When you’re new to blogging, you want to appear experienced, knowledgeable and professional online. You don’t want your readers to figure out that you are a newbie, even if you really are. You can run your blog like a pro, even if you are brand new to the game, in order to avoid losing the chance at becoming successful and profitable.
Most blogs that start and then crash and burn never took the time to become experts in their niche and are simply repeating the same mistakes as blogs that have failed before. Rather than making the same mistakes, getting frustrated at a lack of a following and getting bored at your efforts, take the time to learn how to run it like a professional would. Here is a look at how a professional would start their blog, create their content and promote it.
How to begin
When you’ve decided to start a blog and want to get off on the right foot, you’ll want to avoid the common mistake of going in without a game plan. You can’t just read up on the technical aspects of how to start a blog and then wing it from there. You should go into it with a plan as far as your goals for the blog, a timeline of when you’d like to meet this goal and who your audience is going to be.
Think about how you want it look, what topics you’d like to cover and what people may want to read about. Then, you’ll want to determine what your plan is to make money from it and what level of traffic will be needed to make that happen.
Start creating content
While it may seem that all it takes is to write great content to attract readers, there’s actually a lot more to it. Content promotion is vital to a blog but you’ll probably spend more time promoting your writing than actually writing. You need to make it great and shareable by using strategies including:
- The Skyscraper technique by Brian Dean which includes research articles, writing a great piece, determining who could benefit from the post and trying to catch their attention in hopes that they will share the content
- Creating a resources guide with the top articles of your niche
- Build a round up post that can act as the authority on a topic and build the basis for promotion
Market through social media
It’s extremely important to share your blog on social media and use to its full potential. Almost everyone is signed up on a social media platform which makes it super easy to share your blog on Twitter feeds and Facebook. You can drive traffic from social media by getting page views from Reddit and giving people something to Tweet or Facebook about.
Add a “share” button next to your posts to have it set up to be shared on all of the major social media platforms. Get your own blog social media page on Twitter, Facebook and more so that you can come up with creative Tweets for others to share.
If you’re still struggling to find readers, go to Reddit.com, find some general subreddits that you can fit into, post exactly how everyone else posts there and do some light promotion of your blog. This could lead to upvotes which can lead to traffic.
Use these tips to get started on running a new blog like a professional.
