I don’t like bragging, but I have to say I’m a pretty good blogger. It’s not because I am smart or anything like that, it’s actually because I screwed up one too many times. After starting four blogs and making hundreds of mistakes over seven years, eventually you are bound to figure out what to do and what not to do.
I just wish someone told me all of this before I started my first blog. Here are 11 things you should know before starting your first blog:
You need to be social
When I started blogging, I hoped that I would get a ton of traffic through search engines because all of the other popular blogs got a lot of Google love. The reality is you won’t get too much traffic from Google because your blog is new…it takes years before your search engine traffic kicks in.
So, how do you get traffic in the short run? You do it through social media. Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest and StumbleUpon are just a few examples of social sites that can drive you a ton of traffic.
If you are willing to spend money, you can buy traffic from StumbleUpon ads or Facebook ads, but if you aren't, you’ll have to focus on building your social media profiles. This means you’ll have to spend time participating in the community, befriending other people, sharing stories and even messaging other users.
As you go through this process, don’t put all of your time and energy into one social media site because sometimes even the popular sites die down. I made my first blog, Pronet Advertising, popular by consistently getting on the front page of Digg. Today, however, Digg isn’t popular.You have to diversify your social media traffic.
Once you build up your social media profiles, you can make almost any blog popular.
Consistency is the key to growth
I never realized consistency was important until it affected my traffic…in a negative way. Sometimes, I used to write a blog each week, while other times I would write five blog posts a week. It wasn't until June 2009 that I realized that not being consistent can hurt your traffic.
Back in May 2009, I used to blog five times a month, and my traffic stats were 45,237 visitors a month.
When I slowed down on my blogging, my traffic tanked to 35,786 visitors a month.
I had to blog consistently for three months to get back to my May traffic numbers. This just goes to show that you need to blog on a consistent basis, or else your traffic won’t grow on a regular basis.
For that reason, you better love what you are blogging about, or you won’t have the will power to blog on a consistent basis.
What goes online, stays online
When I first started blogging, I used to create mediocre content. My content did all right from a traffic standpoint because I was good at leveraging social media.
Over time, I got lazy and the quality of my content continually decreased. This prompted a handful of people to email me and tell me how I sucked. To make matters worse, a few bloggers even blogged about how my content sucked.
Your brand is everything, and I hope you don’t have to go through what I went through. Treat it like gold and do whatever you can to protect it. Make sure every piece of content you put out on the web is a masterpiece because if you screw up once, it will be on the web forever.
I was able to recover my brand over time, but I did lose a few consulting clients during that time period, which hurt my income.
It’s all in the list
I've said it time and time again, the best traffic source for your blog is through emails. I used to be a big believer that RSS traffic was the best form of traffic, but over time people stopped using their feed readers, which is why Google shut theirs down.
So, why should you collect emails? Take Quick Sprout, for example. Emails make up 13.91% of my overall traffic; they drive 41% of my comments; and email subscribers are 3.9 times more likely to share the content via the social web.
It’s easy to get new traffic, but hard to retain it
If you look at the image below, you’ll notice that Quick Sprout received 441,676 visits and 340,176 unique visitors over the last 30 days.
Out of all of those visitors, can you guess how many are returning visitors? 31%.
In the past, I had only 18% of my visitors as repeat visitors, but over time I’ve been able to increase the number. I wish I had focused on that earlier because my traffic would have been much higher if I had focused on it years ago.
Here’s how you can retain your visitors:
- Survey them – learn what they want and provide it to them. I use Qualaroo and Survey Monkey to figure out what you wanted to read, and then I write it.
- Collect emails – as I mentioned above, you should collect emails. It’s one of the best ways to increase your repeat visitor count.
Strike while the iron is hot
There’s always going to be a new method of content marketing that is hot…you just have to leverage it before everyone else. It doesn’t matter what your blog is on; you can always make boring topics fun to read…you just have to get creative.
When you find one of these hot ideas, keep leveraging them until they die down.
If you find a hot content idea, keep milking it until it lasts…because sooner or later it will get played out just like everything else does.
Content length affects traffic
I didn’t realize content length affects traffic until I started to write really detailed posts. It wasn’t because I was trying to game Google or any social site, but it was because I wanted to write content that helps you. And I couldn’t figure out how to do that without writing really detailed content.
The beautiful part about writing detailed content is that it ranks higher on Google. If you look at the results page on page one of Google, each site on average will have at least 2000 words of content. That just shows that Google really sees content as king.
Just make sure you don’t fill your posts with fluff to reach the 2,000 word content. Always write for users and never for search engines. It just happens that people prefer detailed content with actionable steps, and it’s hard to do that in a few hundred words.
Write your posts in a conversational manner
People prefer conversations over lectures. That’s why you never fall asleep when you have a conversation with your friends, but you would fall asleep in your high school lecture.
You can make your content more conversational by:
- Using the words “you” and “I”- these are two words that are common in conversations. By using them, you will be talking to your readers instead of at them.
- Use line breaks – don’t make your paragraphs go on forever. Not only will that make your blog harder to read, but it will make your content feel more like a lecture than a conversation.
- Italicize words – have you noticed that I italicize words and phrases throughout each of my blog posts? I especially do it when I am asking you a question or answer one. It helps keep you engaged because it makes certain parts seem more like a conversation.
- Don’t be too formal – conversations are friendly and not formal. Don’t write your posts as if you are writing an essay.
Design is marketing
I always felt that design was important, but I never nit-picked every little thing. Why? Because I felt that my design was better than the average blog’s out there. This, however, created frustration among my readers with certain things such as lack of abilityto find the popular posts on Quick Sprout.
Eventually, I was able to please you once I fine-tuned my design.
As you already know, being average isn’t good enough. You need to be the best! And to be the best, you need an awesome design…not a mediocre one. You need one that drives traffic to your money pages, that boosts your conversion rate and, most importantly, that makes the content easy to read.
The size of your font, typography and even spacing are all little things that are part of your design. Those elements can have a big impact on whether your content is going to be read by someone.
Plus, it doesn’t hurt to have an attractive design because you can thensubmit it to the CSS galleries, which usually can drive 500 to 3,000 visitors to your website, assuming you submit your site to at least 10 galleries.
People matter
When I started my first blog, all I cared about is how many visitors I had and how I could convert those visitors into customers. I never really cared about my readers.
These days, I don’t focus on visitor count or even revenue; instead, I judge how well I am doing by the following parameters:
- The number of comments – usually when you leave a comment, you are asking a question. I then respond back as I love helping you and other people.
- The numbers of emails – just like comments, most of the emails I receive are from you asking for help. I enjoy responding to you and others as it brings a smile to my face.
These days, I do make money, and lot more than I used to when I first started blogging, but money is a side effect of solving problems and helping people. If I had to put a dollar value on my responses to comments and emails, I probably would be in red. But how could you put a price on helping people?
Sure, by helping people I’m gaining a ton of good karma points, which probably helps me, but I wouldn’t trade helping you for any sum of money.
With your blog, don’t just focus on traffic and revenue. Focus on helping people too as the rest will come once you help out enough people.
Conclusion
Hopefully, you can avoid the mistakes I made when I first started blogging. I would hate for you to repeat my mistakes as they hindered my growth.
If you want to make your blog popular, focus on solving one problem at a time. It’s going to be too hard to implement all of the tactics above…but if you focus on them individually, eventually you’ll conquer them all.
So, what other blogging mistakes should you avoid?
