How to Start a Blog Successfully

Blogging is an incredible marketing tool and money-making opportunity if implemented successfully. With blogs, you only need to capture the interest of a targeted group of people and build a community around them.

Also read: How to Start an Anonymous Blog?

However, it’s not always that easy to start blogging successfully and get loyal readers for your blog. Blogging is a long-term venture and your blog won’t become successful overnight. You need to have patience and be committed to your blog just like you would in an offline business. Use the tips below to a start your blog the smart way.

How to Start

If you’re completely new to blogging, start with free blogging platforms like Blogspot and WordPress.com. They will help you get your feet dirty with all the basics of blogging.

These platforms are free and you won’t face the risk of losing money.

After you get some experience, you can simply upgrade to a paid platform.

 

Choose a Good Niche

The niche you settle for is important and will go a long way in determining the success of your blog. Your niche should be a specific topic that targets a particular group of people, or a product/service that targets a particular group of people.

The niche could be any topic that affects people e.g. Dog Training, Personal Finance, P.C Maintenance, etc.

A good niche for you will be a niche that is popular and one that you’re knowledgeable or passionate about. It’s important to have passion in your niche so that you don’t get bored blogging about it. It’s also important to have enough knowledge about your niche to offer useful information to your audience.

 

Understand Your Audience

Research and analyze your audience and understand what they want. This will help you produce content that satisfies their needs. That’s the secret to hook readers to your blogs.

Interact with your visitors through the comments they leave on your blog. Answer any questions they ask and respond to their emails. Some people won’t leave comments but will instead contact you with queries via email.

Make an effort to know what kind of people visit your blog. Are they old people or young people? This will help you present information that suitable to them.

How much disposable income do you think they have? That might affect how you monetize your blog. Their gender, geographical location, etc. Such information will help you understand your audience.

Social media is also a good way to learn about your audience. After you understand your visitors’ needs, you can easily target them with content that suits them.

 

Update Your Blog Regularly

The secret to a successful blog is regular fresh content that is informative to your readers. This is a proven strategy that has helped many gurus start blogging successfully. You need to find time to dedicate to your blog.

Start by posting on your blog daily or at least 3 times a week. It does not matter whether you’re writing the posts yourself or getting other people to write them for you. As long as you update your blog regularly with good content, your readers will love it. Remember it’s your readers who will make your blog successful.

In the beginning, you can write the posts yourself to give your blog a personal touch and improve your blog writing skills. You can get other people to write for you once you have established yourself.

 

Make Your Blog Attractive to Visitors

Successful blogs are always attractive to their visitors. The first step to making your blog attractive is providing content that visitors enjoy reading and offer solutions to their problems.

Remember, people browse the internet to find solutions to their problems. By providing these solutions in an easy-to-follow way, you’ll be sure to attract and win over many visitors.

Another way to make your blog attractive is using an attractive design. Remember to use a design that resonates with your niche.

Other ways to make your blog attractive to visitors include using free gifts and incentives.

 

Promote Your Blog

How you promote your blog will largely affect its success. Blog promotion starts with the very content on your blog. Before you reach out to readers make sure your blog is filled with quality content. Content that is engaging and solves the problems of your readers. If people find your blog useful, they’ll promote it for you.

Visit other blogs in your niche, read them and leave comments with a link back to your blog. You’ll benefit by getting traffic to your own blog and a backlink. Also, the owners of those blogs might reciprocate by visiting your blog and leaving comments.

Use social media to promote your blog. It’s one of the best tools for blog promotion. Create profiles for your blog on the major social networks and share your content, take part in conversations and generally engage your followers in a natural way. But you need to draw up a solid strategy so you don’t get sucked up in it.

Also, make it easier for your visitors to share your content by having buttons for sharing on your blog. WordPress has many plugins to simplify these tasks for you.

Promote your blog through link building. Links form the basis of the internet. Incorporate link building in your daily action plan and start building links steadily. Links will grow your authority in the eyes of search engines and your audience.

The key thing in blog promotion is to let people know that your blog exists.

 

Monitor The Performance of Your Blog

After you start promoting your blog, people will start visiting. That’s exciting. People are taking notice.

But it’s important to monitor your blog. You want to know what people are doing on your site, how long they’re staying on your blog, where they’re coming from, and much more. This will help you know what to improve on, what’s working, and what’s not.

You’ll realize many people visit your blog even though they don’t leave comments. That’s normal since many people are only interested in reading the information.

There’re many tools to help you monitor your blog including Google analytics and stat counter. They give you plenty of data about your blog. For Google Analytics, there’s a wordpress plugin that makes it easy for you to insert the tracking code on your blog

 

Leverage Your Traffic

Once your blog starts attracting good traffic, you can leverage that traffic. In online business, traffic is one of the most sought after things. The type of traffic you attract to your blog will determine how viable your blog is as a business.

You can leverage your traffic in different ways depending on the goals you set at the beginning. That means you can use your blog to grow a subscriber list, monetize it with ads, grow a community or expand your client base.

 

Conclusion:

The tips above will make your blogging efforts more successful. However, it is important to realize that building a profitable blog or any online business doesn’t happen overnight.

It requires a lot of hard work and commitment. More times than not, you’ll encounter frustrations and if you’re not self-disciplined, you might find yourself giving up. Also, it’s important to have a step by step action plan to guide you towards your blogging goals.