Beginner Blogger Tips
So you have just started your own Blog but not entirely sure on the best way forward? The world of blogging has exploded, but what approach should you take with your new blog to get noticed and the foundations set?
Here is a list of tips for beginners bloggers to get started:
1. Create your Content Generation Strategy
This single most important aspect of blogging is writing quality content. So what is your strategy for getting new ideas for content creation? Research, case studies, interviews, other blogs, Google alerts etc? Figure out the best way for you to write quality unique content. It’s also important that you can create content in a time efficient manner. If it takes you all day to write a blog post, it better be a pretty damn good blog post!
Ideally look to write posts between 400-800 words, and if you can do this in under half an hour – you will be ahead of other bloggers.
Calendar/ Timeline
Keep track of upcoming topics/posts, deadlines you need to have content produced by, and working with other bloggers into your schedule.
Guest Blogging
Invite guest bloggers and contributors onto your blog. They will often bring a fresh approach and your readers may enjoy reading content from a new author. I encourage guest blogging as much as possible and if you are interested in posting on SocialMediaNews.com.au then check out my guest blogging page.
Posting Frequency
It is imperative that you are constantly posting fresh content to your blog, for 2 main reasons.
1. You want to keep your readers interested and remembering what you have to offer
2. Consistent posting will get you more attention from the search engines and therefore more organic traffic. Then we are back to point 1 – keep posting to keep these new readers interested. It’s a vicious cycle of content generation and satisfying your users (people and search engines).
As mentioned above, if you are efficient at content creation (ie 30 minutes to make a quality blog post), try to post 2 a day. The search engines will love this and so will your readers.
Incorporate Social Media
Blogging and Social Media go hand in hand. Integrate social media share buttons on your website so your readers can easily share your content on their social networking accounts.
Promote your RSS / Email Subscription feeds
You want to get people subscribing to your RSS and email subscription feeds so they can check your content even when not on your blog. Incorporate these in highly visible areas on your blog to encourage signups.
Encourage User Commenting
An active user community commenting on your blog can bring enormous value to your blog, repeat visitors, brand recognition and mainly just more traffic.
Use Headings and Blog Summaries
Make sure you use headings to capture the users attention about the topics you are discussing. Only show summaries of your blog posts to encourage your readers to click the title and view the post in full. If you display all your posts in full on the homepage you may find a high bounce rate to your blog.
Incorporate Media
Use pictures, video and other media where appropriate to add some audio/visual stimulation to your blog. Simply writing post after post can become dull after awhile so add in pictures and videos on your blog posts where possible.
Show off your Personality
This is your blog so give your readers you own personal opinion on the topics being discussed. Be subjective and tell it how you see it. Being controversial from time to time can attract readers and get commenting/ further user engagement.
We hope these blog tips for beginners do help you – if you have any tips you would like to share, please do so in the comments box below.