Expanding Your Customer Base

3 Tips To Get Your First Blog Up And Running

10 August 2015

Jorge Medina

You might have dreams of becoming a successful blogger, but your dreams come to a halt before you write your first post. Do not allow intimidation to prevent you from indulging in the world of blogging. A few basic strategies can help you learn how to start a blog.

Plan Your Content

Content is critical for driving traffic to your blog and helping increase your ranking in popular search engines. Before you make your first post, set aside some time to figure out the content you want to post for a month or more into the future. You do not need to write out full blog posts immediately, just write down a list of topics.

Start with the goal of writing a blog post per week. Ideally, you should work up to posting two to three times weekly or more. Most blogging platforms allow you to schedule your posts, which can help with planning. If you have limited free time throughout the week, you might want to write your blog posts on the weekend and schedule them to post throughout the week or month.

Produce Great Content

You should aim for each blog post to be at least 300 words of interesting and useful content. Make sure your content is easy to read by keeping paragraphs short and using bullet points when possible. Links can be useful for your blog and you may want to include internal links to other parts of your blog or affiliate links if you talk about specific products.

Limit your links to one or two per blog post. The only exception is when your blog post talks about materials or supplies used in a project. You can make a list of links to the products at the end of the blog post. Too many links can make search engines treat your blog as spam and your audience may become leery of your intentions.

Relevant pictures or videos can help you relay information to your audience and increase engagement on your blog. If you are relying on pictures and/or videos to show products or vlog, make sure you continue to incorporate written content. Although visual imagery is popular on the internet, everyone is different in the way they prefer to consume information.

Capitalize On Social Media

You should connect your blog to one or more social media accounts where you can share your new blog posts. Incorporate free or inexpensive social media management software that allows you to manage multiple social media accounts and schedule information you want to share. Since you are often limited in the number of characters you can use for social media posts, you will want to plan a concise and informative post to coordinate with your blog posts.

Integrating social media buttons into your blog makes it easy for your audience to share posts and information with their followers. Encourage your audience and friends to re-share new blog posts on their social media to increase your viewership.

There is no magic formula to having a successful blog, but there are a few strategies to get you started. As you gain an audience, you can begin experimenting with different aspects of your blog to determine what works best for your purpose and audience.

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