5 Top blogging tips for beginners

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Jul 5, 2019 / by
5 Top blogging tips for beginners

Blogging isn’t just a consistently powerful and flexible online marketing tool – it’s an art form. In the last decade, it’s evolved from its origins as a way for ‘edgy’ teenagers to vent their spleens in public into an industry that’s worth billions. Indeed, there are millions of professional bloggers currently using their skills to connect people with ideas, businesses and brands, so why wouldn’t you want to get involved?

Starting on the long hard road to blogging success, however, can be a challenge and perhaps the most challenging thing of all is figuring out where to start. Allow us to help alleviate that problem a little with our top 5 tips for beginner blogging success.

1. Write for Yourself First

If you’re not enjoying what you’re writing, why should you expect the audience to enjoy it? Whilst you might be limited by the topics you can cover depending on the specifics of your site, particularly as a blogging beginner, you should always make sure you believe in what you’re writing and that your thoughts, ideas and opinions come across. People are perceptive and will be able to tell if you’re phoning it in for a paycheque. The key is to strike that balance between both natural and professional. It’s a delicate balance, but once you’ve found it you could be on to something quite special indeed.

2. Use Your Audience

If you’re struggling for relevant and engaging blog topics, there can often be no better resource to utilise than your readers. Use your blog comments and social media posts written by your readers to help you ascertain what the audience actually wants to read and give the people what they want. Of course, first you need to actually understand your audience and you can do this by reading and absorbing their comments, interacting with them and being a visible presence, or by creating ‘test posts’ and seeing how well the audience respond to them. Utilising your audience will also help you to focus your posts, which can be a crucial tactic as so many new bloggers try and fail to do everything at once.

3. Heed the Call

The call-to-action (or CTA) is perhaps the most loathed of all blogging tropes, but there’s a reason why it’s stuck around this long – it simply works! Whatever you’re trying to achieve with your blog, you’re undoubtedly either going to want people to read another piece or click on an affiliate link. In order to direct attention towards these links, a CTA is an unfortunate necessity. Keep it simple, keep it direct and don’t rely on people to find what you’re trying to direct them to on their own. Sometimes, they just need a little guidance.

4. Remain Consistent 

It’s important to remain consistent, not only in regard to the frequency of your posts (though that is important too, of course) but in the quality of your content. Don’t lower yourself to churning out pointless and irrelevant content just so you can ‘get something up’. That being said, sometimes a quantity over quality approach can work. A Hubspot survey, for example, recently found that businesses that blogged more than once a week added subscribers over twice as fast as those that only blogged once a month.

5. Don’t Obsess Over Stats

Real-time analytics can be both a blessing and a curse. It’s a wonderful way to keep track of how your posts are doing, but it can also lead to a scenario where you’re just sat watching screens waiting for numbers to go up and down. And that doesn’t help anyone. Stats matter, don’t get me wrong, but they will go up and down as algorithms change. You should really only be checking your blog stats once a day, as any more often and it runs the risk of becoming a bad habit.

We’ve just scratched the surface here, of course, but if you’re just starting to find your feet in the heady world of professional blogging, there should at least be enough foundational information here to help you keep your balance. Just remember to always keep reading, always keep changing and always keep posting!