There’s a massive difference between blogging like a beginner and blogging like a pro. Pros receive traffic, beginners don’t. Being a beginner isn’t bad of course; everybody has to start somewhere. Taking the step and becoming a better blogger, however, is a key part to seeing success.
Granted, I am not the greatest example. I have seen moderate success with my writing, but nowhere near that of excerpts like Neil Patel or Cristian Mihai. However, these ten tips are a compilation of the tips offered by experts such as the aforementioned Neil Patel. Employing them will ensure your step-up to the levels of elite bloggers and will give you an eventual boost in traffic.
Blogging can be tricky, and it doesn’t get any easier. Mistakes in the beginning may not count, but the further along you get, the worse you feel when you actually do mess up.
If you want to avoid the massive dip in traffic that often comes with committing a major blogging mistake, make sure to have these four items checked off your list. If you have already done the work, you will be fine. If not, you should probably get to work right away.
Blogging is a difficult job. Countless hours are spent writing, optimizing, marketing, and sharing. We bloggers barely have room to breathe. Thankfully, there are several shortcuts that can, in fact, increase your blog traffic and save you a lot of time in the future.
If you aren’t incorporating these hacks, now would be an excellent time to begin. With the arrival of corona, internet traffic has spiked in ways nobody has ever dreamed of. Possible readers are everywhere- on Google, social media, and other websites. Adding these hacks to your daily blogging routine could allow you to access more readers from more places then before, increasing your traffic and bringing you more readers.
1: Ping your website
If you aren’t doing this, you need to begin now. It is an easy, automated process, allowing you to set up the ping once, at the beginning, and never have to do it again.
Pinging accomplishes two things- it tells Google you exist, and it also helps tell it when you’ve published new content. When you set up your ping, Ping-O-Matic will automatically ping Google again when you release new content. That way, you don’t have to manually do it every time, and yet you’re still receiving all the benefits.
If you haven’t linked your website to the Google Search Console, now is the time to start. Don’t worry, though. I am going to walk you through the process one step at a time.
Begin by clicking here. That link will take you to the Google Search Console home. Towards the bottom-left of your screen, click the blue button that says, “Start Now”.
This will take you to a loading page where you will be asked for a URL to your website. Clicking the right option under “URL Prefix” will allow you to input the link to your website. After you have pasted the URL to your website, you will be asked to verify your ownership. Don’t be scared, WordPress makes this a very easy process. Simply scroll down and select the HTML tag option.
Then copy the HTML code it gives you and go back to your WordPress home (mine is bookmarked under “Stats”). On the left sidebar, click Tools, then Marketing. Then, at the top of the screen, click “Traffic” and scroll down to the very bottom. Pasting that HTML under the Google option and clicking “Save” will give you everything you need. Wait a few seconds and go back to the Google Search Console verification screen. Click verify, and it should allow you to view your site’s Google status in a page something like this.
You are now all set to begin using Google Search Console.
GSC has two fantastic uses when it comes to getting your website indexed. To begin, go to your GSC home and click “Sitemaps”.
Now, go back to the previous WordPress page we you had up before, where you pasted the HTML. Scroll up a little to the section that says “Sitemaps”.
Click the first link to pull up another tab. This will be a random jumble of links and titles, but all you need is the URL to this tag. Copy that and paste it back into the Google Search Console section, then click “Submit”. If it’s your first time doing this, you will see a section underneath that that will look something like this.
If it wasn’t your first time doing this, you will see the number under “discovered URLs” increase. Now, here’s the thing- you need to do this every time you release a new post. Release the post, wait five minutes, then copy and paste the URL to your sitemap page into the section on Google Search Console.
After this, you have one more step to do. Copy the URL to the new post and paste it into the search bar at the top of the Google Search Console.
Click Enter and wait a few minutes. It should bring up a page that will look something like this.
Clicking “Request Indexing” will ask Google to Index your website, speeding up the process of getting your post on Google. This can be especially useful if you are trying to post news within a timeframe.
Now, to cap it all off, once you’ve done all of this, you can go back and ping Google manually. The process of getting your website on Google is now finished.
3: Optimize your images
This isn’t as difficult as it sounds. To optimize your images for the best viewer usage possible, make sure none of your pictures are above 1200×800 pixels and that all of them contain the proper alt text. Although alt text can be a little tricky, it is useful for helping Google understand what the image is. For example, if you had a properly-sized picture of a sunset, your alt text might be “red sunset”.
4: Interlink your posts
Interlinking is not something built in a day. It is a habit created over several weeks, involving linking to all of your related, featured, or previous posts (or in my case, all three). This helps Google create a web between your posts and has been confirmed as one of the factors Google uses in its ranking algorithm.
Make sure to leave links to similar content at the bottom of every post you write. This invaluable habit can help you rank higher on Google quickly and with little work.
5: Stagger your posting dates
Some bloggers mistakenly believe that posting five or six posts at once is a healthy thing for your blog. This is wrong. Not only is that considered spam, it will lose you followers.
So, instead of writing all of your weekly posts and publishing them on the same day, stagger them throughout the week. Try to spread them out as evenly as possible, so you have a day or two in between each post (unless you post daily).
Furthermore, attempt to publish in the early morning (you can schedule posts ahead of time by writing them the day previously), so that your readers have the full day to find their ways to your site through the email your new post sent out. Hopefully, you sent it out in the early morning to fully maximise the post’s potential.
