Blogging is becoming more and more popular and interesting everyday, infact according to
Wikipedia there exist over 300 million blogs with million of post every single day, scary... right?
The question you have to ask yourself is that with this huge statistics of blogger, how do I succeed?
How can I make my mark in blogging and more importantly how do I become successful blogger?
Blogging is job and not a past-time if you want to be successful but the most important quality to go from a struggling blogger to a successful blogger is PASSION. Like I said blogging is a job but if you have passion and determination for it, then I promise you it won't feel like a job.
So here are some tips to take you from struggling blogger to a successful blogger:
1. Why DO You Want To Be A Blogger?
You have to ask yourself this question "why do you want to be a blogger", are you going into blogging for past-time, to make money or because you have a passion for it.
Most people go into blogger with aim of making money and they fail almost immediately after wasting time buying thousands of SEO tools, plugins and ebooks, yet they fail to make a single kobo out of it.
The first step you have to take is to think about what you have passion for, what you want to blog about, it could be tech, fashion, entertainment, news, inspiration, relationships, religion, politics, sports, the list is endless.
What do you talk about the most with your friends? What do you search online the most?.... As a girl, it could be fashion or how to take care of your body. Then why not start a blog on "Women Care" as your niche. Believe me if there is enough passion for it, you will experience success sooner.
2. Find A Good Name
So you have discovered why you want to be a blogger, you even now know the niche (topic) you want to blog about, Let's say the niche you want is "Women Care".
Then your next job is to find a catchy name that relates to your niche, finding a domain name that says http://www.womencare.com is awesome, it is better than naming your blog http://www.deborahworld.com. No one knows what you are talking about.
Don't get me wrong, you can name your blog your name like www.deborahworld.com and still take your blog to the top of your niche but naming it a name that relates to your niche makes your work easier and also makes it easier for search engines to find your website. The more traffic you have the more money you are likely to make.
3. Read And Work
"Readers are Leaders", read anything and everything you can find about your niche, grow your knowledge and become an authority in your niche. Research your niche on other authority websites like Wikipedia everyday.
Work everyday on your blog, add some thing new, some thing valuable on your blog everyday, if you become lazy no one will visit your blog, and don't give up, many top bloggers have failed many times before they become popular, When you quit you are giving someone else your position.
4. Write Great Articles
Don't just write a good article, make it great, before you write any article, have your tools ready. First do an extensive reasearch on the article, Get other people's opinion, do a keyword research.
Post at least one great article everyday, It takes me two days to come up with one great article, Use Microsoftword to write your article, then proof read it for grammatical errors, having an article with grammatical blunder on your blog is a big turn-off.
Make your article feel real, like you are addressing one student in your office as a lecturer, put yourself in the position of your blog reader and write what he/she wants to see, you can use your own personal experience, use the word " I" instead of "We" but don't be self-absolve and talk about yourself too much, talk about other successful people and what they did.
When you are done writing your articles, copy and paste it on plagiarism- checker software, This software helps you check if the article you are about to post have appeared some where else, make corrections to the parts that have appeared on internet and try and get uniqueness score of atleast 95%, The software is completely free to use.
5. Build An Audience
This is very important, you won't be successful if no one is reading what you are writing, you have to keep coming up with unique materials to keep getting new readers while keeping your old readers interested.
One way to do this is to start collecting emails as soon as your blog is ready, There are many emailing service or autoresponders you can use for this. When you collect emails, you have the opportunity to be in touch with your readers, give them fresh contents, bonus and incentives to keep on visiting your blog.
Using TrafficWave autoresponder is the best way to do this, TrafficWave offers you one of the best email subscription service you can find and also allows you to make money while you do so.
6. Don't Walk Alone: Find A Mentor
The journey into blog-sphere should not be alone, find a mentor that will direct you as you are starting up.
I subscribed to be mentored by many authors in my niche, your mentor should be somebody that knows what he is doing and probably have lots of experience. Follow them everyday, read their blog posts and make them friend on social media so that you can understand how they think and more importantly ask questions.
There are professional mentors like Jeremy Shoemaker, Darren Rowse, Jide Ogunsanya whom you can pay to be your mentor, if you can't afford to pay at-least subscribe to their newsletters and get daily tips and tricks.
7. Advertise Yourself, Then Advertise Others
Before you can even begin to think on how to advertise for others in your blog to make money. You first have to advertise yourself. First thing to do as a newbie blogger is to establish yourself as an authority, I talked about this in building an audience.
Find various means to advertise your blog, comment on other bloggers post and if it is allow you insert your link, join forums provide answers to people questions and insert your link, then you can use traffic exchanges to increase your site visitors. Install Traffic Browser software in your computer in other to surf traffic exchange sites and use the credits to advertise your own blog.
Then advertise others, if you have met the condition for Google's adsense you can apply for it otherwise find other alternatives like Addynamo, Infolink, Bidvertiser, Kontra, Chitika among others to monetize your blog. You can also join Buy-Sell ad to sell advertising space in your blog.
8. Keep Posting
The only reason it is called a blog is because it acts like a website diary, and you have to keep writing on your diary daily, so you've got to keep posting fresh contents on your blog as often as possible.
Invite established bloggers to guest-post on your blog, this boost your credibility. The guest author can link back to your blog thereby increasing your own blog traffic.
9. Good-Looking Design
Give your blog a good looking design, keep it simple and interesting, don't overload it with widgets and plugins as this makes your blog to load slowly.
Good looking templates can entice your blog visitor to stay and read more, make sure your blog have no broken links. Use Page-Insight the google's developers tool to make sure your blog measure up. This tool help you to check if you have any broken links, your blog loading speed, you template design and how responsive your template is.
10. Build Backlinks
Backlinks is linking back from your website from different sources which help you rank higher in Google's search engine.
There are many PR9 websites where you can build a high quality backlink that will keep the organic traffic you want coming in.
Applying these tips will take you from being a struggling blogger to a successful one, remember to read other posts on this blog to increase your knowledge on how you can build a successful blog.
