44 things i wish i knew - codeinwp · 2018-09-14 · build links to boost your rankings i put link...
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44 THINGS I WISH I KNEW
BEFORE STARTING A BLOG
W h i c h Yo u C a n U s e t o G r o w Yo u r s To 2 2 5 , 0 0 0
V i s i t s / M o n t h , L i ke We E v e n t u a l l y D i d
K a r o l K r o l • B i l l W i d m e r • C o l i n Ne w c o m e r
Copyright © 2017 CodeInWP.
All rights reserved. No part(s) of this book may be
reproduced, distributed or transmitted in any form, or by any
means, or stored in a database or retrieval systems without
prior expressed written permission of the author of this book.
Contents
1. Use SEO to drive tens of thousands of visitors every month .......... 1
2. Build links to boost your rankings ................................................. 5
3. Go for quality over quantity .......................................................... 7
4. Use internal linking to help Google (and people) navigate your site ........................................................................... 8
5. Guest blog for more traic, better SEO, and brand awareness.................................................................................... 10
6. Use social media to drive thousands of converting traic ............. 13
7. Create amazing images to increase shares, backlinks, and subscribers ............................................................................ 16
8. Format your blog post to make you look like an expert ............... 18
9. Use content upgrades for 785% more conversions ....................... 20
10. Add call to actions to get the most from your audience ............. 23
11. Use inluencer marketing to 10x your audience ......................... 25
12. Always be networking. Always. .................................................. 26
13. Build an email list from the start, and don’t forget to send them stuf .......................................................................... 29
14. Stick to a theme for better SEO and a stronger follower base ..... 32
15. Use your audience to choose topics ........................................... 34
16. Share your content somewhere besides social media .................. 36
17. Give your “About” page some love ............................................. 40
18. Leverage paid social media advertising for better reach .............. 41
19. Add videos to your blog posts to increase engagement ............... 43
20. Don’t try to please every single person ....................................... 45
21. Stop writing intros like high school research papers ................... 48
22. Don’t wing your content. Make a plan ...................................... 50
23. A little bit of maintenance now saves big problems later ............ 52
24. You can reach new followers by resharing old content................ 54
25. Complicated WordPress themes are always not the best themes ................................................................................ 56
26. Steal your competitors’ keywords, it’s awesome .......................... 58
27. Headlines matter. Don’t miss out on clicks ................................ 60
28. Add a FAQ section before your contact form to save time ......... 62
29. Make a habit of testing important pages on your site (like forms) ................................................................................ 65
30. Ignore the haters…most of the time .......................................... 67
31. Stop staring at your analytics data ............................................. 69
32. Hosting matters! ........................................................................ 71
33. Do regular content audits .......................................................... 74
34. Update your content, regularly .................................................. 78
35. Easy on the number of plugins you have ................................... 80
36. Mind your site’s security, damn it! ............................................. 82
37. Don’t sweat over your Google PageSpeed Insights score ............. 83
38. Use Quora to really ind out what people want to learn ............. 85
39. Do keyword research for each and every new post you publish ............................................................................... 89
40. Get inspiration from seemingly unrelated niches ....................... 91
41. Give your best stuf away for free ............................................... 93
42. Stop obsessing over grammar. Nobody cares .............................. 95
43. Writing, editing, publishing – it’s a 3-step process ..................... 97
44. Set up your blogging/writing tools right .................................... 99
hat’s a wrap! ................................................................................ 104
44 hings I Wish I Knew Before Starting a Blog: he Cheat Sheet ............................................................................ 105
44 THINGS I WISH I KNEW
BEFORE STARTING A BLOG
W h i c h Yo u C a n U s e t o G r o w Yo u r s To 2 2 5 , 0 0 0
V i s i t s / M o n t h , L i ke We E v e n t u a l l y D i d
1
1.
Use SEO to drive tens of thousands of visitors every
month
Bill Widmer
A content marketing and SEO consultant.
Has 2,500,000-words of experience publishing content.
SEO, or search engine optimization, is the art of optimizing
your content in order to rank for certain keywords on search
results like Google.
44 hings I Wish I Knew Before Starting a Blog
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SEO is an umbrella term including keyword research, link
building (the process of acquiring links to your site from other
sites to improve your search rankings; here’s a nice guide on that),
and a whole slew of other actions needed for best performance.
But more on that later in this guide. For now, while it may
sound intimidating, it’s actually a simple process. It works like this:
I. Find keywords with a fairly low ranking
difficulty around your niche.
You can use a tool like Ahrefs, Moz, or SEMrush to see keyword
search volume and difficulty. Here’s how using Ahrefs for
keyword research looks:
II. Create content that’s the best on the web for
the topic and keyword you’ve chosen.
For example, Brian Dean created the definitive guide to keyword
research, and it’s better looking, more in-depth, and more
actionable than any other guide on the web.
44 hings I Wish I Knew Before Starting a Blog
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Look on Google to see what’s ranking in the top 10 results, then
do everything you can to make a better post. That could mean better
images, more in-depth explanations, linking to more resources, or all
of the above together.
III. Spend just as much time promoting that
content as you did creating it. Maybe more.
That doesn’t just mean sharing it on social media, either. You
should do email outreach to influencers, write guest blog posts
(some strategies), and even consider paid promotion like Facebook
ads or Quuu Promote.
Here’s an example of Quuu’s ROI on $10 spent:
44 hings I Wish I Knew Before Starting a Blog
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And that’s for a very small niche – RVing and campervans. It’s
way more impactful with bigger niches, like any kind of business,
marketing, or travel.
Oh, and in case you come across it, I highly recommend white
hat SEO (valid tactics according to Google’s terms of service) over
black hat SEO (tactics that work, but are against Google’s policies
and can penalize your site).
Now, obviously, there’s a lot more to SEO than I can explain
in 250 words. But this gives you the basics, which really aren’t
difficult.
To lean more, Moz wrote an in-depth beginner’s guide to
SEO you should check out.
5
2.
Build links to boost your rankings
I put link building right after SEO because it’s really just an
extension of SEO. Backlinks to your website are one of Google’s
strongest indicators for ranking a site higher.
It’s a lot of work, but isn’t necessarily difficult or complicated.
It’s just a matter of networking, building strong relationships, and
targeting your content to the people who can provide links.
Here’s a quick and dirty overview to link building:
First, you need high-quality content. No one is going to link to
garbage.
Brian Dean actually recommends creating content specifically
for the people you want links from, rather than focusing on
keywords first. It’s worked for me.
44 hings I Wish I Knew Before Starting a Blog
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Once you have quality content, reach out to anyone you linked
to in your article. These people are the most likely to share and
link to it, since they have a stake in it.
(Hint: The better you make people look, the higher the chance
they’ll link to you.)
For example, here’s an email I sent out to all 30+ people who
contributed to the last post on my blog:
If you want to automate this process, you can use an email
outreach tool like MailShake.
This isn’t the only way to get backlinks, though.
There are tons of other backlink building techniques you can
use, like resource page link building, broken link building, and
getting links from people who write roundups, to name a few.
For a more in-depth overview of link building, check out Ryan
Stewart’s strategies for bloggers.
7
3.
Go for quality over quantity
This is a lesson I’ve learned in my study of SEO, and in blogging in
general. Quality always beats quantity when it comes to blog posts.
