10 tips for starting a successful blog

A successful blog can be defined in multiple ways. You may have a successful blog in terms of traffic and advertising revenue. You may have a successful blog in terms of building your brand. Success can also be gauged by the amount of business your blog generates.

Every individual, every business has a different definition of success. The moot point is, does your blog help you achieve your goals, and if it does, it is a successful blog for you.

Blogging brings you many benefits but just like any venture, it also comes with its own set of challenges. For example, 70 million blog posts are published each month just by WordPress users. You can easily imagine how much competition an average blog faces and how difficult it must be for Google algorithms to crawl, index, and rank blog posts based on their relevance and quality.

If it is so difficult to generate visibility of your blog, why am I advising to start a new blog? Isn’t blogging already saturated?

Blogging is saturated for people who want to make a quick buck, or people who don’t have enough patience or a desire to work hard.

Yes, in the beginning years it was easier to get enough visibility for your newly started blog and now it may take a few months before some decent traffic begins to trickle down, but it all depends on your niche, how much competition you face, and what is the quality of your content.

Besides, many people think that starting a successful blog means getting millions of visitors and generating lots of advertising revenue. Even a small blog with 200-300 visitors per day can be successful if it generates business for you. A successful blog can help you

Improve search engine rankings of your main website.
Generate leads for you.
Enhance your brand presence.
Establish yourself as a thought leader.
Increase your social media visibility.
Keep your audience engaged and informed.
Build you a platform where you can tell your side of the story in case of a controversy.

Listed below are 10 tips for starting a successful blog

1. Clearly define your niche

The narrower it is, the better it is. Remember that you are not looking for millions of visitors. You are looking for visitors who will do business with you. 200 people coming to your blog and 10 among them submitting your contact form is much better than 5000 people coming to your blog and just 5 among them submitting your contact form.

It is also easier to start a successful blog if your audience is selective. It means there is less competition.

I’m publishing a blog on content writing and copywriting. This is not a narrow niche because in the field of content writing and copywriting there are multiple fields, but when I started it was a niche because there were very few content writers.

Suppose you start a blog on digital marketing. Again, it is a broad topic and many people might be covering many things in the field of digital marketing. How about just creating a blog on podcasting for digital marketing, or digital marketing writers? Or even graphic designers for a select few graphic design tools?

2. Blog about something you love (or hire a blog writer)

I know, this is a clichéd advice. You love different ice cream varieties, and you would like to start a blog on ice cream recipes, but you are into finance and your business requires a successful blog in the field of finance.

Since you are into finance, you must be passionate about your topic (unless fate has entrapped you).

Love for the topic will enable you to work on your blog every day even when you don’t encounter success in the beginning. The ongoing effort can be daunting especially when you don’t see any improvement in your blog traffic.

Most of the people who started a successful blog are passionate about the topic. Every day I write on content writing copywriting, and blogging, because I am interested in these topics. I have learned a lot. I like to share. Also, my website is my bread-and-butter and this keeps me motivated enough to stay put and work on successive blog.

Even if you’re not passionate about the topic but still you want to start a successful blog on your chosen topic, and if you have the budget, the next best option is to hire a blog writer or a professional content writer.

Since he or she is a trained writer, and since he or she will be paid, which is a good incentive, you will get a regular supply of high-quality blog posts.

3. Choose the right blogging platform

Currently my favorites are WordPress and Medium. WordPress gives you independence (I’m talking about WordPress.org). You can install it under your domain name either as a subdomain or a directory. Your design, your layout, your images, and all your blogging content belong to you.

A good thing about WordPress is that it gives you complete customization. You can have custom themes. You can search engine optimize your blog. You can install plugins to achieve various tasks and get different features.

If you want to move to another host all you need to do is take backup of your entire content (images, themes and blog posts) and take it to the new host.

I have been using WordPress for more than 15 years and I believe it has been an excellent choice.

There are many more content management system but WordPress is the best, both for managing website as well as blog.

