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Starting a blog is now easier than ever. Gaining an audience, however, is arguably now quite a bit harder than ever (for most folk at least). People are generally so time-deprived that acquiring new readers now requires way more than the kind of “If you build it, they will come” attitude that may have worked a few years back! That said, there’s still plenty of opportunities — provided you’re prepared to put the effort in. Here’s a quick head start with ten blogging tips you’ll most definitely need to keep in mind to stand any chance of building a successful blogging enterprise…
Ten Essential Blogging Tips for Beginners:
Direct link to watch the video over on Vimeo.
– (note: video credits to Topher DeRosia – creator of HeroPress)
Video Transcript:
Hi! This is Topher with WinningWP. In this video, we’re going to look at essential blogging tips for complete beginners. The very first one and by far the most important is have great content. And I can’t emphasize this enough. This one is more important than all the others combined. Have great content. Now you might be wondering what great content means. There’s an excellent article here on the Kissmetrics Blog with nine ingredients that make great content. And I really like it. I’m not going to cover them all in this video, but you’ll find the link to this article as well as every other site that I’m going to link to in the description of this video right down below. Number two is have solid search engine optimization. That means that you can configure your site in such a way that Google finds it easy to catalog your content. Once Google knows what your content is, it will be able to know who should see it and who it should present it to in search engines. This site is moz.com and this article is The Beginners Guide to SEO, search engine optimization. And it’s a wonderful article about things that you can do to make your site better prepared for a visit from Google. Number three, make it accessible. And accessible means that it’s usable by a wide variety of people who may not use it in the way that you intend. People with color blindness or total blindness or people who aren’t able to use a mouse. This is a wonderful article showing some examples of bad accessibility. Things like insufficient color contrast. This is difficult for people with weak eyes. And there’s a tool here to help you fix it. Each used with keyboard navigation. Alternative text for images for people who can’t see. There are many more. There’s lots to learn about accessibility and if this interests you, I suggest you read up on it. Number four, make it mobile friendly. More and more people are browsing the web on their phones. And your site should be easily readable on a phone. The browser I’m using here is Chrome and if you right click and go to Inspect, there’s a button right here that looks like a little phone. And if you click it, it will show your site as if it were on a phone. Now we can grab this little bar here and slide it down so that we can see more. But this is what it looks like on an iPhone seven. This site has a few problems with the title. It’s a little too large. But the navigation is easy to find and the search bar works. But you can choose other phones as well. And then you can also rotate it. So right here in Chrome, you’re able to test multiple mobile devices. Number five, use HTTPS, Google loves this. HTTPS is a secure protocol for moving your website around the internet. Let me show you what it looks like. This site that we looked at just a moment ago is using HTTPS and you can see it right here in the browser bar. And right next to it is a green lock and it says Secure. Not all sites use HTTPS. It used to be that people only did if they were doing eCommerce on the site or something that required encryption. These days people are using it for just about every website and Google approves so it boosts your ranking in the search results if you’re using HTTPS. It also used to be very expensive. But these days there’s a thing called Let’s Encrypt which does it for free. And this is a list of all of the hosts in the world that provide Let’s Encrypt for free. Number six is encourage comments. Conversation on your website can drive an enormous amount of traffic and you may learn some great new things about your own content. Here in WordPress, in the left column under Settings, Discussion, at the top of the page is a check box to allow people to post comments on new articles. And note that it says these settings may be overridden for individual articles. So if there’s a particular one you don’t want comments, you can do that. Number seven is fight spam. When you open up comments, you will get spam on your site. And negative spam can hurt you just as much as positive comments can help you. Fortunately, there’s a great way to deal with this. There’s a great plugin for WordPress called Akismet. Akismet has been running on this site for a couple of years and has blocked over spam messages in the last six months and over , all time. Now in that time, there’ve only been three false positives and missed spam, out of ,. That’s pretty great. You can read about Akismet at its own website here. And the prices range anywhere from free to as much as you want to pay. Number eight, cross promote on social media automatically. You want to be sure to cross promote on social media, but it can be tedious after you’ve posted a blog post to go to Twitter and then Facebook and then LinkedIn and then Instagram and then Tumblr and all those other sites and do another post pointing back to yours. Fortunately there are tools that do this for you automatically. This plugin is called Post Promoter Pro. And right in your own website, you can tell it to cross post to all of the social networks for you. It does good tracking, it’s easy, and if you’re doing eCommerce, it can even help visualize your sales. Furthermore, it’s created and supported by just one guy, and his name is Chris. And when you buy his plugin, you help support this family. Number nine is allow people to subscribe to your posts via email. Some people simply like to get their content in their email delivered to them so they don’t have to go out and hunt it down. Fortunately, there’s a plugin to allow your blog to email people your blog posts. Postmatic allows people to sign up to your blog to get your posts via email. It’s very simple. It just puts a form in your sidebar. They put it in their email address and then they start getting your blog posts. And number is use images for visual appeal. People respond to images far more than they respond to text. And a good image can draw them into your text. This is a great article from Orbit Media Studios about how to use images and the advantages that they provide to you. Not only is there emotional appeal, but there’s some science in here. For example, in this picture when the woman is looking at the camera, % of test subjects looked at the product. But when the woman is looking at the product, % of the test subjects looked at the product. This article will help you think through things like that. And if you’re looking for some great images, I strongly recommend Unsplash.com. There are over , free photos on this site and they’re great. Every topic you can imagine. There are collections. There are good places to explore. And you can narrow your search by even more. And there we have essential blogging tips. I hope that they can help you make your blog a great success. If you’d like to learn more about WordPress, check out WinningWP.com.
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