Pushing out daily or even weekly posts simply isn’t necessary. If
you do things right, once a month is plenty. That gives you the
whole month to spend on promotion.
Google used to give some merit to sites with fresh content.
Then sites started abusing that and pushing out a dozen
crappy articles a day. It worked for a little bit, but then Google laid
down the ban hammer. Now those sites are extinct.
Besides, would you rather have ten OK posts on your blog, or
two really great ones? I’d rather have the two great ones. Especially
because, as those high-quality articles gather backlinks, they have
more authority and increase the value of internal links (which I’ll
talk about next).
If you want to learn how to create truly amazing content, check
out this guide.
8
4.
Use internal linking to help Google (and people) navigate
your site
Internal links are especially important when you’re starting a blog.
They’re simply links from one page on your site to another page on
your site. (Where external linking is a link from a page on your site
to a page on another person’s site.)
Internal linking is important for SEO, but it’s also important to
help your readers get around your blog. It’s also a great way to get
new readers to read old content.
Plus, when you have a blog post that ranks highly in search
engines and got a lot of backlinks, any internal links from that
page to your other pages helps boost those pages’ rankings.
Here’s a visual to help explain that:
44 hings I Wish I Knew Before Starting a Blog
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I hope that helps you understand it. For more info, Andy
Crestodina from Orbit Media Studios wrote an excellent guide to
internal linking. Give that a read if you want to learn more.
10
5.
Guest blog for more traffic, better SEO, and brand
awareness
Guest blogging is a strategy for getting backlinks and traffic to
your site. You’re essentially borrowing (stealing?) another authori-
tative blog’s traffic.
You’ve probably seen or heard of this before. It works like this:
First, you have to find a blog you’d like to write for. (If you’ve
been blogging for awhile, you probably already have some in
mind.) Look for the people who are industry leaders in your niche
or a very related niche.
For example, I’m a content marketer. So I read blogs about
content marketing, like Content Marketing Institute, who has over
100,000 email subscribers and a domain authority (DA) of 85.
44 hings I Wish I Knew Before Starting a Blog
11
(Note: Domain authority is a rank on a scale of 1-100 that
shows how authoritative a site is. It’s based on their link profile,
age, and a ton of other factors. Higher is better because it gives
you a bigger SEO boost.)
I wanted to write a post on their blog to increase my brand
awareness. It’s like a badge of honor, almost – and it would help
me land clients by getting there, since it’s so well-known in my
industry.
To do that, I reached out to my network to see if anyone had a
contact there with an editor. Turns out, they did! That got me an
in. Here’s my post:
44 hings I Wish I Knew Before Starting a Blog
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Speaking of attractive blog posts, we’ll actually talk about
formatting later in this book. But for now…
What if you don’t have a network? What if you’re just starting off?
My good friend Aaron Orendorff talks about that exact
problem during his interview on the Rebel Growth podcast. It’s
worth a listen!
13
6.
Use social media to drive thousands of converting traffic
Social media and blogging are two peas in a pod. You can’t really
have one without the other.
But, there’s nothing more frustrating than spending four
hours writing a blog post, only to see zero engagement. No
comments, no shares, and your one like is from grandma.
That’s because most people do social media all wrong. They
use is as a publishing platform where they just push out their blog
posts. Social media isn’t an RSS feed!
So, how do you use social media the right way?
By networking and being social. (You’ll start to notice that
almost everything in blogging revolves around networking.)
Let me give you a perfect example: I have a Facebook page
for my RV travel blog. Almost everything I post gets less than 5
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likes, no comments, and no shares. But then I implemented this
simple strategy…
I created a high-quality post that involved over 30 other RVers
– many of whom have lots of social media followers themselves.
Then, I wrote a Facebook post and tagged all of them in it.
Look at this engagement:
1,840 people were reached organically, with 11 shares and 21
likes. (Note: The 769 paid results are from a $5 test I spent just to
see how well paid promotion does. I’ll talk about that later.)
But it gets better. I also posted the link in a relevant niche
Facebook group. That post got over 56 likes, 10 comments, and
drove nearly 600 in traffic to our blog!
And all that to a new Facebook page with fewer than 100 likes.
Moral of the story? To get social engagement, engage with
other social people. Tag everyone, be present in Facebook groups
44 hings I Wish I Knew Before Starting a Blog
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and build solid relationships. That way, even when just starting a
blog, you can still get a ton of engagement.
Pro Tip: While you shouldn’t automate everything on social
media (since people will be able to tell), you can use automation
to build a real, engaged following. For example, you can use a tool
like Narrow to interact with Twitter users that are talking about
subjects relevant to the audience you want to attract. Or, use a free
tool like Revive Old Post to get more eyeballs on your archive content.
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7.
Create amazing images to increase shares, backlinks, and
subscribers
Creating high-quality images is not only easy, it’s also affordable
and fast. And it’s a must-have in today’s highly competitive world.
If you look at the top blogs in your industry, do they use a lot of
quality images? I think we both know the answer.
Images make it easier for people to read your content, keep
them on your page longer, and help readers digest the information
you’re giving them.
So how do you create awesome images?
Here are all the tools you need:
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o Canva – A design tool for non-designers. Free, with some
paid icons. Also has a $10/month version with added
features, like instant image resizing.
o Relay That – An amazing image creation tool that creates
images for you! Unlike Canva, you don’t even need to
design it yourself. Get everything you need at the click of a
button.You can get a free version or pay $16/month for the
basic package.
o Unsplash – A directory of free, high-quality stock photos.
o MyStock Photos – Similar to Unsplash, with even more
photos.
o Icon Finder – Get high-quality icons for just a dollar or two.
Pro Tip: Add charts and graphs when relevant. Seeing data
visually helps readers process it quickly, and looks really nice in a
post.
To learn more about designing great images, check out this
guide (on creating images from scratch) or this one (on getting
and then tweaking free images).
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8.
Format your blog post to make you look like an expert
Just like beautiful images increase reader’s time on page and
engagement, so does a well-formatted piece.
Let’s face it: People don’t read everything word-for-word
anymore. The average internet reader today skims. There’s just too
much content and too little time to do anything else.
That’s where formatting comes in. A well-formatted post
makes it easy for your readers to skim (to see if the post is worth
their time), then dive in if they feel it is.
So how do you go about formatting?
Here are some pointers:
o Divide long text with headers and subheaders
44 hings I Wish I Knew Before Starting a Blog
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o Use bulleted and numbered lists to point out key
information
o Bold and italicize key points (but don’t use both at the
same time)
o Add quality images (rule of thumb is to use one every 300
words or so)
o Use short paragraphs (no more than 3 to 5 lines at most –
this helps with skimming and mobile reading)
Check out our full guide to WordPress formatting to learn more.
20
9.
Use content upgrades for 785% more conversions
I’m sure you’ve heard of a lead magnet. It’s basically something
you offer your audience for free in exchange for their email, like an
eBook, checklist, or worksheet.
A content upgrade is like a lead magnet on steroids. They’re
created for one specific blog post and highly related to that post.
For example, Formilla created a blog post titled “25 Customer
Service Scenarios (And How to Handle Them)”.
From this page, they have a content upgrade that allows you to
download the guide as a PDF:
44 hings I Wish I Knew Before Starting a Blog
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This upgrade converts for them at around 10% – much higher
than a typical lead magnet. And all they had to do was download
their post as a PDF and offer it to their readers. Easy peasy.
