Get Better At Blogging

Learning from other peoples mistakes is a lot more productive than studying their success, so here are some tips for blogging that was learned the hard way. It will save you a lot of time and headaches if you pay attention to the following:

When Writing:

• This is basic, but you have to remember it, check spelling and grammar!
• Hook your readers quickly by asking a question.
• Use lots of white space, bullet points and even colors to make your post easy to read.
• Get to the point as quickly as possible, don’t waffle on and on.
• Make an outline before you start, it makes things go faster.
• Write about things you love, it just make it more believable.
• You don’t HAVE to publish everything you write, if it’s bad leave it.

Getting fresh ideas:

• Be aware of what’s going on around you, the ideas will come.
• See what market leaders are doing and adopt it to your work.
• Look on forums what people are struggling with, and provide answers.
• Use Google trends to see what’s happening.
• Read magazines and newspapers to get ideas.

Your headline:

• Keep it short and sweet.
• Keep them fewer than 65 characters, or Google will cut them off.
• Your headline is super important , so spend time on it.
• Use a well researched long tail keyword or phrase as a headline.
• Try to think what people will search for and use that as a headline.
• Be controversial, but don’t offend people for the hell of it.
• Evoking curiosity is an art, but it works well in headlines.
• Get the readers’ emotions going and you have a winner
• See what magazine writers are doing, that’s how they pay the bills, so they must be good.
• Make it short enough to fit in a tweet.

Get more comments on your posts:

• Ask questions to encourage people leaving comments.
• Reply to all the comments you get, good or bad.
• Reply quickly and give proper responses, not just one or two words.
• Moderate your comments, you don’t want spam all over the place.
• Give value in your comments, don’t use them to self promote.

Scheduling:

• Publish consistently, if you want good rankings.
• Stick to your schedule, no matter what.
• Publish in the mornings and not over weekends.

Getting your SEO in place:

• Yoast WordPress plugin is a must if you use WordPress.
• Write for humans, not search engines.
• Infographics are a favorite with search engines at the moment.
• Don’t stuff your article with keywords, it doesn’t work anymore.
• Use sub-headings and headings to rank even higher.

Social media help:

• Don’t put 10 buttons on your blog, three is more than enough for sharing.
• Place the sharing buttons at the bottom and on the side of your post.
• Share your post a few times on Twitter to get more exposure.
• Ask people to share, ask and you shall receive, or something like that : >

Blogging takes practice, but you will get better the more you work on it, hopefully these pointers will make the learning curve faster and eliminate some of the headaches! Please give me feedback from your own blogging experiences and share this with people that will get value from it.