Blogging tips for beginners.
I wish I’d learned them when I was starting out as a blogger.
November 8 marked the end of my 4th year of blogging.
It’s truly amazing how far my blogging skills have progressed in four years.
I didn’t even blog about blogging in November of 2014.
Do you want to see my first post?
I started as a news blogger.
If you want to see how I used to blog before I learned a better way, check out my first post, “Is Ebola an African River or a Forest?”
The 40 blogging tips for beginners in this post either share what I learned in my 4th year of blogging or what blogging tips became reinforced as I went through the year.
These are the lessons I learned and you should too no matter what your experience level.
January: I started 2018 learning I’d received a link from the Huffington Post to my review of Dale Carnegie’s HOW TO WIN FRIENDS AND INFLUENCE PEOPLE.I was actually one of the last bloggers ever to receive a link from the Huffington Post. Soon after I was their featured blogger, they ended their free blogging guest author program.
February: In February, I feared the bottom had fallen out, at least of my PayPal account. I lost my only steady blogging gig. I was a regular contributor for ProvenSEO until they ended their paid guest blogger program and started asking bloggers to write for them for free.
What to do? Ryan Biddulph discussed in his articles the need to vary our income streams. I read many bloggers were finding blogging lucrative after they’d increased their Domain Authority score. At the time of this writing, my Domain Authority is 44. People write to me and ask me to publish their guest posts for compensation. If I make a concerted effort to point links at my blog and get my DA up, can I monetize without my steady gig? We shall see. I started by guest posting in more earnest in addition to my “link dropping methods” I’d already employed.
Changes in blogging practice In the first quarter of the year, I changed my networking practices. I became involved in groups where I was allowed to leave links. Happily, I always knew I could leave links in answers at Quora.com. This year, I discovered I could do the same in forum discussions at other websites. I received the most traction from Inbound.org, so I focused my attention there. When I published 8 Proven Ways to Write LinkedIn Posts That Will Boost Your Influence, I knew the members of LinkedIn groups were my target audience, so I became active in LinkedIn groups as well. I also reinvented myself at BizSugar. After what seemed like an eternity when I was locked out of my account, I created a new account with a new email address and started over.
March: I received triple-digit page views from LinkedIn for the first time. 
By the middle of March, LinkedIn became the site that sent me 1.5% of all my traffic and my 5th best over-all traffic generator. I also became more active at Steemit. Steemit and I had a love/hate relationship. On days Steemit refused to add even a penny to my Steemit wallet, I turned to Virily for comfort. So, I became more active there as well.
I realized in March why people don’t click my links more than they do when I guest blog: My author bio didn’t tell them why it should. It does now.
[Read: Steemit: How to Make Money at This New Rev Share Site and How to Make Money from Virily and 6 More Sites That Pay You.]
April:
I realized I have FAR more control over the outcome of my blogging efforts than I originally thought.
I conducted an expert interview asking how we can possibly get links to our site to boost our organic traffic when that’s in other people’s hands, other people’s control.
Boy, was I wrong! That couldn’t be farther from the truth.
I spent 2018 pointing links at my articles in order to boost their position in the SERPs. Did it work? Absolutely!
I watched with glee as my posts positions moved up.
A great example was my post with the Lady Blogger. I figured people didn’t like interview posts since it began 2018 in position 98.
My keyword phrase was “create a successful blog.” Each time I wrote about how to create a successful blog, my keyword term was my anchor text and I linked to the article. By the end of March, the post moved way up to Position 33.
Note: There are 480 searches for this term each month. Is this worth my efforts? 480 searches for just one keyword term? Absolutely! These numbers add up.
In April, I had my second post go viral on LinkedIn and I received my highest page views since I started blogging.
Look: I received over 1,000 page views from LinkedIn and my post about unusual social media tips went viral (received unusually high page views.)
I also realized how much control I have over receiving high blog traffic from StumbleUpon.
On Sunday, April 8, I knew my links were on SU. My friend Phil had stumbled one of my posts as had others, yet no SU traffic.
I hit the stumble button 30 times. On April 12, look at what I saw:
Triple-digit StumbleUpon traffic!
I always thought I had no control. Traffic generation from SU relied on other people stumbling my links. I stumbled other posts 30 times and BAM!
As you can see in April, I received almost 25,000 page views due to an average of 825 visitors per day.
It’s true: I just about doubled my traffic from the same time the previous year.
May:
May saw the beginning of the end of StumbleUpon, the content curation site known for bringing mass traffic to our blogs. It certainly did mine. StumbleUpon announced in May it was closing its doors. What was to become of my StumbleUpon group?
May 25 was also the deadline to be in compliance with the GDPR, a European privacy law that affected us.
