10 things to know to have a successful blog

Hi , I am Praneeth kumar.

Blogging is tough in 2021 there is no doubt about it.

It becomes even harder for those of you who are just starting out.

It is very important for you to know the right strategies and things before and while starting your blog so that you can be successful in Blogging making as few mistakes as possible throughout your journey.

So let’s learn what are the 10 things to know to be successful in blogging.

Without further ado, let’s get started.

10 things to know to be successful in blogging.

Here is a list of 10 things that you need to know to be successful in blogging in 2021.

Start on WordPress.org.
Pick a niche that you are really passionate about.
Build and grow an email list.
Act on improving the experience of your target audience on your blog.
Use images and videos where necessary.
Focus on the quality of the article over quantity.
Focus on relevance and authority of backlinks.
Diversify the income streams.
Don’t build a blog, build a brand.
Use social media strategically to promote your Blogpost.

Let’s learn the tips and things.

1. Start on wordpress.org.

The number 1 rule of successful blogging is to start your blog on WordPress right from the start,

Note: I am not saying that it is not possible to be successful in blogging if you don’t start a blog on WordPress only,

There are thousands of blogs that are successful in blogger, Wix, and other platforms other than WordPress.

It is just that, WordPress opens up new possibilities and features that you can add to your website and make it more successful than what you have already achieved so far.

For, those of you who are unfamiliar with what the heck is wordpress.org.

WordPress.org is a free and open-source content management system through which you can create your website.

Here are quick benefits of building your website straight on WordPress from the start,

You can get access to literally thousands of free plugins and themes to use for customization on your website and are mobile-friendly as well.
WordPress is a highly SEO-friendly CMS.
You can have complete control over your website.

For your kind information, over 39% of the websites on the internet are using WordPress to build their websites with a large community of people to help you.

2. Pick a niche that you are really passionate about.

I understand it is quite repetitive as everyone talks about passion and interest over blogging,

But have you ever wondered why having a passion for the niche is very important

Here is a straightforward answer on why you really need to have a passion in the niche you want to start a blog.

You get traffic and earnings to your blog from SEO and SEO for a brand new website takes at least a year to have decent traffic and earnings.

In short, blogging takes time,

Look,

Blogging is definitely a get-rich scheme but not a to get the rich QUICK scheme.

Blogging is a long game if you don’t have passion or interest in the subject you are writing about,

You are most probably expected to fail unless you outsource the writing process of your blogs which most people don’t.

The golden rule for blogging is

Passion, Patience, and Persistence.

And If you have a Passion Patience and Persistence will follow because you no longer need to push yourself to write blog posts as you are interested in the subject already.

Most of the bloggers only mention that having knowledge in the subject that your blogging is so important but,

I feel having an interest in the process of blogging and creating content is equally or even more important than having knowledge on the subject.

When you do have an interest in the subject I feel you will automatically learn all the things you need to know to be an expert on this subject eventually as blogging is not a one-night success strategy, it takes time and effort to see results.

It is my personal experience,

When I started this blog on topics like entrepreneurship, blogging, and online marketing,

I did not know even the basics of these things but today I have pretty much good knowledge on these subjects (thanks to my consistent efforts).

It’s just a matter of time and effort but when you know the interest you can go a long head in blogging because you don’t have to push yourself to publish content every day and when creating and publishing content does not feel like a grind to you,

You have automatically won 75% of the battle in Blogging which most bloggers don’t because,

Most people blog on things they are not interested in and they expect to see results very soon like a get-rich scheme in which blogging is not anything like that.

And the only way you can find out which topic you actually have a lot of interest in is by experimenting with different topics and eventually identifying the topic that you are really very interested in.

3. Build and grow your email list.

Have you ever wondered why any authority blog you visit, more often than not, all are trying to get your email address giving something free stuff through newsletters or something free asset on the homepage or through blog posts?

It is that they all are building the email list.

Ever wondered why it only emails?

There are 3 major reasons all authority blogs are mad at building email lists of their audience.

Emails build trust with the audience, connecting with your target audience more on a personal level.
Emails establish you as the expert on the subject with the audience.
Emails are highly targeted with your audience helping you make more money.

Still not convinced with the reasons, here are few quick facts about emails and email marketing.

The average expected ROI is $42 for every $1 you spend on email marketing.
Nearly nine out of every ten marketers use email marketing to distribute content organically.
81% of small businesses rely on email as their primary customer acquisition channel, and 80% for retention.

Another thing worth noticing is that,

Through building email lists,

You simply own the traffic which you can redirect from the email app to your blog posts and to your important pages,

You can be less dependent on search engine traffic and continue to make money monetizing your audience.

You can use strategies like lead magnets and content upgrades to increase your email list,

For more info on building an email list, click here.

You can use tools like constant contact and Get a response to building email lists.

