For years, blogging has been the most popular way to reach a wider audience, whether as an individual or a business. Through the years, it has evolved how to capture the target audience by providing informative and engaging content to make them recognize your brand.
Blogging is one of the most effective ways to improve a brand’s reputation by sharing knowledge with the audience while improving traffic and authority in search results.
Starting a blog can be overwhelming, especially for beginners. It can be dreadful to think of a relevant topic that will be relevant to your target audience, search for information to share aside from the ideas that you have, and formulate the content to make it more appealing and engaging to the target audience.
In this guide, we will provide essential tips to guide beginners on how to begin blogging and make it successful.
Choosing the Right Blogging Platform
WordPress, Wix, Blogger, and Squarespace are a few of the most well-known blogging platforms anyone can choose depending on their preference. However, as a beginner in the blogging industry, which one should you choose? Here are some guides on each platform for your reference.
WordPress
WordPress is an open-source, freemium Content Management System (CMS) suitable for anyone with or without coding experience.
One of the advantages of WordPress is you can customize your website through the various free and paid available themes online. However, for someone who doesn’t have any coding experience or technical knowledge, you cannot fully maximize the features offered in the platform. Furthermore, some plugins and themes can be expensive.
Blogger
Blogger is considered one of the oldest CMS platforms published. It has been existing since 1999 and operating up to date.
Blogger is beginner-friendly, and it doesn’t require someone to have some technical knowledge to maximize its full features. However, the downside is it has limited features, unlike WordPress. However, it has limited customization options.
Wix
Compared to the abovementioned, Wix’s winning feature is the drag-and-drop, which makes it easier for beginners to create their page design. However, the templates are more expensive.
When choosing the platform, as a beginner in blogging, some factors to consider are ease of use, especially for those who don’t have a background in technical stuff, customization features, and the cost of making your website more appealing to the target audience.
Identifying your Audience
After choosing a suitable and reliable platform for your blog, the next thing is knowing your target audience.
Audience will make or break your blogging career. They are the ones who will bring traffic engagement, and if they find your content amusing, share your content with their peers or group. And that can contribute to more and more audience coming to your website to see your other posts.
Content Creation
After knowing your audience, this is the time that you have to do content creation.
In the content creation stage, you have to consider some factors to keep your target audience engaged on your website. Such factors are:
- Adding visuals
- Storytelling techniques
- Adding headlines
- Implementing subheadings
Furthermore, focus on these three things when you start on the content creation stage:
- Quality
- Relevance
- Consistency
Search Engine Optimization
Search Engine Optimization, or SEO, is tweaking your website to land on the top spot of search engines. Top spot means more organic traffic.
When it comes to SEO, authority is essential. The more relevant website linking to your page means they find your content reliable, which also means search engine will get an idea to recommend your website to the audience.
In order to get quality backlinks, you can create a guest post or collaborate with other websites with the relevant niche and link your content to your website.
Blog Design and User Experience
Another factor to consider when it comes to blogging is the blog design and the user experience.
A well-designed blog can help you establish credibility, attract and retain users, and boost engagement on your website.
Choose a clean, uncluttered layout with legible fonts, and a color scheme that is easy on the eyes. Add visuals like images and videos to make it more appealing. Moreover, ensure the website is mobile-friendly and loading fast because it might trigger the users to exit immediately.
Social Media and Blog Promotion
Social media is a powerful tool to promote your website and build following.
In promoting your blog through social media, make sure to follow these steps:
- Choose the right social media platform
- Share your blog content regularly
- Engage with your audience
- Use hashtags to increase or do social media advertising to increase visibility
Blog Analytics and Metrics
Tracking your blog is essential to determine whether your blog post is successful and to make data-driven decisions in optimizing your blog.
Some of the important metrics that you should look at in analytics are:
- Pageviews
- Engagement rate
- Conversion rate
These three will help you analyze what tweaks you could do on your current and future blog post to increase traffic, engagement, and conversion.
Google Analytics and WordPress plugin such as Jetpack can help you track your website performance.
Monetizing Blog
Blogging can be a great way to earn income while sharing your passion and expertise.
Here are some ways you can monetize your blog:
- Affiliate Marketing
- Sponsored Content
- Advertising
- Digital Products
In choosing the best monetization strategy for your blog, align it to your values and your audience’s needs.
Why Use a Digital Agency?
Nowadays, more than. 90% of people worldwide are using internet not just for entertainment purposes but also to look for the brand or product they intend to purchase. If your brand hasn’t started any digital marketing efforts, then you are losing a lot of opportunities to be seen by your target audience. But why hire a digital agency for your brand?
One of the benefits of hiring a digital marketing agency is that you no longer need to undergo the rigorous process of hiring people to be part of your team. Furthermore, once the contract is signed, you only need to book a meeting regarding the performance of the campaigns and other strategies.
Another benefit of hiring a digital marketing agency is that they are already well-versed with the strategies needed to meet your goal. No need to continuously think about the next task you would want your team to prioritize.
Lastly, you can save budget. The common misconception about hiring a digital marketing agency is that they are expensive, but on the contrary, it’s a cost-effective strategy especially for beginners.
Usually, the package involves a lot of services that they offer, and you will get all that for the price of one. There are also instances that they discount the price so you can afford.
Conclusion
When starting a blog, don’t rush and don’t feel overwhelmed with the tasks to do before launching your first content. The essence of blogging is to share your knowledge in a creative way as possible.
Always think that you are not writing for yourself, but for your audience who will benefit from the information you are sharing. Research on their behavior, best if you could also identify the best type of content they engage often so you can adapt and enhance it to keep them reading your posts.
Never underestimate the platform that you are going to use since it can contribute whether you can make or break your blogging career. Although some do have limited customization features, think whether you also need that much to your website.
Knowing basic digital marketing strategies such as SEO and Social Media Marketing is essential for you to be able to get a grasp of what is happening and you can make some actions to help boost your website’s presence.
Analytics and other metrics are your friend. It can help you in strategizing your next plan of action in optimizing your page to meet your goal. Everything that you need to know on how your audience react on your page is there, and from there, you can create an informed decisions.
Maximize your blog by also monetizing it in different way. Ensure that the monetization strategy that you will choose aligns to your values and your target audience needs.
Don’t be afraid to seek help from digital marketing agencies since they are well-versed on how to run and make your brand increase visibility through various strategies and platforms. It will make your life easy to hire and agency than of a single person and you will have to constantly manage to ensure the delivery. Furthermore, hiring several people to perform a single goal which is to boost presence and generate conversion is much costly than of hiring an agency that comprises all the positions that you need, plus they will handle the burden of managing their team to deliver your goal at your own timeframe.
About Dreamtech
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