There are many reasons why you might want to start your own blog. Clearly, one key one may be related to the potential financial benefits of doing so, as well as efforts to use your creative skills as a writer or producer of engaging content.

However, the overriding appeal should be your overall excitement and interest in the niche your blog sits within. In other words, you wouldn’t start a fine dining blog if you didn’t enjoy great food, and if you’ve never left your home state, it’s unlikely a travel blog would be uppermost in your list of possible blog topics.

Starting a blog has never been easier, and the associated costs of getting one off the ground and up and running are relatively low. However, you will require a great deal of patience, and you should be ready to temper expectations and don’t expect a large audience to spring up out of nowhere.

Blogging

Know Your Niche

The easiest way to make sure that your blog is going to be successful is for you to know your niche inside and out. It’s not enough to have knowledge of the area or specialty your blog will cover, but you have to live and breathe it and have an undying passion for it.

Anything less, and your audience will know. This means you shouldn’t seek to start your blog just because you want to imitate another blogger in the field and not just because you feel it’s a way you could scrape a living.

Your attitude to the subject matter is crucial when it comes to getting buy-in from your viewers and readers. Today’s audience is very clever and is well aware when an individual or the content that is produced in their name doesn’t pass the smell test.

Select the Right Website Builder

Even if your blog has all the right content, great informative content, entertaining and educational videos, and all sorts of valuable tips, it will count for nothing if the website you post the blog on isn’t up to scratch.

A website builder is perfect for those of us who are not that savvy in this area, and they can take on a lot of the more technical aspects for you. So find a great provider; Hibu websites are among our favorites, and then that way, your blog has a solid base from which to build.

Produce Engaging Content and Look Out for Trends

The content you post should be very engaging, and you should work towards a very set routine so that your audience, especially as you start to attract traffic to your blog, knows when to expect new posts, be they articles or videos (or indeed a mixture of both).

A great way to make sure that the value of your content is not transitory is to produce evergreen content. This basically means content that isn’t time specific and has long-term value to a large audience.

So, for instance, if you are running an exercise and healthy living blog, you might dream up innovative and enticing list pieces (listicles as they are sometimes referred to), such as, for example, seven quick and healthy meals you can make on your return from the gym.

Also, look to stay up to date on trends. This means checking relevant sources for up-to-the-minute hooks for your articles. There may be a certain trend that is starting to get popular, which you can use as a basis for content. As an example, if your blog is related to cooking, perhaps a successful TV show in this area just had a grand final; you could then use this as a base for a number of pieces of content.

Use Social Media Effectively

Social Media

In order to grow your blog, you’ll need to open relevant social media channels to help widen and broaden your audience. It may even be worth starting up a couple of these ahead of the blog launch itself to help spread the word.

All the major social media networks work in different ways and speak to different demographics. Get to know them and see which has the most value to you. Seek to convert your social audience to your blog, but don’t do so in sneaky ways. In other words, keep your clickbait posts down to a minimum.

If you communicate your message well to your social media followers, they will soon realize that you have something interesting to say and will then click through and start to engage via your blog.

Get Some SEO Knowledge Under Your Belt

SEO, search engine optimization, relates to how you best improve your blog’s ranking on search engines such as Google. While you don’t need to be an expert in this field, it would be useful to get a grounding in the key areas so that you can learn how to become more visible on search engines, particularly for important search terms.

This is a slow process, and do not expect to crack the code instantly. If Google notices your blog posts engrossing and relevant content regularly, you will start to get noticed.

Whatever CMS (content management system) you are working with, it is likely that there will be some user-friendly SEO tools to help you structure your blog posts in an appropriate way to attract search engine attention.

Interact With Your Audience

Audience

However small your audience is, the personal touch works wonders. When you start to get people interested in your output, be sure to react, comment and discuss directly with them, as doing so helps you in two key ways.

Firstly those you engage with will feel the instant value in what you have to say and will appreciate the interaction, and secondly, this interaction is very useful from a search engine perspective.

Make the Most Of Your Data Analytics

One hugely beneficial tool you can use to assist the growth and reach of your blog comes in the form of data analytics. These are available almost in real-time, depending on where your blog is hosted and will give you crucial information about how your content is being received and digested.

Perhaps your latest post has led to a marked decrease in time on page stats, which may lead you to conclude that your posts need to be shorter or more concise. You can see analytics relating to where most of your audience is based, which could help direct you to produce more geographically relevant material for that region.

When you start your blog, you’ll be amazed at how much data you can collect, all of which can be of use to you as you begin your exciting journey as a blogger.

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