4. Act on improving the experience of your target audience on your blog.

Blogging in its heart is all about finding the problems and queries that people have or searching for and solving, answering those problems in blog posts that is it.

Here is what I mean when I say think and act to improve the experience of your target audience.

Get your website load fast both on mobile and desktop to improve UX.
Get your website mobile-friendly because a lot of people use mobile phones over desktop while visiting websites from search engines.
Improve your blog’s readability.
Write the blog post in a conversational tone like you are explaining a concept to your friend on the internet.
Add attractive headlines and meta descriptions.
Hook your audience with amazing yet short intros of your blog posts.
Use brief paragraphs to make your blog easy to skim and read.
Build trust with your audience with the simple design and structure of your website(First Impressions matter).
Include your personal stories as examples to explain a point throughout your blog post and build common ground with your audience.
Back your strong bold statements in your blog post with facts and statistics so that you can easily convince your readers over something.
Always include a strong CTA at the end of the blog either to share the blog or subscribe to a newsletter or your audience would get confused on what to do next after reading through the blog and leaving the website.
Use good site navigation to make your audience stay on your website long and continue finding and reading new posts.

It is very important to get your UX good on your website to be a great and successful blogger in 2021 and beyond.

5. Use images, videos, and audio where necessary.

People love images because they’re easy to process, engaging, and understand compared to text.

Okay, continue reading why images are important.

The stats speak for themselves,

Articles with images get 94% more views as opposed to those with no visuals.
71% of bloggers report using visuals as part of their marketing strategy.
19% of bloggers are now including video in their typical posts.
45% of bloggers who add audio to their posts such as podcasts see better results.
Video content is 50 times more likely to drive organic search traffic than plain text.

If done right,

A single image or visual piece can explain at least 500 words.

Everyone talks about adding more value to your audience through your blogs to get successful but very few tell you how you can actually do that,

You can actually add more value through,

Using videos and infographics in your blog posts.

In order to be successful in blogging, don’t just think about text today,

Leverage other forms of content like,

Video and audio along with text to drive more eyes to your website.

Go the extra mile, do what others and your competitors are not doing so that you can have the upper hand over the competition by adding extra value to your audience.

6. Focus on the quality of the article over quantity.

Blogging back in 2010 was like this,

Find a keyword-write 500 words blog post-build a bunch of links-keyword stuff the post-publish the post and rank high.

Blogging has completely changed today to something like this,

Find a topic-write great quality article-build a few but high-quality links-publish and promote the post-be patient and repeat the process to rank on search engines.

So what has changed, 2 things that have changed are,

Google improved the way it ranks the blogs.
Competition has increased.

In such a case,

Following the same old practices of blogging like,

Publishing the same 500 words blog posts daily with keyword stuffing and building lots of links does not work anymore today.

Look,

Over 2.75 Million blog posts are published every day,

In such a scenario, For your blog post to stand out in the crowd it needs to be outstanding and of high quality my friend.

Here are 3 major reasons you should over quality over quantity strategy in Blogging.

You can literally rank for hundreds of other similar terms in Google with a single high-quality blog post.
You can establish proper authority and trust with your audience.
Competition is extreme today.

Back in the day, you could only rank your blog for their exact match Keyword in Google and you needed to write 100 different articles to rank for 100 different keywords in Google and drive traffic to your website.

Today, with a SINGLE blog post targeting a topic,

You can rank for hundreds of other keywords in Google and drive traffic to your website, is because of RANK BRAIN which is a machine learning algorithm that Google started using in 2015 to improve search results rankings.

By focusing on the quality of blog posts you can increase authority, credibility, and conversions of your website.

And by focusing on the quality first, you can beat the competition in Google who are also fighting for higher rankings and traffic like you do because good high-quality content is definitely the king of SEO.

Then the question arises, How can you make a blog of high quality?

Here are a few things you can do to make your blog post of high quality.

Make your blog post more in-depth increasing the word count to at least 2000 words.
Break your blog post into multiple subheadings.
Use lots of multimedia in your blog post.
Include lots of LSI keywords for the main keyword in your blog post.
Include all the sub-topics related to the major topic so that you can rank for multiple keywords in Google through passage indexing with a single blog post.
Use tools like Answerthepublic and Google autosuggestions to come up with more ideas to write about and include an FAQ section in your blog.
Use lots of data, stats, and examples in your content.

Write high-quality content both increasing the length and depth of the blog posts making all of your blog posts the best resource for that topic on the internet,

This way you can increase chances of getting backlinks to your website and drive more traffic to your website from social media and SEO.

Don’t blog once a day, only publish blogs once or twice a week as long as you are maintaining the quality standards high and promoting the post as much as possible.

For more information, read how frequently you should publish a blog post?

By posting high-quality blogs on a weekly basis consistently you are actually laying a firm foundation for your blogging success.