But, if you really want to see success, you should offer
additional bonus content, like Brian Dean’s checklist offerings:
44 hings I Wish I Knew Before Starting a Blog
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Content upgrades work so well because they’re created to help
someone achieve the exact objective they came to your page to
achieve.
If you’re writing about Facebook ads, a content upgrade on
Facebook ads is way more likely to convert than a lead magnet on
general marketing.
The key with content upgrades is to offer them from day
one when starting a blog. To learn more about offering content
upgrades on your blog, check out this case study on how
Backlinko boosted conversions by 785% in one day.
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10.
Add call to actions to get the most from your audience
Not leveraging call to actions (CTAs) on my blog was a major
mistake.
A CTA is anything you want for your customers to take action on.
It could be subscribing to a newsletter, reading another blog post, or
making a purchase. A content upgrade is an example of a CTA.
Every single one of your posts – and especially when starting a
blog for the first time – should have a CTA of some kind. Whether
it’s as simple as a request for a share or a comment, or as big as
making a purchase, every post should have an outcome.
If your post doesn’t have a CTA, you’re missing out on tons of
potential sales, leads, and traffic generation opportunities.
I’m not saying every post needs to sell something. It just needs
to give your reader a “next step”.
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For example, if this chapter were on the web, I could ask
you: “If you’re enjoying this post so far, would you mind taking a
second to share it with your audience?” That’s me calling you to
take action. Just one click:
Yes, it benefits me by improving my reach. But it also benefits
you by showing off helpful content on your social media channels.
People will see you as someone to go to for good information.
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11.
Use influencer marketing to 10x your audience
Influencer marketing is a hugely under-rated tactic.
I’ve seen influencers achieve incredible results.
For example, RESCUE had natural remedies it wanted to
promote. Their outreach campaign resulted in 133 million social
media impressions, more than 6,000 clicks to the coupon site,
and a 258% increase in their Instagram following.
They’re not alone, either. Hundreds of companies are seeing
similar success. In my post with the 30 full-time RVers, for
example, the influencers in that post drove several hundred
visitors to my site.
Pro Tip: Use an influencer database to find influencers in
almost any niche to help you promote your posts – a great thing to
build as you’re starting a blog.
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12.
Always be networking. Always.
The more your network grows, the easier it becomes to promote
your work, and the more opportunities naturally come your way.
Prime example: My freelance writing career took a massive
upswing this past January. I was able to get into a Slack group
consisting of some of the most well-known marketers and writers
on the web.
My income tripled almost overnight. They gave me
opportunities I never would have dreamed of. Their influence got
me in doors, and they’re marketing expertise almost 10x’d my
ability to promote my posts.
Once that happened, my eyes were open. Networking went
from an afterthought to one of my main priorities. I truly believe
that, with the right network, anything is possible.
Some quick tips for developing your network:
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o Always look for ways you can help people. Share other
bloggers content, comment on their blog posts, follow
them on social media, and send links and people their way.
o Join groups and forums around your interests. I’m in
Facebook groups around content marketing, SEO, and full-
time RVing. They’re interesting, and I always find myself
learning and meeting new people.
o Take online courses. Many of them have private
communities you can become a part of. This opens the
door to plenty of like-minded people. Plus you get to learn
whatever the course teaches.
Here’s a post in one of the groups I’m in that’s taught me a lot
and even landed me two new clients:
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(I found out, by the way, that Google hadn’t indexed the sites
that linked back to me yet, and that’s why I wasn’t getting credit
for them. To get around this, I submitted the URLs that linked to
my post to Google’s URL crawler.)
One last tip: Don’t let relationships fade. Make it a point to
reach out to your new network at least once or twice a month.
Shoot them an email with a cool article, or tag them in something
interesting on social media.
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13.
Build an email list from the start, and don’t forget to send
them stuff
Over time, your email list will become your biggest source of traffic
– and sales – if you treat it right.
Imagine this:
You wake up, excited for the day. You put on a pot of coffee.
While you’re waiting for it to brew, you head into your home office
to check your email.
There’s over $1000 in sales from the email campaign you
sent last night.
You grab the coffee, and while you’re drinking it, write up
another email to be sent out on schedule. Then you go off and do
whatever you want – your work is done for the day.
44 hings I Wish I Knew Before Starting a Blog
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Basically, your life becomes a typical stock-photo scenario. Like
this one:
Some people really do have it that good. An email list makes
that possible. Of course, you’ll still have to write blog posts and
run your business (unless you hire those out), but your work load
can be seriously reduced.
Building an email list should be a priority when starting a blog
and even before you write your first blog post. But if it wasn’t,
that’s OK – make it a priority today.
o Get an email marketing platform like MailChimp, SendinBlue,
or Convert Kit, if you don’t already have one. I use Convert
44 hings I Wish I Knew Before Starting a Blog
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Kit because it’s easy to use and it works. (Editor’s note:
Here’s our own list of good alternatives and more cost-
effective solutions.)
o Add exit-intent and on-scroll popups using a tool
like Sumo. This is where you can offer your content
upgrade or lead magnet.
o Place in-line opt-in forms like Brian Dean’s or Formilla’s.
You can offer your content upgrade, lead magnet, or simply
give users the option to subscribe.
o Use a tool like LeadPages to create strong landing
pages for your offers.
For a more in-depth look at list building, check out these
actionable list building tips.
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14.
Stick to a theme for better SEO and a stronger follower base
One of the biggest mistakes I made early on, and see other bloggers
making, is not sticking to a theme for your posts.
I get it – people are diverse. We all have multiple interests.
You might be a photographer who also loves travel and
marketing. But your blog won’t benefit from talking about all
three things. Here’s why:
o Finding the right readership will be difficult.
How many people do you know that are travelers,
photographers, and marketers? (OK maybe that’s a decent-
sized niche, but you get the point.)
44 hings I Wish I Knew Before Starting a Blog
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o SEO will be more difficult. Google likes sites that are solely
dedicated to a single topic because it knows exactly what
that site is about.
o It will be harder to monetize your blog. Money comes from
direct, targeted traffic. If you’re spreading yourself too thin,
you won’t get the quality traffic you need.
If you really must talk about different things, I recommend
starting a blog that’s totally separate. Unless you can really find a
niche audience and still have very strong posts around each topic,
it’s just not worth it.
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15.
Use your audience to choose topics
Randomly picking topics based on what you think your readers
might like is a lot like playing the lottery. Maybe you win, maybe
you don’t.
But what if you let your audience tell you what they want to
hear about? That’s a guaranteed win.
Here are a few ways you can find out:
o Reach out to them on social media or via email and just ask!
o Send out a survey to your email list, or by using Qualaroo.
o Read the comments people left on your blog or on
competitor’s blogs.
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o Go to forums in your niche and see what people are
asking about.
o Use Bloomberry to find common questions around your topic:
The cool thing about Bloomberry is that once you write an
article answering a common question, you can go to that forum
where they asked and link back to the article. (Just make sure to
add more insight and not just a link, or you’ll get banned from
most places.)
So asking your audience is pretty easy. You can even do the last
three ideas if you’re just starting out and don’t have an audience yet.
36
16.
