The very first step to successful blogging is to make sure you write as you talk. As famous copywriter Eugene Schwartz said, “If it sounds like writing – I rewrite it.”
Since there are more than 600 million blogs out of 1.9 billion websites worldwide, you should not expect people to find your blog easily.
To earn blog success, you must clearly understand the reason behind search intent, make your posts easy to read, promote your content constantly, use high-quality visuals, keep your content up-to-date, and so much more.
By mastering the best blogging tips we’ll reveal here, you can establish your expertise and build online authority, yet the best thing is that you can take advantage of monetizing options. Whether you have a personal or business blog, this guide will help you exceed your blogging competition.
Let’s get started!
Table of Contents
Research and Structure Your Content
Find Your Profitable Niche: Follow Your Strengths, Not Your Passion
While brainstorming about your perfect blog niche, you should always consider whether it’s profitable or not. Strengths are more analytical, and passions don’t actually necessarily earn money (except in special cases). So, if you are more interested in the education or travel niche but more knowledgeable about personal finance, and yet this blog niche is more profitable, you should choose the last one.
Search for your niche using relevant keywords, such as ‘most profitable blog niches’, ‘blog ideas that make money’, ‘how to monetize your blog’ etc. Here are some of the most profitable blog niches:
- Personal Finance
- Health, Fitness, Spirituality
- Marketing Coaching, Online Business
- Dating, Parenting, Relationships
- Food, Drink
- Education, Book Reviews
- Travel, Photography
- Science, Technology, Astronomy
- Outdoor Lifestyle, Wellness
- Video Gaming, Popular Movies
…or even Blog Coaching.
Blog sites can monetize from display ads, affiliate marketing, products ( healthy products, e-commerce, equipment, books, etc.), brand mentions, programs, and services (consulting, coaching, online courses, etc.). For instance, if your niche is marketing coaching, you can sell courses, subscriptions, and daily educational sessions.
Research Your Ideal Target Audience
In order to master successful blogging tips, you’ll first need to know who your audience is and how to solve their problems.
Every blogger would like to reach over 500,000 website monthly visits and make money all the time. One of the biggest blogging mistakes is not considering your audience fully. Writing for yourself won’t get you anywhere, nor will you experience any blogging success.
So, how to research your ideal target audience?
You can simply take advantage of Hubspot’s buyer persona. By creating your buyer personas, you can better understand your customers’ needs and behavior. Yet, it will be much easier to structure your messaging, brand strategy, and even service or product development.
Make Sure Your Site Health Score is Between 97% and 100%
You can improve your site health score by checking Semrush’s Site Audit campaign data, which will help you enhance your SEO rankings.
For example, you can see if external links are broken or if some pages don’t have meta descriptions or enough text within the title tags. Another possible issue could be if your webpage contains more than 3,000 links. So, search engines will understand this as if your page looks spammy and has too many on-page links. To fix this, you can delete all necessary links by carefully reviewing all pages containing them.
Furthermore, it is possible that some images will not have alt attributes, so search engines will not clearly understand your images’ contents. This can negatively impact your placement in search results. According to SemRush, you can solve this issue only if you specify a relevant alternative attribute inside a <img> tag for each image that your website contains.
To understand how to fix each warning or error, you can simply click on “learn more”.
To sum up, your site health score is based on the number of total errors and warnings found on the pages crawled on your site. Pay closer attention to fixing errors, such as ”X internal link is broken”, “X pages don’t have title tags”, or “X pages have duplicate content issues,” since they have more impact on your overall score than warnings. However, fixing warnings such as “X URLs with a temporary direct”, “X pages have too many parameters in their URLs”, or “X pages have a low word” will also have a positive impact on the overall health of your site.
Target Topics That Have Low Keyword Difficulty and High Traffic Potential
The best way to find topics that have low keyword difficulty and high traffic potential is to use Ahrefs’ Content Gap tool.
Content Gap basically steals all the keywords your competitor ranks for, and you don’t. What you get is a list of keywords that you should be targeting.
This amazing tool allows you to add as many targets as you want and check the data simultaneously. After you click the “show keywords” button, you will see an extensive list of valuable keywords for your audience.
