A blog is an important marketing tool. It enables you to create awareness for your products and services and gets clients and customers to interact with each other.
So once you’ve chosen your blogging platform, you’ve decided on what you’re going to blog about and you know your target market, it’s time to get that first blog published.
It’s normal for first time bloggers to experience some kind of anxiety. Creating content that people will find interesting and take action on takes time and practice. However, you don’t have to wait around that long to make the journey a little easier for you. You can do and learn things before you even publish your first blog post.
The following are 7 tips for first time bloggers.
FREE Download: 21 Days To A Better Blog
7 Tips for First Time Bloggers
1. Have a Clear Plan and Be Consistent
Don’t just publish your content without a plan. Know what you want to do and what action you want your audience to take once they have read your post.
When you first start a blog, in whatever niche, it’s important to keep adding content, and keep creating products for your niche. You need to update your blog regularly to get the most traffic. It’s no secret that practice makes perfect.
2. Edit Thoroughly
Double check your content before publishing. Look out for misspelled and misused words, poor sentence structure, run-on sentences, unclear phrasing, and anything else that makes it difficult for visitors to read and understand your content, such as big words.
You can improve readability with practice but the best way to be sure about it is to use a plugin like Yoast SEO. Failing to edit and read your content can leave you with what appears to be inaccurate and unprofessional information.
3. Personalize
Add something to your content that makes it different. For example, include a video or an infographic—anything you really enjoy or relate to your niche.
4. Stay on Topic
Your audience will read your blog because it’s about something that they are interested in. But, if you start writing about a completely different subject and our niche you’ll not only confuse your readers, you’ll confuse Google and the other search engines. If you start running out of content ideas, reconnect with your audience and do more research. Read industry news and survey your audience to get ideas. Use the information you discover to bring your blog back into focus and create a content plan to help you stay on topic.
5. Be Yourself
Always be yourself. You don’t need to write like the most popular bloggers to be successful. Copying someone else will never allow you to really achieve your goals. Eventually, you’ll burn out and get lost as you can’t be like someone else forever.
Remember though, your audience is more interested in what you can teach them rather than what you had for breakfast. When you lose your perspective about what is important and why people read your blog, you will also lose followers and buyers.
6. Instill Determination
Blogging isn’t a get-rich-quick business. It would help if you had the determination to keep going even when you have no readers. For first time bloggers, this will be common. Please don’t use it as a reason to give up. Instead, use it as practice and content for marketing purposes. Just because people aren’t reading now doesn’t mean they won’t later when you share it across other platforms.
7. Use Social Media and Other Websites
To become a successful blogger, you must take advantage of all the third-party options. First, build and create a website that is easy to find and repurpose your content on other platforms. Sharing your blog post on social media is a good way to start getting your content out there. Also just because you have a blog doesn’t mean all the content has to be written. You can create the text as video content.
Free Checklist: 21 Days To A Better Blog
As you see, being a blogger is really only part of the job. You should do many different things before and after to build your audience and build your blog and your audience business. Over time as you establish your own routines, you’ll gain the confidence and experience to improve and publish content that gets better and better.
To discover more on what every blogger should have to be successful, download my free checklist, 21 Days To A Better Blog to help you build a better blog and achieve the results you want.
