Blogging is competitive and if you are new to it, you might face a tough challenge. In order to create a fan base and gather an audience around your blog, you need to do something extra. An important fact is that blogging is not limited to writing only, but you have to be good at relationship building, content distribution, social account management and more.
This may be overwhelming, especially if you are a one man show, but like it or not this is the only way you are going to sustain a position in the market and with time you will obtain a great amount of traffic on your blog.
In this post today, I am going to discuss a few ideas that are important for new bloggers to consider as important. Number 1 is important, but it is not the only thing bloggers should focus on. All of these ideas should be marked in your to-do list as "High Priority."
1. Relationship Building
Building relationships is as important as writing a quality piece on your blog and this is because without it you might not be able to promote your content and get the word out from others.
When I started a blog three years back, the first thing I did was build relationships within in the industry and that helps me with following things:
-It helps me get my content out to a wider audience when people I was connected with shared my content with others in their circle.
-I mostly build relationships with influencers within my industry; they give me honest feedback about the content quality I put up on my blog. This helps me get better at content quality.
-They introduce me to others within the community and, slowly and gradually, I was able to make a circle of peers and friends who help me get extra traffic and opportunities to build links, which helps me organically.
If you need to see consistent traffic coming in on your blog and want your content to pull readers naturally, the idea is to build strong relationships with other fellow bloggers within your industry; comment on their blog, participate in social chats, forums, promote their content and you will see the magic start to happen almost automatically.
2. Writing Quality Content on a Consistent Basis
Writing quality content is important and I am so glad that many bloggers are actually doing this, but this is something you need to know as a professional blogger; you need to write quality content on a consistent basis. There is no short cut to it!
If you are going to write quality content once a month and the rest of your posts are average, readers might leave you as there are more choices available than you can imagine. Checkout Biz Sugar or Inbound.org, you will have an idea of how many blogs update amazing content on a regular basis.
In order to stay ahead of the crowd, you need to write quality content that should be posted on a consistent basis.
3. Organization is the key
Blogging is lot of work and, if you are not going to be organized, you probably will end up frustrated and your blog will be affected negatively. The idea is to organize and schedule everything a month prior at least. Here is a post that tells you how you can organize and manage blog content and calendars.
Once you are done, you can schedule your post through social media sharing and subscribers email accordingly. This will help you get more done in less time without getting frustrated.
4. Distribution is very important
This is an extension of point one. As discussed above, you need a wider audience on your blog and for this you need to build relationships with others within your niche. There are other options that you can use to attract an audience to your blog, which includes outreaching to like-minded people, sharing your post on social media platforms, using paid social media to attract target audience, submitting your content to content communities and more.
Once you do that efficiently, chances are you will see a consistent increase in traffic and organic rankings for your blog.
Important: It's always important to look into your niche and see what social networks are working well for you and act accordingly. For instance, for women's products Instagram and Pinterest might work well, whereas for digital marketing the powerful social media platforms will be Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.
5. The Technical SEO
This is the one point that most people do not discuss, but for any website (commercial or blog) is very important. If you have your page correctly setup, chances are you will be more likely to rank better in search engines for your long tail key phrases.
Long tail key phrases are important, especially for blogs, for two reasons:
-It's easier to rank for long tail key phrases and, due to less competition, you usually stay on the first page for a longer period of time and get to enjoy consistent traffic on the blog.
-Other bloggers, when finding quality sources, usually search for long tail key phrases which allow you to get a link naturally to your website.
If you are using blogging platforms like WordPress, there will be lot of plugins that can help you make your life easier from the SEO stand point. We are using plugins like Yoast SEO, Yoast Google analytics and sociable on our company blog and these have cut down lot of our manual work.
There are lots of other things that you should know and consider as important as a beginner level blogger, but the above discussed ideas are the few most important items that you should have in your list. Are you seeing tracking with your blogging? Share your blogging secrets with us in the comment section.
Moosa Hemani is a search marketing consultant. He shares his thoughts and experiences on his blog setalks.com. Follow him on twitter (@mmhemani) to get in touch with him.
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