To become a successful blogger in any niche, you will want to follow these best practices.
Set your blogging goals
You’ll never know if you are getting the most out of blogging if you haven’t set goals for your blog. Is your goal to make money? Get a new job? Find people to connect with about a specific topic? Define your blogging goals and periodically ask yourself if your blog is helping you meet them. If not, ask yourself how you can improve your blog in order to meet the goals.
Commit to becoming an expert
No matter what your blogging goals are, if you strive to be an expert in your niche, the fulfillment of your goals is sure to follow. People who are known as experts in their niche tend to receive more recognition and income for their content. They also tend to have larger audiences and the option to turn their readers into customers by offering related products and services.
Engage with your audience
The best way to stay in tune with your readers is to engage with them. Some ways to do this include replying to comments, responding to queries from your contact form, joining in conversations with readers on social networks, and visiting your readers’ blogs to see what they are interested in and join discussions. As you do this, you will build stronger relationships with your readers and learn more about what they want, something that can help inspire your future content. The best way to stay in tune with your readers is to engage with them. Some ways to do this include replying to comments, responding to queries from your contact form, joining in conversations with readers on social networks, and visiting your readers’ blogs to see what they are interested in and join discussions. As you do this, you will build stronger relationships with your readers and learn more about what they want, something that can help inspires your future content.
Be consistent and realistic
Creating a consistent schedule of posting on your blog helps your readers know when they can expect to hear from you again, whether it’s daily, weekly, monthly or even quarterly. The key to maintaining consistency is to be realistic. Individual bloggers will find it difficult to create high-quality content on a daily basis. Start with weekly or bi-weekly posts and work your way up to daily posts, if that is your ultimate goal. Just don’t sacrifice quantity for quality.
Use an editorial calendar
To help maintain your consistency, be sure to use some form of editorial calendar. You can use Google Calendar, Outlook Calendar, or even a simple spreadsheet. Use it to manage your ideas and plan your content themes for each month so that blogging is something you focus on, not something you do in your spare time, quantity for quality.
Edit your work, or hire an editor
For many people, it’s hard to create content, then proofread and edit it. As a matter of fact, editing while you write can hinder your creative flow. Proofreading is not optional. A blog post full of misspelled words and typos reflects poorly on you. If you’re not able to do these tasks on your own, consider hiring a virtual assistant to do it for you. This is especially important if you’re not writing in your native language. Having a native speaker of the language used in your blog edit your work can boost your credibility. While blog content does not need to be perfect, it does need to be easy to read and consume.
Analyze the data
Be sure to install Google Analytics when you begin blogging and regularly check your data. In particular, you want to make sure your traffic is growing and see what websites, social networks and other types of sources drive the most visitors to your blog. You’ll also want to watch for significant drops in traffic, as these drops may indicate a bigger problem, such as downtime for your website or loss of traffic due to Google algorithm changes.