Medium is a third-party blogging platform. Which means, all the blog posts that you publish belong to Medium. It is basically a content publishing platform that can generate lots of traffic for you. It already has a great following. You don’t have to build everything from scratch. There is a standard template and people are accustomed to the template. Medium allows you to take backup. There is also provision for publishing Medium blog posts appearing under a custom domain but you will need to figure out how to do that.

Both WordPress and Medium have their individual advantages and you will need to weigh your pros and cons. The only problem with Medium is that a third party owns your content and the traffic that comes to Medium may remain on medium and not come to your website. It is good for branding though.

You should also keep an open mind towards LinkedIn blogs. Just like Medium you can use the LinkedIn platform to publish blogs. Again, the content that you publish will remain on LinkedIn and the traffic that you generate will be secondary, but just like Medium, you can increase your visibility faster.

My personal take: Install the blog on your own website through WordPress and keep Medium and LinkedIn secondary options for additional visibility.

4. Publish blog post with greater frequency in the beginning

This will help you get your content crawled and indexed faster by Google. How fast Google crawler crawls your content depends on how often you publish. If your publishing frequency is quite low, the crawling frequency too is quite low.

For example, if you publish just one blog post every week it may take you anywhere between 5 to 6 months to get some traffic and visibility. On the other hand, if you publish a blog post every day, at least for the next two months, your content will get indexed faster and your search engine rankings will improve quicker.

Even if every day is not possible, keep your target 2-3 blog posts every week.

5. Pay close attention to the search intent of your visitors

Why you want people to come and read your particular blog post? What should they get out of it? This can be gauged by knowing their search intent.

Although search intent is SEO specific it can also help you write and publish targeted blog posts to help you start a successful blog without wasting much time.

Are your visitors looking for humor? Are they looking for a specific solution to a particular problem? Do they want to read a review so that they can say something based on your decision or based on the information that you have presented?

Paying close attention to search intent will help you generate highly targeted traffic faster.

6. Create great, high-quality content

The quality of your blog posts is going to be the backbone of your successful blog. No matter how great your template is, no matter what blogging platform you use, no matter what is your frequency, unless the content is great, unless it serves a strong purpose, it is of no use.

I advise my clients to focus on quality at the cost of quantity. Yes, quantity does matter but it is of no use if it is not backed by quality. If you need to compromise based on budget or effort, compromise on quantity, but not on quality.

What does quality mean in terms of starting a successful blog? Here are a few things you should keep in mind:

Write for your readers.
Provide applicable solutions and advice.
Satisfy their search intent.
Make it easier to read your content by using appropriate formatting.
Do enough research and find credible data to back up your claims.
Always be accurate when you are presenting statistics.
Try to write mostly on searcher’s query.
Make your content readable on all devices.
Write in a simple language people can easily understand.
Add your own perspective to trending topics.
Whenever possible, use your own experience and anecdotes to explain concepts.
Write on niche subtopics.
Create a knowledge wealth.

7. Don’t ignore promotion and marketing

Your blog is just another business venture, or a subset of a business venture. To start a successful blog, you need to promote it regularly. Simply publishing blog posts won’t do. How can you market your blog?

Maintain a vibrant presence on social media. Promote your links over there. Start a mailing list. You can promote your links with your mailing list. You can also create shorter versions of your blog posts and then post them on blogging platforms like Medium and LinkedIn with a link back to your original blog post. You can also run paid promotions for certain blog posts on Facebook and Instagram.

8. Maintain a repository of blog post ideas

When people try to start a successful blog, this is one of the biggest challenges they face: how to keep coming up with interesting blogging ideas that would serve their audience? You need to brainstorm constantly. You need to keep your eyes open when browsing the Internet.

You can use apps like OneNote or Google Keep to maintain a list of blogging ideas or you can maintain an Excel sheet.

You can also use Google alerts to come across trending topics and interesting ideas for your blog posts. I have set up Google alerts for content writing, content marketing, online copywriting, and other terms for which I want to get regular blogging ideas.

Here is another trick that I follow: when I start adding blog post ideas to my repository, I don’t use them unless I’m hard pressed against the wall. I keep them when I completely don’t find any new ideas. I keep adding ideas to the repository but then for the upcoming blog post I try to find or come up with a new blogging idea by myself.

