Top 27 Blogging Tips to Crush It with Your Blog
Updated: November 13, 2020While there is no exact recipe for a blog's success, there are some blogging tips you should follow to maximize your blogging efforts.
The blogging world is a competitive world. And the thought of competing against so many other bloggers can feel overwhelming for beginners. That's why some blogging tips and tricks are always welcomed.
In this post, I gathered together the best blogging tips for beginners and beyond. Implement these tips on your blog and you'll boost the impact your blog has on your readers.
Basic Blogging Tips
1. Get started
The first and, in my opinion, one of the best blogging tips you should receive: just get started with whatever you plan on doing.
I say this because I know how it's like in blogging. You postpone the launch of your blog because you want it to be perfect. You hold back on creating your first digital product because you're afraid it's not good enough.
There are a lot of situations when bloggers get too scared to act. In fact, most beginners don't make it as successful bloggers because they are too afraid of failure and end up by giving up.
You must keep in mind that things don't need to be perfect. And you probably place too much importance on things that don't even hold much power. For example, the launching of a blog matters only to the blogger. So there's no need to stress yourself out with it. The products you create don't need to be perfect either. Once you release them, you'll start getting feedback. Then, you'll know exactly what people want from you and what you should improve.
There will be no perfect moment. Whatever you're waiting to get started with – DO IT NOW!
2. Know your audience well
This is one of the crucial tips for blogging as every piece of content that goes on your blog must benefit your readers. And to provide the best blog posts for your audience, you must first know what they are looking for.
The first step is to think about the purpose of your blog. You could be selling a product, services, or make money through affiliate links. For each of these methods to be successful, the blog posts you write must follow your audience's best interest.
For example, let's say you want to make money with affiliate links. Have you found products in your blog niche you can recommend? Who's willing to pay for those products? What kind of content are those people looking for?
You must know what your audience wants if you want to give them the right content.
And not only the topics you choose to write about are important. The tone and writing style matters, too. Do you have a younger or an older audience? Each age group interacts better with a different type of content.
The gender of your audience is another thing you should be familiar with. There's a big chance your audience is mainly consisting of one gender.
You can get insights about your audience's age, gender, and location from Google Analytics.
Another way to get to know your audience better is to ask them questions. You can easily do this on social media. Twitter is a great place to start.
3. Listen to your audience
Who better knows what's the best content for your blog if not your audience?
An important blogging advice is to always pay attention on how your audience reacts and interacts with your content.
Do they leave comments? Are they giving you feedback? Do they ask questions about specific topics?
For example, if your audience is asking questions on a blog post, you can do two things. It can be that your blog post is missing some pieces of information and you can update the content and fill in the gaps. Or, those questions can give you ideas on new topics you can cover in future posts.
Another thing to keep in mind is sometimes you will receive negative feedback. And it's important to be aware that you can't please everybody. Also, it may seem like a bad thing, but negative feedback can actually give you an advantage. It's a way of learning what changes you can make and what you can improve.
Don't forget to also check your social media accounts. That's another place readers use to ask questions or request specific blog posts.
4. Have the right tools
Blogging is about various little tasks contributing to the final result.
As a blogger, you must learn how to properly distribute your time for each task. Keeping everything organized is one of the must have blogging tips because it's not hard to lose your mind in too much randomness. And this is achieved by having the right blogging tools.
There are various online tools out there you can use for specific purposes. It's all a matter of finding the best fit for your needs.
We've put together a list of the best blogging tools. I suggest you take a look through them and start experimenting. Each one of them has its own strengths so it's better to test them so you see which ones help you the best.
5. Dont write for the crowd
One of the most important qualities of a great blog post is its power to resonate with the readers.
You want your readers to feel understood. They should see you as a friend who recognizes their problems and provides a helping hand.
Your blog posts can't have that kind of power if you're trying to write for the whole crowd. When you write, you should imagine yourself talking to a specific person rather than thinking to please a big audience.
One exercise that can help is to imagine yourself talking to a friend. Say you want to write a blog post about how to plant a lemon tree. Imagine a friend of yours is in front of you and you have to explain to him/her how the process goes.
6. Build your email list
Readers who subscribe to your newsletter are the most important. And you should be building your email list right from the beginning.