Share your content somewhere besides social media
Most people usually post their new blog article on social media when
it goes live… but then they don’t share it anywhere else. This is one of
the huge mistakes people make when promoting their posts.
What else can you do? We already talked about email outreach
and working with influencers. But there’s so much more work to
be done!
Here are the best places to share your new blog post:
I. Niche-related forums
You probably saw this one coming after tip #15. Forums are a great
way to get long-term traffic because (if done right) your post will stay
there for a long time and even possibly show up in search results.
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You can find forums by searching on Find a Forum or by
googling inurl:forum + “your_keyword”
But once you find the forum, you need to become a member.
This isn’t just a quick, “pop in and leave a link” strategy. You’ll get
banned pretty quick doing that.
I recommend leaving at least 20 to 30 high-value comments
before any self-promotion. (High-value meaning thought-provok-
ing and helpful, not just “Nice post!”.)
Kristi Hines gives some great tips on forum marketing in her
guide on Hiveage.
II. Quora
Quora is a place for anyone to ask anything. Anyone can go and
leave an answer.
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Search Quora for questions related to posts you’ve written,
write a thoughtful answer and link back to the post with more
details. Easy peasy.
With that particular post, I didn’t even have to answer it
myself! Steve Curtin, an influencer we worked with, answered it
for me. (See how all this stuff is so connected?)
Buffer wrote a super helpful guide to Quora marketing. Check
it out for more details.
III. Social media groups
I briefly mentioned Facebook groups in the section on social
media, but I wanted to talk about them more.
44 hings I Wish I Knew Before Starting a Blog
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Social media groups, like those on Facebook, LinkedIn, and
Google Plus, are an amazing way to drive highly targeted traffic.
The 600 new visitors I got from one post proves that.
They’re easy enough to find. Just search on Facebook or
LinkedIn and click on “Groups”. For Google Plus, go to the
“Communities” tab and search there. Join any relevant ones.
Like forums, don’t just spam your stuff. Become a loved
member of the community. Engage with the people and share
other people’s stuff. Once the group members know your face and
like you, then you can share your own posts. And don’t forget to
respond to their comments!
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17.
Give your “About” page some love
If you don’t have an about page, you’re doing it wrong. Building one
really is a must when starting a blog.
In the blogging world, people follow people who they know,
like, and trust. How can you know, like, and trust someone who
doesn’t show their face or have a compelling story?
When someone looks at your about page, what do you want
them to see? A crappy page put together as an afterthought, or one
built to draw users into your personal or brand story?
Check out these 12 about page examples for inspiration.
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18.
Leverage paid social media advertising for better reach
Paid ads aren’t just for selling things. You can use them to promote
your blog posts, too!
In fact, I recently promoted a post with affiliate links in a $5
Facebook ad test campaign. (The one I mentioned in section 6.) It
resulted in 740 people reached and 47 link clicks.
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The resulting clicks ended up generating $11.47 in revenue. So
all-in-all a $6.47 profit. Not bad, and it’s scalable.
But what if you have a blog post that isn’t monetized with
affiliate links?
I’d actually still consider spending some money to promote
these, with one caveat: You need a way to monetize that traffic.
It’s possible to make a lot of money blogging. In his guide to
starting a blog, Neil Patel claims to make over $380,000 just from
his blog!
The simplest way to monetize your traffic is to lead the ads
to a blog post with a really strong content upgrade. That upgrade
will get them on our email list, at which point you can put them
through an onboarding campaign and eventually sell them on
your affiliate links or products.
In the end, using paid ads should have some kind of expected
ROI, whether that’s quick gains like my affiliate linked article or
long-term gains like the email onboarding process.
If you’re ready to experiment with paid ads, here are a few guides:
o Facebook ads
o Instagram ads
o Twitter ads
o Pinterest ads
o LinkedIn ads
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19.
Add videos to your blog posts to increase engagement
One of the most important metrics for SEO is your visitors’ time on
page. One of the easiest ways to increase time on page is by adding
video content.
Besides, not as many people are using videos on their blog
posts. It’s a great way to stand out from the crowd and increase
engagement.
The best part?
You don’t have to be a videographer genius or spend a
ton of money on fancy equipment to get started. In fact, your
smartphone is more than enough.
Well, getting a tripod and an external mic can help boost the
quality. But they’re not necessary.
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Note that you don’t need an expensive camera for this when
you’re just starting a blog for the first time. While it won’t be quite
as high-quality as Pond5’s video, most smartphones can shoot HD
video now that will more than suffice.
But what if you’re camera shy? That’s OK – you can create
animated videos so you never have to appear on screen.
Finally, the last option is to hire someone to create a video for
you. You can find video creators on Fiverr or People Per Hour.
Just be sure to check out people’s reviews before you hire them.
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20.
Don’t try to please every single person
Colin Newcomer
Freelance writer.
Helps clients grow their web visibility by
writing primarily about digital marketing,
WordPress, and B2B topics.
If you’re starting a blog, you probably want people to actually…read
your blog. I think that’s a safe assumption, right?
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That pull to be “liked” can cause you to try to make your
blog appeal to as many different people as possible. And while
that can work, it usually doesn’t. By trying to appeal to everybody,
you really just end up appealing to nobody (OK, nobody is a bit
hyperbolic…but you get the point).
I’m not talking about choosing a tiny niche, but more creating
a specific brand and voice for your blog.
Are swear words part of your personality? Then swear on your
blog! Sure, you might drive some people away, but you don’t have
to please every single person. Everyone who isn’t driven away will like
you even more.
Don’t believe me? Look at Mark Manson’s introduction on his
website:
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Can you imagine if Mark tried to be some straight-laced
personal help blogger? He never would’ve grown to where he is
(which is a New York Times Best Selling Author, if you’re not familiar).
Don’t try to please every single person – just try to
make a group of people really happy.
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21.
Stop writing intros like high school research papers
If I had to pick one piece of content that’s had the greatest impact
on my blogging, it’s this one from Grow and Convert:
Content Marketers: Stop Writing Blog Intros Like A
High School Research Paper
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It had such an impact on me because I immediately knew that
I was guilty. I was bringing my high school English repertoire to
my blog, and that wasn’t good.
Now, I try to speak with readers, not at them. If you want
people to engage with your blog, you should do the same.
I won’t rehash what Devesh said because he already laid it all
out perfectly. Just read his post and try to start applying the ideas
to your writing.
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22.
Don’t wing your content. Make a plan
When you’re starting a blog, you have a whole world of topic ideas
available to you. As a result, it’s easy to fly by the seat of your
pants and still do just fine. But as your blog ages, two things start
happening:
o It becomes harder and harder to come up with unique
content ideas.
o You develop more refined promotion tactics for your blog
posts that actually require some planning.
When that starts happening, it helps to have a plan. In this
case, that’s an editorial calendar.
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Your editorial calendar is basically your entire content plan,
from topic ideation all the way through to promotion.
It helps ensure that you post consistently, know what you’re
going to write about, and have proper time to promote your
content.
For a free solution that’s perfect when just starting a
blog, you can use Trello or the Editorial Calendar plugin.
Otherwise, CoSchedule is one of the most popular editorial
calendar services.
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23.
A little bit of maintenance now saves big problems later
Look: No one likes doing maintenance. Maintenance itself doesn’t
build your blog’s content, audience, or revenue. So what’s the point?
