Generally, if you want to know how to become a better blogger, the best bloggers & writers recommend to do two things: write and read more. Writing is essential, as practice makes perfect. Reading will expose you to other styles, voices and genres. Whether you’re playing guitar or painting landscape, getting good at something takes time and effort. The same thing is with blogging.
There is no secret sauce to a successful blog, but there are certain strategies to becoming a better blogger. In this post I’m going to share with you ten simple steps which helped me to get noticed and become a better publisher.
1. Write Down Your Ideas
According to one academic study, you remember what you write. That’s why it’s better to write down the ideas come to your head. It’s better to generate a habit of taking notes, even while you’re waiting for your friend in a coffee shop or buying groceries at a local market.
If you don’t write down an idea, you risk to forget about it and lose it when you need it most, hence how become a better blogger. The best way to take notes is to download Evernote app on your smartphone and computer. It will keep all your text and images in one place safe and secure.
2. Brainstorm New Titles
Invest your time and effort to find a topic which will make a huge difference. To get to know what your target audience want to read, you can see what worked out for other blogs from your niche.
Use popular marketing tool Ahrefs which allows to see other sites’ pages which bring the most organic traffic. Just go to Ahrefs, open Site Explorer and paste a link of any blog or site you want to analyze.
3. Focus on Your Target Audience
There are so many blogs out there, and it seems like every topic in the world has been already covered somewhere. However, don’t give up. The best way to attract your target audience is to produce high-quality and useful content for your readers over and over again.
To do this you need to install Google Analytics and research what posts your readers are actually like.
Go to Behavior – Site Content – All Pages to see which posts on your blog get the most views. Show your readers you’re good at some particular topic (you can’t be good at everything, narrow down your interests) and they will keep coming back to get a piece of advice from you.
4. Find Your Blogging Schedule
You need to find your own blogging routine. At the first glance, it seems that publishing a new blog post every day is great, the more posts the more readers you get. But, it’s impossible to produce high-quality content every day. And if you keep posting something people will unsubscribe from your RSS feed feeling overloaded with information.
I figured out as a blogger that posting one, two, or three articles per week is actually better than everyday. Besides, if you post an article once a week or even once in two weeks you will have time to write in-depth, high-quality post and bring value to your readers.
5. Create an Outline
Having a plan before you write a new blog post can help you to save time and effort, and keep your ideas at one place. It’s essential step in writing a new article. A proper outline should contain headline, short introduction, points of the body text and conclusion.
Feel free to include keywords and other notes into your outline. With a proper outline all your thoughts would be neatly covered in the article, without a need to rearrange them when you’re done.
6. Find Questions and Answer Them
There are several popular sites with questions and answers, for example, Quora or Reddit AMA. They are quite popular, because people desperately need answers for their questions. On Quora you can find answers regarding almost anything, including content marketing.
The more people follow the question, the more popular it is. Find questions within your niche with most followers and upvotes and answer them on your blog using a blog post. After that, you can share the link to your blog on Quora answering the question and get promotion for your new post.
7. Develop Strong Headline
I’m pretty sure you have heard a lot of time how it’s important to create strong headlines for your blog posts, and here are a few main reasons:
– headline is like an advertisement of your post, encouraging readers to open it;
– headline helps search engines find your post;
– headline makes your post shareable;
– headline drives traffic to your site.
There are numerous guides written on how to develop great headlines. CoSchedule even crafted a free Blog Post Headline Analyzer which shows type of your headline, defines strong, emotional words, and suggests what you should do to improve it.
‘How To’ headlines are the most popular and strong as they usually teach people to do something, like title of this post: “How to Become a Better Blogger in Easy 10 Steps”. Also, headlines answering questions perform better, for example, “Want to Become a Star Blogger? Here is How to Do It”.
8. Make Your Posts Scannable
Huge pieces of undivided text can scare your readers. People do not tend to read your articles just like an ordinary book – word by word, usually they scan the text reading subheadings and some sentences. That’s why it’s critically important to make your post easy to scan, read and understand.
Use subheadings, bold and italics text and bullet points to make your post well-formatted. Make sure your paragraphs have up to 2-3 sentences to add some white space into your post.
Also, the research found that posts with visuals like images and videos are more engaging and interesting for readers than the ones with no visuals at all. It means that you need to include some photos or screenshots to illustrate your thoughts and bring attention.
9. Improve Your Proofreading Skills
Every blog post, magazine article or book includes proofreading process. This is usually made after editing right before publication. Proofreading is necessary to make you see your work from a whole different angle. Here is a great example of how our brain can screw up your proofreading.
So, here are a few tips on improving your proofreading skills:
– read your post out loud;
– don’t trust a spellchecker and read it once again;
– never proofread until the editing process is done;
– print your post and read it with a pen;
– when it doubt, use the dictionary;
– ask a friend to read it for you.
Sometimes a tiny grammar mistake or a typo can make you look silly. So, make sure to proofread your post when it’s done.
10. Be Confident
And the last tip I’d like to share here is to be more confident. Nobody will take an advice from a person who starts a sentence with a word ‘maybe’. Find your niche and try to become an expert in it. Speak confidently to your audience and make them believe you know what you’re talking about.
To speak with authority you need to conduct an in-depth research before writing. Show your readers you put time and effort to make the blog post worth their attention.
Over to You
The tactics I have put together here may seem familiar and common. However, if it works, it works. They will help you to become a better blogger and bring value to your readers.
Have you got your own steps on how to become a better blogger? Share them with us in the comment field below. If you like this post, don’t hesitate to help us spread it the world with social media.