9. Publish guest blog posts

Once your blog begins to generate decent traffic, people will approach you to publish guest blog posts for your blog. This is a good way of publishing fresh content and bring in fresh perspective. The only caveat is that they will want backlinks to their own blogs.

Some guest writers will want to publish on your blog to get extra exposure from your blog and some will approach you for backlinks because they want to improve their search engine rankings. You can decide whether you want to use the no-follow tag for your outgoing links but if you do that, do let it be known to the guest bloggers.

I provide do-follow link from the author profile section but not from the main blog body content. Anyway, that’s a different issue.

Make sure when you get guest blog posting ideas you maintain the same quality standards that you maintain for your own blog posts.

10. Prepare for a longer haul to start a successful blog

You will need to be patient. You will need to persevere. There are months of struggle behind overnight successes. No matter how narrow your niche is, someone is already writing on the topic because there are billions of web pages being created and published on the Internet every month.

What the others don’t have his persistence, which you have to start a successful blog. This is where you stand apart. Most of the people give up after a month. Be prepared to continuously publish your blog for at least six months without experiencing any success.

That’s why it is important to choose a topic that is close to your heart so that even if you don’t experience much success in the initial months, at least you enjoy writing about it.

Importance of E-A-T for writing SEO content

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The importance of E-A-T for writing SEO content explained

The term E-A-T came to be recognized after major Google algorithm update in August 2018. E-A-T stands for Expertise, Authority, and Trustworthiness – three attributes of your content that help you improve your search engine rankings.

Theoretically these are not new concepts. For more than a decade now Google is increasingly making it difficult for websites to rank well, especially those websites that publish lots of random content just to improve their search engine rankings.

E-A-T is Google’s new standard to gauge the relevance of the content that you write. It isn’t simply the quality now. Sure, quality still matters, but in addition to quality, you also need to show your expertise, your authority, and the level of trust that people show in your content.

What exactly is Google E-A-T?

The expression E-A-T began to appear in various SEO articles after a major Google update in 2018. The finer nitty-gritty of the E-A-T part of the algorithm isn’t exactly clear to anyone but in this SEO guideline, Google seems to define “low quality pages” as pages “lacking expertise, authoritativeness, or trustworthiness”. Untrustworthy pages have the lowest E-A-T quotient.

To rank well, according to the Google update, the following needs to be considered:

The level of expertise of the creator of the main content.
The authoritativeness of the creator of the main content, the authoritativeness of the main content itself, and the authority of the website.
The trustworthiness of the creator of the main content, the trustworthiness of the main content itself, and that of the website.

Expertise can be of two types:

Something like a medical journal where highly expert people write about medicine and treatments.
Less formal expertise such as restaurant or movie reviews.

It depends on how much the writers and their websites are trusted and believed by the readers and viewers.

The most important factors for E-A-T web pages may include

The main content quality and quantity.
The main beneficial purpose of the content (the web page or the blog post).
The expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness of the content as well as the content creator.
The reputation of the website and the author.

How to write content according to Google’s E-A-T

Google’s intention is to find and showcase the most reliable and trustworthy information to its users. This is its reason to exist. If people don’t find trustworthy information, they will stop using the search engine and another search engine may fill the gap. You need to write content keeping that in mind. Here are a few things you can do

Write content based on search intent

Why are people looking for your content? Exactly what is the information they seek to solve their problems?

Further reading: What is search intent and how knowing it improves your SEO

When people are looking for content on my website they have to reasons

They are looking for a professional content writer and copywriter.
They want tips and information on content writing and copywriting so that they can either write themselves, or link to the blog post to add value to their own content.

When people link to my content it improves my search engine rankings. Also, when people are easily able to find my content on Google they more eagerly contact me for work thinking that I can achieve the same for them (which, on many occasions, I do).

Hence, whenever you are writing your content or editing existing content make sure why you are writing, what purpose it solves, and whether it delivers exactly what the readers are looking for.

Write blog posts and web pages in question-answer formats

The reason is quite simple. People are constantly asking Google questions and Google intends to provide answers. If you already write in question-and-answer format you deliver a ready-made template to Google.