Well, while it might not do any of those things, maintenance
prevents everything you built from crashing down around you…
I’m talking about things like:
o Updating your software and plugins
o Backing up your site (and actually testing to make sure
those backups work)
o Optimizing your database
o Checking for broken links
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It’s tedious but crucial. Just recently, hundreds of thousands
of WordPress sites were hacked as a result of a vulnerability
that was actually patched before it was discovered by hackers.
But because hundreds of thousands of site owners hadn’t updated
their core WordPress software – they got hacked nonetheless.
A little of routine maintenance now will prevent big problems
from happening later.
If you don’t want to do this yourself, there are plenty
of WordPress maintenance companies who will handle things for
you…for a fee.
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24.
You can reach new followers by resharing old content
We already talked about sharing your content on social media. But
here’s the thing:
As your blog grows, you’re going to pick up new social media
followers. So even if you shared a post when you published it, those
new followers will never have had a chance to see that piece of
content simply because they didn’t follow you when you posted about it.
Tomasz Tunguz found that recirculating old content still
garnered significant engagement numbers. While the numbers
were never as large as when first shared, the reshared content still
got enough interaction to make it worthwhile:
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Recirculation Attempt: Average number of retweets:
1 4.9
2 3.7
3 2.7
It’s not a difficult idea to grasp…but it is one that’s easy to
forget about. Thankfully, you can put this whole process on
autopilot with Revive Old Post (one of our tools).
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25.
Complicated WordPress themes are always not the best themes
I might catch some flak for this one. But I’m not taking a shot at the
vast majority of WordPress developers – I’m just gunning for some
of the bloated monstrosities you’ll occasionally find on ThemeForest.
If you go for a theme that tries to handle everything and the
kitchen sink, you may just end up slowing down your site with
convoluted code and/or heaps of extraneous requests. Both those
things mean worse performance and more chances for things to
break.
All I’m saying is this:
Don’t pick a WordPress theme just because it looks pretty or
has a feature list longer than Infinite Jest.
When starting a blog, try to find something that’s, at a
minimum:
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o From a reputable theme developer
o Well-rated (if public ratings available)
o Regularly updated
If you want some more specific advice, we have posts on how
to choose a WordPress theme as well as whether you should go
with a free or premium theme.
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26.
Steal your competitors’ keywords, it’s awesome
We’ve already talked about primary keyword research. But some-
times I’m feeling lazy and would rather have someone do the work
for me.
That’s when I go to my competitors and…steal the keywords
they’re ranking for.
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There’s nothing malicious about it – just good old fashioned
research and “doing it better”. All I do is go to my SEO tool, plug
in my competitor’s URL, and see what they’re ranking for.
If I find a juicy keyword that I’m interested in, I check out
their post and write one that’s better.
This is one of my favorite strategies because it helps you both
come up with topics and keywords in one fell swoop.
Additionally, because you already know that your competitor is
ranking, you also know that Google is willing to rank blogs highly
for that keyword (which is especially important if you’re blogging
in a niche with lots of e-commerce sites).
I personally use Serpstat for my research, but Ahrefs and
SEMrush are two other great options.
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27.
Headlines matter. Don’t miss out on clicks
When starting a blog, headlines matter for two reasons. They:
o Make your readers click on your site in organic search
results.
o Grab your readers’ attention to make them actually read the
rest of your post.
It’s a common refrain that 8 out of 10 people read your
headline but not your copy…but that stat is from 50 years ago
when we had newspapers, not blogs and eye-tracking studies.
Still, a simple perusal of your bounce rate and average time on
site will provide proof enough that most people aren’t making it
past your headlines.
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Copyblogger has a great resource on how to write headlines
that work. And you can also get some more data-focused
insights like:
o People dig numbers in headlines (hey – look at this book!)
o Some words get more Tweets than others
o Using more verbs than nouns is usually a winning combo
You can even use a plugin like Title Experiments to test
multiple headlines against one another and find out which
performs the best.
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28.
Add a FAQ section before your contact form to save time
When first starting a blog, you put up a contact form because you
think it’s something you need, even if you’re not expecting anyone
to use it.
Then, as you start to get a little bit of traffic, someone actually
uses your form and sends you a message. Hallelujah! A human
person cares about your content enough to use your contact form!
Then your blog keeps growing and suddenly you find yourself
inundated with a deluge of messages, many of which ask the same
thing.
Suddenly, you’re spending more time replying to emails than
you are blogging. And that’s not a good recipe for continued success.
But guess what? You can at least eliminate many of the
most redundant emails that you get by adding a FAQ (or
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something similar) above your “Contact” page. For example,
check out how Henrik at The Positivity Blog has two quick FAQ
questions above his contact form:
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If your contact form plugin allows it, you can also use
conditional fields to achieve much the same effect by asking users
what their email is about before they’re allowed to send it.
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29.
Make a habit of testing important pages on your site
(like forms)
I still feel like banging my head against the wall over this mistake
that I made…
I switched contact form plugins on my site and, soon after,
started noticing a drop in messages (this was my portfolio site – so
the messages were important). Naturally, my first instinct was to
check for a problem with my contact form plugin.
But after sending test message after test message, I couldn’t
find a single thing wrong with my form plugin. I guess people just
didn’t like me as much anymore…
Eh, not quite. See – it turns out that I wasn’t testing my
forms the right away. There was a problem, but it was a caching
issue. Because I tested my form plugin via my admin account
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(which was excluded from seeing cached pages), I never ran into
the issue in my testing.
Don’t make my mistake. If you have any important pages on
your site – make sure to test them as your end users will see them.
That is, at least use incognito mode.
Wasting your effort because of non-working pages sucks…but a
little bit of testing can prevent that from happening.
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30.
Ignore the haters… most of the time
If there’s one thing all bloggers have in common – no matter if
you’re just starting a blog for the first time or not – it’s this:
Angry comments.
You could write a blog exclusively about cute puppies and I can
almost guarantee you’ll still get angry comments from people who:
o Think you forgot about the cutest puppy ever.
o Don’t think one of the puppies you posted is cute.
As YouTube demonstrates, though, angry comments are just a
fact of putting yourself out there on the Internet.
You will get them, and they will sting…if you let them.
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You need to develop thick skin. Most of the time, these
comments are just angry people hiding behind anonymity.
Occasionally, you will get a comment with a legitimate gripe that
you should address. But the vast majority of the time? Angry
comments go in one ear and out the other.
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31.
Stop staring at your analytics data
Staring at analytics is almost as addicting as your Facebook news
feed. And when you start to see your numbers consistently grow, it
gets even be more addicting.
But here’s the thing:
Unless you’re running a huge ad campaign that requires
real-time monitoring, these analytics don’t matter at all in your
day-to-day life.
Yes – looking at analytics data over time is helpful. But do you
really need to know if you had 100 or 200 visitors today? Does it
matter whether you earned $10 or $12 via AdSense today? Does
any of that data actually do anything for you in the moment?
Years of experience have taught me that it doesn’t.
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I encourage you to set strict limits to avoid wasting time. You
really do have a lot more important things to do when starting
a blog. Say something like, “I will only check my analytics on
Monday morning.” That’s still frequent enough to see how your
site and content is performing, but not overly frequent so as to
become a time-suck.
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32.
Hosting matters!
Karol K
Editor at CodeinWP. Blogger, author of “WordPress Complete”.
