What I Have Learnt from Blogging for Over 4 Years
Blogging tips

Blogging tips

When I first started my blog, I had no idea what I was doing. I loved writing (which I still do!) and I was a full-time copy writer; a blog seemed like the most practical thing to do!

I hardly had any followers during the first few weeks (aside from my best friend and my mom who would leave positive comments all over my articles!), but then I started implementing a few tricks I learnt from work and picked from expert articles I read; what do  you know, visitors started flowing in!

Today, I have over 1 million monthly visitors!

So I’m writing this post to share the tips and tricks I implemented to get this far and the lessons I have learnt on the way, hoping that it will help you get your blog up and running.

Let’s dig in!

Pick a Niche!

My first post on my own blog was about content writing; I basically shared everything I knew. The post had over 3000 words. Then I started writing my second blog post; it was on climate change and how I felt about it.

I was about to publish it, when it hit me that there is no absolute connection between my first post and the second.

When I published my first post, I hadn’t decided on a niche, or a target audience; I simply wanted to share my knowledge on what I’m good at. Then there was it; content writing! My target audience could simply consist of those people who want to know information on what I am good at. So I based the next series of articles on content marketing. It was an effective move, for I was able to attract a few curious visitors.

A target audience is a crucial element in blogging, for without one you cannot even begin to think of promoting your blog, let along generating traffic. Pick your niche first, and pick one that you can genuinely share your knowledge with.

Be Consistent!

This is something I learnt at work.  I maintained our company’s blog and our senior editor had advised me not to publish more than two blog posts per week; so I published one every Monday and Friday. I never broke away from this routine.

I implemented this strategy on my personal blog as well, publishing only two blog posts a week. This was easier for me as well, for it gave me plenty of time to write my blog posts. Most importantly, it helped boost traffic to my blog. Plus by now my followers know when exactly to expect the latest post from me.

Consistency is key to driving traffic to your blog. So, it’s important to create a schedule for your blog posts and stick to it.

Use Social Channels!

It wouldn’t be an overstatement to say that social media literally saved my blog from getting buried in the sea where all other unsuccessful blogs go to die!

I vigorously promoted my blog posts (sometimes even publishing the same post 2-3 times a day) through all my social channels (Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn, Facebook etc.). It generated a significant amount of traffic to my blog; plus it helped me gain a lot of new followers who have stuck with me through out time.

  • Make sure you add social share buttons to your blog!
  • Include images or videos when you share your posts on social media platforms
  • Add click to Tweet links in your blog posts
  • Publish your updates during times when your audience is most likely to be online

These are some of the tips I used when integrating social media channels to my strategy and they worked like a charm!

Listen to Your Audience!

The lifeline of your blog is your audience! I would like to emphasize it even though it is obvious.

It is important to listen to them, understand them and give them what they want. I used my social media channels to figure out what my readers were interested in. If I find something that sticks out, I would start writing about it the very next day. This way I was not only able to cater to the satisfaction of my current followers, but was also able to get a plenty of social shares for the articles.

Now, while you focus your energy on bringing in new visitors to your blog, you shouldn’t abandon the existing followers. I regularly engage with my followers by replying to the comments they leave on my articles and on social media platforms. This practice has helped me gain quite a lot of loyal followers who regularly visit my blog.

Guest Posts on Other Blogs!

Guest posting is a great way to promote your blog. In the middle of the second year, when I had already published a little over 100 blog posts in my own blog, I started reaching out to other sites that accepted contributors.

Now, I made sure that these blogs I reached out to, targeted similar niches I catered to, and this helped me both create exposure to my blog and gain new readers.

When writing guest posts, I did my best not to violate their guidelines, and by creating truly unique pieces that I really put an effort to, I was able to get them published without a hassle.

This is the trick to getting your post accepted by another blogger; avoid spamming your article with links to your blog, simply write an original and informative post and use the author byline to add the relevant link.

Note: make sure the blog you reach out to allows do-follow links to your own website or blog!

Learn SEO!

At first I had a very hard time wrapping my head around all the SEO mumbo-jumbo. But I did a little research, and found a ton of SEO guides for writers of various proportions. I might have read all of them, and the key points I memorized were;

  • Do thorough keyword research before every post
  • Use the primary keyword (s) in the title, meta tag, meta description, beginning of the article, (a few times) in the body of the article, subheadings, at the end of the article and the slug
  • Make sure the article is always more than 300 words (the longer the better!)
  • NEVER plagiarize content!
  • Use short paragraphs and include bullet points
  • Don’t ignore meta descriptions
  • Link to relevant resources (always make sure the sites you link to are trusted!)
  • Add images and optimize them (remember to add the primary key word in the Alt Tag!)
  • Do a lot of link building (via guest posts on other blogs, leaving comments with a link to your blog on question-and-answer sites like Quora etc.)

