Asus Zenbook Laptop
Protect Your Laptop & Select a Great Laptop Bag
August 27, 2016
Tips to Help You Market Your Blog
10 Marketing Tips for Bloggers
October 2, 2016
Asus Zenbook Laptop
Protect Your Laptop & Select a Great Laptop Bag
August 27, 2016
Tips to Help You Market Your Blog
10 Marketing Tips for Bloggers
October 2, 2016

Blogging Tips for Beginners

Blogging Tips for Beginners

1. Begin with a self-hosted WordPress blog

Period. Google loves WordPress. You will love it too. It will pay huge dividends over the course of your blogging career. WordPress is a great CMS with flexible options you can add as you need them. Self-hosting means you are in control of your blog and Google favors independently hosted blogs. But, be sure the host you select has exceptional up-time, to retain that advantage. (We recommend TigerTech.)

2. Keep it conversational

Encourage interaction on your blog by keeping your language, your tone, and your presentation “real.” People who read your blog should feel that they “know” you as a result. (Effective blogs allow you to network with thousands of people at once!)

3. Provide “Eye Candy”

Use at least one large, high-quality image for each blog post. Excellent graphics are imperative to encourage readership. They “draw the eye” to your topics and should reflect some aspect of the topic your blog addresses. Using humor in your images (as well as your content) is good, when appropriate.

Keep a camera with you at all times. To blog successfully, you need to create new images — so be ready to capture situations or original objects at any moment!

4. Niche your topic

There are over 152 MILLION blogs on the Internet (and that figure is three years old now!) with new ones being created at a rate of two per second! There is no room for a generalist — unless you are blogging simply for self-gratification. If you want to be read, you need to carve out your own special niche in the blogosphere.

5. Write what you know

This is true for any writer, using any format, on any platform. If you don’t know what you are talking about, you have no business blogging it. Select a topic you DO know.

6. Select a solid domain name

Make sure your blog URL reflects your niche topic, is easy to spell, is memorable, and contains no confusing combinations (like “for/four/4” or “two/to/too/2”) which require you to spell the URL. Use a .com rather than other extensions. (It’s what people expect and it’s the first one they will type in.)

7. Post late at night

Most blog readership happens from 7 a.m. to 10 a.m. and statistically, the sharing of blog information happens in the earliest of those reading hours. So your posts should be scheduled to appear late in the evening or VERY early in the morning to capture the most traffic.

8. Make sharing easy

Add “clickable” icons at the bottom of each post to make it easy for readers to share your content with their social media accounts. There’s a plugin for that! (Actually there are dozens, so select carefully and review often for functionality.)

9. Make your site “sticky”

Add a related posts plugin to your WordPress installation to automatically display similar posts at the bottom of each post. These plugins highlight other blogs your readers may find interesting and can present a thumbnail of the images used in those blogs – along with the blog title. This will entice readers to click on the other blogs, stay longer and return more often. I advocate using three of these posts at the bottom of each blog.

10. Check and double-check before publishing

No one will consider you an expert if your blog is riddled with spelling, grammatical, and other obvious errors. (You should also double check any facts you present.)

Comments are closed.