8 Critical Things Every Beginner Blogger Should Know

If you’re reading this post, you must be a beginner blogger!

Like all beginner bloggers, I bet you’re struggling to find ways to grow your blog and your traffic. If that’s the case, you came to the right post!

In this article, we’ll go through a handful of things that can make a huge difference for any beginner blogger.

1. Don’t Just Rely on Yoast SEO to Increase Organic Traffic

Don’t get me wrong, Yoast SEO is an amazing plugin and will help anyone keep track of how their keywords are implemented within their articles, however, you need more than just that plugin if you want your blog posts to get more organic search results.

Let’s say you want to write an article about making money and you set your keyword as “make money.” As a beginner blogger, you’re probably following everything on the Yoast checklist — making sure your title, permalink, images, and content contain that keyword. By the end of it all, everything is green. Your post is optimized, congrats!

Or is it?

You see, there’s a lot of competition for the keyword “make money” so even if you’re optimized for that keyword, the chances of you even landing in the top 100 results of Google are unlikely.

How are you supposed to increase organic traffic with those keywords if nobody’s going to sift through 10 results pages in Google to find your link in the first place?

That’s why you should focus on something called long-tail keywords—which are keywords that consist of more words, have less competition, are more specific and will ACTUALLY get you the traffic you desire.

This is probably the most important thing I wish I had known when I first started blogging.

Check our our article on how to conduct keyword research to learn how to actually rank high for specific keywords every single time!

2. Do Your Research For Your Blog Niche

It’s time to face the facts!

Blogs aren’t going to grow themselves. If you’re not going to spend the time and effort into researching how to make your blog grow, then it’s not going to grow.

The truth is, it’s easy to start a blog but most fail to do well because most beginner bloggers expect awesome blogs with minimal effort.

Do you honestly think that the authors of the best blogs out there conducted little to no research to get to where they are today? Absolutely not!

These bloggers spent hours upon hours researching the best ways to increase organic traffic, their number of social media followers, and their number of returning visitors.

How?

1. They copied methods from other successful bloggers within their blog niche.
2. They underwent trial and error to see which methods worked and didn’t for their blogs.

It’s all about experimentation.

Every blog is different, which means each blog will require a different approach to gaining traffic as well. There is no one-size-fits-all technique to growing blogs. If you want to learn how to create a successful blog, you’re going to have to figure out yourself what works best for your niche.

I’ve come to find that even successful bloggers never stop conducting research and neither should you.

3. Don’t Spend Too Much Time Making Your Blog Look Pretty

I’m not saying don’t make your blog look good, I’m saying you shouldn’t spend too much time tweaking the minor visuals of your blog. You probably think that changing your theme templates, and reorganizing your layout to make it look pretty will encourage more visitors to your blog.

It won’t.

I’ve gone from theme to theme, customization to customization, but what did I achieve in the end? A pretty blog but still no traffic. Most readers don’t actually care what your blog looks like, they care about how valuable your content is.

You can have the most beautiful website in the world but that’s not going to help you generate the traffic you’re looking for. It’s better to spend your time figuring out ways to grow traffic on your blog instead of spending numerous hours on aesthetics.

4. Don’t Settle For a Slow Website

Let me ask you a question. What would you do if you clicked on a link and it took forever to load? You’d probably click the back button and move onto a different site, right?

Why would you expect any less from someone who is visiting your site?

Based on an informative infographic on Kissmetrics, visitors expect a web page to load in 2 seconds or less and if the page takes over three seconds to load, they’ll usually abandon it.

What does that mean for you?

• Choose a good web host with fast server response times
• Install a caching plugin to reduce your page load time
• Use Pingdom to conduct a page speed test. The higher the score, the better.

I use Siteground and my site is faster than 80% of all tested websites and also has a performance grade of 83 with the Pingdom test. Learn how I did this in my tutorial on How to Make Your Website Faster Than 80% of Other Websites.

Also Read | The Best Web Hosting Service – Why I Use Siteground

5. Don’t Focus on What You Do, But What You “Can” Do For Your Audience

Let’s face it. When people search the web for something, it’s usually for their own benefit. That’s why nobody’s actually going to care about what you do, but what you can do for them.

The only way you’re going to get subscribers is if you’re able to offer something valuable to your viewers.

So ask yourself, what can you do for your audience?

Perhaps you’re a lifestyle blog that focuses on fitness and healthy eating. In that case, you can promote yourself as a blog that helps others become fit and healthy too. That’s pretty valuable.

Maybe you’re an entertainment website that has funny videos. You can promote yourself as a blog that’s guaranteed to make your viewers laugh. Also valuable.

For my this website, I tell my audience that I provide blogging tips, tools, and resources to help them grow their blogs and create successful online businesses. That’s the value I bring to the table.

The more value your audience sees in your site, the higher the chance they’ll subscribe or bookmark your page and visit again.

What value does your blog bring to your audience?

6. Connect With Other Bloggers in Your Niche

No doubt, you’re going to come up with some great ideas along with your journey to becoming a successful blogger, but so will other bloggers in your niche.

The more bloggers you connect with, the better off you will be. This will give you an opportunity to share strategies, marketing techniques, and other details that can help make your blog successful.

You can also help solve each others’ problems and motivate each other along the way.

I believe that successful blogging comes from complimenting other blogs instead of treating every blog within your niche as a competition. You will be able to learn a lot from each other.

Start with Facebook blogging groups to start making friends.

7. Always Choose Quality Over Quantity

I used to think I had to post every day to gain more visitors on my blog. Now I realize that it’s better to publish one quality blog post every few days rather than publish low-quality blog posts every day.

Remember, more content isn’t necessarily better. If it’s good content, then it’s definitely better but if it’s bad content, it could hurt your site’s ranking.

When visitors check out your blog, you only get one shot at impressing them and if you don’t, they’ll probably never visit your blog again. If you take your time to make sure that all your posts are high-quality and offer a lot of value, you won’t have to worry about that.

It’s also good practice to read your old articles and edit them if you think they can be improved.

8. If You’re Patient, You Will Succeed

If you’re first starting out, do not expect your blog to grow quickly right after you launch it. In fact, most new bloggers get discouraged and end up quitting before they even get a chance to see their blogs do well. This is the main reason why unsuccessful blogs become unsuccessful.

That being said, the ones who make full-time incomes with blogging are the ones who stayed committed, overcame obstacles, and never backed down from challenges.

Understand that if you put in the time, the research and commit to being patient with your blog, you will see success later on.

Conclusion

Ever since I started implementing everything on this list, I started to see my site grow exponentially. With blogging, it’s all about focusing on all the right things and doing research. I’ve spent way too many hours researching and learning from my own mistakes and that’s why I’m hoping that this list will help kick-start your blogging journey much faster.

Comment down below if you have any additional tips to offer beginner bloggers!

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