Blogging has been there for some time now. There was a time when blogging was just a personal diary content type, but it has evolved to more than that. Entrepreneurs have been able to leverage their blogs to build their audience and make money from monetizing their interests.
However, many bloggers end up failing because they fail to attract readers and visitors to their sites. Hence they fail to make money. Getting a successful blog is not that easy. There are steps to getting there if you want to know how to blog. Here are a few top tips that will help you learn how to blog better:
Write on Verified Topics
The first thing you need to make sure when blogging is that your blogs are based on topics you are passionate about. If you are excited about a subject, you can be more engaging than bloggers turning out bland posts for traffic.
To blog better, you need to have a niche. That means that you’re not writing about everything you are passionate about; you have a focus. If you are looking to drive results with your posts, then your topics must be proven.
You can check if you are living up to that by picking one of the keywords and see how it’s trending on Google. You can also use the categories tool to check what’s trending in your niche and create your post based on those topics.
You can be a better blogger by writing about what your audience would want to know about. That will give you instant value and help you drive more search traffic as well.
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Use Format That Attracts People
If you want to know how to blog and attract people, then you need to ensure that your headline and topic draws an audience and the format hooks them to your work. Your content has to be quickly scannable in that, it has to be very easy to read.
Tools like Crazy Egg will help you find out if your headlines, sub-headlines, and other content are scannable. This tool will show you where your focus is and where it ought to be. It will allow you to see where you need to adjust the format to improve your site.
Making it easy for your audience to read through your articles means that you should emphasize on the key points in your headlines, use bullet points or other segmentations to break up your text, and write smaller and easy-to-digest sentences.
Using images has also been used continuously to break up content by other bloggers. The format of your posts should be readable and easy to understand. If you are looking to blog better then you need to keep your work simple for your audience. Simple is always better.
Write Killer Blog Titles
Proven content always requires a proven headline. If you want to know how to blog, then one of the critical things you should know is that you should spend more time writing your headline or title, than you do writing your content.
You can analyze your headlines with tools like CoSchedule’s Headline Analyzer to find out their overall grade. It gives you suggestions in case your title needs to be improved. It also offers sentiments and keywords that might be helpful. Often we find ourselves bypassing a post because of the title, consider the possibility of your audience doing the same.
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Include Guest Posting
Becoming a better blogger requires you to ask experts to guest blog on your site. This is a strategy to increase traffic to your blog. You can also offer guest posts to others; this will help you improve the quality of your blog and blog better.
Find experts within your niche with credible and proven content. Do not make the mistake of just looking for anyone. Guest posts also reflect on your credibility, so you have to be very careful who you allow to add content to your site.
Guest posting is also an excellent SEO boost for both you and the poster because they can also link back to their website. Tools like Mention will allow you to find expert bloggers within your niche if you don’t already know one.
It helps you find out who is already talking about your brand on the web. If your name is previously known, then it will be easy to find influencers. You can also use BuzzSumo to find influencers that also act as brand evangelists. All you have to do is, type in a keyword that is relevant to your niche, and a list of top posts will pop up with contributor names as well.
Make sure you look for content with the voice you want to portray, and that’s in line with your writing style. You can then find out if the contributors would be willing to guest post on your site by reaching out to them.
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Instead of Blogs, Post Infographics
Learning how to be a better blogger also includes creating infographics instead of posts. People love visual themes. The best thing about infographics is that they combine essential data with visuals. This makes it stress-free for your audience to understand.
To check all your boxes, all you need to do is create infographics of something related to your niche and also revolves around case studies, data, and other metrics. Therefore, the first thing you should do is gather data.
You can then turn the data you gather into an infographic, edit and customize it with the data you found. You can then use it on your website instead of the usual traditional blog posts. Visuals are an excellent way to change up the pace for your audience. They are also shareable and pin-worthy.
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The Visuals Should Be ‘Pin-Worthy’
Learning how to blog better includes making sure your posts really shine. Incorporating visuals helps out with that. When people come to your site, the first thing they should see is a featured image. Featured image is a thumbnail that shows up in other places around your website and web.
It also tends to be the image that is most shared on social media. Therefore, the image should be impressive enough to be pin-worthy. Being pin-worthy means that they will stand out against others on visual sites like Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest, and so on.
The image should be enticing enough to make your audience click on it. If you don’t have a creative flair, you can find pictures from stock sites. If you prefer to make things from scratch, you can use tools like Canva to help you create sharable featured images.
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Make a List of Post You Prefer Writing About
Your niche keywords should determine the topics you write about. Write down general ideas enough to cover a couple of months and try to post weekly. Break the topics into categories that are high-level to act as your blog navigation. This will allow your readers to explore specific areas of your content.
To help you with this get a solid blogging strategy that will help you find topics that suit your blog site and benefit people within your niche. Set goals that match your approach so that you don’t wind up giving up on your blog as most people do.
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Write More Monthly Posts
Once you’ve learned how to blog by formatting good posts and decking them out with fancy visuals, then you will start to experience success. However, to make sure of that, you need to be consistent and post more often.
Focus on how often your readers would want to hear from you and on posting as regularly as you can. Remember more traffic, also means more bounce rate, page views, and time on page. Whether or not you have features images or killer headlines, posting more often will get you results. Make your posts count, people always want value; give that to them in frequent doses.
