Blogging has become a major trend and it is highly beneficial. According to Susan Gunelius at Lifewire, there are many reasons why people prefer blogging. Such as financial purposes, hobbies, educational purposes, etc. Consequently, this situation has caused many people to drag towards blogging from anywhere. Starting a blog is not as easy as it seems unless you follow the right tips at the beginning. It is bloggers' responsibility not to mess at the beginning. This article wraps 10 Tips for Beginner Bloggers. This will help you to start your own blog more confidently.
1. Choose a perfect niche
Having a broad idea about your upcoming blog is important. The success of your blog depends on this matter as it is all about how people engage with your blog. While some bloggers simply write about whatever pops into their minds, that's not a great strategy for long-term success. As a beginner blogger, you have to think more and more about your blog niche.
How to choose a perfect niche
What is a niche ?
A blog niche is a specific topic you'll write (or create other types of content) about on your blog
A few of the popular niches are,
- Food
- Fashion
- Personal Finance
- Lifestyle
- Programming
- Health
- Dating and relationships
On many websites, many writers explain the process of choosing a perfect niche in different ways.
According to Entrepreneur,
1. Pick a topic you enjoy talking about
2. Do market research
3. Pick a smaller niche
4. Make sure it is profitable/perfect
Whatever idea you have, you need to have a good plan on it. Imagine you decided to start a blog on programming. You ought to think about it more and more. You ought to research the current status of other existing blogs too. In short, try doing something new for people. It makes them rush towards your blog and you will experience success.
Tip: Try to make your blog social.
2. Identify your precious blog audience-Blaudience
What does Blog Audience (Blaudience) mean?
A blog audience is the group of people who visits and returns to a blogger's site. Developing a true audience- as opposed to gaining unique visits through search engine optimization- is a tall order for bloggers as Internet users tend to have variable tastes.
The audience of your blog is gold. Try jotting down the appropriate kinds of audiences according to the main theme of your blog. However, targetting the audience is something to talk about. It requires a good knowledge of audience behavior. In contrast, that does not mean without good knowledge about audience behavior fails you. Moreover, knowing how to interact with audiences is pretty safe and sound. That will also help you in promoting your blogs too.
It is important too to decide how you may present content to your blog audience. This is just a simple method used by bloggers and there you go!
- How old are they?
- Where do they live?
- Are they primarily male or female?
- How educated is your audience?
- What does your audience do for a living?
Asking yourself these questions will help give you a better understanding of how to approach certain subjects with your readers. In many cases, the category of your blog will affect the demographics of your audience.
Tip: Do attractive things to reach your audience goals.
3. Create an eye-catching blog
An eye-catching blog is something that attracts and keeps a good audience silently. Psychologists say, mostly, people prefer beautiful, charm, eye-catching websites and blogs. You need to create your blog to make the audience's eyes not to go away.
Finding and developing great content to have a successful creative blog and website will bring in traffic, increase your search engine rankings, and make you money not to mention engage your readers so they keep coming back. But there are two areas that all bloggers struggle with, even the pros:
- Finding something to write about
- Having the motivation to write
And... sometimes it's both.
Regardless of your blogging experience, it's important that you set yourself up for success by choosing content that is fun to research, write about, and explore. Here are a few ways to feed your inspiration so that blogging continues to be enjoyable, rewarding and effective
A creative blog depends totally on your creativity and your own decisions. So, it is up to you.
4. Have a great content
Super-duper content is the core of your blog. The content of your new blog will be the bait that attracts your readers. Without great content, even the most well-designed, tightly-structured blogs will ultimately fail. There are two blocks you need to worry about, pre-launch and post-launch contents.
Pre-launch content
- Static pages: such as "About," "Contact," etc
- Sidebar content: content that appears on the sidebar of your blog (if you are going to have one)
- Blog category pages: content (around 100 words) for category pages on your blog (plus pick categories to divide your content)
- SEO meta tags: content for the SEO title and description tags of each page (not seen on the actual page but you need to have it ready)
Post-launch content
48% of Technorati's Top 100 Blogs are managed with WordPress
- Blog posts: regular articles you are going to write
- Cornerstone content: this will be the base of your blog
Extracted from firstsiteguide.com
As beginner bloggers, you need to thrive to create good content. For that purpose, research and learn facts relating to the blog's theme. Although you have a good knowledge of a certain theme, do not ever stop, just search and learn more. Great content includes a lot of things such as images, videos, creative headlines, essential links, animations, interesting posts, and facts, etc.
Tip: Pay attention to create great content in your blog posts.
5. Get to know your competitors: bloggers
You have to keep an eye on what other bloggers are doing. That does not mean phishing or spying. It means that you have to study their styles, stories: inspirational -- how they started blogging. You can learn more from other's experiences. Be competitive with them. But, do not harm any other for your own success. Good policies for a blogger is important. Knowing about your competitors gives you motivation and helps you to create goals and achieve them. Moreover, have a self compare with your competitors' blogs and yours. It might help you to identify your own mistakes and grow fast.
