Blogging Tips – I wish I had this in mind when I started my own blog. I created this blog through lot of hassles and then discovered certain blogging tips on the way through several other internet marketing blogs.
You must be passionate about telling stories, your personal life, your business ethics and products details or you wanna share your stuff to your readers…but the question arise here…Are you doing it right?
If you’re very much serious about blogging and you want to be recognized as an authority within your niche, here’s your blogging tips aka Bloggers Checklist 2015.
I will give you everything that I have learned and experienced about building an effective, secured, safe and inspirational website – obviously, in my own simplified way!
One mistake that most people do is they polish their own website for just search engines but not for readers. I would advise you to write for your readers, a real human being and not the bots. I will also give out the tools and resources that will help you grow your website through blogging tips.
I tried my best to make this post as effective as possible so hopefully you will find every tip and resources useful and if it does, please do not hesitate to share it with your friends on social media.
Must Needed Blogging Tips
Let’s start with different blogging tips to help you proceed with your blog. This includes your journey from starting a blog to writing a post, from writing a post to getting traffic, from getting traffic to making your website a brand.
Starting Tips
Choose your blog domain name to make it a brand in the future. Let it be a unique name that no one has used or heard of. It should be related to something that you wanna blog about.
Get your domain registered with well-known registrars such as Namecheap.
Choose your web hosting wisely. You can go for Hostgator or Bluehost to start with.
Install a CMS platform like WordPress, Joomla or Drupal. We love WordPress and recommend it the most.
Get to know the WordPress platform. We have 20 WordPress Training Videos to walk you through the WordPress platform and various basics of this CMS platform.
Choose a favourable theme for your website that match and suits your personality and brand.
Decide on the plugins that you want to install on your website depending upon the requirements of your website. I would recommend these plugins…SEO by Yoast, Shortcodes, Magic Action Box, Google Analytics, Akismet, Contact Form 7, Layered Popups, Thank Me Later, Ultimate TinyMCE, 404 To Start, GC Message Bar, Pin It for Images, Q2W3 Fixed Widget and WP Super Cache.
Include mandatory pages on your website such as ‘About Us‘ and ‘Contact Us‘. This is very much needed for your readers to know more about you and the way they can get in touch with you.
Include the legal pages such as ‘Terms of Use‘, ‘Privacy Policy‘, ‘Disclaimer‘, ‘DMCA Policy‘ and ‘Anti-Spam Policy‘.This way you let your readers know that you are not at all liable for any loss or damage to them while perusing and implementing the ‘takeaways’ from your website.
Blog on the topics that you are passionate about. The topics that you love the most, the topics that you wanna share with the world. It can be your expertise or it could be something that you are learning everyday and wanna blog about. It still works this way because you are learning, implementing and putting on your blog to share with your readers.
Be consistent while blogging as your consistency will decide your success or failure. Ensure you be in touch with your readers through your blog posts or latest knowledge that you have gained or with your latest experience. Whatever it may be, share it with your readers on the blog.
You should write your posts and schedule WordPress posts for future dates. This way you become more consistent and provide your readers with the flow of connectivity.
Install analytics to identify what brings in traffic to your website and at what hours!
Have a regular daily back-up scheduled for your website to ensure your website contents (posts, images, data, etc) are secured which can help you, when you lose your content in case your website gets hacked.
Everyday learn something new, implement it and share it with your readers on the blog.
Determine your niche, go deep in to it, stick to it and continue blogging with consistency.
Layout and Website Structure
The heading or brand name of your website should be clearly visible – mostly it is on the left hand side of a website.
Ensure your theme supports at-least two navigations menus. This enables you to get 2 menus – one for pages and another one for categories.
Choose color combination wisely and ensure it is rhymed through-out your website.
Ensure your website is mobile responsive. You can check it using this website.
Avoid using flash on your website as it makes your website slow and is hard to get favoured by search engines.
Add a search box on your sidebar.
Ensure you have social media icons or social media follow buttons on your sidebar or in the header of your website.
Put your subscription box on the sidebar and also at the end of each post. If a person likes the post, he/she may want to subscribe to your future blog posts, so give them an easy option to do so.
Make sure the posts are paragraphed substantially and the post is more legible and readable to ensure you get maximum ‘stay over’ on your website.
Avoid writing posts without or least paragraphs.
Display related posts at the bottom of every blog post.
Display most popular posts on the sidebar.
Ensure your website have a 404 error page. If it doesn’t have then not to worry. I have a work-around here.
Review your blog posts and blog’s homepage in different browser using Browsershot or netrenderer.
Use either WordPress comment system like Disqus, Facebook or CommentLuv commenting system as they are widely accepted by commenters.
Epic Content
Always write original and authenticated blog posts.
Do not copy any article from the web as it could be plagiarism and you could be sued for the act.
Use copyscape to ensure you are using at-least 70% unique content on your website.
Use images that you have the copyright of, or use the images that have ‘Creative Commons License’. You can use this post on Buffer to find free image sources on the internet.
Ensure your headlines are emotional, calculative and eye-catchy to attract more eyeballs to your blog posts.
Keep your paragraphs very short as possible and use more white space to ensure your blog post is easier to read.
Use lists where possible to break-up the content and to make your post scannable.
Add relevant tags to your blog post.
Publish your blog-posts under a certain specific category and not under ‘Uncategorized’ by default.
Do not publish your blog post under multiple category. One category per one post. Make that a rule. Put your post in a specific related category and avoid putting in multiple categories.
Use header tags (H1, H2,H3, etc) where required and underline or bold or italicize the word or line wherever required.