Following these hacks should easily increase your traffic, although sometimes traffic increase comes better in the long run (would you rather get 10,000 views in two months or 1,000 this month?). Make them into habits, and you will see changes.
Alright, that’s all for today. Thanks so much for reading! I hope you learned a lot. If you did, make sure to click that Follow button below (or to the side). Then, when I release new posts like this one, you’ll get notified. Thanks again, and I hope you have a fantastic day!
Being a good blogger means standing out from the rest. Too many young bloggers begin their journey, mimicking their peers, only to give up after two months with no followers.
The reason? They lacked individuality and professionalism.
I have been blogging for almost four years, though the first three shouldn’t count. I had six followers by the end of year three, and I honestly didn’t care. I was in my own little world. If five people read what I wrote, it was a good day. It wasn’t until the beginning of 2019 that I was introduced to WordPress, and there, I found my passion.
From the start, four things set me apart from the rest: I was hungry to learn, I put what I learned into practice, I consistently maintained professional writing, and I posted as often as possible. These four pieces to my blogging identity, coupled with my unique background, thrust me above the crowd and into a different status: trusted. People trusted what I wrote and took my words to heart. Why? Because I took these tips and worked.
With these tips, you should understand a bit more about the goal you are undertaking. Blogging is, after all, more than just a responsibility- it’s a job, and it should be treated as such. If you aren’t willing to put in the time and work, you won’t succeed.
Well guys, we’ve done it. It has been almost exactly one year since Africa Boy’s birth. One year since I had two followers (myself and Ariana Evans), one year since the background was blue and the blog header was an elephant. One year since I discovered the fantastic platform known as WordPress. And boy, it has been a unique year. Let’s do a quick recap.
March was a trial-and-error month for me, trying to figure out what WordPress was, how to market my website, and trying to tell my friends about it. I was also discovering my writing style, something that has significantly changed over the last year (if you’ve been with me from the beginning, you’ll agree). During March, I published 16 posts, averaging 2 likes per post, had 304 total views from 80 visitors, and reached 40 followers.
Let’s face it. Views are the name of the game when it comes to blogging. Nothing is cooler than being able to say, “I got 18,000 views on my last post.” Of course, getting to that level of writing takes a long, long time and a lot of perseverance. But even if you have a small blog like mine, averaging 115 views per post, you can still usually tell if your views are starting to decline.
This can be seen in a few ways. Firstly, you might see a decline in your average daily views. Last month, my blog averaged about 85 views per day. Not terrible, not amazing, but pretty much average. That took almost a solid year of work just to reach in the first place. If, for example, I checked my average next month and found that I only averaged 60 views per day, warning bells would go off in my head. Obviously, something would be wrong, and I would attempt to find an answer.
Another way to tell this is by looking at your comments/likes on a post. My posts average 21 likes and 17 comments, and I can usually tell if one is above or below average at a glance. If it’s below average, I’ll start thinking- is it the time I published? Did I offend someone? There’s almost always an answer.
Finally, the last way to tell if your blog is losing readers is by looking at your average post views. My average post gets around 100 views after about a week, since some readers can take a bit of time to read them. Of course, if you’re publishing wintergreen content on a regular basis (content that could be read in ten years), your readers will continue coming back, making this statistic irrelevant. If you, like me, publish half-wintergreen content, now is the time to check your average post views. You can do so by clicking the WordPress stats panel, clicking “Months” to show your monthly statistics, and scrolling down. Under “Posts & Pages”, you will find your posts ranked by views, highest to lowest. This can be a fantastic indicator of which posts do better than others. If my Africa posts were towards the bottom of the spectrum, and my SEO posts were nearer to the top, what does this say? Obviously, some posts are read more then others.
There is, of course, a way to troubleshoot this. But before we get to this, let’s take a look at four reasons your views are declining in the first place.
When I first started blogging in 2017, I didn’t have a clue what I was doing. At first, I blogged on my dad’s website, writing about random things ranging from Fantasy Football scores to a weird dream. I believed my only readers to be my grandparents, and that was true.
After about eight months of this, I decided that blogging under my dad’s name seemed rather stifling. I created my own website using the free platform Blogspot. The website, elishamcfarland.blogspot.com, has since been deleted, but the lessons it taught me remain.
Let’s face it. In today’s world, Search Engine Optimizers are a dime a dozen. It only takes a Google search and a few clicks to find an Optimizer that will help you or, at the very least, give you tips on helping increase your website’s traffic. So why write on this at all? Word
The answer is astounding- around two out of every three new bloggers has no clue what SEO is. They start a WordPress blog, convinced the world is going to come calling at their doorstep, only to realize (after a week of writing) that they’ve only had five visitors and one comment from a dude with a weird username. They give up, convinced that blogging isn’t for them.
Blogging is more than just SEO and post format. At the end of the day, there’s only so much you can do to change your site for the better. However, don’t make the mistake I did in thinking that once I had checked all the SEO boxes, I was fine. This is wrong.
Unfortunately, there are many things that can go wrong with SEO. Websites devolve, mistakes are made, and habits aren’t developed. And so, to combat this yet again, we must learn to use tools.
What are tools? Well, they are internet-based apps or websites that will help your site for the better, one way or the other. Some may be able to actually help your SEO (although these require plugins which, in turn, require you to be operating on WordPress’ Business Plan), while others will prevent you from making crucial mistakes. These are the tools we will be focusing on today. And the best part? They’re all free and you can start using them right now. And so, without further ado, here are three fantastic tools that you can start using right now.
