Starting a blog can be exciting and exhilarating, but let’s face it, the early stages of a blog can be hard. You’re often writing for no one, or maybe you have a small audience consisting of your mom and best friend.
But whatever you do, hang in there. Keep writing. Just put your head down and WRITE. Consistently. Just do it. The more you continue to provide good content, the faster your blog will gain traction.
To give your blog the best chance for success, follow these eight tips to blogging success.
1. Know Your Audience
Really get clear on who your audience is for your blog. Is it moms? Young people who like to garden? Entrepreneurs? Women looking for fashion advice? The better you know the interests and behavior of your audience, the better you’ll be able to write content that attracts their attention.
2. Niche It
Finding a niche will help you with #1. If you’re writing for everyone, it’s going to be hard to 1.) Focus and 2.) Develop a good relationship with your readers. Tightening your niche will also help you gain targeted traffic and position yourself as an expert in your field.
3. Be Consistent
Throwing up a blog post here and there with weeks in between will not help bring traffic to your blog very quickly, if at all. You don’t have to blog every day, but you do need to be consistent. Three to four times a week is a great goal. Creating an editorial calendar is a valuable way to be strategic and plan your post topics ahead of time. WordPress has an excellent plugin in for this called, you guessed it, “Editorial Calendar”!
4. Be Personable
People relate to people. The more you can weave in your own personal stories or experiences into your blog posts, the more your readers will connect with you. It’s helpful to use “you” in your posts so your readers feel like you’re talking directly to them. Remember, be real!
5. Be Passionate
It’s going to be very hard to write blog posts consistently if you don’t like the topic you’re writing about. Be sure and chose a niche and/or an angle of your topic that you enjoy.
6. Check Out the Competition
Find blogs that talk about a similar topic and see which of their post topics are popular. You can do this by seeing the number of comments that are left and by how many times the article has been tweeted (often you can see this with a social icon next to the blog post). This will tell you which topics are hot and which ones you should also be writing about – without copying of course!
7. Get Involved
To get more traffic to your blog, you need to leave your blog. Leave comments on similar blogs, not spammy or salesy comments, but ones that add to the conversation. Use Facebook and Pinterest to get to know other bloggers in your niche. Get out there and get involved! It’s not enough just to blog anymore.
8. Guest Post on Similar Blogs
This is a highly effective way to get traffic to your site and/or blog. Find high quality blogs that reach a lot of your target audience and request to do a guest post for them. Write a fabulous post (must be unique and not a post recycled from your site). Be sure and write an author bio with a link to your site and a compelling reason to come visit.