Contents
- 1 Do You Have the Skills to be A Successful Blogger?
- 2 The Skills You Need
- 3 Make Your Blog a Success With Your New Skills
- 4 What's Next?
Do You Have the Skills to be A Successful Blogger?
Picture This: You’ve finally done it! You did the legwork and figured out how to create a blog. From there you made a pretty good-looking website and you’ve even started publishing some riveting content. However, you notice that there hasn’t been much traffic or activity on your site. With a little research, you soon realize that maybe you're blogging skills aren’t quite up to par.
Fear not, don’t get you panties in a bunch just yet!
There are tons of ways to improve your blog and blogging skills. We suggest becoming familiar with these skills before creating your blog. We aren’t saying you need to be an expert from the beginning, your skills will grow as your blog grows. A basic understanding of these skills will so just fine.
But, do you know where to start and what the importance of these tactics are?
If you’re reading this and thinking to yourself, “Nope, I haven’t got a clue” then stick around. You'll discover ways in which you can boost your blog’s traffic, tap into a larger audience and increase the overall success of your site.
The 30-Day Blogging Challenge team presents: The most important blogging skills that will lead to a successful blog.
The Skills You Need
1.The Ability to Write Well Written Content
The key to an intriguing and high-quality blog is to publish well-written and engaging content that is geared towards the blogging community.
It’s important to distinguish the difference between writing for a blog versus a play, book, or script. These will all vary in content writing, structural and formatting styles.
Keys to Creating Content for Your Blog
• Blogs are often broken up into short sentences and paragraphs in order to keep the reader's attention. Blogs are often skimmed by the reader. They don’t want long drawn out details.
• SEO dictates how you write your post. Keywords are important for your blog to appear on search engines. This means you will have to place these words throughout your articles. While this is important, don’t just throw the keywords in there for the sake of it. Make sure it fits and reads well.
• Use hyperlinks instead of footnotes. Links are great because they don’t take up space and the viewer can just click on them if they want to know more.
• Talk to the reader as if you are their best friend. Writing in first person makes the viewer feel as though you are talking directly to them.
If you’re not a strong writer there are…
Ways to Improve Your Blog Writing Skills
• Research Your Competition
Take note what the most popular and professional blogs are doing. This will give you a better understanding of what makes them successful writers.
• Be Consistent
A simple but effective trick is to write something everyday. It doesn’t have to pertain to your blog or even be a particularly good piece, just make sure you practice your writing skills on a daily basis.
Take the time to write anything, from a short story to a summary of your day or whatever comes to mind in the moment. Putting words to paper on the daily will help develop your writing skills. Making you more confident, coherent, and engaging to your audience.
• Always Proof Read
In addition to improving your writing skills, you will also have to proofread and edit your articles before you publish them. This will make you appear more professional and your audience will know you took the time to make sure your writing is near perfect.
Now, all you have to do is practice your writing style, harness your creativity and discover tricks that work best for you. You won’t be the most eloquent writer overnight, it takes time to develop strong content writing skills.
2. A Solid Grasp of SEO
You may think that the essence of a successful blog lies within the functionality and aesthetic of your site and its contents. However, it’s safe to argue that SEO is the most important factor at play.
Search Engine Optimization is imperative to getting your blog and it’s contents noticed. If you’re asking yourself “What the heck is SEO?” pay close attention to this section. SEO directly relates to the visibility and traffic of your website through a web search engine’s unpaid results; this is referred to as “organic” results.
In a saturated market like online blogging, you need to set yourself apart from the rest. Getting to know SEO, being comfortable with it and applying it to your blogging routine ensures you'll get noticed above the rest.
The bottom line is to: Understand the importance of SEO, educate yourself on how to use it. Then apply to your blog and work towards acquiring more organic traffic.
Don’t forego SEO practices to your blog simply because you don’t know what it is or what you’re doing. It’s a crucial factor to a successful blog. It may be a little daunting especially if you don’t know much about SEO, but don’t be discouraged!
5 SEO Skills You’ll Want to Familiarize Yourself With
1. Keyword Searches: Having keywords strategically distributed throughout your article help improve your rankings on search engine pages. Avoid the overuse of keywords when it’s not necessary (known as keyword stuffing).
2. Writing Meta-Descriptions: Meta-descriptions are what's known as the small portion of text below the link of a search result. It describes the contents of the page to the searcher. You want to write a meta-description that draws the searcher to your page. The whole point, after all, is to get them to click on the link to your blog.
3. Writing SEO-Friendly content: Utilizing internal linking and making sure your headers, sub-headers, and images are written and configured correctly will lead to a more SEO-friendly blog.
4.Making Your Blog Mobile Friendly: These days, it is more and more prevalent for people to use their phone or tablet for searching things online rather than a computer.
So, why would you separate yourself from a large population by not making your blog mobile-friendly?