A couple of benefits of having an email list:
- Subscribers read all (or almost all) the blog posts you publish.
- They are easier to turn to customers.
- If they are subscribed to your newsletter, it means they see the value in your content and there are great chances they will recommend your blog to other people.
Even if you're not to the point of selling something with your blog yet, you should still build your email list.
When you'll publish a new post, you'll also be sending out an email telling your subscribers about it. Meaning you'll have readers on your post even before Google gets to index and rank your content.
7. Show appreciation to your audience
What's the easiest way to keep people around? By showing them you appreciate their presence.
When someone feels left out and not taken into consideration, there are great chances he/she won't stick around. People want to feel valued, that's human nature.
If you were looking for basic blogging tips, this is an important one – reply to your audience and show them you care.
Every time you get a new comment, either on your blog or on social media, reply. If someone asks you a question, answer it. Even a thank you message can go a long way. It shows your readers you read and appreciate their presence.
8. Find your own voice
A blog is more than some words on a page. When a reader follows a blog, he usually follows the writer.
So it's important that you, as a writer, have something valuable to say and show your personality in your blog posts. You must resonate with your readers so you keep them close.
Every writer has its own voice. If you follow bigger writers, you'll notice you can spot their pieces of writing anywhere on the internet. You don't have to see they authored the article, you just know from how the article was written.
Of course, finding your own voice takes practice and… a lot of writing. Don't worry if you're not sure about it in the beginning. You'll find your voice by constantly writing and paying attention to your evolution.
Just make sure your voice is your own. Don't fall into the trap of trying to copy someone else's style. It won't work. Believe it or not, the authenticity can be greatly felt in writing too, not only in person.
9. Learn how to be productive
Productivity is a blogger's best friend.
As a blogger, there are a lot of things you need to take care of. And if you don't learn how to value every minute you give to blogging, you'll end up overwhelmed by tasks.
The better you learn to manage your time and organize your tasks, the easier it will be for you to grow your blog.
Luckily, productivity can be learned. You can start by taking a look through our post on productivity for bloggers.
Blogging Tips for Motivation
10. Have patience
A blog doesn't grow overnight. If you decided to start a blog to make money, one of the best blogging tips you can get is to be patient.
Give your blog time to grow.
Overnight successes are not sustainable. A blog you slowly build up the right way will serve you for a long time to come. You can turn it in an almost passive source of income. But until you reach that point, you must have patience to plant the right seeds and learn how to care for them.
11. There will be mistakes
Don't think that you can start a blog and avoid all the mistakes there are. Don't think that you won't have any fails.
It's better to have this in mind even from the start: failures will happen.
I'm not saying this as a negative thought or to get your mood down. I'm saying this because it's real. And the more aware you are of it, the better.
If you are aware that failures happen, you can be prepared for them so you won't be overwhelmed at the time.
Get used to the mentality that failures don't have to be as awful as they sound. They are a lessons. And one of the most important tips on blogging is to always keep on learning.
Blogging Tips for Growth and Traffic
12. Master writing headlines
No matter how great and researched your content is, people must first click on the headline to get to it.
A poor headline buries the quality of your content.
When you're searching for something on Google, how do you pick which result to click on? I bet the first thing you do is analyze the headlines and then click on the one that's more appealing to you.
If your headline doesn't make people click, no traffic will come to your blog.
That's why clickbait titles are so popular. That's why websites like Buzzfeed are so successful. They mastered the art of writing headlines.
You don't have to copy what Buzzfeed does because I'm sure your blog has a different purpose. But it's not a bad idea to take a look through their content to see what works for them.
Learning how to write amazing headlines is not easy and it all comes down to practicing.
So don't be afraid to try different headlines for your blog posts. You can create a title for one of your post, let it run for a while and then change it. Analyze the results you get for both titles to figure out what works better. You can also test different titles when you share a blog post on social media.
13. Master call to actions
Do you want to catch more followers on Twitter? Then tell people to follow you on Twitter at the end of your blog posts.
You'll be surprised how a well-crafted call to action can change your reader's behavior.
You might think people will spend time looking for your Twitter account by themselves. Hint – they won't. But if you give it to them, there are higher chances they'll follow you.