Writing in the question answer format also helps you write according to the search intent. When you answer a question, you already know what you are writing about. Similarly, when people find your content on Google they already know what answer lies ahead, and more eagerly click your link, improving your CTR, and in the process, elevating your search engine rankings further.

Increase your authority as an author

This happens over a long period of time, but ultimately, it begins to have a bearing on your search engine rankings, especially considering E-A-T (the authority part). Do people refer to you as an expert? Do they mention you as an expert or an authority figure when they link to your content? Do they recommend you?

These things are interrelated. Unless you have content people are not going to find it and if they don’t find it, how do they know that you are an expert in your field?

Now, unless they know that you are an expert (based on E-A-T), how are you going to improve your search engine rankings so that they can find your content?

It may become a vicious loop, but it doesn’t have to be. You need to begin from somewhere.

Be active on social media. Use websites like Quora and LinkedIn. LinkedIn these days have many forums you can post your answers in and once you have built a presence, you can start sharing your content over there.

Pay close attention to search engine optimization when writing content

Don’t just write and publish content because you think you are an authoritative figure in your field. Yes, this definitely matters, but you need to make it easier for Google crawlers to crawl and index your content. For that, you need to follow some SEO conventions when writing and formatting your content.

What can you do?

Use an appropriate title that truly represents what you are writing. Preferably use your keywords or an SEO tool when formulating your title.

Use headings and subheadings like <h1>, <h2> and <h3>. Use <h1> just once for the main heading of your blog post or web page. You can use the subheading tags for multiple headings to make your content scannable.

Sometimes Google crawlers don’t go through your entire blog post or web page. They just skim through the headings and subheadings and bulleted points. Make sure you have useful information in these tags.

Why pay close attention to search engine optimization when writing content?

As I mentioned, it will make it easier for crawlers to make sense of your content and increase your chances of appearing in search results.

However low your rankings are, sooner or later people are going to find your content and start interacting with it. After that, your further rankings depend on how people interact with your content. This is where writing content according to search engine optimization standards is going to help you.

Find credible data and cite authoritative sources

Content writers, especially thought leaders, do lots of research when writing content. They find research data, quote it, and then link to the original sources. This renders credibility to their writing. It’s easier to trust numbers. Find information from multiple sources so that your readers don’t have to do that, and they can find all the credible information at the single source.

If you are an organization, you should also encourage your writers to improve their authoritativeness. You can invite well known authors to write for your blog. Write and publish lots of long form content because it is considered more authoritative and informative compared to thin content. Researching and citing sources also elevates your E-A-T factor.

Call-to-action tips for your day-to-day content writing and copywriting

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Call-to-action tips

Call-to-action is a statement that you make to prompt people to take an action when they are reading your blog post, web page, landing page, or an email. It is also called CTA.

Think it in this manner: why do people come to your website? Why do you want them to come to your website?

If you run a business website (provide app development services) you obviously want people to contact you if they want to develop a mobile app. Almost every page has a Call-to-action button such as “Call us” or “Contact now”.

But simply telling people to contact you isn’t going to make them contact you. Your entire copy must fuel your Call-to-action statement.

Call-to-action can be straightforward (buy my book right now), or it can be subtle – the narrative of your writing moving in such a manner that people want to take an action.

Content Marketing Institute has compiled a list of call-to-action tips to help you supercharge your writing. Some of these tips include

Clearly define your call-to-action goal

You’re CTA isn’t always about making a sale, although, that would be the ultimate goal. Before a sale happens, you need to generate leads. You generate leads by establishing communication channels. How do you establish those channels?

You can ask your visitors to download your white paper or case study. You can ask them to download your e-book. You can encourage them to subscribe to your updates. You can also ask them to visit other portions of your website for further action.

If you define your CTA, it helps you write your content accordingly.

Make contextually relevant offers

Call-to-action must be relevant to the document or the visual your viewer is currently viewing. Suppose I’m writing a blog post on how to write compelling copy and then in the middle of the copy I ask them to download an SEO book. Vaguely they are connected, but directly they are not. Instead, if I ask them to download a small PDF on how to write a compelling copy with more details and data, they will be more eager to download it.

