10 blogging
actions that will succeed in 2018 and beyond
Thanks to new
developments in web technologies, the pressure to be on top, rising competition
from fellow bloggers and social media, and search engines' changing perception
of reputation and relevance, success in blogging is becoming that much tougher
by the day.
I will like to be crisp and to the point and therefore, instead of repeating things I would give links to other resources on ITB itself or elsewhere for further reading.
Before I go any further, let me hasten so say that in this article, we'll judge success of a blog in terms of popularity and earnings, though as a philosophy IndianTopBlogs sees success in terms of overall happiness that an enterprise brings.
I will like to be crisp and to the point and therefore, instead of repeating things I would give links to other resources on ITB itself or elsewhere for further reading.
Before I go any further, let me hasten so say that in this article, we'll judge success of a blog in terms of popularity and earnings, though as a philosophy IndianTopBlogs sees success in terms of overall happiness that an enterprise brings.
Take these actions and succeed as a
blogger in 2018 and beyond
1. Gift yourself a nice domain name and host the blog on a reliable server. If you are an old blogger, I need not preach you about the importance of these two basic actions, but if you have created a new blog and not taken care of these, take these actions right now. You will need to place the blog on a web host if you want to have an independent blog. (On free blogging platforms such as Blogger and Wordpress.com, they give you a free domain name and host your blog too.) You can visit this post for more on domain names.
2. Before hosting the blog, you must create it. I will recommend Wordpress.org. It is a very blogger-friendly content management system, which makes it easy to set up the blog, and all major web hosts have some facility to put the blog on the host easily, without knowing much of technology.
3. Design is even more important now. Blog's design has assumed more importance because your blog must stand even among professionally designed blogs. Design should not only be appealing, it should be highly functional. Visitors must be able to find content in one or two clicks. Go for a good theme. There are numerous in-built and free themes for Wordpress.org blogs but you might prefer to buy a premium theme. One word of caution: recently there have been many reports of hacking of Wordpress blogs through vulnerabilities in themes.
4. Write good, write big. If you want to earn from the blog, you must write well - good language skills, no mistakes, logical thoughts, well-researched article, supported with graphics/ images/ video. It has been proved in studies that well-written long posts score much better in terms of traffic, re-visits and actions by visitors. Listen to what Google says on what constitutes site reputation, and how content plays an important role in it.
5. Don't ignore promotion. However good your blog is and however good you write, the blog must also be promoted by way of talking about it, linking it on social networking sites, placing it on reputed webspaces such as genuine and good directories and bookmarking sites. It also is a good idea to promote the blog through AdSense or Facebook ads. Since many professional bloggers have established themselves in all niches, a new blogger has to promote his/ her blog to catch up.
6. Don't ignore SEO. Search engine optimization is necessary for getting traffic through search engines. But the old SEO tricks are not effective any more, and SEO has to be genuine and ethical. Google has released this fantastic guide on this subject: SEO Started Guide
7. Pay if need be. Every blogger does not and cannot have all types of skills and time enough to do everything relating to blogging. If you need to pay for some part of blogging, e.g. SEO or designing or adding useful codes or implementing receipt of payments or photographs or something else, don't hesitate to hire services or products.Consider the blog as your business, and like other businesses it needs investment to succeed and prosper. Leave rare exceptions aside, the rule is that a footpath seller remains that throughout his life while one who sets up his store decently in a mall ends up owning a chain of stores.
8,9,10. Keep blogging!
