Discover essential tips for new bloggers! Unlock the secrets to building a successful blog and establish your online presence.
IE 354: 13 Tips for New Bloggers
Importance of Knowing Your Audience
The first thing that I want you to understand is that there is a great importance in understanding and knowing your audience, you have to know who it is that you are ideally trying to attract.
What is it that you are going to teach them, the problem that you’re going to solve, but primarily who are they?
A wide net of people that you expect to be able to bring to your site and feel that it’s going be easy for you to be able to connect and create content for them if they range from 18 to 65.
I need you to be more specific.
I need you to really think about who your ideal people are.
Where are they shopping?
What are they doing?
What kind of content are they continuing to look for and what platforms are they using in order to consume that content?
So really getting a better understanding of who your audience is.
Choose a Blog Niche that Works for Your Audience
The second tip for you is to choose a blog niche that works for your audience.
It’s important that you choose a niche that is something that you are passionate about, potentially an expert in, or at least two steps ahead of your potential audience in that niche.
Now I go through a ton of different blog niche ideas, and you can check that out to make sure that if you are not exactly sure what niche you’re going to fall into.
It gives you some ideas of ones that have worked for clients and clients that I’ve worked with that have used different niches.
Understand Your Goals for Your Blog
The third tip is to make sure you understand your goals for your blog.
When you first start out, what are you trying to be able to accomplish?
When I talk about this, I’m talking about not only professionally within your business, but also personally within your life.
What are the expectations for your family?
What are you trying to be able to accomplish with your blog?
Are you looking for it to be a full-time income?
You have to set goals and expectations for where you are trying to go and connect it to your why.
Why are you trying to make it a full-time income?
Are you trying to leave a nine to five or you’re trying to be more there for your kids?
Are you trying to have a flexible schedule?
Whatever your why is, it needs to be connected to the goals that you are setting.
Now I walk you through exactly how to set your goals by thinking about long-term goals, as well as short-term and how to make sure that they aresmart goals.
So make sure that you dive into that.
Strategically Plan Your Content
The fourth tip that I have for you is to strategically plan your content.
You want to make sure that, again, your content is connected to your goals, is connected to your niche, that everything ties together.
It’s like that spider web of where people are going to come to read about your content, and they’re going to go from one post to the next post to the next post because it all builds on each other.
So really thinking about how can I create content that is going to set me up as the expert, but potentially also give me an opportunity to sell a product or service to my audience?
Having an idea of the problem that you solve is going to be huge and make this much easier for you.
Write Quality Content that Solves a Problem
My fifth tip is to write quality content that solves a problem.
When we’re talking about quality content, we’re not talking about needing to have a certain amount of words or a certain amount of pictures, but you want it to be information that your audience is going to benefit from that is organized in a way that is easily easy for them to consume, whether that is by reading it, by listening to it, or by watching it, you want to make sure that it’s easy for them to consume you.
When you are creating that content, like I’ve said previously, you want to make sure that it solves a very specific problem for your audience.
The problem that they have should also be something that you are solving with a product or service, potentially down the road.
Your content should always be looking to help solve that problem, breaking it into its tiny pieces so that you can make sure that you are interlinking within your content.
You want to have a content strategy that builds your business.
Optimize for SEO
Time for my sixth tip, which is to optimize for SEO.
It’s very important that when you create a blog post that your blog post structure is set up to be easily organized and easily consumed.
It’s also important that when you are optimizing that you do the keyword research that is going to make it easy for you to strategically plan your content.
All of this falls back together, so that makes it easier for Google to understand what you want to be known for and for your audience to understand the problems that you can potentially solve for them.
Making sure that SEO is something right from the beginning, that you are paying attention to understanding keyword research, the volume that needs the way in which you can create content to interlink to each other so that there are no orphan posts on your site that don’t connect to anything else, really making sure that you have an emphasis on SEO right out of the gate.
Foster Engagement with Your Audience
Then seventh tip is to foster engagement with your audience.
The first way that in which you’re going to do this is to have a business elevator pitch.
You have to be able to tell a perfect stranger what it is that you do and who you do it for.
If you can’t do that, it’s going to be very difficult to engage with them because they don’t know what to expect from you.
You also want to make sure that when you are trying to engage with them, you give them a call to action.