Here is an example of the top marketing and small business blogs. So, if you put yourself in MarketingProfs’s shoes, you will finally see all the keywords that your competitors (above) are ranking for, and you are missing them.
Simple as that!
Always Do Competitor Research to Get Inspirational Ideas
So, suppose you are running your blog related to small businesses and marketing. One of the biggest challenges is keeping up with the latest blog posts from the most popular bloggers within your niche.
The first step is simply searching for “small business marketing blogs”.
Once you’ve found your favorite list, visit their blogs and borrow their ideas, but make sure you keep your own spin on it.
However, always keep in mind your blog’s purpose. Whether it’s about attracting traffic, driving conversions, or educating readers about a specific life or business field, you must find topics aligned with your goal.
Have a Conversational Tone and Make Your Blog Posts Readable
According to Forge&Spark, 247% more readers will read the full article if it’s written in a conversational tone. This surely encourages you to start implementing conversational writing and simply having an honest conversation between you and your audience.
Here is the difference between formal writing and conversational writing.
- Conversational = Active voice, starting sentences with ‘but’, ‘and’ etc., personal approach, empathy, no rules
- Formal = Passive voice, starting sentences more carefully, objective approach, no emotions, strict rules
A conversational approach helps you connect with your audience on a more personal level, while formal writing gives an impression of a polite voice rather than a friendly one. You should have a consistent tone and voice that reflect your brand accordingly.
Use Keywords Strategically and Structure Your Blog Accordingly
Keyword research alone does not require focusing only on search volume and keyword difficulty. It requires diving deep into the competitors’ keyword structure. In short, researching and placing relevant keywords into the content is a comprehensive process that requires practice and expertise.
The Keyword Gap tool is therefore essential, and you will get a better insight into the several groups of keywords:
- Shared keywords: Keywords for which you and each of entered competing domains have the same rankings.
- Missing keywords: Keywords for which your domain doesn’t have rankings, but your competing domains do.
- Weak keywords: Keywords for which your domain ranks lower than any of your competing domains.
- Strong keywords: Keywords for which your domain ranks better than any of your competing domains.
- Untapped keywords: Keywords for which your domain doesn’t have rankings but at least one of the entered competing domains has.
While doing keyword research, ensure you’re adding value to your business messaging and driving relevant prospects that will eventually convert. Before this, you just need to insert your domain in the first field and your competitors’ domains afterward.
Keywords are important because they describe your expertise and business goals, yet they attract your target audience. Therefore, this keyword gap tool is so useful because your content can rank for a keyword that has value and meets the searchers’ intent.
Another great tactic you could use is to structure your content into topic clusters.
Here is an example:
Mapping your topics and different keywords is a great way to have a clearer picture of the overall importance of your brand messaging.
Promote Your Content
Reach Out to Your Targets to Strengthen Your Brand Image
To reach your ideal target audience, you must clearly define your brand voice, type of content, and personal tone. After you’ve defined all those elements, document your key messages and start reaching out.
Attend or organize various conferences of your business nature, interact with your target audience, and spread the word about how your business is different and about the quality of services and products you offer.
You can also offer discounts and deals to your existing customers in exchange for a good customer review. Getting enough exposure to build your brand can bring you more customers and boost your conversion rate and sales. It is important to maintain a consistent brand image and keep a close connection with your audience. All of these suggestions can help you lead your brand to success.
Create a Blog Newsletter to Establish a Long-Term Relationship With Your Customers
Email marketing is still one of the most popular ways to promote your blog. A newsletter can be a great strategy to drive traffic to your blog and establish long-term customer relationships.
To run a successful email marketing campaign, you must keep track of your newsletter’s performance and make updates based on those insights when needed. Only that way can you define your approach and messaging that resonates with your readers.
Promote Your Content by Using Social Media Channels
The power of social media will never come to an end. Having profiles on all major social platforms, like Linkedin, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc., will help you grow your brand constantly.
Add Promotional Banners and a Subscription CTA to Your Blog
Banner ads are static or animated web page images showcasing a product or brand and linking to the advertiser’s website.
Most marketers and businesses use banner ads to get more conversions. Animated web banner ads are more attractive than static banner ads, but you have to ensure they don’t distract from your blog’s content.