You also need to keep in your mind the intent, both for the content and for the reader/viewer. Is the reader looking for information or is she ready to buy? If she is looking for more information it is better to direct her to the relevant document and if she wants to buy, then it is better to prompt her to buy.

Keep your CTA straightforward

Call-to-action must be an active verb. Use expressions like “Download our White Paper” or “Subscribe to our newsletter” or “Download our mobile app”. These are very clear actions. Avoid using something like “Learn more” because it is very vague and doesn’t tell much what it leads to.

Create a sense of urgency and importance

Instead of saying “Download our mobile app” it is better to say “Download our mobile app now”. Also, use “Call us today” instead of simply “Call us”. Also, something like “Download our custom catalogue specifically for you”. This makes the reader feel unique and special. There is also a sense of urgency.

Avoid using multiple Call-to-action prompts

If you choose too many call-to-action prompts readers begin to ignore them or their eyes get used to them. Use CTA only where you think now is the right time for them to click and do the needful.

Also, keep your CTA brief if you are using a button, because people prefer clicking buttons that are of small size.

Be transparent in your CTA prompts

Don’t needlessly send people to other locations of your website because you want them to stick around. The Call-to-action must be transparent. If it prompts them to download an e-book, they should be able to download it without much fuss. If they need to fill up a form, no matter how small it is, quickly mention that. Avoid using words like “Sign up” or “register” if they need to fill up a form before downloading.

Why should people click?

Can they get a 25% discount – “Avail 25% discount instantly”? Are they going to generate ideas for their blog posts? Is the software going to help them generate quality content? Is it a toolkit they can use to manage their customers and clients? There needs to be a great benefit that your call-to-action offers. Solve a problem. Help them get unstuck. Help them save money.

What is topical authority in content writing? How to write topical authority content?

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Building your topical authority

Google is constantly looking for authoritative content. When people search for information, Google wants to provide them with best possible search results. This is achieved by topical authority. What is topical authority?

There may be two definitions, one by Google and one by your readers or users.

If you want to improve your search engine rankings, then topical authority means your authority and expertise in a particular niche or topic. For example, I would like to have a topical authority in the field of content writing and online copywriting. What do I do to achieve that? I try to cover as many topics as possible pertaining to content writing and online copywriting.

As you may know, content writing and copywriting for SEO isn’t just about writing content. There are many factors involved such as

Quality of content
Search engine optimization of content
Writing keyword-centric content
Writing content based on search intent
Frequency of content writing and content publishing
Writing topical, relevant content
Writing style
The authority you have already garnered
Pillar pages and topic clusters
Topical authority

Even these may have subtopics: search intent can be of different varieties such as informational intent, transactional intent, commercial intent, or navigational intent. It goes on and on, and you can keep writing on these topics and subtopics to increase your topical authority.

Why topical authority is important for SEO?

To rank you higher, Google wants to know if you have authority in your chosen field. It wants to know your content density for the topic you have chosen to write about.

Suppose you are an SEO company, and you know that content writing is important for search engine optimization. Therefore, you write a web page describing the benefits of high-quality content.

I have a similar page: benefits of high-quality content. Now, your web page may be excellent, but it is just a single web page dedicated to content writing on a website that is dedicated to SEO.

On the other hand, my page on content writing resides under a website that is dedicated to content writing. Who is supposed to have more authority on the topic?

Of course, if your SEO website already enjoys massive authority then this authority may also trickle down to the page on content writing and consequently, your page may rank higher than mine, but when it comes to topical authority, my page will have a higher authority over yours.

Is topical authority an SEO jargon? As per Google, topical authority is the perceived authority over a niche or a broad idea set, as opposed to authority over a singular idea or term.

What does that mean? Coming to the above content writing blogging example, if you are a digital marketing company and you also provide content writing services and you have published lots of content on content writing, you have authority over a broader niche. On the other hand, being a content writing website (a subset of digital marketing), when I publish content on content writing, I have authority over a single idea or term. In this regard, the digital marketing company has an edge over my website.