Hosting is something that we take very seriously here at CodeinWP.
We’ve done our hosting surveys, our hosting reviews (for
multiple different types of scenarios), and everything in between,
it seems.
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But I, personally, wasn’t all too worried about hosting or
anything server-related for the better part of my blogging journey
and especially not when I was starting a blog for the first time.
This changed dramatically one beautiful day when I discovered
that there had been a whole spam forum running on my server …
and for who knows how long at that point.
The way I discovered was also kind of funny. I got an
automated email instructing me to “update my vBulletin forum.” I
didn’t have a forum.
So as it turned out, the email was sent to a random email
address sitting on my main domain name – newinternetorder.
com. And since I had a catch-all feature set there for email, it got
redirected to my actual email. I started looking around, and lo and
behold, I found a forum:
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Just sitting there, fully indexed by Google, and full of outbound
links pointing to other websites using fun anchor texts like “louis
vuitton bags” or whatnot.
Anyways. Long story short; this was the day I learned the value
of reliable and high quality hosting. This sort of infection happens
at server level. It’s not a WordPress issue or anything.
Please, do yourself a favor. Work only with reputable hosting
companies from day one when starting a blog. It’s not such a
huge expense anyway, you can get something cool for as low
as $5 a month. SiteGround is good. InMotion as well. Digital
Ocean if you’re server-savvy. Or WP Engine if you want to spend
some more. We’ve looked through all these companies in our
research piece.
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33.
Do regular content audits
As much as I would love for this not to be the case, not everything
we publish remains evergreen indefinitely. Regardless of your niche,
there are always new developments, new ideas, new things to write
about, and also new things that relate back to your older content.
The simple fact is that no one can predict the future. So even
if you think that the piece you’ve written will remain timeless due
to the topic matter it touches on, this is only a wish and you can
never be certain.
For that reason, doing regular content audits is a great idea,
and especially if you’ve had your blog online for more than 12
months.
The goal of a content audit is simple: check which of your
posts are still relevant, which need updating, which can be
removed entirely, which can be consolidated.
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This is something that Pat Flynn talked about in one of his
podcast episodes featuring Todd Tresidder. In it, Todd actually
shared how deleting a third of his content tripled his traffic,
believe it or not.
Here’s the in-the-nutshell version if you don’t have the time to
listen to the entire episode + some tips of my own:
Start by compiling a spreadsheet featuring all your posts
(URLs are enough). Divide that spreadsheet into three sections:
o “Keep and improve” – posts that are good on their own and
still relevant; might need some work to bring them up to
date or expand (new data, new insights); in other words,
we’re making them even better than they are now.
o “Consolidate” – smaller posts that can be combined into a
bigger post; this makes the resulting resource much more
in-depth and complete.
o “Delete” – posts that are completely irrelevant at this point in
time and can be deleted entirely (think old sponsored posts,
old news posts, reviews or how-tos relating to things that are
no longer around, accidental duplicate content, etc.)
Once you have those, you can begin working on them, in this
order: start by deleting content, then consolidating, then improving.
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Some things that you can do when going through the
individual pieces of content:
o Set up 301 redirects when consolidating posts into bigger
resources.
o Set up 410 status codes for content permanently deleted.
o Fix internal links when working on posts that you’ve
decided to leave online. Make sure that they link to your
newer content as well. (Naturally, internal links from old
posts don’t point to your new content since those were not
around when you created the links.)
o Fix the formatting on your old content – use H1, H2, bullet
points.
o Update images on your best posts – make them more
sharable on social and up-to-date with the current
requirements for social media images. You can use any of
these tools.
o Fix Yoast SEO metrics.
o Remove dead links.
o Fix any in-line HTML issues.
o Add content upgrades where relevant.
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o Update your tags and/or categories to make the whole site
more consistent.
o Republish old content if it makes sense. Just change the
publication date to now.
o Delete comments when you republish.
Doing an audit like this and reviving your past content is only
proof that you care about what people see when they come to your
website and begin consuming a random piece of your content. It’s
basically a signal to Google that everything on your site deserves to
rank since it’s all kept up to date.
How often to do the full audit? Probably once a year. But
there’s something you should be doing more often:
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34.
Update your content, regularly
I’ve mentioned this briefly above, but it deserves its own spot on the
list, so here goes.
It basically comes down to this:
Your content isn’t evergreen unless you put in a conscious
effort to keep it that way.
Let me show you something; this is one of our list posts on our
blog – featuring some cool WordPress themes. We have probably
revised this post over 100 times over a span of 3 years.
This is an extreme example. We don’t update all of our content
this often. But still, the message remains:
Your content absolutely deserves to be updated on a regular
basis. There’s always new information popping up, new data, new
techniques, methods, products, or whatever else it is that you write
about. Your audience wants to read about what’s new. Google
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wants to see you write about it too. Literally, the world wants
you to keep your content up to date. If you don’t … goodbye your
Google rankings.
Updating your old posts is one of those techniques that
basically every blogger with experience speaks highly of. Neil Patel,
for instance, says that bringing his old posts back to life resulted
in 51% more traffic over a three-month period.
Here’s what you can do specifically:
1. Go to your Google Analytics, and create a list of your top 10
most visited posts.
2. Make an effort to update those once every month.
3. Go back and expand the list to top 30-50.
4. Make an effort to update those every 3-5 months.
5. Create a spreadsheet to make that more manageable, or a
Google Cal reminder.
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35.
Easy on the number of plugins you have
Chances are that you really do not need all those 30 plugins currently
running on your site and especially not when you’re starting a blog.
And I know it’s easy to get carried away and lose yourself in yet
another list of “Top 10 WordPress plugins for X,” but that’s really
not the way to live your WordPress life, so to speak.
First off, not every little feature you want requires a plugin.
Many can be done with simple WordPress hacks or other quick
modifications. On top of that, other things you actually don’t need
at all – they’re just one more “shiny object” that looks cool but
isn’t actually all that useful.
Also, not all plugins work together that well. Sometimes you’ll
stumble upon things interfering with each other, thus making
your site crash (worst case scenario) or your performance drop
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significantly (best case). And don’t even get me started on having
multiple plugins trying to do the exact same thing (installing W3
Total Cache on top of WP Super Cache, for instance).
Instead, focus on just the essentials, and get just one plugin
per purpose. Usually:
o SEO,
o backups,
o caching,
o social media,
o contact forms,
o Jetpack … possibly.
Which brings me to the next point that’s truly crucial when
starting a blog:
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36.
Mind your site’s security, damn it!
Okay, so some things are outside of your control. If your server
crashes, there’s not much you can do about this, but there are also
multiple other things that you indeed can control.
First off, as Colin said above, keep your site updated. If you
don’t, you risk having it hacked via some old vulnerability.
Secondly, get yourself a security plugin/solution and pay
attention to the notifications it’s sending you.
Really, this one is a no-brainer, there’s no need for me to keep
talking about this. You absolutely need this!
Also consider things like two-factor authentication and other
simple fixes that will make your site ultra-secure.
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37.
Don’t sweat over your Google PageSpeed Insights score
You know why you shouldn’t sweat over this? Because most of the
time you can’t even improve it by much anyway.
A while ago, we did a fun experiment. We wanted to
check what sort of impact you can have on your PageSpeed
Insights score once you get your initial grade. So we got two
hosting setups, did the testing, and then optimized the lower-
performing one via a couple of standard methods.