The main purpose of the banner ad is to link to a page that includes your offer or pricing plans. Make sure to incorporate the banner ad unobtrusively.
Now that you know blog basics, it’s time for more lessons!
Include Visuals and Linking Strategy
Break Up Sections of Text With Eye-Catching Visuals
You might be familiar with people not taking the time to read the entire content. With images, you can break up walls of text, and as a result, you can help your readers follow the story, learn how to do something, or simply encourage them to continue reading.
If your content feels text-heavy, they may stop reading it. Yes, having too much text could be overwhelming unless the text is broken with eye-catching images, graphics etc. So, it is more likely that a visitor will be interested in the topic or content if you include images that will make a good first impression.
The best way to break up your overwhelming wall of text is to use images and media to separate various points or paragraphs. You could simply hire a designer and be sure that the work he is producing is the most effective method to enhance your overall look of the content.
Use Descriptive Examples to Help Your Readers Understand the Point
To create a strong sensory impression, you must craft descriptive examples that will capture the reader’s attention. Descriptive writing includes details that paint a picture in the readers’ minds, helping them better understand the meaning of what you’re writing about. You can use real examples or analogies; even metaphors add breadth to your topic.
It is also essential to use precise language. For instance, specific nouns, adjectives, and strong action verbs will help you paint that picture in the reader’s mind. However, the original meaning might be lost if you pack your content full of metaphors.
Develop an Effective Linking Strategy
Building an effective linking strategy means that your website and business will gain better success in terms of conversions and search engine rankings. Therefore, linking enables you to boost your conversion rates, improve SEO results and maintain your content and brand influence. Pay attention that you should use link building to reach only the relevant audience and focus on getting links from highly authoritative sites.
There are three main types of links:
Internal links – their purpose is to connect your audience with other relevant content within your site and also help crawlers find relevant content.
External links – are typically used to cite sources or content. These links allow Google to think you’re not pulling the content out of thin air, but you have other sources to support your writing.
Backlinks – are at the core of SEO. Google’s page rank algorithm will give more weight and authority to sites with more backlinks. The best way to get more backlinks is to contact your partners or other relevant prospects to mention your brand in their blogs, for example.
Linking strategy still play a significant role in the online business world, but you must have a decent knowledge and expertise in building links. It’s not about having a bunch of links but quality links; for instance, it is better to have 100 high-quality backlinks instead of 1000 low-quality backlinks.
Bonus Blogging Tips
Take Advantage of Monetizing Your Blog
To the question of ‘Is blogging still profitable’ we can simply answer with one sentence – Yes, it is, but it will never be easy to develop a great monetization strategy for your blog as long as the online world is expanding.
For example, if you are running an education niche blog or consulting agency, you can offer online courses or sell e-books. On the other hand, you might become an affiliate partner to a wide range of brands that want their services to be featured. The possibilities are endless if you know how to define your blogging niche from the beginning.
By taking advantage of sponsored posts and reviews, a blogger can charge a company a fee to write a dedicated review about their product or get their product on some of the best-off listings. Another monetization option you should remember is incorporating a banner ad within your article.
Keep Your Content Up-To-Date
Updating content that is not valid anymore is crucial for your site’s health. First, you must optimize and update posts that generate traffic. Second, deleting old posts and merging similar ones are of utmost importance.
Internal links allow visitors to explore and spend more time on your website. Internal linking is also a great component of SEO; you could always invest more effort there. Check out if you have some new content relevant to the posts you are updating at the moment.
Bottom Line
Yes – we agree. Learning how to be a good blogger is not easy, but you will get there as time passes! Once you’ve decided to start a blog or simply improve your blogging tips and tricks, you can take advantage of blog strategies or many feasible options for monetizing your blog we discussed here.
We’ve seen that finding the right blogging niche comes first. Next, focusing on growing your blog by using all relevant tools is something you need to master to yield good results.
Finally, instead of painstakingly reading every single blog on ‘how to start a blog’ or ‘best blogging tips’, you can simply come back here where we crafted all essential information into one easy-to-understand piece.
And here is our final blog advice: Check out our VPS hosting plans as a great place to make your blog come alive!