What are the Best Practices for Blogging in 2021?
If you’re reading this, you probably want to know the best practices for blogging because you’re tired of doing things that don’t bring results to your blog.
You have seen how other bloggers have turned their blogs around and managed to gain paid sponsorships, brand deals, and many other benefits from simply blogging and you want to know how they did that.
In this blog, I will tell you some of the best practices for blogging this 2021.
Without further ado!
Pick a niche and stick with it
One common blogging mistake many new bloggers make is not picking a niche.
New bloggers nowadays write about almost anything that captures their interest and then complain that no one reads their blog.
There’s a saying that goes “If you blog to everyone, you’re simply blogging to no one.”
There are actually some bloggers who were quite successful with a no-niche blog. Bloggers like Seth Godin, Chris Garett, Wendy Piersall, and more.
These people have thousands of followers despite having no niche. One common theme among them is that they’re high profile in other words, they’re famous personalities.
If you’re not a famous personality, it’s hard to build an audience with a no-niche blog.
If you want your blog to grow fast, you start by picking a subject that you’re interested in and then focus on it. This is the only way to succeed in blogging.
Get into the habit of doing keyword research
One of the advantages of owning a blog is the ability to do whatever you want with it – that includes writing about any topic that comes to mind.
But if you’re thinking about your blog as a business, you can’t simply do whatever you want.
Ahrefs conducted a research study and found out that 90.63% of content gets no traffic from Google and only 9.37% do.
From this study we can conclude that many blogs get few or no traffic at all – this can really be discouraging for people who are still new to blogging and are hoping to make money from it.
There’s however one thing that will help you understand how content gets found on search engines and it will also help you gain traffic.
That thing is search intent. In simple terms, search intent is used to describe the purpose of the search or the objective the searcher is trying to accomplish.
For example, someone who searches for top Filipino YouTubers on Google wants to learn something new.
Additionally, a person who searches for the best bluetooth headsets is most likely looking for information that would help them decide on a purchase. This is all what we call search intent.
It’s vital to get into the habit of doing keyword research. Keyword research will help us find search intent keywords or phrases that are driving search traffic to search engine result pages (SERPs).
There are many keyword research tools experienced bloggers, copywriters, and marketers use to understand what users are searching for in relation to their industry, services and products. I’ve provided some of the popular tools used today.
Create content that your audience wants to read
We can’t deny that keyword research is important for bloggers out there, especially for those starting out because the keywords you use will help a lot with search rankings.
On the flip side, knowing what keywords to use is not enough. On Google, you’ll find many other bloggers competing for the first page on SERPs for the same keyword. In order for you to stand out from your competitors, your content needs to have a unique angle.
First, you need to ask yourself these questions:
- How can I be more helpful to my readers?
- How can I provide more value to them?
By asking yourself these questions, you can discover what content your audience craves for. These are some of the ways you can discover content.
- Use analytics i.e Google analytics, Facebook, Instagram, and more to find out what content resonates with your audience. And produce more of that.
- Simply ask your audience what content they like in order for you to get a sense of what they’re interested in.
- Learn from bloggers in your niche. It doesn’t hurt to spy a little bit on what your peers in your niche are doing. See what’s working for them. If you see that their audience is similar to yours, what worked for them might actually work for you. However, don’t over do it.
Work on your on-page SEO
Another blogging practice you need is to work on on-page SEO. There’s a lot more to blogging than writing posts and hitting the publish button.
There’s on page SEO and off page SEO. Today, I’m just going to talk about on page SEO.
On page SEO is the practice of optimizing web pages to rank higher in search engine results pages and attract more relevant traffic from search engines.
On page SEO includes practices such as optimizing content for keywords, optimizing titles, internal links, URLs, images and more. A plugin that can help you optimize content is Yoast SEO.
Promote your blog fiercely
Once you have enough content running on your blog, it’s imperative to drive traffic to it. Writing for search engines is a smart move. But this will take some time.
For the meantime, you can start by promoting on social media platforms where your audience resides e.g Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and others.
But if you’re not sure where you audience likes to hang out, you can try to join blogging communities on social media. In the Philippines, there are many Facebook groups made for bloggers to promote, connect, and collaborate.
An example is bloggers association of the Philippines.
Another way you can also promote your blog is through paid advertising. Although, you need to invest money for this, an Ad will help you reach a wide audience. This will increase traffic to your blog significantly.
If you have an email list, you can promote your articles and send newsletters to your email subscribers.
Wrapping Up
You’ve finally reached the end of this blog. Congratulations, if you’ve read this far. Blogging requires constant effort and learning.
These practices mentioned above should be included in your blogging routine. They will help you reach your goals.
I’m so glad to see that you’re taking the time to invest in the knowledge necessary for blogging. Check out johnfisalbon for more tips and guides.