As you may already know Google uses artificial intelligence to rank links. Your topical authority signals to Google that your website has a deep understanding and a vast knowledge of the topic. If Google already considers your website a topical authority, then it is more likely to crawl quickly and rank your links higher.

Why should you focus on improving your topical authority?

Not many people are aware that in 2018 Google changed its algorithm, putting more emphasis on the topical authority of a website. Before this, news publishers had an advantage over smaller publishers due to the vast amount of content they have. Now, it is more about a narrow niche.

This way, a national newspaper publishing a gadget review isn’t going to hog search engine rankings if there is another website solely focusing on Gadget reviews publishes a gadget review.

The advantage is that you can focus on your niche instead of worrying about bigger publications inundating search results simply because they have swathes of content.

There are multiple benefits of improving your topical authority. Some of them are listed below:

You will have scores of topics to write about.
Your visitors will find every possible information they need on your website or blog itself.
There will be more content for you to share on social media.
You will have more content to re-purpose.
You will generate a library of information which will be favored by Google.
If people want to link to your website or share your links, they will have plenty of opportunities.
You will be covering and capturing more keywords.
Google will index more content from your website, increasing your presence in the process.
When Google is looking for answers, it will find them on your website.
When Google wants to display additional information, it will find it on your website.

How to build the topical authority of your website?

You can begin by preparing a long list of primary, secondary and long-term keywords that are relevant to your website. These will give you plenty of topics to cover.

You can ask your customers and clients what questions they would like to put in front of you before deciding to do business with you.

You can write case studies and white papers.

When you write blog posts and web pages there are many subtopics that you lightly touch upon. You can extract these subtopics and write complete blog posts and web pages on them, with further details. Later, you can link to these blog posts and web pages to increase the value of your existing blog posts and web pages.

You can either use external tools to track your keywords and what content other websites are publishing on those keywords, or you can do it manually. You can maintain an Excel sheet of the top blogs in your field. Then, once a day, you can quickly visit these blogs and see what new content they have published. You can either aggregate the content or get new blog post ideas from them.

To build your topical authority you need to

Write quality content over a long period of time on your chosen subject.
Primarily focus on creating E.A.T. content – Expertise, Authority, Trustworthiness.
Cover as many topics and subtopics as are available.
Strategically link to different topics.
Put in effort towards improving your search engine rankings by paying attention to SEO content writing conventions.
Maintain buzz on social media networks.
Increase your visibility.
Seek feedback and input from the peers.

Regularly coming up with topics to increase your topical authority may be difficult in the beginning, but once you get into the groove the topics will come to you naturally. Otherwise, you can always hire a professional content writer to write and publish content for you.

LinkedIn content strategy to generate more traffic to your website

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LinkedIn content strategy

LinkedIn can be a great source of traffic. This ReadWrite update claims that 79% of B2B marketers value LinkedIn as an abundant source of leads. For many B2B websites and blogs, almost 50% of social traffic comes from LinkedIn.

I mostly use LinkedIn to post blog links that I publish on my own website. A few times a year I become active on LinkedIn, but I haven’t been regular.

According to experts, content strategy for your LinkedIn profile may include a mix of native documents, videos, images, and text only posts. It depends on your market.

Native documents are the PDF slides that you upload – these are then converted into carousals like Instagram.

Here are some insights you can use to leverage LinkedIn’s social reach, especially for B2B market.

Native documents attract maximum clicks on LinkedIn

The average conversion rate on LinkedIn is 3X the other networks. The average CTR for native documents is 2.20%. In fact, some posts containing native documents attract a CTR of 3.5%-8.6% on an average. Native documents, as mentioned above, are the PDF files that you upload. The slides of these PDF files are turned into carousals automatically by LinkedIn.

Video content fares well on LinkedIn

This is the case for almost every platform – Video content outperforms text content. 15-20% posts on social media are video content these days. Average CTR for videos on LinkedIn is 3.16%. The data is slightly different if the following on LinkedIn is 50,000-100,000 – then native documents and single images get a higher CTR.