How To Start A Successful Blog - 3 Things To Do
If you want to know how to start a successful blog, there's three things you need to do.
Decide what purpose your blog is going to fulfill. If you're in a crowded vertical like mine, you're going to want to do some research and digging into other industry blogs to see what different angle you can take, to stand out from the noise.
Ask yourself, why am I blogging? What am I going to concentrate on that's different? If you can't really come up with satisfactory answers to these, set your blogging desire aside for awhile until you can come up with a sustainable different angle.
Do topic and keyword research on your industry or vertical to see what information prospects need, or the problems they are looking to solve.
- By doing keyword research, you can find long-tail phrases that are generally informational - phrases that ask questions, are looking for a solution, etc.
- Dig into sites like Ubersuggest, Topsy and Quora to find out what people are searching for, tweeting about, and asking questions on. Get together a list of long tail keyword phrases and issues. The more you have, the better, because you'll be able to create multiple blog posts for a long time to come.
Finally, apply SEO to all of the blog post elements - title, description, images and content - and plan on publishing for several months before you start getting some real traction. It takes awhile for readers to find your posts, warm up to you and decide to subscribe to your blog. Don't give up; many bloggers do so just as they are starting to gain readers.
Happy blogging!
Remember, keep it safely between the ditches until we meet again!
All the best,
Nancy McDonald
Image courtesy of kaboompics.com
