A Blogger’s Beginning Woes

Starting a new blog can be exciting for some, and overwhelming for others. However, if you plan correctly, set the right goals, and learn some simple best practices, it should be simple. There are many reasons to start a blog; you could be famous and looking to interact a little more with your fans, it could be a personal blog to get your thoughts out, most likely it’s for business. If you’re like me, you know that blogging can be both fun and profitable.

Research, Research, and Research

Starting up a new blog always starts with an idea. What topic will the blog be about? What perspective will you take on the subject? What sort of content should be produced (images, videos)? If you plan to make money from the blog, usually from affiliate programs or pushing your services, then you must have a clear plan before you begin. Anyone familiar with SEO will tell you that you need to start with a topic and try and narrow it down as much as possible. The next step should be to find keywords in close relation to your primary topic that all have a good volume of search traffic while having low competition at the same time. We offer a few different keyword research plans that can help. On our tools page, we also talk about what tools we use to find the right keywords if you want to do it yourself.

Creating a successful blog post:

• Come up with a topic that is relevant to your audience.
• Narrow that topic down to something as specific as you can get it.
• Do your research, identify the main keyword that belongs in the title, and some secondary related keywords to put in the body of the post.
• If you are monetizing the post, plan this out. Don’t just throw a couple of links randomly into the article. Maybe you want a strong call to action as an image? Put some thought into it.
• Don’t just write something to write it, make sure you are providing real value to the reader. Google is getting better at identifying content that is created for SEO value only. They want you to write for the visitor, not the search engine.
• Cite your sources, never hide where you learned the information you are sharing. Readers can tell when you are hiding things from them. When you are confident enough to share your sources and talk about how you learned something people trust you more.
• Don’t Expect Overnight Results

Many people start out blogging with high hopes of taking the blogosphere by storm. Chances are you will not become an overnight blogging sensation. The chances that anyone but your close friends and your mom will be reading your blog within the first few months are very slim. These things take time and persistence. Too many people start strong and only last a couple of months before they feel hopeless and give up.

Getting regular traffic takes time and constant attention to the details, but most of all it takes patience. It’s a common belief in the SEO community that things like this usually take about six months before you start seeing anything worthwhile. If after this amount time you still have no traffic to your site, you’re probably doing something wrong. Don’t give up, do your research!

More Tips

Unique content is king. Nothing makes the search engines happier than a big block of fresh keyword rich content that’s highly relevant to the keywords they’re indexing on your site. Don’t settle for copying big blocks of text from other sites or bloggers and just making small comments, or no changes at all. Content scraping does not help you rank and isn’t worth the effort.

Regular posting is important, especially keeping up with the latest news topics relating to your niche. If you make regular updates to your, Google and other search engines will visit your site more often. This effect is amplified when you’re posting about popular news topics.

If you’re only in it for the money, take up SEO and hire a writer, you will be much more profitable and much less miserable. Let’s face it; if you’re not enthusiastic about the topic or the writing, the end product will not be as good as it could be. If you have a paid writer dedicated to writing high-quality content for profitable keywords, and you do your research on what offers to include you should easily make more money than you put in.

Here at Local SEO Company, we have many services to help with blogging. We can do the keyword research for you, provide article titles and writing prompts to you monthly, and we can even write the blog posts for you with our higher level SEO plans.