Build the Email List!

I did not have an email list during the first 4 months; I didn’t even have a call-to-action on my blog asking readers to subscribe to my blog (let alone a newsletter!). In many articles I read on promoting blogs, I saw how creating an email list was repeatedly emphasized. It wasn’t until I added an email subscription form on my blog, did I realize the true power of an email list.

It wasn’t easy getting readers to sign up at first, but I, with the help of a designer who happens to be my best friend, created a unique and attractive subscription form that soon was able to gather email addresses from plenty of readers. I used the list to promote new posts I write to my readers directly. It had quite the impact on boosting traffic to my blog.

 

I admit it, finding readers for my blog was a very slow process.  It took me more than a year to get a little more than a thousand readers. But by practicing these methods on a regular basis, I was able to increase traffic to my blog eventually. I hope these lessons I have learnt in my journey would guide you to instant success with your own blog!

 

A Helpful Guide to Start-up SEO
6 Signs of a Successful Startup

A Helpful Guide to Start-up SEO

Whenever I attend start-up conferences, I get to meet many founders of early stage-startups. While almost all of them are focused heavily on their product, marketing it is almost an afterthought. This is understandable for few reasons.

First of all, most early stage start-ups are headed by software engineers or someone with a tech background. It’s hard to find a team that has someone from marketing in a leadership role. Another reason is that you need a robust and working product to secure investments. So naturally the emphasis is on the product and not on marketing.

But things like social media marketing and search engine marketing has made it extremely easy for start-ups to reach potential clients quickly and affordably. Take Creately for example, we rely heavily on traffic coming from search engines. This has enabled us to attract customers like NASA, Amazon, NatGeo and PayPal without having to succumb to sales pitches and calls.

Search engine optimization is a complex area with algorithms and strategies that change frequently. But the basics of SEO haven’t changed much since its beginning. Below are the first few steps to search engine domination. I’m just going over the main points briefly; make sure to check out linked tools and articles to get a thorough understanding of each topic.

Keyword Research

This is one of the most important steps in any SEO campaign and should be your first step in the journey to search engine domination.

The goal of SEO is not to get a lot of traffic, but to get the right kind of traffic. This means potential visitors who will convert into leads and traffic. And you need to find out which keywords bring in the right kinds of users. And keyword research helps you do just that.

Google’s very own keyword planner tool, which comes with Adwords, is a good free option. There are also commercially available tools that can be used to get further insight on keywords.

Check out the Moz’s section about keyword research and why it’s important.

You can make use of this research to improve your search engine rankings for the right keywords and get the right kind of customers.

You can add those keywords strategically for on-site optimization of important pages. You can also create blog posts and other articles targeting those keywords. You can even make use of them for Adwords bidding if you’re taking that approach.

SEO Audit

This is another important step for any website that’s starting out a SEO campaign. This enables you to find out if your site is inadvertently sending the wrong signal to search engine spiders. Your site might have duplicate content, lots of broken links, multiple pages with the same title and many other common mistakes which will lead to search engines penalizing your site.

Screaming Frog’s SEO spider is an excellent tool which you can use for this purpose. The free version allows you to crawl up to 500 pages with some limitation. But that should be more than enough for a start-up that doesn’t have many pages.

An SEO audit can cover a large area and we have touched upon it briefly in this blog post about doing an SEO audit. There are plenty of articles that go in depth into this, so make sure to do some further reading to get the maximum results.

On-site Optimization

If SEO is a house, then on-site optimization is its foundation. And we all know what happens to a house with a poor foundation.

As the name implies, this step is all about optimizing your content and site structure for search engines and users. Some of the things done in this step are

  • Optimizing titles and meta descriptions using the keyword research data
  • Adding alt tags, schema markup and other relevant code snippets
  • Fixing broken links, wrong redirects and duplicate content errors

For an in depth read of on-site optimization check this article. It includes a downloadable checklist as well.

The hard part of SEO

Now you have the structure in place, it’s time to start cranking out content and getting links for your site. A blog is a very useful addition to have in this regard. B2B marketers that use a blog, get 67% more leads than those who do not use a blog.

Just pumping out content is not enough. You need to actively promote it and bring more eyeballs to your content. The obvious first step is to get it indexed in search engines so you will start getting search engine traffic. Other than that you can send it via your newsletter, share it on social media channels, send it out to bloggers for back links etc.

Tracking Your Efforts

As I mentioned before, SEO is a complex field with constant changes to algorithms and strategies. And it might be hard for a start-up owner to keep track of these things. But you should always keep track of things that are related to your website. Some of these include,

  • Keyword rankings
  • Traffic from search engines
  • Website errors like crawl errors
  • Backlinks

There are many different tools, even free ones which you can use to keep track of these things. If you find it cumbersome to log into different website to find these data, you can use a SEO dashboard to view all these data in one place.

