Blogging is not as easy as we like to think it is when we are starting out. It needs time, commitment, and dedication to make a mark as a blogger be it in any niche. Almost everyone who likes to write, has a blog today. And most people start with real energy and enthusiasm, but after some time they give it up. Because the returns from blogging are not as spontaneous as many people think. And no matter what you have heard or read or whatever you do, it takes time for articles to rank in google and depending on your niche anywhere between 1 in 10 to 1 in hundred of your articles will rank. Which means it needs lots of patience and consistency. And very few, we call them smart bloggers, stick around long enough to be able to make their living via blogging and earn a name for themselves in the space.
Most of them talk about how they do it, and what they do to stand out among millions of bloggers and grow as much that no one can neglect them. And everyone’s story can teach us something. While there are certain common methods that every blogger uses, the way they tell their story is what tells us a lot about the intangible. Their uniqueness that helps them stand out in the crowd. And while optimisation is necessary, what really makes all the difference is ‘What’s my uniqueness? Why would people want to read my blog rather than anyone else’s? Once you find your uniqueness all you gotta do is create a plan to present your uniqueness in the best and most helpful way. For example- Neil Patel’s uniqueness is that he provides proven data backed actionable steps for bloggers and digital marketers to excel in all areas of digital marketing. Smart bloggers plan everything before even they start the blogging and commit to the plan, no matter how bad things are, they never give up and with time, effort and as a result of their hard work, they succeeded. Many in the ‘audience’ envy and like to think they ‘they just got lucky’, very few care into what they really did and try to understand the hard work involved in reaching where they are today.
Today I am sharing with you some of the tips and tricks that smart bloggers use to excel all the time and I have used to take my blogs from 0 to an average 112,254 visitors per month.
Write for Users not for Search Engines
We all know that bloggers nowadays tend to do what I call ‘too much marketing’ and write with the intentions of ranking on google and forget about the users. Especially with things like overuse of keyword-optimisations, title optimisations etc. It’s perfectly normal to have an intention to rank for the right keywords but not at the cost of ‘the User Experience’ of your blog. The reason is, ultimately your readers are the ones whom the blog is intended to help and not the google bots. And if your articles do not connect with humans, there is a rare chance you are gonna come to the top. Or even if you do, you are not likely to stay on the top. (Especially considering the recent evidences that suggest UX elements as a major ranking factor). Smart bloggers know that writing for real human beings is important so they do it and after that they use smart marketing techniques to reach to the users and users always spontaneously share good articles. Also the blogging community reacts positively as well and bloggers reward good content by backlinking good content as reference. And SEO happens automatically in an inbound manner. So next time you want to choose a phrase, try to think what connects with people rather than referring to your keyword research tool every now and then.
Create a Community for Your Blog
You must have read and heard this many times and each one who tells this has his own reason. Your community is the place where your readers become your customer, fans and your brand ambassadors. The most regular and loyal followers of your blog are gonna be the ones who are in your community. Community is not only the place to amplify your brand image but also to convert readers and followers to paying, happy and loyal customers. The most underestimated benefit of having a community for your blog is, there is no noise. All the engagement will be either about your blog or about related topics. This helps you in creating high value ‘hot’ WALLET OUT leads for your business. Community can act as an automated channel for various things like search engine optimization, social media marketing, content writing and link building. And once those things start taking care of themselves, you can start concentrating on very important subtle aspects of blogging like optimising your content to make it more interacting. Updating your articles so that the information does not become outdated. Remember one thing, it’s not your efforts in marketing your blog that matters most. To create and run a successful blog you will have to consistently create great, informative, and actionable content and that is tricky task where most of the bloggers fail. It is an art to create engagement on your blog so that users always come back.
Create The Best User Experience You Can Imagine
The readers who come to your blog if their user experience is hurt then everything you have done, will be failed so it is very important to create the best user experience in your blog. For that you will have to take care of every little thing from speed of your blog to design etc. so that when users come to your blog they don’t leave without creating an engagement. And that engagement is the metric modern search engines like Google are using to rank the blogs.
Use New Forms of Content
Visitors in today’s world are not interested in boring articles that’swhy smart bloggers use different forms of content like videos, memes, images, infographics, lists, gifs etc. Take an example from buzzfeed, they have a totally different style of writing than other news sites on the web and because of that users love buzzfeed than other sites.
Let us know in comments if you have other tips that smart bloggers are using to grow their blogs.
