Great writing, marketing and networking skills are three of the prerequisites for creating a successful blog. Your journey to build a blog that gives business can become easier if you're familiar with associated technologies. The technical know-how can help you to be one step ahead from the competition. Almost every successful blogger, no matter what's his background, strive to learn all important technical know-how to design, optimize and nurture his blog in the best possible way. Absence of basic or essential technical knowledge can restrict your blogging experiments in several ways limiting your creativity.
Whether you're a lawyer, an accountant, a programmer or a housewife, the day you start your professional blogging journey, you must devote some time to learn all the important technologies that are needed on day-to-day basis for making your blog a better place. How does it help you in blogging and in what way being technical can make you a better blogger?
You Can Easily Grasp Technical Blogging Tutorials
One of the advantages of gaining such knowledge is that you can easily understand the technical solutions related to blogging. Often several bloggers land on a technical tutorial and leave it dejected simply because they're technically challenged and cannot implement the solution provided in the article.
I've encountered this situation in my early blogging career and I know how it feels when you want to take advantage of a feature but you fail to do so due to your limited technical knowledge. It is such a frustrating experience when you see that your competition has implemented a feature and are benefiting from it and you can only watch them race ahead due to that. That's why I always suggest newbies to grasp important technical knowledge right from the day one. You cannot learn everything in a day, but you cannot afford to wait for such a situation where you're clueless about implementing a killer blogging feature that requires some technical knowledge.
You Can Easily Tweak Your Blog's Theme
When I talk about gaining technical knowledge related to blogging, that doesn't mean that you need to learn hardcore programming. Simple working knowledge of CSS and HTML can do wonders and can bring you the best possible results. One of the most common problems that large number of bloggers faces is their inability to make minor changes to their blog's theme as per their preferences.
This can significantly boost your conversion rate if the required tweaks are done to get a more visitor-friendly layout containing targeted sections. Fortunately, almost every WordPress theme can be tweaked quite easily provided you're comfortable with basic CSS and HTML. This way, you can not only change the default appearance of the theme, but can also optimize it for better visitors' experience. Branding plays an important role in professional blogging and a unique blog theme helps in creating your brand that makes you stand apart from the crowd. I'll strongly suggest you to learn to basics of both these web programming languages so that you can change or optimize your blog theme at your will.
3rd Party App/Widget/Code Integration Becomes Easy
No matter which blogging platform you're using, the default features are never good enough to implement all the required functionalities. For example, if you want to disable native WordPress comments and want to replace it with Facebook comments, you must integrate the respective social plugin provided by Facebook.
And to successfully implement it on your blog, you must have working knowledge of HTML and theme tweaking. Whether it's about adding widgets in the sidebar or it is about inserting ads at targeted positions within your theme, being technical helps in completing these simple tasks with ease. So do not wait more and start practicing integration of popular third party apps and services on a test blog. This will give you ample options to experiment with, and to provide the best possible content and features to your valuable readers.
Leveraging Advanced Web Analytics Becomes Easy
Normally, we're quite happy with our default web analytics tracking system and the metrics we get in our analytics dashboard. It only requires a simple script insertion and that's all we need to do to start tracking our visitors. Unfortunately, good numbers of bloggers are unaware about the sheer power and flexibility a typical web analytics program (e.g. Google analytics) has on offer.
To take advantage of all the advanced and powerful features of your web analytics program, you must be technically sound and must have sound knowledge of essential analytics vocabulary. This can tremendously help you in capturing leads and sales at the rate that you had never thought before. At weekends, you must devote some time to learn advanced web analytics tricks to get more out of your blog.
On-page SEO Becomes Easy
No matter how good content you're writing for your readers, you cannot undermine the role of basic on-page SEO that is essential for making a search engine friendly blog. Working knowledge of the same can add a layer of cushion on top of your great content. This can help you get targeted traffic from organic sources and can keep your blog in the good listings on all the major search engines.
Working technical knowledge of modifying theme files and directory permissions is vital for implementing core SEO features. Absence of this technical knowledge and slight incorrect SEO settings done inadvertently can result in penalization even if you're writing top notch content. Right from day one, you must strive to learn all the essential technical knowledge related to on-page SEO that determines your success in getting organic traffic.
General Blog Maintenance Becomes Easy
And last but not the least, every professional blogger has to perform dozens of peripheral blog maintenance tasks to keep his blog in a healthy condition. Almost all of these tasks need sound technical knowledge to securely and efficiently perform key housekeeping jobs related to your blog.
For example, fixing broken or non-functional links and taking regular backups are some of the important blog maintenance tasks that every blogger must learn and master. All this technical knowledge can be easily gained through a test blog hosted either on your PC or on your web server. You must add these maintenance tasks in the list of technical things you need to master to milk your blog in the best possible way.