[Read: Alert: Do You Need New Sites like StumbleUpon? Mix Is Here.]
August
I became a contributor to the Fotor blog, a paid opportunity!
As a result, I began publishing less on my blog in order to have time to research and write marketing posts for Fotor.
This served several purposes:
People on my email list complimented and complained. They complimented my content but complained I was “overposting.”
Next, links to my blog from Fotor help my SEO. The articles have the same effect as guest posts.
Also, I’m interested in writing about marketing, but the topic has lukewarm results in the page views department on my site.
Finally, after 4 years of blogging, I didn’t want to run out of ways to engage my readers.
Publishing less felt strange after 4 years of publishing up to, in some extreme cases, 7 days a week.
September
In September, I got my first speaking gig. I was a speaker at the Uppercase conference.
I spoke about how I boosted my SEO 294%.
My readership grew tremendously as a result.
Also, in September, my husband become my business manager. We both realized I was beyond busy and not making enough publishing guest posts to make it worth my time. As a result, we raised my prices to accept guest posts severely diminishing the number of guest posts I receive.
This results in more time for my family, my blog, my social life, and my day job.
Readers were complaining that I use to post too often.
Everyone is happier now, and the guest posts I do receive are higher quality.
October
I continued as a contributing writer for the Ezine blog and the Fotor blog.
October 8 saw the upcoming end of the social media website Google Plus when the struggling social media site announced it would be closing its doors in August.
November
As my 4th year of blogging comes to a close let’s take stock:
Inbound.org that I made a renewed commitment to folded and once again, I’m locked out of BizSugar.com.
What have I learned from these experiences?
There are many blogging tricks.
These are the tips I learned based on my experiences this year and you should learn them too:
40 Blogging Tips for Beginners
- Be patient. People say, “Everything worth having is worth waiting for” because it’s true.
- Blogging success comes in waves. Get used to it. Don’t get comfortable. Don’t rest on your laurels.
- Write like you speak. Blog writing is easy. It’s like talking. You find your voice when you speak and when you blog.
- Give away your knowledge. Empower your readers. Do what you love and the money will come.
- Write for people not for money or Google’s bots. People join your blogging community when they like your articles.
- Don’t try to spam your readers. There are 3 ways to write on the Internet: Sales, Story, and How-to. If you write sales content in a blog post, your readers could resent it. They came to you for information, not to be spammed.
- Have fun. Your passion will transfer to your writing, and your posts will be more interesting for your readers. You reader’s experience matters more than your experience. A blog is not a diary, after all.
- Use traditional blogging tools. Blogging is time-consuming. The more tools you use, the less you’ll resent the time it takes you to blog. Let blogging tools save you time. Many free blogging tools are available to you if you don’t have a budget.
- Take your time to do widespread promotion. Do what you can to extend your reach. For example, use hashtags. This will extend your reach on Instagram, Twitter, and even LinkedIn. Promote everywhere.
- SEO matters. Promote on blogs and forums with a high DA. Doing so will boost your DA and internet visibility.
- Comments are an integral part of blogging. I realize many bloggers turn off comments. I also realize why: Spam comments, comments that don’t show evidence the commenter read the post, and the time it takes to return comments can be overwhelming. However, in my opinion, without comments, you might as well keep a diary. Also, blogging is about building a community. Without your own comments, you can join other people’s communities, but building your own will be difficult.
- You still need Facebook. Despite the bad press that Facebook took in the news this year, bloggers still need Facebook. Before my work day starts, I promote in Facebook groups that allow daily self-promotion. During my first break, I promote in Facebook groups that have special #promodays. In this way, my email list has grown.
- You need an email list. Offer people a freebie they’d find valuable in exchange for their email address. Bam! Your email list and your reader base just grew.
- The best freebies are not downloadable. Your freebies have to be extremely valuable to your population. I have people writing to me and asking for my freebies. They are happy to get on my mailing list. Many freebies might appeal to your target population.
- Use push notifications. People will not be annoyed when they get notifications in contrast to popular belief. Why would they? They signed up for the notifications! The technology exists so people can receive your articles and not be bombarded by more emails. Use it!
- Hashtags help you. When I published my list of hashtags relevant to all blogging niches, people wrote to tell me they had no idea how valuable hashtags are. When I started using the “daily” hashtags, my Twitter following grew at 100 followers a day!
- Money comes from the most unlikely of places. Brands I never thought I’d hear from again came out of the woodwork to offer me additional financial opportunities and steady financial opportunities. This is also known as “Don’t Burn Bridges.”
- Optimizing for mobile matters. For years, I put titles in italics. I’m a licensed English teacher, after all. Then, I read reading italics on mobile devices is difficult. Oops.
