5 Awesome Blogging Tips for Newbie Bloggers

Blogging has become very popular over the years, especially since more and more people are now aware that they can use it to make a side income. 

It does take time and effort to create a successful blog, but if you are willing to begin the journey, here is a list of some of the best blogging tips out there. 

Blogging tips for beginners

The SEO blogging tips showcased below will help you in the beginning, but what it takes for you to create a blog that offers you results over time is commitment. Don’t quit writing if you fail to acquire an audience in just 2 weeks’ time.

1. Create a strategy

This is by far one of the first successful blogging tips that we can give you. Without a strategy, you will be lost in an ocean of so many other blogs and so many other people who feel like they have something to say. Here’s what you should consider right from the beginning:

• Find your niche and stick to it

There are hundreds of thousands of personal blogs that are excellent, but it’s always a better idea to give your readers information that you know something about. If you are an expert on a specific topic, you have a better chance of creating a community that you can interact with in the long run.

Besides, a too general blog can make it more difficult for you later on to organize your content in categories or to create an internal linking strategy. Unless you’re a writer and you’re looking to show the world how creative you are, sticking to the same niche is always a better idea. 

• Create a reader persona

Who’s going to read your content? What problems will your content solve? Here are just a couple of questions that you should try answering before putting ‘pen on paper’ for the first time. 

If your content isn’t useful in any way, you might be getting traffic and your content might be indexed on some keywords, but your bounce rate is going to be too high. In this day and age, time is of the essence. People like getting the answer to their question from the first paragraph, if at all possible. 

Start by creating an ideal website visitor persona, a description of someone who might be interested in reading your articles. What are their passions? What do they do in their spare time? How will you help them? 

• Put together a publishing calendar

Now that you’ve decided on the main niche of your blog, you should create a list of posts that you want to publish over the next month. The calendar will both keep you committed to the cause and it will also give you some pointers as to what type of research you should perform.

Most bloggers give up because they aren’t organized enough. Think of the articles you are going to write, but also consider the ways you’re going to market them. Even before deciding on a CMS, if you’re in the beauty niche, for instance, you should look for beauty blogging tips. 

If you have a business and you’re looking to build a blog to showcase your potential clients what your services are all about, look for blogging tips for business. You can use productivity tools to stay on track of the number of articles you’ll be posting in the next month. 

• Create a list of the social media platforms where you’ll share your content

No matter if you ended up here looking for fashion blogging tips or travel blogging tips, you should know that not all social media networks offer the same results for all blogs. For example, if you are a food blogger, Pinterest might offer excellent results for you since your content is most likely going to have an abundance of photos.

On the other hand, if you write about productivity, entrepreneurship, marketing, and the online media, in general, you’re going to have a hard time using the same platform. You might be better off on Twitter or Facebook, where you can strike up a conversation. 

You might be able to get even more creative and go on Reddit — since that’s where all the interesting conversations are taking place. 

2. Link building

Getting relevant backlinks is still a thing and you shouldn’t believe those SEO gurus who say that link building is now dead and that all you need to do is write about anything and as much as possible.

Since we also mentioned having a strategy in place, if you know great blogs in the same niche, you could use tools like SEMRush or Ahrefs to make a list of the links that they have acquired. 

Then all it takes for you is to reach out to those sites and ask them if they wouldn’t mind publishing a guest post. Most beginning bloggers don’t have a huge budget, but if you’re smart, you can convince people to give you a backlink.  

3. Focus on SEO

Search engine optimization is one of the most important things that you should focus your efforts on. First of all, all search engines like well-organized content, so think of a list of categories for your posts. 

Then create an internal linking process and stick to it, and try not to link from and to posts that aren’t in the same category or that don’t deal with a similar topic. 

Yes, link building matters, and quite a lot, but the on-page side of your site can sometimes be even more important. 

4. Make the most of social media

Not only is social media a neat way of getting more traffic, but it’s also a great way of building relationships with other people. There are other platforms that you can use, of course, such as your CMS (if your blog is on WordPress.com). 

Social media signals can help your site to rank better, too, and with enough social exposure, you can make your blog successful in less time. 

5. Create a relationship with other bloggers in your niche

A free and effective method of increasing your traffic and making your blog known is to find bloggers that like to write about the same things you do. Leave them comments, but make sure that you take time and read their articles. Some of them will probably do the same for you at some point.

We’ve already mentioned some guest blogging tips, but there is something that we’d like to note here. You can use indirect link building if you don’t feel comfortable with a link exchange – and we’d advise against using the latter. 

That means that, in exchange for a link on your site, you could get one not from the blogger that’s pitched you, but from another, perhaps from one of their other blogging friends. 

Monetizing your blog

Writing content for your blog is all fun and games, but you somehow have to pay for the bills or at least your hosting and SEO-friendly theme. There are several ways you can make money with a blog and here is just a short list of some of the most popular ones:

• Affiliate marketing

We have several articles on affiliate programs that you can use to market products that you don’t sell directly. 

Amazon used to be a very popular one until they slashed their commissions for their affiliates. There are many other options, however, so you should do some research on that or check out our other posts. 

• Publish guest posts on your site

If you get an email from someone in your niche and they’re offering to pay for a link insertion (also known as a niche edit) or to publish a guest post on your site, you might want to take them up on that. 

However, keep in mind that selling links is against most search engines’ policies, so you should try to be as safe as possible. 

• Ad revenue

Displaying ads on your site can also generate some income, and while Adsense has become less popular over the years since it doesn’t pay that well, there are many Adsense alternatives out there, too. 

If you’d like to take your blogging skills to another level, especially if you’re a business, we offer SEO training. Get in touch today. 

Craig Campbell

I am a Glasgow based SEO expert who has been doing SEO for 22 years. In this time I have gained extensive knowledge in the subject of SEO and have build up a wealth of experience in SEO and other digital marketing services.

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