Make your posts as long as possible but that should provide value and do not stretch it un-necessary.
Write for the real human beings and not for the search engines.
Your writing tone should be as if you are talking to another person and not like an essay. Put some emotional touch within your posts wherever possible.
Try to start your post with stories which makes your readers to know more about the conclusion.
Use ‘Author Box‘ at the end of every post to let readers know – who they should trust and what’s your background and your calibre.
Avoid using Jargons in your blog posts – Be specific and be more clearer to your readers. Explain every bit in detail.
Write your blog posts as if you are writing to a newbie blogger.
Review the content or post before publishing for grammatical mistakes and spelling check. You can use Spellcheck.
Ask yourself this question before publishing any damn post. Does it make sense? Can this post provide value to my readers?
Ask for comments at the end of every post. If you do not ask, they won’t respond. You have to awaken them by telling them what is the next step they should take.
Search Engine Optimized Website
Set your preferred domain name – either www or non-www. You just cannot have both.
Shorten your URLs wherever necessary by removing the stop words
Use permalinks structure as /%postname%/ under Settings > Permalinks in WordPress. This will ensure that your title acts as your post URL too.
Whenever you use images in your post, ensure you use ALT tag. ALT tag could be the description of your image or your primary or secondary keyword.
Use the SEO plugins – My favourite is YOAST.
Keep the title of your post to be short, unique and descriptive enough (maximum 65 characters only)
Ensure you keep the meta description of each post to be different from others. The meta description should not exceed 155 characters for each post.
Do not stuff keywords in your post.
Keep keyword density around 2% but do not overdo it.
Ensure you reference your post details or a topic or an explanation to an external website of higher authority than yours. E.g. If I write about ‘Karma’, then i would want it to be linked to ‘http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karma’ for ease of explanation to my readers.
Ensure there are no broken links from any page. Broken links are those links which end up in 404 error. You can use this plugin to be updated of every broken links that are found on your website.
Do not put more than 100 links on one single page or else it won’t be indexed by Google.
Ensure your site speed is best. Your website should load within 2.5 to 3 seconds. You can use the tools such as Pingdom, GTMetrix of Google’s Page Speed Insights to check the page speed. You can also look at posts on page speed here.
Avoid getting in to link exchange programs. This will adversely affect your SEO ranking.
Make sure that you do not have canonicalization error.
Try to make your blog posts interesting so that readers would want to stay at your site for longer duration thus reducing the bounce rate. Reduction in bounce rate is a plus point for your website.
Register with Google Webmaster Tools and include your website by verifying the ownership of your website. This will ensure you talk to Google directly using this platform.
Try to keep your keywords at the beginning of your post.
Ensure your post is at-least more than 300 words long. The more you write and the more your make use of different keywords, better for your blog post to get multiple rankings…so keep writing more and provide more value through each of your blog posts
Ensure the keyword/keyphrase appears in the URL of your blog post.
Get your sitemap.xml created and submit it to major search engines for indexing your existing blog posts and also to update your future blog posts depending upon the set priority.
Blog Promotions
Integrate your social media accounts on your website’s sidebar. You can put the ‘Follow’ buttons on the sidebar for each of the major social media websites like Facebook, Google+, Twitter and Pinterest
Ensure you have social media sharing icons at the start or at the end of your blog post. Most blogs also use scrolling share-bar to ensure they get maximum social media exposure through their readers. You can use Digg Digg plugin to achieve it.
As soon as you publish you blog posts, ensure YOU share it to your social network. You be the first one to start the process of sharing your blog post.
You can use an automated platforms like SNAP or IFTTT to achieve automatic sharing of your blog posts as soon as you publish a post.
Analyse your analytics and find out the best time to publish a post. You should publish a post just few minutes before the readers are arriving on your blog. You will notice this from your analytics reading. You may have to track this stats multiple times and then arrive at a conclusion of timing to publish your future posts.
WordPress do have a feed generated for your blog automatically but to let it allow your readers to subscribe to your blog posts, you may want to use Feedburner or MailChimp or any other favourable autoresponder.
Put the subscription form on your blog’s sidebar to allow readers to subscribe to your latest blog updates.
Always follow your competitors to know how they are promoting their blogs.
Find a community around your niche on social media networks and participate amongst the members by sharing your valuable blog posts.
You can convert your blog post to an audio and use iTunes to make podcast subscriptions available to readers.
You can create infographics from your blog posts and use it to get mileage for traffic and SEO rankings too.
For more traffic tips and tricks, I advise you to get my FREE book and if you are seriously looking for guaranteed evergreen traffic, then I would recommend you take a look here.
You can also join multiple G+ communities, LinkedIN groups, Facebook groups and join related Pinterest Boards to be able to share your content.
Take some time to do blog hopping. Comment on related blogs in your niche. If you are in the Internet Marketing niche then I would welcome you to join our blog hopping community on Facebook.
Share valuable posts from your competitors too, they will value your act and could also share yours with their followers.
Join some of the blogging networks like BlogEngage, BloKube, BizSugar or Inbound.
Join related niche forums and help people who need help and then you could drive traffic to your blog posts through a signature link.
You could also do guest posting which is really a best way to tap in new subscribers from an authority website.
If you can afford to get paid traffic, then use Facebook, LinkedIN, StumbleUpon or Solo Ads route to get highly targeted niche traffic to your new blog posts.
Facebook is more favourable as you can create a fanpage on Facebook and then boost post to get good traffic for few days and then it depends on your blog post and its value on how viral it goes.
The post 93 Blogging Tips: Bloggers Checklist 2015 appeared first on Laplacef.