Since the early 2000s the blogger space has become a fiercely competitive place, to make it as a blogger today you can’t just be a good writer. You need a lot more besides writing skills, you need to be as tenacious as you possibly can. From our experience over the years, here are the six key areas that likely determine your success as a blogger or not.
Related: Google, common-sense and SEO
Make a living
If you’re ever planning to make it long term as a blogger you’re going to need to develop multiple income streams to support yourself. Now there’s AdSense, Affiliate and many others standard channels, in the long term being part of these makes sense as you build your traffic and if you want to find out more on these and others areas of monetisation here’s a good piece on how to make money writing a blog.
Initially one of the biggest areas where you can make income in is influencer marketing (IM). IM is where a company will either sponsor your content to appear alongside it or sponsor you to write a piece in your niche area. It’s a fast-growing area of the advertising industry and definitely a good place to be in terms of profitability as you begin to grow your blog.
Be consistent when publishing
One of the key points of building a successful blog which people rarely talk about is consistency, that is posting your content on specific days at specific times each week or day depending on how regularly you blog. This is key because as you build an audience, you want them to keep coming back and the only way you can turn an audience into frequent readers is if they can rely on you to consistently post fresh content they’re interested in. Remember people are creatures of habit, having a regularly posting schedule at set times is critical to building readership.
Understand and practise SEO
Search engines have become sophisticated beasts since the early days of blogging, a basic to expert understanding of SEO is now crucial to your success as a writer as SEO will allow you to build traffic, audience and readership. Organic traffic from search engines is also by far the most valuable and dedicated type of traffic. There are many sources you could look at for SEO, but we highly recommend Moz as the definite white-hat source for SEO in basic English.
Write long posts
It could be argued this is as critical as SEO, but practically it relates more to writing, the average 500-word post doesn’t cut it these days. If you want your content to be found and read through search and other channels, you need to write longer pieces, the average post that appears on page 1 of Google for a search keyword is 2,000 words, so, in essence, make your content longer.
Know your blogging audience
Understanding your target audience and your actual readership is a key factor in growing your blog, you need to use this information and analyse it to shape what content you produce going forward and how you interact with your audience. The best way to get started on this is by using Google Analytics, for an easy beginners guide click here.
Structure your time and work
This relates to many professions, but it’s a very core tenant of blogging, to effectively grow your blog over time you need to structure your time effectively. It will likely take years for you to establish a significant audience in your niche, so week structured work is your friend. It will help you to consistently grow your readership and success over the longer term. Often this is where most bloggers fail, so be disciplined and work hard to make sure you succeed.
Related: How to use content management systems