blogging seriously. Why DO you want to blog? Is it because you want a place to express yourself, like an online diary or journal? Great! Blogging is an excellent form of self-expression.

Is it for your profession, like how lawyers and doctors create their own professional websites? Will you use it to build a personal brand or business? That’s also great!

Do you want to start a blog because you want to use it to earn money?

Are you blogging because you expect to earn hundreds or thousands of dollars a month from it? If you’re blogging for that reason, you might need to change your expectations. While some people DO become superstars, for the vast majority of us it will be very difficult unless you have a really, REALLY good action plan.

When I started blogging, I wrote a 700 to 1,000 word article every week and shared them on social media, and I also commented on other blogs to build backlinks to my website. Even then, I barely ever had two or three viewers a day during my first few months and I had no earnings at all. Bob Lotich, the author of How to Make Money Blogging, said that such an experience is typical for most bloggers. In any case, after over two years of work I now get a hundred or so viewers a day from google search (also known as “organic search traffic”) and it’s still growing.

If you want to blog seriously, you NEED to be incredibly passionate about it. Your passion must be enough to fuel you through tough times, and believe me, the first several months or years will usually be tough. You need to be inspired enough to keep going even though it feels like you’re not making any progress at all.

Our Top Three Tips:

1. Give VALUE – WHY should readers read your blog?

This is one thing a lot of bloggers forget, and I admit I sometimes forget this too. Whenever you write an article, it must give something valuable to the reader. If you want to create a blog that OTHER people will read, there should be a compelling reason WHY they should read it. When they spend several minutes of their time reading, they must get some benefit like learning a useful piece of information, an entertaining or emotional story, or something else. Whatever it is, it needs to leave the reader better off than before (and by the way, false information designed to fool people leaves them worse off).

In YourWealthyMind.com’s case, we write guides and articles that people can use to improve their lives, such as how to pay back debts, how to save money, how to create and earn money from a blog, and more.

2. Find your niche

Imagine that you wanted to learn how to play guitar, so you searched for and found an instructor who can give you guitar lessons. They taught you the basic notes on how to play guitar and you enjoyed the lesson, so you decide to come back next week. Then on the next lesson, however, your instructor started talking about how to install electric lighting instead of guitar. On the next lesson after that, they started talking about improving your Indonesian language grammar. On the fourth lesson they started talking about the economic situation of the European Union.

By then I’m pretty sure you’ve stopped visiting that “guitar instructor”.

You have to stick to a particular niche or topic for your blog. People will read your articles for a reason, and that’s because they like what they’re getting from it. If you don’t give them what they want, they will leave, just like the other students of the guitar instructor who stopped teaching guitar.

3. Write QUALITY articles

One of the tools I use to promote my blog is Viral Content Bee. To use it, you need to share OTHER writers’ articles to earn points, and you use those points to get people to share yours. I was able to read and view a lot of blog articles thanks to that system. Unfortunately, and this could just be my opinion, a lot of blog articles I read there are simply not that good. Many give the same tips that hundreds of other bloggers give, many don’t give decent examples, and many don’t have nice pictures and are just paragraphs of boring text. It’s difficult to describe, but if you’ve read enough articles online you will get a feel for it over time. Some articles are just written badly or are formatted badly, and it’ll make you want to stop reading and leave.

You must learn to write AND format your blog articles well. Even if you write down the most important advice in the world, if your grammar, blog structure, and everything else is wrong or ugly, people will most likely stop reading and leave. That could seriously hurt your blogging career.

Now that we’ve discussed the most important tips, here are a few others that you might want to consider.

Other Awesome Tips for New Bloggers:

1. Make sure your blog’s layout looks good. Choose a good theme and make sure it looks clean. Don’t clutter your website with ads or other elements. You must also remember to use a lot of nice pictures.
2. Post regularly. Write an original article at least once or twice a week. This will help your rankings on search engines.
3. Write longer articles. A lot of other bloggers say that longer articles with at least 700 to 1,000 words or more do better on search engines.
4. Use lots of pictures. Walls of text are boring. Use good pictures every few paragraphs to make your article look better.
5. Write scannable content. Again, walls of text aren’t good. Separate your articles into short sections or use lists.
6. PROOFREAD and use good grammar. Articles with lots of mistakes look and sound unprofessional and it makes readers want to leave.
7. Share your articles on social media. Almost everyone uses Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, and other social media websites nowadays. If you want to reach people, it’s best for you to share your posts there. It’s especially important when you start out and your website isn’t ranked highly on search engines.
8. Comment and share other bloggers’ work. Help others, and pretty soon they’ll help you in return. Besides, by commenting on other blogs, you can use the comment section to build backlinks to your own blog.
9. Kaizen (“continuous improvement”). Sean Beausoleil said “Whatever your current state is, it can be better.” Always continue improving your blog. Is there something with the layout that can look better? What about your writing style? Your promotion methods? Whatever it is, make as many improvements as you can in order to make your blog great. Read our article about how to improve your online business here!
10. Save a backup of your website regularly. Save them on your computer AND on a cloud storage (like Google Drive). If something goes wrong with your website (hacking, malware, corrupted files), you will be able to easily restore it if you always create backups.

NEVER:

1. Never plagiarize. Write your own original work and make sure you credit sources. If you don’t, you might get sued for plagiarism.
2. Never use pictures without permission or approval. Some people think they can use any image they find on Google for their blog or product, but they don’t know that most pictures on the internet are protected by copyright. You can get sued for thousands of dollars. Here’s a story you might want to read.. Don’t use any old picture you find on the internet. Use CC0 or “creative commons” images instead.
3. Never lie, cheat, or steal. Some people think that just because they can blog for self-expression, they can post things that are completely false or fake. Don’t do that. Nobody is stopping you from lying, cheating, or stealing from others, but never forget that those are wrong. There will be consequences, you CAN get punished, and they’ll likely come back at you when you least expect them (slander or libel lawsuits). We reap what we sow after all.
4. Never post illegal stuff. Because it’s against the law (obviously), and the authorities WILL be able to find you no matter how much you try to hide.
5. Never spam ads and monetization methods on your blog. It’s not really illegal, but most readers will hate it and they’ll soon stop returning to your blog.

Starting and running a blog isn’t easy. You need to be passionate about writing and creating content in order to post an article every few days or weeks, especially when you see that nobody is reading the things that you wrote. That will most likely be the case if you’ve just started (unless you’re a celebrity or you have a big online presence).

Fortunately, being a blogger is a lot like riding a bike or training at a certain sport. You get better as you continue writing, and you get better if you never stop improving yourself and your blog. Don’t forget this saying: “you can build mountains by collecting specks of dust”. Success doesn’t appear from thin air. You build it piece by piece.

When you don’t reach your goals or succeed as fast as you expect, look back at what you’re doing, figure out what isn’t working, and THEN you fix it. Anything worth doing is worth doing badly… at the beginning. You just need to keep going, especially if you’ve determined that it’s something that you really want to do.

By the way, if you want to read our article about how to start your own blog and how to earn money blogging, CLICK THIS LINK.