You wouldn’t and shouldn't!
Having a responsive and mobile-friendly website will make the navigation, functionality and aesthetic of your site more pleasing to your readers. Keeping them happy leads to more time spent on the page and higher conversion rates.
5. Publishing Quality Content, But Don’t Duplicate It: Duplicating content is known as the act of copying the content from another website and using it on your site; this means that there are now at least two sites with the same piece of content.
Since search engines like Google will flag duplicate content this will directly affect your blog's ability to rank up the search engine results.
By familiarizing yourself with SEO and applying these practices to your blog, your articles will likely get listed at the top of the page in search results and also bring more quality traffic to your site.
There are countless videos, blogs and learning applications available on line directed at SEO.
We suggest checking out Brain Dean’s blog at Baclinko.com for SEO training and tips. Brain is the leading authority on SEO and content marketing advice. His site offers free course and many extremely helpful blogs.
3. Basic Coding Knowledge
One of the best things about running your own blog is that you don’t need to be a professional web developer, however, you can’t argue that being able to know the basics of coding will help you maximize the potential for your blog.
Make Your Blog Standout With Code
Being able to personalize your content and layout will separate you from the amateurs and therefore lead to a more aesthetically pleasing and unique blog. Having skills that separate you from the rest of the blogging community will elevate the quality and success of your site.
Depending on the blogging platform you’ve used, it can be extremely beneficial to you and your blog if you acquired HTML and CSS basics. With these skills, you will be able to customize your blog, fix small errors in the layout or functionality of the site, get a better handle on SEO practices, add new features to your site and more.
There are countless educational guides, tutorials, books, articles and more all readily available online and in-store that can help you learn basic coding skills. Coding All-in-One For Dummies may be a good place to start, it will teach you the basics of simple web language and so much more.
4. Strong Social Media Skills
Social media connects you with your readers and new potential visitors to your blog. It’s an excellent networking tool used for marketing, expanding your network and bridging the gap between you and your audience.
By being accessible through social media and communicating with your audience in a more laid back environment, it makes a big world seem a little smaller. It connects you with a vast population of people interested in the same things you are.
You Want to be Seen and Heard
Having an online presence is almost mandatory these days especially if you want a larger audience and therefore more traffic to your site. The most popular social media platforms you’ll want to consider creating an account for to represent your blog is Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and Pinterest.
Learn how each platform functions and use different methods to get more likes, shares, followers etc… The quickest and most effective way to learn more about social media is through experience, so don’t be shy!
Dive into each platform full force and learn as you go!
There are tips and tricks online that can help you make the most out of these platforms. However, for the most part you just need to get out there and start socializing. Practice makes perfect!
5. Know-How With Graphic Design
First impressions will determine whether someone sticks around to explore your blog or if they click that red ‘x’ in the corner.
We live in a time where we can customize extensions of ourselves to reflect who we are, what we think, how we feel and what we know. Your blog is just that, an extension of yourself that is completely customizable and visible to the public.
Peak You're Viewer's Interest With Aesthetics
You will want to get in touch with graphic design and master your photo editing skills in order to show your audience you can produce aesthetically pleasing imagery on your blog. This will keep them intrigued and therefore lead to more traffic to your site. The images you select for your blog not only influence how your readers perceive your content, but they can also make or break whether something goes viral or not on social media.
There are many paid for photo-editing programs to choose from like PhotoShop,InDesign and Pixlr. If you need to save some cash, check out Tech Radar's list of “The Best Free Photo Editors”.
Furthermore, you can educate yourself on the fundamentals of these programs or graphic design in general through online forums, tutorials, articles, other blogs, books, and other great sources such as Youtube.
For example: Photoshop has are tons of tutorials due to it’s popularity. Photoshopcafe is probably one of the best resources for this. It offers tons of free and premium tutorials, you can learn anything and everything about Photoshop here.
Make Your Blog a Success With Your New Skills
You should now have a better understanding of what it takes to run a successful blog. It will take some time to start feeling more comfortable with the methods, but you can do it!
What you should take away from this article is: There are numerous ways to get a larger audience and more traffic to your site, it’s just how you approach it. Not everyone has the same blogging skills, but if you can master one skill you can surely acquire others to make the most of your blog.
It’s imperative to realize that you’re never done learning when it comes to running your own blog. A journey like this takes time, effort, patience and a lot of willingness to learn more about the world of blogging. We are confident that you have the motivation, now you just need the skills!
With these tips on basic blogging skills in your back pocket, there’s nothing you can’t do with your site.
The road to success lies within you!
What's Next?
Do you have any questions or comments about the blogging skills we discussed in this article? Leave a comment below and we will be sure to get back to you!
Or maybe…..
You're looking for more tips on starting a blog? No problem, we can help. Check out our definitive guide on the “7 Things You Should Consider Before Starting a Blog”.
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