How to Find Your Competitors
Finding your competitors doesn't have to be taxing or complicated. The first step to finding your competitors is to differentiate between your direct and indirect competition.
Direct Competition
Direct competition is a term that refers to the companies or publishers who sell or market the same products as your business. Your customers will often evaluate both you and your direct competitors before making a purchase decision or converting.
Conductor, Spotlight
Indirect Competition
Indirect competition is a term that refers to the companies or publishers that don't sell or market the same products but are in competition with your business digitally. They may write the same type of content as you and be competing for the same keywords. In short, they are competing for your customers' attention.
Conductor, Spotlight
To learn more about getting know your competitors, search web on your own
6. Create goals
In the beginning, creating goals leads you to success. Aims and goals maketh a person work hard without giving up. You can use to-do lists or any other method to write them up. Then you won't miss anything. Once you have a goal, you will definitely work hard to achieve it.
7. Choose a good host for your blog
At very first, you need to choose a good host for your blog. That is the most important thing. There are many hosting services for your choice. As you are at the beginning of starting a blog, it is better to look for free hosting services. However, you can go for paid services if you have piles of bills. According to HostingAdvice.com, Free blog hosting sites are great for beginners to get their feet wet in the blogosphere, but they may not be the best bet --- especially if you're looking for complete customization and a brand-specific site.
Tip: Surf web freely looking for free hosting services. You will find many. Carefully choose one of them, newbie!
8. Decide how you would promote your blog
After starting your blog, you need to promote your blog. For that purpose, you need to decide how you would promote your blog. Deciding it after creating the blog is not safe and sound. As it is the beginning, zero messes are better. You can use promoted posts, ads, videos, emails, etc.
9. Be perfect in SEO
When building an audience, traffic plays a major role. Do you know how to get traffic to your blog? That is why SEO ( Search Engine Optimization) comes for. There are two main sources of getting more readers/ audience to your blog. They are Paid Traffic and Organic Traffic. Paid traffic and Organic traffic both sources are great. Paid traffic, when targeted perfectly, will generate more sales. On the other hand, to get organic traffic, you need to optimize your website search engines with the help of SEO. Now you know why you should have a good knowledge of SEO.
10. Build an audience
Building an audience is the most challenging task that beginner bloggers have to complete. This requires pretty much work. But, it does not require a lot than you think. Generally, there are several methods that bloggers use to build up an audience for themselves.
How to build an audience
- Create a Twitter page for the blog
- Create a Facebook page the blog
- Set up emails for targetted recipients
- Choose a commenting system
Social media pages -- Twitter, Facebook...
In the process of building an audience, social media pages highly matter. Most of the bloggers use Twitter as their official page of their blogs. However, they use Facebook pages too.
Building up an audience through e-mails
As you have identifies what targetted audience is, you can find relevant email addresses from email directories, websites, articles. Collect a good number of email addresses from the above-mentioned sources. Moreover, write an email with an attractive layout informing the recipients about your blog. Send it to all the recipients you have chosen.
Commenting system
Choosing the right comment system can make or break your blog. In a blog, the commenting system really matters. Commenting plugin is where the audience expresses their ideas, suggestions and carries discussions. If you want your audience to actively interact with your blog, you should especially consider the attractiveness and user-friendliness of the commenting system. People like eye-catching and charm interfaces. They would like to deal with user-friendly commenting plugins.
When choosing a good commenting system, consider the following aspects.
- User-friendliness
- Attractiveness -- commenting interface
PRO TIP: You can use Hyvor Talk as the commenting system. It's free!😊
Follow these things before you start your blog. If you have any questions or suggestions please feel free to comment below. Happy Blogging!✌
Originally Published on Hyvor Talk Blog. Hyvor Talk is a commenting platform for blogs. We also help our users to grow by sharing tips and blog posts
Top comments (8)
Thanks, Ishini.
I started my blog Books on Code definitely trying to narrow it to a niche. I think a missing piece in this article is that the 'niche' is really the problem you are trying to solve for someone, and you can get to know your audience and refine your message over time.
I'm still trying to figure out what my audience is, but I'm forming a picture of the beginning developer who is looking for some guidance and structure while learning how to code. They are resisting the temptation to get sucked into a structured (but costly) bootcamp and want to feel empowered to gain mastery on their own or with a like-minded community.
Miranda, thank you very much for sharing your opinion and your own experience. Actually, audience really matters. Most of the bloggers find hard when figuring out their audience. From time to time, they find new methods and facts regarding the matter with audience.
Yes! I agree that audience really matters a ton.
One of the key important things about considering an audience is their needs and fears.
Yeah Miranda! It is important to consider audience's needs and fears. It is all about the audience.
good talk..!! btw i seen many writers writes random stuff without going to understand that all of stuff. in most cased they choose random topics. well !! it really like, they have no cares about their blog.
Thanks for appreciation and sharing your ideas Devang!
Thank you. Nice advices.
You are welcome Jscripter.