When you finish wrapping up a blog post, always think about what action you want the readers to take next and tell them what to do.
If you want them to read another post, suggest them. If you want them to share your post, encourage them to share.
14. Create freebies
Don't underestimate the power of free things.
One of the blogging tips I covered earlier was about building your email list. And freebies are one of the best strategies to gather more subscribers.
The most common freebies that are used for boosting the email subscribers list are ebooks, PDFs, checklists, and templates.
Creating a freebie is easier than it sounds. You can easily put together an ebook from a couple of older related blog posts. It's a great way to repurpose old content.
You can either create a freebie and place an optin that shows on all your pages asking for the email in return for the freebie. Or you can make more freebies and advertise them on related blog posts.
15. Provide a great UX
Don't oversee this blog advice. A great user experience is what keeps readers longer on your blog.
It's true that your content matters the most. But what is surrounding the content is also highly important.
This is one of the reasons why ads are not the best way of making money with a blog. Ads clutter the blog and people stay away from pages with a lot of popups and promotional stuff.
Another mistake beginner bloggers make is adding too many popups and email signups on a page. Instead of trying to urge your readers to subscribe by pushing popups at any mouse movement, focus on finding the best place to add call to actions and experiment with various call to actions until you find the one that performs best.
Make sure your blog is not crowded by unnecessary fluff.
Cluttering also means a slow loading blog, something you want to avoid. Google puts a great importance on a page's speed because it knows users abandon websites that take more than 3 seconds to load.
16. Focus on mobile users
Mobile has come a long way. Nowadays, more and more people are using mobile devices for internet browsing. And the number is constantly increasing.
Most blogs have at least half of the traffic coming from mobile sources.
That's a lot.
If you don't focus on providing a great experience on your blog for mobile users, you will lose a huge opportunity for new readers.
So make sure the blog theme you choose is responsive on all devices. And always check to see how your blog posts display on mobile before you hit publish your articles.
17. Create a strategy
Randomly trying new things for your blog is not a sustainable and profitable way of growing a blog.
To get the best of your blog and maximize your opportunities of bringing in more traffic, you must follow a strategy.
Each step you take for your blog should serve a certain purpose.
Set some goals for your blog (e.g. reaching 1k monthly visitors) and ask yourself what you can do to reach them. Come up with a plan and stick to it.
Having a strategy doesn't guarantee everything will work out. But it does guarantee you'll take productive steps forward rather than stepping blindly.
Moreover, not having a plan can become overwhelming pretty fast. There are a lot of methods and blogging tricks that one can turn to because, in blogging, nothing works the same for everybody. So pick one blogging trick or technique at a time and stick to it. Give it time to see if it's working or not and only then jump to trying a new approach.
18. Make the content easy to share
A lot of beginner bloggers forget one of the easiest but powerful blogging tip there is.
Make it easy for people to share your content and your social reach will increase.
You might think that if the reader likes one of your blog posts, he/she will share it with others no matter what. In reality, people are usually not sharing things on social media if there's no button at hand for them to do it.
When you set up your blog, make sure you add a plugin for social shares.
The best social sharing buttons are the sticky ones. They stay on the page at all times so the reader has the comfort of sharing your blog posts at any given moment.
Another great way to increase the number of shares is to use the Click to Tweet plugin.
19. Become part of the community
As a blogger, it's extremely important to be part of the community.
And there are two communities you want to become part of.
- The community of bloggers. You want to befriend people that do the same thing as you do because a community of bloggers means having people around at all times to help each other and learn from each other.
- The communities your readers are part of. Meaning you should check out what Facebook Groups, subreddits and so on your readers are engaging with. Then become part of those communities yourself and start helping people out there. They'll get to know you and you'll establish yourself as an expert in your niche.
20. Spend time to promote your content
It's not enough to just publish your post and move along with writing the next one. It won't work well.
An important tip for building a successful blog is taking time to promote your content. Be it on social media, Quora, Reddit or by reaching out to other bloggers.
After all, how should people know about your blog posts if you tell no one about them? It's true that you can focus on making Google happy so it brings you traffic. And that's not wrong. But embracing other methods to promote your content not only brings more traffic from referring sources but also boosts your SEO efforts.