- Site loading speed can make or break your success when it comes to search engine traffic. Each time my organic traffic tanks, I check GTMetrix to find my site loading speed has slowed.
- Graphics matter. I don’t just mean in your posts. We’re living in a Digital Age. The Bibblio Related Posts Plugin will put your post’s graphic with the headline. Then, you get to see the analytics to learn how many people click your links when they see your blog graphics.
- You need to be flexible. In blogging, everything changes ( and in life too?) YouTube shows horizontal videos; IGTV shows vertical videos.
- White space is your friend. You want traffic. Google sends you traffic if your bounce rate is low. The more white space you have, the longer it will take readers to get to the bottom. This results in them staying longer on your site. Your bounce rate will improve and so will your organic traffic. Also, readability is improved if you have shorter paragraphs. No one wants to read a large block of text. How large is large? Paragraphs should be 3 sentences maximum.
- We all get by with a little help from our (blogging) friends. With apologies to the Beatles, this song lyric is important for blogging success. For instance, if Ryan Biddulph and I hadn’t connected, he would never have thought of me in January when composing his article for the Huffington Post and I wouldn’t be featured there today.
- You will get better. Your blogging skills improve with time. I learned so much about how to improve my SEO, I spoke about my methods at a conference.
- Don’t just empower others; empower yourself. As a blogger, there is a great deal to learn. Stay cutting-edge. Keep on top of your industry.
- Guest posts matter. I thought they didn’t since they never gave me much in the way of traffic or conversions. Why guest posts matter to me now:
- They give me links to my site. These links are needed to boost my search visibility and my Domain Authority Ranking. When my DA goes up, people start emailing me financial opportunities. I don’t even have to seek them out.
- They give me a diversity of links to my site. If I keep getting links from the same places, my DA won’t grow. Also, I am exposed to a variety of new people. Even if I don’t get traffic or conversions, they might share my posts on social media.
- If the host blogger has a DA greater than mine, my DA will really go up getting links from that site.
- If you want to succeed on Instagram, you need to have quote posts.
My quote posts receive more than twice the number of likes my other Instagram posts receive. - If you want to succeed on Instagram you need to use hashtags. I learned to add the hashtags #quote and #quotestoliveby so people liking inspirational quotes can find my post.
- Do not think for other people. In one of my blogging mistakes posts, I mentioned thinking for people is a blogging mistake. “Physician, heal thyself,” or blogging coach, follow your own tips. In March, I was offered compensation to publish a post about how you can make money writing from your RV. I predicted no one would read the post. After all, you’d have to own an RV in order to follow the tips. People wrote thanking me for publishing the post. They said they learned from reading the post that people with internet can write anywhere. In addition, someone stumbled the post. As I write this, six days later, the post is still picking up page views.
- My favorite social media app of the year: Followers: Followers is an app that I use to delete Instagram followers who don’t follow me back. It helps keep my following/follower ratio in check. I use it daily.
- Best blogging tool I became reacquainted with: Ubersuggest: I never used this keyword tool much although I’d blogged about the value of this and other keyword tools. A friend suggested I blog about Ubersuggest, so I did. I then started using the tool often.
- Write when you are alone or people in your home are asleep. This way, you won’t have guilt you’re neglecting the people in your home.
- Feed the pets before you blog. This way, they won’t bug you for food while you’re trying to write. You won’t be preoccupied that you need to get up and feed them as well.
- Save your readers’ comments. They make nice introductions for future blog posts.
- Save your readers’ questions. You can answer them in future blog posts.
- Use internal links. Not only are you boosting your on-site SEO, but when people click those links, you boost your blog traffic.
- Hold your guest authors to high standards. After all, your reputation is at stake.
- Write evergreen content. That’s the kind of timeless content that gets continual organic traffic from search engines, content that’s always relevant.
- Include external links in your posts. You’re boosting your SEO and look like you care about empowering your readers with the knowledge of experts. This boosts your brand’s credibility.
- When you include other companies or people in your posts, send them the post on Twitter. Ask them to retweet. Most will and you will get exposure to their followers.
Wrapping Up Blogging Tips for Beginners: Takeaway
New bloggers, you don’t have to go it alone. Blog writing is easier if you follow these tips.
Any post about blogging for beginners will have one important takeaway:
You’ll follow a smoother road as a blogger if you let others pave the way for you.
Learn from my experiences that I shared in this post. Use these tips as a blogging resource.
Readers, please share so new bloggers learn these 40 blogging tips for beginners.
These strategies also make a valuable reminder for more seasoned bloggers.
Did I miss any? I look forward to your views in the comments. What blogging tips for beginners do you recommend?
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