As with everything in life, becoming a blogger requires a number of skills for success, but before talking about the factors for starting a blog that can make it successful, we should define what exactly “success” in a blog consists of.
As I have promised myself, to stop publishing bricks, I will leave this topic for another day, but I will mention, at least, some of the most important indicators in my personal opinion that are a combination of visits, degree of loyalty of those visits (visits that become regular readers), level of “engagement” of the community (comments, etc.), visibility and reputation.
From here, then, what would be those essential success factors for a blog and more or less in what order of importance?
I think you already knew the first one very well. It is something that almost 100% of bloggers will surely agree on.
Creating a blog requires many hours of work and the situation of most bloggers is that they have to get them from where there are none. That is only possible with passion. The reader will notice whether or not there is passion behind the blog and if you know how to transmit it, it spreads and hooks your reader.
On the other hand, all this will be worth nothing if the passion lasts just three days. It will be essential to have patience, faith in what you do and perseverance to continue for months or years without clear results because all blogs go through a long period of drought before beginning to bear fruit.
I know, this is already widely seen… But it is necessary to mention it in this list, even at the risk of repeating things already said in other posts.
The Internet suffers from a great info toxication nowadays. With the enormous offer of quality free content, mediocre content is superfluous. However, a second, third or fourth variant of the same topic, if it is produced with quality, still has its place.
Do not get me wrong. We all get bad posts from time to time, it is impossible for it not to happen. I am not referring to publishing one brilliant post after another, I am referring to not knowingly creating “bulk posts” that do not provide real added value to the reader in order to save time and effort.
It is simply that it doesn’t work anymore. Forget every hour you spend doing something mediocre or even worse, copying content from others, is a wasted hour.
It is very common the phenomenon of people who believe that because something seems interesting to them, it also has to be interesting for others. It happens in all facets of life and also in blogs.
If you can create a bit of quality, getting yours read is as simple as hitting the nail on the head with the needs and tastes of your audience. The better you know how to empathize and detect the needs of your audience, the more successful your content will be.
There are many techniques to achieve it that hardly anyone applies and quite a few of them are very simple. For example: ask your readers directly and react to their needs. This is something we haven’t probably tapped into its potential. It’s a safe bet, so take advantage of it.
There are some bloggers who have a bad habit of not taking care of their community: they don’t reply to emails or they reply rudely, they never reply to comments, etc.
Someone like this will end up being seen over time as inaccessible, distant, borderline or worse, whether you like it or not, that will be part of your personal brand and your community will hardly prosper in that way.
On the other hand, it is true that as soon as you gain some visibility, the time spent interacting with people begins to overwhelm you.
But it is not necessary that you roll up your sleeves to solve life for everyone. A simple gesture is enough, with a short but kind phrase, saying that you are sorry, but that individual attention is impossible for you. In my experience, people understand it perfectly and you don’t come across as rude. If, in addition, you can think of a link to a related post to recommend, that will be a plus.
So, the next time you get that typical email from someone urging you to check out their website (or whatever) to give them an opinion, don’t f*ck them directly, just politely tell them you can’t.
On the other hand, if something differentiates blogs, it is the relationship that is created between the author and his community. You may not become personal friends with every single one of your readers, but just making the effort to reply to all or most of the comments and having conversations with your readers already creates a strong bond with them. And this is not only something nice and rewarding but also tremendously positive because it builds enormous loyalty and generates the necessary trust in your audience to take your blog to the next level, which may consist, for example, of selling products or services.
You don’t have to be a crack to write well, doing it “reasonably well” is enough. Even small misspellings are perfectly tolerable.
What matters is that your content will be pleasant to read and easy to understand.
The point is that, even if you don’t have much talent to write, there are very simple but quite effective techniques that will give you a great improvement.
These techniques are as simple as keeping sentences short and simple, eliminating redundant words and expressions, keeping paragraphs small, etc. There are many posts on the subject.
And then don’t forget the most important thing: when you write, ask yourself in each sentence if a “normal” person will be able to understand it.
Here I’d like to limit myself to saying that the belief that SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is not important in a blog that is just starting is one of the false myths of blogging.
If I could go back to the point when I started blogging, it would be, along with copywriting, that one of the first things I would train in would be SEO.
On the other hand, “copywriting” is a discipline that refers to how to get content that attracts attention and keep it as long as possible. Something that is especially important in the title of a post, which is where you play 80% whether they read your article or not.
A good “copy” (one of the things in which I would most like to progress) is so powerful that it can make the second or third result of a Google search exceed the first in clicks.
When you start with your personal blog, social networks are almost the only thing you have to start attracting visitors. You have no email subscriptions, no RSS feed subscriptions, and Google will ignore you for a few months. So, basically what you are left with is aggregators and social networks.
To use them effectively you have to know them well, each one is different and to promote your content there are things that will work for some but not for others. And then you will discover little gems like the fact that, for example, LinkedIn groups or Facebook group communities are a very good source for attracting traffic to your blog if you know how to take advantage of them without spamming.
Whether you have a portfolio of products and services or not, unless you don’t care if they read you, somehow, on a blog you are always selling. The difference is that in one case you want to generate income and in the other you simply want to read, even if it is free content. Therefore, it will always be interesting to know the principles and techniques of online marketing, because the same principles apply to both.
You will learn very, very interesting lessons that will have a direct impact on how you design your blog and create your content.
In my case, some of the most outstanding lessons (and that we have not yet been able to implement as we would like):
Landing on a blog is like entering someone’s house, surely if you find underpants on the sofa and cockroaches in the kitchen, you will not get a good impression and you will have little desire to return. Exactly the same thing happens in a blog.
It doesn’t take any “mega-design” to impress you, just clear and simple (usable) organization, a bit of cleanliness and good looks. If you use WordPress, you have it relatively easy because of the great offer of excellent themes for this platform.
Capturing and retaining readers will largely be a matter of them finding what they’re looking for. If you have a clear idea of what added value you want to offer your reader and how to translate that into content, and you are also able to organize it in a simple way, you will have taken a big step.
To be really successful with your blog project, of course, the blogging platform you use is key.
By far the most powerful platform is WordPress.org, the hosted WordPress variant, as it has thousands of templates to customize the look of your blog and an incredible number of plugins (+30,000 free) to add specific functionality.
Of course, it is essential that the hosting you hire is of good quality so that your blog goes well. But fortunately, there are good quality hosting services that are very affordable, although there is also a lot of junk on the market.
Getting a blog to be successful requires much more than just good content, you need to acquire a series of skills to ensure that this content is also disseminated and read.
The problem is that it is impossible for you to acquire them all at first, it usually takes years until you really get the whole “pack” of knowledge to really take advantage of the full potential of your blog. But if you really want to have success with your blog, you can get it.
My name's Cody Fauser and you've entered my technological world here in this site.
As an online marketer in the technological sector, I have gained experience online both in sales and in the coding sector. On this blog you can expect marketing tips that are technically based as well as product reviews and tips about tech setups.
I hope you get a lot out of what I write.
