Blogging tips for beginners

Last year, Si Quan Ong wrote an article about blogging tips for beginners, and we have translated it into the Russian language for our readers, as we considered the tips quite useful and we recommend you to read the original article. Still, we'd like to present you with a shorter version of it, with comments from SPRAVA specialists.

Si Quan Ong demonstrates the results of his methodical work on blogging:

Break dancing blog, led by the author in 2015, and its traffic

Ahrefs blog and its organic traffic

The first and most popular advice we get sounds like this:

Find a niche for your blog

What does that mean? It means that you should find some unique topic for your blog's articles, and make sure you can give your readers expert information or comments on specific topics.

Alya Gorelikova, Head of Key Projects Department at SPRAVA

“For example, our customer, the Finnish eco-house construction company LUMI POLAR, tells in his blog what to look for when building a house or choosing a construction company. The management and employees of the company actively participate in various construction exhibitions and events, which are also written about in the blog.

Every month, the website lumipolar.ru publishes detailed material either about the company's houses construction specifics, the construction nuances in general, or the active life of the company in the construction market. For users who are interested in construction topics, such content will be as useful as possible, and trust in the developer will only grow with each article.

Or one more example. Slim Clinic, a reflexology clinic, specializes in weight loss through acupuncture. The head physician of the clinic understands well how difficult it is for a patient to decide on a course of acupuncture treatment and believe in Chinese medicine. A blog on the site and articles come to the rescue: doctors talk about the effectiveness of the method, indications for treatment, and describe cases from practice.

In the blog on the clinic's website, you can find information that will be relevant for everyone who wants to lose weight. These are recipes for healthy meals, reviews of treatment programs, and related medical services. In blog articles, you can remove doubts, objections, and answer all questions in detail.

Many bloggers who are successful today started at something very specific. Start small and very niche, and once you get a big enough audience, you can broaden the scope of topics to write about.

Natalia Protsyuk, CEO at SPRAVA

“When we decided to blog at the agency, we started from two inputs:

1. It was decided to write not so much for IT specialists as for our target audience.
2. Our recommendations should be available for implementation and effective for both large corporations and small businesses.

The task is to tell the owner how he can use Internet marketing to achieve his goals. We have prepared a content marketing strategy. Then we started to implement it. SPRAVA experts, together with the editor, work on each topic of the content plan, we publish articles on the blog and make announcements of these articles on Facebook. Now we are preparing a release version of our site so that this site becomes a convenient tool. There are plans to launch a mailing list. Traffic has grown, as well as the number of calls to the sales department.

We try to share with our readers only what is useful to them, what they can implement on their resource, we talk about our experience, nuances and trends of promotion on the Internet.

Write on topics that are interesting to people

If you feel stuck, here's a shortcut: use the key research tools to get new ideas.

Tatyana Zhevega, head of the SPRAVA SEO department:

“The site should be useful and interesting - this is an axiom. In order to achieve maximum success in this matter, not only landing pages but also texts on the blog / articles / Useful tips should be written, focusing on search queries.

If the purpose of the article is auxiliary, for the sale of a particular product or service, search engines will be an excellent assistant in choosing the topic. They show what interests users in this niche in a particular period of time, the so-called trends.

If we are looking for a more independent topic - the first, but not the only, assistant will be Google Keyword Planner. But competitors should not be neglected, only you should look at those who are a cut above you.”

But keep in mind that such tools usually do not show things like monthly keyword statistics.

Look closer at your competitors

It's really helpful. As it goes, many blogs show their most popular articles right at the start. You see the «Top-5 popular articles this month» on barbershop sites, or beauty blogger sites, wherever. Look through such articles to better understand what keywords were used.

Keep the search intent in mind

Look at the top results for your keyword to figure out if the topic you chose could be competitive. It feels useless to write an article on «coffee maker» when the top is full of online stores, not blogs.

Here is why your blog article on coffee makers would not get to the top — it is full of online shops.

Make great content worth sharing or referencing

If your article consists of the info which everyone could easily find on the Internet, it is not worth sharing. You don't bring anything new or interesting. On the other hand, if you have unique information on your topic, and interesting tips, then people would love to share the article link.

Make sure your posts are easy to read

People nowadays don't like to spend much time reading. So help them decide to read your post by writing it in an easy-to-digest form. Advice:

• Avoid long paragraphs and long sentences: it is easier to follow the thought this way.
• Use multimedia: to attract visual comprehension and to illustrate points in your text.
• Use formatting: quotes, bold and italic, etc, helps to break a visually boring wall of text.
• Read your post out loud: maybe there are places where the text does not sound smooth or interesting.

Attract attention with headlines

No one requires you to write clickbaits. But you must have an understanding of how headlines work, and how a good headline would sound. You could search for templates for that, special tools, and of course you should analyze competitors and top bloggers to see how they write their headlines.

Provide a good introduction

If the first lines of your articles are boring or far away from the topic, your reader will close it in a matter of seconds. Instead, you have to hook your reader. At Ahrefs, people who write the blog follow the next algorithm:

1. Describe the problem;
2. Present its solution;
3. Give proof that the solution works.

You can use either this approach or find something that works better with your text.

Optimize your text, even on SEO basic level

It is not about stuffing your text with keywords (honestly, the idea is bad and outdated). Just make sure that relevant keywords could be found in the Title and/or Description meta tags of your page, and also in your text. Making your URLs descriptive (e.g. <code>https://sprava.ua/en/blog/17-sovetov</code> leads to this article) also helps.

For WordPress users, Yoast SEO makes the implementation of this advice easier. Also, if you are interested in SEO services, you can hire professionals.

Prepare an email list

If you want people to engage with your content and you want to communicate with them even despite YT blocking your channel or FB limiting you in any way, you should think about getting people to subscribe to your mailing list - so they won’t miss your articles.

By the way! If you enjoyed this excerpt or any other of our articles, you can subscribe to our newsletter. We are ready to share with you useful things and life hacks, news and cases once every two weeks.

Update old content

It is useful in many ways: your readers will get new information, Google will treat your content as new and relevant, and it also improves your SEO indicators. As an example, you can see the growth of organic traffic to the Ahrefs article after the material updating.

Take notes

Any time you are running out of inspiration or have to quote someone famous, notes will help you. The author of the original article uses Notion for taking notes.

Nata Zayats, SPRAVA blog editor

“We have a more familiar Evernote. You can take notes in Trello and create themed boards. Or create folders on Google Drive. To record thoughts along the way, a voice recorder or a Telegram channel named after yourself is good.

In conclusion

Blogging is hard work. You must publish regularly and advertise your articles. The good news is you are not alone. So many bloggers have been through their ups and downs, and with their hard-won experience, they've created the path for you.

For now, all you have to do is stick to the blogging tips and get started.