Some final thoughts about Start-up SEO

This article provides a good overview of things a start-up can do to improve their search engine rankings and bring more visitors to their website. It’s important that you involve someone with a good SEO background as early as possible, because once the website gets old it might be too late to change some things, especially things related to site structure.

How to Conduct an SEO Audit in Less than Five Minutes
Run an SEO audit in 5 min

Run an SEO audit in 5 min

Search Engine Optimization is one thing that is so common, yet so mysterious at the same time. It is common, because everyone is talking about it on a daily basis. It is mysterious, because it is constantly changing.

The principles governing SEO are not stagnant. There are new things being added to Google, Bing and other search engines to make the user experience friendlier. By making these changes, the search engines force websites to change some of their characteristics in order for them to rank favorably. This is why you need to always be up to date as to what is happening on the SEO front.

While you are in the business of being up to date with the goings-on in the world of SEO, you should conduct an audit every once in a while.

The thought of conducting an SEO audit is a bit scary to some people, but it does not have to be so.

An SEO audit is not a financial audit that will take you several hours or even days to complete. It all depends on how deep you would like to go with your audit. However, don’t forget that you can actually conduct an SEO audit within five minutes.

Why carry out an SEO audit?

You have probably attended some SEO events and seen the sessions where experts conduct live site reviews and present the owner of the site with recommendations for its betterment. An SEO agency or a consultant should be able to quickly assess a site without much of a hassle.

You should not be so concerned if it takes you fifteen minutes to carry out your review. This is one of those tasks which take a little practice to become acquainted with. If you want to do a full audit, then you will have to look at very many things.

However, to begin your audit, you will need three pieces of information;

  1. Brand name
  2. Domain
  3. Location (if local search is important)

This article assumes that you have no access to webmaster and analytic tools. With that said, here is how you do a five-minute SEO audit.

Check traffic to get you started

Check traffic to get you started

The first thing that you need to do is to get a traffic overview. Pay a visit to the likes of SEMRush and run a search for the root domain. This is one of the tools that you can use for this work, and it does not require you to create an account or to login.

You will be provided with a graph containing PPC and organic traffic. The graph will also give you the five top keywords and five top competitors who are giving you a run for your money. There is also a pie chart availed to you, representing various sources of traffic to your site.

Traffic data that you will need to be looking out for includes things like: how much search volume is there? You need to know how often people are searching your site. Secondly, it is also important to check the fluctuation of the traffic; is traffic increasing, decreasing or has it stagnated somewhere?

The keywords that are bringing in the largest traffic are very important. These are the keywords that you will use to create more content for your site.

Appearance on the search engines

The next thing that you should find out concerns the appearance of your site on the search engine results pages (SERPs).

Generally, what you need to do is run a search of the brand name and a search for the brand name together with a location. If your brand is popping up and ranking in the first position, then it is really doing well.

It also helps to check whether there are site links. A site that is performing well will always have great links. You do not want your site to be linked to a spam site, because this would affect your SEO ranking significantly.

Appearance of the website

This is one thing that many people tend to focus heavily upon. The general appearance of the site will determine whether the site is going to perform as you would like it to or not.

There are significant things like the color of the website you need to pay attention to. You should choose a color scheme that is going to work for the kind of business you are running.

Bright colors tend to be too exciting and jovial; hence, they do not work so well for professional sites (the site of a law firm or financial blog). In other words, the colors that you would use on a restaurant website are not the same ones that you should use when you are creating a Fortune 500 company’s website.

Check the content that is on the page that you are planning to optimize. Does the content come off as authoritative or is it just something to fill the webpage? You can use something like the Moz SEO toolbar to check out the general appearance of a page.

 Study the content

The content of a webpage can affect it significantly when it comes to ranking. When conducting an SEO audit on content, you should check whether the navigation of the page is logical.

Check the design of the site and also try to figure out whether it is possible to make the user experience even friendlier than it already is.

There are some pieces of information that some sites lack: the about page, contact, private policy and terms of service along with content relating to the business operations. Make sure that your site does have them.

Bottom line

If you pay attention to these factors, then you will be able to get a decent and comprehensive SEO audit.

With only these factors being put into serious consideration, you can discover tons of features that require modification. It is more like the daily cleaning that you do in your home as you wait for spring to arrive so that you can do a major cleaning. This audit will help your site stay above the rest while at the same time allowing you the time to create fresh content for your site.

 

Author bio

Vinod Jethwani is the CEO and Founder of Walnut Solutions and he helps web based companies with his SEO strategies to grow their revenue. He started his career in 2007 as a software developer with an Indian based MNC and later in 2011 became an entrepreneur. Follow him on Twitter @VinodJethwani or through his blog.