10 Rules about Blogging: What Newbie Bloggers Ought to Know

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

      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.

Recommended: How to Write Headlines That Drives Traffic; 5 Amazing tips

      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.