You'll stumble a lot on that build it and they will come thinking in blogging. That would be the ideal scenario. Unfortunately, it doesn't go this way in the real world.
21. Guest post
If you want to extend the audience on your blog, one of the best ways to do so is by becoming a guest blogger.
Guest blogging has more benefits:
- Reaching a new and targeted audience
- SEO benefits because of the backlinks
- Building relationships with other bloggers
After you've been blogging for a while and figured out your style, you should consider adding guest blogging on your list of methods to grow your blog.
If you're new to guest blogging, you can start learning about it from our guest blogging guide for beginners.
Blogging Tips on Writing
22. Solve problems with your blog posts
Does your content focus on solving the problems your audience has?
The answer to this question should always be yes.
It doesn't matter how well a blog post is put together if it doesn't cover the right topic. If your audience, for example, is interested to know how to clean their feather pillows and you provide them posts about how to maintain a pillow, you're not solving that specific problem.
Whichever way of making money with your blog you choose, the principle is the same. Your blog must help people.
This is the key ingredient of a successful blog.
One clever way to find out more about what problems your readers are struggling with is to ask your subscribers.
You probably noticed in some emails that the blogger you're subscribed to will send you a useful email and, at the end of it, will ask you a question encouraging you to reply and share your story and struggles on a certain topic. This way, they get a lot of insight about your problems so they know what content they should create in the future so they help you even more.
23. Use a lot of "You" and "I"
The words you choose in your blog post matters.
And nothing is more boring and uninteresting than reading a blog post that doesn't feel personal at all. This might work for novels and books. But in the blogging world, the reader must feel he's valued.
When you express yourself in a You and I manner, the whole reading process will feel more like a friendly conversation rather than a mechanical school book.
24. Keep your paragraphs short
An internet reader and a book reader have different reading behaviors.
While reading a book, you read the text word for word and don't care about the length of the paragraph because you're trapped into the story.
With a blog, things don't happen the same way. People don't read blog posts word for word. They first scan the text and emphasize on sentences that grab their attention.
If the paragraphs are short, it's way easier for readers to spot the important ideas from your content and it will make them keep on reading.
25. Proofread, proofread, proofread
A blog post full of mistakes will successfully make your readers not to trust your writing.
Never jump over the step of rereading your blog posts to make sure there are no mistakes left. A human editor is the best to take care of this job, but for a beginner blogger, this might not be the most affordable method.
Luckily, you can find free tools online that can spot a lot of mistakes in your texts. From typos, grammar, and punctuation to spotting complex sentences, poor word choices, and weak words.
Two proofreading tools that make a great job are Grammarly and Typely.
26. Pack your content in chunks
As you might've read it everywhere around, people's attention span is lowering.
Readers don't read a blog post as they do with a book. They first scroll and go over the headlines. If something catches their eye, they will read the whole thing (and not word for word). So make your blog posts easy to scan. Use lots of headlines, images, bold important words.
Always section your blog posts in more chapters and subchapters by using H2, H3, and H4. This will make it way easier for your readers to go over the content without feeling overwhelmed by a huge chunk of text.
27. Write freely
When you start to write your blog posts forget about the world.
Writing freely without overanalyzing what you write while you do it will boost your productivity.
When you write and keep on going back through the text to make twitches or to edit mistakes, your flow will get interrupted. Contrary, when you keep writing without looking back, your mind will go with the flow and the writing will be more natural and easy.
The first step in creating great blog posts is the drafting part. Which, in most cases, is not as good as you expect but it serves for getting all the ideas and information out. After everything is laid down on “paper”, you go back, rewrite and edit any mistakes and then's when the post gets its great shape.
“Write drunk; edit sober” – Ernest Hemingway
Although I'm not telling you to take this literally, what it highlights is that writing and editing are two different processes. And they should not disturb one another.
If you're having trouble letting go of the need to edit while you're writing, you can always try using a writing tool that blocks the text until you finish writing. For example, Draft has this feature.
Ready to apply these blogging tips?
In the end, you should keep in mind that different things work for different bloggers. So don't be afraid to experiment.
You won't find a recipe for blogging success, unfortunately. What you can do is learn what others are doing and try those methods yourself to see if they work for your blog.
Blogging is experimenting.