The results were kind of surprising (or not surprising at all,
depending on how you look at it). It turns out that having your
site on a fast host is much more important than doing any other
optimizations.
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Long story short, the faster hosting setup still got a better grade
right out the gate than the slower hosting even after doing a range
of optimizations to it. Here’s the complete experiment.
In the end, this all comes down to, again, getting a good
hosting setup. This is always the easiest and best way to improve
your PageSpeed Insights score when starting a blog.
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38.
Use Quora to really find out what people want to learn
Bill already mentioned Quora in a previous section, but I’m listing
it for whole another reason. This is not about finding relevant Quora
threads, submitting your answer, and then plugging your content.
This is about something else:
Quora is one of the few places on the web where you can go
to find out what people truly want to learn about. Basically, every
question is an opportunity for you to write a completely new post
on your blog – a really awesome helper when starting a blog.
All it takes is going to Quora, following a handful of topics that
relate to your blog niche, and paying attention to the questions
that people ask.
Here’s what you achieve when you do that:
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o First, you know that the issue indeed is important to at
least one real, breathing person – in other words, you have
confirmation that a given problem doesn’t exist only in
your mind.
o You see the exact wording the person used to ask the
question – you can use that as your headline, even, or
part of it. Also, this gives you an indication of the type of
keywords that might be related to the problem.
o You have a great place to then promote that post once
done. You can come back to Quora, answer the question
in a simple and quick way, and then add a link for whoever
wants to learn more.
This is the exact thing we did with at least a handful of posts
on our website:
Does Avada have more features than Divi?
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Shopify versus WordPress, what is the comparison between each one?
What is the best WP plugin for a club member directory?
Key points:
o When building a post like that, make sure that you get to
the core of your answer right away. Like Colin said, forget
your intro writing like high school research papers.
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o If you need to write an intro of some kind to not alienate
your regular readers then at least use document anchors
when linking to the post from Quora. (E.g. link to your post
as yoursite.com/some-post/#the-relevant-
part.) That way, whoever’s coming from Quora can skip
what’s not important from their point of view.
o Use images to make your Quora answer stand out from all
the other ones. Neat trick. Some examples of mine above.
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39.
Do keyword research for each and every new post you
publish
We’ve mentioned keyword research here already, but I wanted to
open this can of worms for one more minute just to make sure that
we’re all on the same page. There’s one main thing that I wanted to
reiterate here:
The key to real, proper keyword research is doing it over and
over again for every new post you publish.
Sounds like a lot of work, I know, sorry about that, but there’s
just no other way to do content publishing in the web landscape
of today when starting a blog. There’s just too much great content
out there already. Too much content that’s already quite optimized.
In an environment like that, you can’t just rely on your main
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keyword for the entire site and then keep creating your content
around “whatever” loosely connected topic.
This also goes back to doing content audits. When going
through your past content and auditing it, ask yourself, “What
keyword is this post even targeting? Is it optimized enough?”
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40.
Get inspiration from seemingly unrelated niches
Coming up with good blog post ideas can be tough at times. But
keeping yourself inspired by consuming content only from within
your niche can be a double-edged sword.
o On the one hand, it keeps you informed and with your
finger on the pulse.
o But on the other, it doesn’t let you open up to new ideas
and perhaps try out new things that haven’t been tried
before.
A popular author and podcaster, James Altucher says that idea
sex is one of the most powerful things that a creative person can
experience (paraphrasing). In other words, the only way to have
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good ideas is by having lots of ideas. And once those ideas start
having sex with each other this is when great things/products/
articles are born.
That’s why we need to expand. Read a lot. Watch a lot of
videos. Do a lot of stuff. Allow yourself to consume content
outside of your niche. This is perhaps the ultimate path to follow
when starting a blog.
Tim Ferriss – a guy you might have heard of – also sees
value in allowing himself some freedom in this regard. One of
his things, for instance, is reading fiction before bed. He’s not a
fiction writer. It would have seem that reading fiction should be
doing nothing for him. But still:
Do not read non-fiction prior to bed, which encourages projection into
the future and preoccupation/planning. Read fiction that engages the
imagination and demands present-state attention.
— Tim Ferriss
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41.
Give your best stuff away for free
This is about paid vs free content. It’s a common mistake to think
that your best content should be reserved for your paid customers.
Nope!
Think of it this way, when you turn on the radio (if you haven’t
moved to Spotify or podcasts completely yet, that is) what do you
hear? Do you hear a random song from an artist’s album?
No! You’re hearing their absolute no.1 hit! And you’re getting it
for free. Why? Because this is how they get you to buy the album
or the concert ticket.
Call it the “radio principle” if you want.
The thing is this:
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Free, awesome stuff gets people through the door. When they
come, they start searching for more. They begin thinking, “damn,
this free resource is better than what other people charge for!”
That’s a win.
This is where you get to sell one-on-one consultation,
premium multi-part courses, speaking appearances, real estate …
you get the idea.
In a nutshell: Starting a blog? Give your best stuff away for
free. It has a huge ROI!
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42.
Stop obsessing over grammar. Nobody cares
(Except this one person who will point it out in the comments.
Don’t worry about him. He’s a jerk anyway.)
The core of the information is what truly matters. And I know
it sounds corny, but it’s just how things are.
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No one – and I really mean no one – will ever read your
blog because your grammar is spot on. If “good grammar” is
the only thing you have going for you, you’ve lost.
In other words, a badly written, insightful post is always going
to be better than a nicely written, sexless press release.
Ideas! Stories! Entertainment value! Raw information! Invest
in your contentmuscle first, and only then focus on your grammar
muscle.
However, with that being said:
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43.
Writing, editing, publishing – it’s a 3-step process
Even though grammar isn’t something you should be obsessing
over, getting a quality post out the door and into the wild is still a
process that needs to be thought through.
My favorite approach is to treat it as a 3-step thing: writing,
editing, publishing.
Why like that?
It’s simple, as you’re writing, it’s easy and tempting to edit on
the fly – as in, fix your sentences/paragraphs as you write them.
It seems natural, it’s what we did when writing papers for school.
But it’s not the most effective.
The problem with editing as your write is that it stops the flow of
ideas, disrupts your creative thinking and makes storytelling harder.
The correct way of writing – I dare use the word “correct” – is
to write first, edit later.
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The goal when creating the first draft is to get as many words
as possible onto a piece of paper (or digital paper) and not worry
about how it all looks. I really mean that you should write down
everything that you can think of that relates to the topic.
The important thing here is to not stop yourself and try to fix
anything. Not even typos. Your goal is to write. To be creative.
Then, once you have the whole draft written, this is when
editing can take place. This is when you can go back to your draft
and start fixing it.
And I do realize that this separation is something incredibly
difficult to keep up with. I too catch myself editing this or that as I
write, but the key is to notice this and try snapping yourself out of it.
Lastly, there’s publishing, which is kind of its own thing
nowadays since most of what we write gets published online by us
(and isn’t sent to a third-party newspaper or something).
Blogs are unique in the way they work. I mean, apart from the
body of your article, you also need to prepare the headline, format
the post, add some images, set your tags/categories, add some
“click to tweets” maybe, and do a myriad of other things – all the
things that starting a blog involves. This is all in the “publishing”
bucket. Do this last. Work on making your post look great
immediately before you hit the publish button.