7. Focus on relevance and authority of backlinks.

Blogging and backlinks move hand in hand.

But,

Following the same old practices that used to work back in the initial days will not reap the same results today.

Although backlinks are still very important today, the way you gain them has to be a little different.

Previously when QUANTITY of backlinks mattered a lot with less importance quality and from where you get them,

Today,

QUALITY speaks loud.

Here are some important rules you need to keep in mind while building backlinks to your website.

The number 1 rule is to look at how relevant the website’s niche is compared to yours,

If you have a blog talking about pets and you got a backlink from a website that talks about business,

It will not be effective at all today.

Another important rule is to focus on the authority, the credibility of the website from where you are getting the backlink.

There are lots of other factors that decide whether a backlink is of high quality like,

From which section of the blog post, you have received the backlink.
What’s the anchor text of the backlink?
Content quality of the blog from where you received the backlink.

Overall backlink quality matters A Lot.

You can have a single backlink of high quality that has more value than 100 low-quality backlinks from irrelevant websites.

Note: With proper internal linking structure you can pass the link juice from blogs that attracted lots of backlinks to pages with fewer backlinks and rank those blogs on Google along with improving site navigation.

8. Diversify the income streams.

It is very important that you diversify the income streams of your blog.

The reason being is,

By diversifying the income streams you can reduce the financial risk.

One of the most common thing which we can find in all the successful bloggers is that,

They have diversified their income streams,

Not just implement affiliate marketing, Run advertisements and sell digital products and services on your blog so that they diversify your income into multiple streams and you can constantly earn money.

The best reason for diversification is,

On April 21, 2020, Amazon associate has reduced the commission rates of its affiliate program,

Amazon Associates is the largest affiliate program in the world, and,

Their single big decision of reducing the commissions has affected millions of Affiliate marketers, content creators, and publishers across the world including myself both financially and emotionally.

Hence if you are only monetizing your website through affiliate marketing or any other single monetization plan, you are probably putting your future at risk;

I highly recommend it to diversify the monetization plan and build more income streams So that you won’t get into financial risk If you lose in one channel like in affiliate, You Would Still make money and pay your bills from the other one.

9. Don’t build a blog, build a brand.

Google loves brands.

Google’s objective is to serve the end-users With the best resource of content possible in its Search engine which is what blogging is all about of creating content and ranking in search engines for traffic,

If you observe all the Google updates in its algorithms are some way or the other moving ahead for the betterment of the User experience.

Brands are a sign of quality, credibility, and consistency because of which Google likes them as users love brands.

Use a professional-looking well-designed website and logo.
Increase your presence on social media marketing [PPC] and search engine marketing.
Use Canva to create custom images and other visuals for your website Instead of using stock photos.
Get interviewed or featured on other blogs and increase collaborations to maximize visibility and also social proof.
Create a good about page and show your expertise and certifications if you have any in the subject to your audience.

At the end of the day, the most important thing is the product which is why people like brands and product in blogging is content,

So create a highly HELPFUL, UNIQUE, AMAZING piece of content which is going to be the face of your brand online.

So it is highly important to build a brand and be an influencer in a niche and to a target audience.

10. Use social media strategically to promote your blog post.

One of the big factors of blogging success is the act of promotion behind it.

Promotion helps give your blog initial momentum increasing the visibility of your blog post in the competition, getting your blog viewed in Infront of the right audience initially,

Increasing the chances of getting backlinks, shares, and traffic, and also getting your blog post indexed by Google fast.

But here too, promoting the blog post on the same platforms which used to work along back ago may not work today, some major platforms include,

Facebook.
Instagram.
LinkedIn.
Twitter.

It is fine to use these platforms to get connected with your audience or build a community besides your blogs like a Facebook page or group but,

If you are using these platforms trying to drive FREE social media traffic to your website, you are wasting your time my friend.

The organic reach of these platforms is simply decreasing because of top competition and a large volume of people posting content every day and,

These platforms are not suited for bloggers anymore who are looking to drive more FREE social traffic to their websites,

Although it can be a very useful platform for marketing your blog by PAYING MONEY to the platform for the traffic (Social media marketing),

If these platforms allow bloggers and content creators to take away traffic from the platform to their respective websites,

The company can’t make money which it would through social media marketing and running PPC ADs and keeping users on the platform for a long time.

In such a case you might wonder,

Then which platforms are the best for bloggers to drive free and targeted traffic to their website?

They are these,

These sites are not that competitive compared to other social media platforms so these can be great places to drive FREE targeted social traffic to your websites if you have your target audience here I highly recommend it to leverage these platforms for your blogging success.

Ending remarks.

There you go I have answered everything related to things to know to be successful in blogging in 2021.

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I will catch you next time till then,

Keep learning and keep growing.