Blogging has provided a lot of opportunities for people to share their experiences, knowledge, and expertise this day. It has given people the opportunity to express themselves and to even earn money while doing it.
There are more than 152 million blogs on
the internet according to visual.ly, and with this more are still springing up
every day.
Many people are going into
blogging but without knowing the rules first, they think blogging is all rosy
because they’ve seen a couple of successful bloggers sharing their grass to
grace stories, in fact, they don’t know the rules that apply.
I want to address this in
this article, so in this guide, you’ll see 12 rules about blogging that newbie
bloggers should know.
10
rules about blogging
1. Teach yourself SEO
SEO is simply a series of
practices you perform on your blog to make it easily visible to search engines
so you can rank high on them and receive good traffic. The first blogging rule
a blogger should follow is to know what SEO entails and how to use it on his blog.
To succeed in blogging you
need to be found on search engines, for this to happen you need the knowledge
of SEO. There are a lot of resources available online and you can find one on
this blog on the basics of SEO, this will be very helpful to you if truly you
want to succeed in the long run.
Having the knowledge of SEO
will save you a lot of time you would have wasted blogging without knowing what
SEO is. You don’t have to know everything about SEO before going into blogging,
you could even start your blog and learn SEO in the process. Therefore the
first rule about blogging is to teach your self SEO.
2. Understand the niche you are into
The second blogging rule is
to make sure you understand what you are getting to. Have knowledge of the
niche you want to blog about and don’t go into a niche you have no freaking
idea about, it never ends well.
This is one of the reasons
most people fail in blogging, they get into a niche they don’t understand and
after two or three posts, then they run out of ideas and don’t know what next
to post.
To avoid this type of scenario, you ought to
have least 60% knowledge of the niche you want to blog, along the way you’ll
get to know more about the niche and update your knowledge. If you are an
expert in the niche, it's even better because you can provide helpful
information to your readers.
Recommended: 11 Blogging Skills Every Blogger Should Have
3. Provide valuable content
In the blogging world,
content is king. The content you provide decides if people will keep coming to
your blog or not, so to keep visitors coming back, provide a killer content.
In order words, provide content that will add
value to them, they should not leave your blog the way they first came.
I’ve seen a lot of blogs by
new and upcoming bloggers, they do try their best in providing good content but
they have one thing in common, not so valuable content. They either write a
short post on a topic that needs quite a lot of detail or write long on a topic
that needs to be short and straight to the point.
To succeed in blogging you
need to give out good content, this is the third rule about blogging you need
to adhere to.
4. Consistency
The secret to retaining blog
visitors is to be consistent in blogging, especially for newbie bloggers who
are trying to build a following for their blog. Make sure you do post
frequently if you want to remain in the mind of your visitors; your visitors
are more likely to visit your blog if you are in their face every time with a
new blog post.
To achieve this, create a
blog post calendar to know when you should update your blog, the ideal posting
frequency should be at least 2 blog posts a week if you are a newbie blogger.
You can then decide to
switch to one post a week if you’ve gained a following on your blog. You can
choose to post more but make sure that whatever you do, you are consistent,
this is a blogging rule you should adhere to.
Read also: How to Create a Successful Blogging Business Plan
Read also: How to Create a Successful Blogging Business Plan
5. Do away with plagiarism
Plagiarism has to do with
taking other people's content and then present it as your own content in your
blog. Plagiarism is like a virus, it never lets your blog grow because search
engines won’t even rank your blog because you are copying other people's
content.
And, when Google hammer
comes falling, it will hit you severely such that your blog may not even be
found on search engines, in short, Google will penalize your site.
To avoid this, make sure
that you do away with other people's content; you can use their content as an
inspiration but never ever copy their content, abide by this rule about
blogging and you will do yourself a lot of good.
6. Make your content readable
It's one thing to write good
content and it’s another thing to make that content readable. So even if you
believe you’ve written a killer content but your audience can’t read it, then
it’s a waste of time. This is why as a blogger you need to learn how to
properly format your content.
The font size and number
should be one that will make the content readable, you should also try to write
short paragraphs of about 3 to 4 lines, this will make the post look nice and easy
to read.
7. Always include images
Another
rule about blogging every newbie blogger should know is to include at least an
image in whatever content they add to their blog. According to jeffbullas
adding images to your posts gives them 94%more views.
Adding images to your content also makes your
blog post readable by helping you break your content. Images in blog content
also boost engagement with your audience and make your blog content lively.
8. Control and Reply blog comments
Some newbie bloggers just
add content to their blog and if there are comments, they just reply one or two
comments and that’s it. Some don’t even reply at all, the key to building a
loyal fan base for your blog is to make your blog readers feel part of your
blog.
Make sure you acknowledge
their presence on your blog by replying to their blog comments, they will feel
valued and they will surely keep coming back to your blog. Unfortunately, some
newbie bloggers abuse this blogging rule by not replying to comments that their
readers take out time to make.
You also need to control the
comments you receive on your blog, as a blogger, you will receive spam comments,
these comments are not useful so you need to get rid of them. Do not publish
any type of comment that is of no use or related to your blog post.
9. Give credit
The one rule about blogging
every blogger whether newbie or experienced should know is to make sure that they cite the
source of whatever content they use on their site. This could include images or
text quoted from another website, it is important that you mostly link to the
source of the information you got in order to avoid copyright issues. This will
save you a lot of problems going forward, this could get your blog shut down.
I will always advise newbie
bloggers not to use any image from Google or any website from that matter. You
can use some websites like pixabay and unsplash or better still canva to create
your blog images, you can get these images for free and are also free from
copyright.
10. Build relationships with other bloggers
There is more to achieve
when you connect with other bloggers than when you try to do everything alone.
In fact, you might not go far in blogging if you don’t network with other
bloggers, because it will be difficult building backlinks which are very
important to the success of your blog.
Building relationships with
other bloggers can also drive traffic to your website because they are likely
to mention your blog on theirs. Following this blogging rule will benefit you a
lot if you network with other bloggers in your niche.
Wrapping
it up
Every blogger wants to be
successful but they don’t want to follow the rules and etiquettes that apply to
blogging. As a newbie blogger who just got started in the blogging industry,
there are a lot of things to learn if you want to be successful, I’ll suggest
you start by taking up these 10 rules about blogging and abide by them.
Many bloggers like you will learn quite a lot
from this article, assist them by kindly sharing this article. I’ll love to
hear your thoughts by commenting below.
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