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44.
Set up your blogging/writing tools right
So depending on how you go about starting a blog and creating your
content, you might find certain tools very helpful in your day to day.
Let’s just go through this shortlist one by one:
I. Please, get yourself a good keyboard
Hold on! Please don’t skip reading this one! It’s important.
A keyboard is perhaps the most uznderrated piece of
equipment that we interact with on a regular basis. Most of our
interaction with a computer happens via a keyboard, right?
Yet, we rarely switch keyboards, and don’t usually track
what’s been going on in the keyboard market. We just get
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whatever’s available or whatever our computer came with. But
that’s a mistake.
Keyboards are vastly different, and there isn’t one keyboard to
rule them all. This all comes down to your personal preference,
your skill as a typist, and your general comfort depending on your
position. That’s why you need to experiment with different setups
to find the one that’s a perfect fit.
Some keyboards have low travel keys, others high travel. There
are mechanical keyboards. There are membrane keys. There’s
whatever MacBooks have these days. Etc. But the fact to the matter
is that you never know which of them is going to be better for you
until you try them first hand.
So go to your local store and experiment. Just hang around, fire
up a notepad tool, start typing, see how it feels. Getting the right
keyboard can transform you into a master typist overnight – at
least what it did for me.
II. Try out blogging apps
Doing your work all within WordPress’ interface is all fine,
especially in the distraction free mode.
But when starting a blog, you might find yourself even more
productive in some dedicated blogging apps.
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For instance, my two favorite ones are iA Writer and Bear.
o iA Writer is probably the best writing app for Mac (albeit
just my opinion).
o Bear is a nicely designed note-taking app for Mac that also
doubles as a great text editor. And has a better integration
with the MacBook Pro touch bar than iA does.
Both apps support markdown, which is a much quicker way to
write anything.
Apart from that, if you have more devices, you can synchronize
your content across all of them.
Some other options:
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o WordPress desktop app – Calypso. This one is available for
Windows, Mac and Linux. It also gives you access to some
other parts of the wp-admin.
o Ulysses for Mac. Rather expensive writing app, but it has a
lot of die-hard fans that absolutely love it.
o Google Docs. This one sounds obvious, but with the
newest tools, you can now integrate a Google doc with your
WordPress site directly, which means that you can basically
export any doc straight to your blog. More on this here.
III. Experiment with helper apps
Here’s a quick run-down through apps that make my work a lot
quicker:
o Lightshot – the ultimate screenshot tool.
o Alfred – Mac productivity app, think of it as Spotlight
search on steroids.
o aText – text expander app for Mac. “aText accelerates
your typing by replacing abbreviations with frequently used
phrases you define.” For example, I tend to use the word
“WordPress” a lot, so instead of having to write it by
hand every single time, I’ve set a macro that allows me
to just write WPP, and aText will right away expand it
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to WordPress. I have loads of other ones like this set up
(for common typos I make, complicated words, etc.).
o WorkFlowy – best tool for creating article outlines.
o BetterTouchTool – your Mac touchpad and touch bar on
steroids. I use it for custom gestures, and also to get better
shortcut icons (among other things).
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That’s a wrap!
This book has been a lot! In fact, you’ve just read through 11,000
words of advice on starting a blog. Thanks for still being here!
In the end, running a blog is one of those things that seems
simple in itself, but the gap between just doing it and doing
it to its fullest potential is actually huge. There’s just so many
moving parts! There’s WordPress itself, writing content, editing,
formatting, hosting, SEO, link building, social media, email lists,
networking, and on and on and on.
I hope this list has been insightful, and that it’s going to help
you avoid some of the early mistakes that most bloggers make.
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44 Things I Wish I Knew Before I Started Blogging -
The Cheat Sheet
On Traffic and SEO
1 Begin with SEO in mind; Use a tool like Ahrefs to do keyword research.
2 Use a tool like MailShake to automatically send outreach emails and followups and build links to your content.
4 Add lots of internal links to your most important pages that you want to rank in search.
5 Write guest posts for top blogs in your niche.
26 Use your competitors’ rankings as easy sources for juicy keywords.
31 Limit how much time you spend looking at analytics so that you don’t waste valuable time.
39 Do keyword research for each and every new post you publish.
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On Promotion
6 When you share posts on social media, tag anyone you linked to or involved. Even tag your followers.
9 Include content upgrades, such as a cheat sheet, checklist, or download (like this very sheet) to get 785% more subscribers.
11 Partner with influencers using a tool like influence.co to spread the word of your posts.
12 Focus on your network by joining relevant Facebook or Slack groups, then help them so they’ll help you.
16 Share your content in forums, groups, and on Quora to help with promotion.
18 Don’t be afraid to spend a little on PPC to promote your posts.
24 Reshare old content on social media to reach new and existing followers.
41 Give your best stuff away for free – just like famous artists do on the radio.
On Building a Community and Keeping Readers Happy
13 Build an email list from the start; Use a tool like MailChimp, ConvertKit, or SendinBlue.
28 Add a FAQ or other instructions to cut down on repetitive emails via your contact form.
30 Don’t be put off if you get negative comments on your content - it happens to literally everyone.
33 Do regular content audits to make sure that your website offers only on-point advice and no filler content at all.
34 Update your content regularly - this benefits not only your regular readers but also people coming from Google.
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On Publishing Content
3 Go for quality over quantity - publish just great content.
7 Use a tool like Canva to create high-quality, relevant images for your blog posts.
10 Add call-to-actions to all of your posts, such as a share button, a link to another article, making a purchase, or leaving a comment.
17 Make your about page tell a strong story to increase trust with your readers.
19 Videos are taking over the internet; leverage them!
22 Create an editorial calendar and plan your content out in advance.
On Writing and Creating a Voice
8 Use great formatting to look professional and trustworthy (See: https: //www.codeinwp.com/blog/format-wordpress-blog-posts/)
14 Focus all your articles around the major theme you want to rank for/be known for. Don’t deviate too much from that theme.
15 Ask your audience what they want to learn about, then write about their answers.
20 Focus more on creating an actual brand and voice than trying to please every person in the universe.
21 Write intros that connect with regular people, not high school English professors.
27 Your headline is what convinces readers to look at your post - make it count.
38 Use Quora to really find out what people want to read and learn about.
40 Get inspiration from seemingly unrelated niches - read fiction, keep a journal, explore the world.
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42 Stop obsessing over grammar. Nobody cares.
43 Writing, editing, publishing – it’s a 3-step process. Don’t do them all at the same time.
44 Get a good keyboard -> Try out blogging apps -> Experiment with helper apps.
On Website Health and Maintenance
23 Stay on top of regular WordPress maintenance to keep your site secure and running well.
25 Don’t assume that more features means a better WordPress theme and always choose themes from reputable developers.
29 Manually test important pages on your site regularly to make sure forms and payment pages are functioning properly.
32 Make sure that your website is hosted with a trusted company to avoid trouble further down the road.
35 Go easy on the number of plugins you have - if possible, focus only on getting something for: SEO, backups, caching, social media,
contact forms.
36 Keep your site safe with one of the popular security plugins; options: Wordfence, Sucuri, iThemes Security.
37 Don’t sweat over your Google PageSpeed Insights score - if you really want to improve it, get a faster host.