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Personal Stellar Success Stories
The apparent truth is that most of the content on your blog won’t be all unique, some of it is repurposed from online sources or inspired by books you read. Chances are what you are saying, has been noted at numerous sites in different formats and through some custom post types and platforms.
Therefore, if you want to give your audience a compelling reason to keep reading your posts, make them listen to your voice and see your personality in your blogs. The aim is to make your audience build an emotional relationship with you.
One of the ways to make sure of this is by coloring your posts with ideas and success stories. Most people prefer content that delivers a great story to subtly indicate what they need to do instead of being given outright directions.
Let your posts have more of a storytelling nature instead of a directory one. Storytelling is more convincing if you want to get the reader to act compared to factual information. Using a potent combination of stories and data in your writing will receive better engagement and make you more money.
GrooveHQ tool will show you how to fill your blog with interesting stories correctly to interest your target readers and visitors. However, to avoid boasting while trying to share your stories, make sure your stories are relevant, and they add value to your audience.
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Thinking of Ideas in a Vacuum
Ideas come to you at the most indiscriminate times. You could be on the run, in the shower, on the phone with your friend and an idea just pops. Random ideas, however, are not the best option. Just because you have a good idea in general, that doesn’t mean it the best for your industry.
For you to blog better, you need to make sure that all your posts serve more significant goals for your website. The ideas should help grow your site, and so they should address specific concerns and questions your audience has.
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Stiff Writing
You need to realize that writing a blog is not the same as writing a term paper. If you want to have your readers fascinated, you have to make sure your writing is effortless to read. Otherwise, they won’t read through the entire post.
The solution is to write as you talk, be more conversational in your writing. The idea of being a better blogger is making your audience feel that they are doing business with a real person and not a robot. So you need to loosen up your writing.
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Broad Topics
The mistake bloggers make, especially new ones are venturing into big topics. Topics like ‘How to make money online’ and ‘Best business practices’ are far too broad. These topics have so many nuances and details that can prove difficult to answer.
If you want to blog better, you need to get the long-term and short-term advantages of blogging. To do this, you need to create specific working titles. A working title acts as an angle to keep you on the right writing track.
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Assuming that People Care About You as a Writer
New bloggers tend to think that their readers are interested in their interests and stories. However, that’s not the case. Most people are not interested in you or your experiences especially if you are new. People want to know what you can teach them.
The best thing to do is infuse your personality into your writing style instead of talking about yourself. This will make your audience more comfortable with you. Look for ways you can relate to your audience on a topic you are writing about. Make your tone approachable, personal, and engaging, just like you would if it was a face-to-face conversation.
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Failing To Use Data as Evidence
If you want to be more compelling, then you need rooted research and data to back up your claims. You just can’t convince a reader to join your community; you need to convince them to take the right action. Fluffy arguments do not catch people’s attention, data-driven content does.
Therefore, you need to use research and data to back up any claims you make in your articles. Establish proof, offer arguments, and then end with a takeaway for your readers. Use the data in the posts to introduce the primary evidence and show it’s relevant to your audience.
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Plagiarized Content
If you contemplate of getting away with the old copy-and-paste technique, you are on the wrong platform. Readers and editors have an incline to content that has been copied elsewhere. If you copy, your voice sounds off, or you may end up misusing some words. Plagiarized work will get your website penalized by Google which will end your blogging career before it even starts.
Instead of copying other people’s work, learn how to cite them. It’s essential to understand how you can cite content that’s not yours into your blogs.
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Trying to Make Every Post Perfect
If you want to learn how to blog, you need to understand that your post will never be perfect. There is always something you will be required to add to make the post better. It could be a better phrasing, more images, wittier jokes, etc.
You need to stop obsessing and just ship the post. While you don’t want to publish a post with grammatical errors and factual inaccuracies, it’s not the end of the universe if you find typos. Chances are, they won’t even affect the leads it brings or the number of views you get.
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Thinking You are Done Once The Writing is Done
The most prominent mistake bloggers make is failing to edit their work. Just because the ideas sounded so fluid in your head doesn’t mean you executed them correctly. Your work will always need editing, in fact, maybe a lot of it.
Even the most experienced writers need to edit their work. So always take at least 30 minutes to write your posts and shape them up. Fix the run-on sentences, the typos, and accidental mistakes. To be a better blogger, your story needs to flow as well as it did in your outline.
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Failing to Blog Consistently
If you want to achieve any form of success. Consistency is key. The traffic you attract to your blog is influenced by how often you post. If you’re going to gain more subscribers and improve your blogging, you need to blog more often.
Inconsistency tends to confuse your readers. Get a planning strategy and an editorial calendar .This will help you to establish a habit of creating posts ahead of time, scheduling the posts, and publishing consistently. This will set off your blogging career by increasing more traffic and leads for your site.
Learning how to blog and building a successful blog requires years and years of publishing and scribbling. However, you need to scale up your content. Otherwise, if you keep pushing the same content, you won’t be able to scale.
Always make sure your posts count by making them readable, relatable, and accessible on every level. Throw in some fun stuff to spice things up. Throw together an infographic or shareable graphics and see where it will pop up. Improving on your blogging and becoming a better blogger is highly dependent on how much you try and never give up.
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