You tell them how you want them to interact with you, whether you are promoting via email on your blog, in a podcast episode, in YouTube or on social media.
You have to give a call to action so that they understand how you actually want them to engage with you.
Know How to Monetize Your Blog
The eighth tip is to know how to monetize your blog.
Think of all the different ways that you could potentially do that.
We’ve talked a lot about that in previous episodes.
You have the opportunity for ads and sponsored posts, affiliate income, your own products or services, a digital product or service.
So really starting to think about how you are going to monetize is going to help you be strategic when you are creating content, because then you can send them down the road of showing them that you can solve the problem for them.
Grow your Email List from the Beginning
Now, the way in which you would send them down the road is my ninth tip.
It’s to grow your email list from the beginning.
You have to have an email list in order to continually have people coming back to your content.
Now, notice you haven’t heard me talk about promote your blog on social media yet.
You don’t regularly hear me talking about that because it changes all the time.
But when you are growing an email list, that is something that you will always have.
So if you do it right from the beginning, showing them what you’re an expert in, giving them an opt-in in exchange for their email list, and then being able to continue to engage them with a nurture email sequence to potentially then send them to a sales sequence for your product or services.
This is how you create a funnel for sales that makes it easy to continually sell to people while you are sleeping.
Have a Strategy for How to Grow Your Blog
The tenth way that you are going to, as a new blogger need is to have a strategy for how to grow your blog.
Really think about what platforms are your audience on.
It does not make sense to try to do work on every single platform to promote on, and I’m not just talking about social, I’m also talking about what is going to be your consistent piece of content.
Where is it going to come out?
Is it going to be your blog, which it absolutely should be, or could it potentially be a YouTube video that you’re going to repurpose into a blog post or a podcast episode?
Really start to think about how you can be consistent as possible, and then where are you going to promote?
My next place I would recommend is your email list again
That’s why we’re telling you to build it from the very beginning.
Then from there you can look at a potential social media platform.
Don’t start with all five of them.
Pick a social media platform that you know your audience is on and figure that one out so that you can then be able to go to another platform once you feel confident.
On how to use the one you started with.
So in other words, if your audience is between the ages of 40 to 65, I’d probably recommend looking at Facebook and seeing if that’s where they’re interacting for your specific type of content.
If your audience is 18 to 30, I’d probably recommend Instagram because that might be more likely where they’re going to be but again, are they consuming your content there?
That’s important to think about.
Blogger Collaboration
The eleventh strategy is to have blogger collaboration, and we spoke two weeks ago about exactly the benefits of blogger collaboration as well as how to approach other bloggers and what you could potentially be doing.
Blogger collaboration is one of the best ways to continue to grow your site because you will learn the strategies that are working for others as well as not feel so lonely.
You can feel like you’re in your own little silo and have no idea what else is going on in the world, and the people in your real life probably don’t understand what you’re working on and what you’re doing.
So having blogger collaboration is going to help with that.
Analyze Your Data
The twelfth tip is to analyze your data. You have to make sure that at the time of this recording, GA four has to be set up.
You have to be using it so that you can have a better understanding of what is going on the backend of your site.
Where is traffic coming from?
What content are they going to?
Then I would also recommend that you have Google Search Console set up so that you can have a better understanding of what Google is already ranking you for as far as your keywords and how you can potentially improve upon those key terms and continue to create other content that is going to be able to interlink with again, that strategy for content.
So really looking at the data,
Adapt to Changes
The 13th and final tip is to adapt to changes.
We, in the past 13 years of my online professional career of blogging have seen a lot of changes.
We went from a time where blogging was just a thing that people tend to talk about their food for the day, or the trip that they went on with their kids to being very strategic by understanding SEO and having ad companies that are able to bring in thousands of dollars per month for bloggers because they understand how to monetize their traffic.
Then with Covid we saw social media change drastically.
We saw Instagram and TikTok get very flooded and saturated because there were so many people home that now thought, “I’m going to be TikTok famous and go on there.”
The issue becomes when you look at only social media, you’re building your business on rented property.
So those influencers that we feel we are trying to elbow out of the way, you have to always remember to ask whether your audience is on that platform, or is the audience on TikTok looking to watch funny videos that are going to have them dancing or talking about A D H D or whatever it might be?
Is your audience really understanding that?
Is that where your audience is?
Then when changes do come, being willing to move with them and change with them.
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