The Best Blogging Tips

Now I’m a computer science engineer, but after having worked in the corporate world for about five years, I quit my job and start this blog called digital inspiration. Now this blog mostly has how-to guides in software tutorials around all things tech. I start this blog in 2004.

So it’s almost 10 years now that I have been talking now. It was a very different story back then there was no Facebook or Twitter and the only way people could subscribe to your blog was through RSS feeds or through email newsletters. Also, Google was a mere collection. Google search results were a mere collection of 10 blue links, so it was relatively easy to get on the front pages of Google. It’s almost impossible now.

Also people would maintain blog roles and link roles, so if they found something interesting, they would generously link to you today. If I find something interesting on the internet, I either tweet it or put it on Facebook, but back then people would generously link to your stuff from their own blogs. So what does it take to become a successful blogger? Now, frankly speaking, there are no secrets or magic van that will make your blog a success, but I think it’s a combination of good luck, hard work and consistency in one of my recent interviews with Lifehacker.

They asked me how I work and I said I work enthusiastic Lee and I work diligently. I do not see my blog as work. I see that as my hobby, it’s like getting paid for your hobby, I’m always looking forward to working on my site. The next morning, I’m always looking to improve my site, and I think this this attitude has kept me going all these years. So in this article I will try to try to summarize some of my learnings and I will try to share some tips that will probably help improve your blog and take it to the next level.

So, let’s get started tip number one. I think this is the most important one you should move to WordPress if you’re on blogger, do your blog, a favor and move everything to WordPress. It isn’t complicated and will definitely help you in the long run, especially from the search engine perspective. Now. Blogger is a great platform, it’s easy and they have some great visual templates, but the biggest drawback with blogger is that blocks everything from search engines that not an article or opposed.

Also. It is relatively difficult to tickle with the back end and that may become a bottleneck once you want to take your blog to the next level. There’s another big concern that I have with bloggers, and that is it’s mostly a distraction for Google now Google. In the past have mercilessly killed products that have been very popular, for example, Google Reader, I’m not saying that Google will kill bloggers someday, but why build your business on something where you do not have enough control on the platform itself? The content you write is definitely the most important part, but at the same time you got to have a good and interesting writing style to really attract an audience.

You just cannot say that this is how I write. This is my site and that’s how it will be good. Writing is a gift that comes naturally to some of us, but if you happen to be in the other half, please get some good books. There’s the element of style. There is on writing by Stephen King. There is on writing well and also eat shoots and leaves right the drafts in a proper editor. You could use Microsoft Word or Poetica, because these will highlight all the typos and grammatical errors in your writing.

You don’t want them to appear on the main site, because that will convey a really bad impression. I would also recommend getting a style guide, something like the New York Times style guide or The Associated Press style book, because they will help you develop a consistent writing style. These style guides have accepted writing rules for journalism, and there is no reason why you cannot apply those rules to your own style of writing.

Don’t try to imitate someone else’s style. You have your own personal style and your blog readers are following your blog because they love your style. Make your writing your own. You don’t have to imitate someone. Not do you have to write your blog as, if you’re writing a press release make it personal. The most important part of a blog is actually the post headline in suddenly everybody is trying to do BuzzFeed style headlines.

This is why the Apple read is not round the chart that Google executives don’t want you to see. You will never believe what Facebook will and will next now with these headlines. What happens is that you raise the expectation level of the audience and when they read the actual content, they are often disappointed. Such headlines do invite visitors. But what is the point of a visit when the person is just glancing at your site and leaving it disappointed? My suggestion would be that you have boring headlines that are accurate, but they not be very cute or clever.

Everyone should be able to guess what article is all about by looking at the post headline itself: there’s a lot of noise in the blogging world and there’s a mad rush to report something new. But I take a step back and think. Are you really adding any value or just contributing to the echo chamber? It is probably the job of the mainstream media. Are the really big blogs to publish news, as happens, but for the rest of us? We can step back and only say when we have something interesting to say: you won’t lose much if you aren’t among the first few to reporter news, just say no to gas blogging, I mean think like a business when you aren’t getting anything in return by giving Away a content to other side for free.

Yes, it will help raise your profile on the Internet. If you manage to write for repeated and authoritative sites like TechCrunch or The Huffington Post, but 99 % of the guest blogging on the Internet is done to direct some link juice to your actual website, but that’s just waste also, as your blog will grow popular you Will see that big publishers are approaching you asking for permission to republish your stuff? Now don’t get too excited about this? They will promise you eyeballs in turn, for your content, but that won’t actually happen.

People will just read your content on their side and go away. What you should instead ask for is a two-way partnership. If they can republish your stuff, would they be? Ok if you republish their stuff on your own website, always make it a point to use good high-resolution images or screenshots with your blog post. This helps for two reasons: when people share your content on social sites like Twitter and Facebook, your story may stand out in the crowded newsfeed just because of that image.

The other important reason is that you can cleverly use images to draw attention to parts of a page that you want to emphasize and if your articles are really long, you can use an image to add break points to add visual break points, and it goes without Saying that you should only use images that you have either captured or those that are in the public domain or under Creative Commons and never ever use stock images on your blog.

They look good on corporate sites, but not on blogs. It is definitely important to rank well in Google search pages, but the problem is that none of us really know how Google works. They have some 200 plus factors to decide the ranks of web pages, and we only know about a few of them. The fact is that, as long as you have the basics right, the cream will automatically rise to the top. So here are a few SEO related tips that will probably help you improve.

The visibility of your blog in search engines 1 have an HTML sitemap so that all your pages are no more than two or three levels deep from the homepage. This will help the Googlebot and other search engine. Bots discover your content when writing content. When writing block was make sure that it’s well organized and that it has headings subheadings and your images should have titles and captions always interlink your content, so that both human visitors, as well as the search BOTS, can find the goal.

That’s hiding in your archives. Also, when it’s not just about the headlines, you should also pay special attention to the excerpt, because that will show up in search, snippets and other places when people share your content on social sites, because people will use that snippet as well to decide whether they really Want to click that link and come to your site or not. You should never rely on your blogging software to auto-generate that, except you should always write it on your own.

Any web page on your website has two parts. There is the main content which includes the actual article that you have written and then there is the common content stuff, like the navigation area, the footer, the sidebar stuff, that’s present across all pages on your site, so in your HTML source, you should ensure that the Main content is above the common content, because that will help search engines understand what your page is all about.

Also, he should use breadcrumbs because that will help search engines understand the organization of content on your site. Do pay attention to your site’s typography, because reading experience matters, google has released some good fonts like Roboto, open sense that look good across all screens, including mobile devices, and you can consider using these fonts on your website as well site. Speed is definitely important, because if your website doesn’t load in a few seconds, people will abandon your site and go to another one.

So what you can do about it? You can switch to a good host make sure that your images are compressed. Your sites, assets like the CSS and JavaScript files, are cacheable and also try to keep your site simple. I mean keep all the bells and whistles out of your site so that your pages load fast. It goes without saying that you’ve got to switch to a responsive design. It’s a Google recommended practice and it will also help you save time, because you don’t have to maintain two versions of your site, one for the desktop and one for the mobile.

While you may be drowning in email. There are a lot of people who still prefer to get the daily dose of News through the email newsletter and therefore important that you use a professional service to send your email newsletters. Now, services, like MailChimp have an RSS to email functionality that will automatically convert your RSS feed into an email newsletter, but I would suggest, is don’t use these services instead handcraft your email newsletter, because the response rate, the open rate, will be much much higher good and Useful content automatically spreads on the internet, but if that’s not happening with your content, for some reason, it will not be a bad idea to pitch people, but who should who? Should you pitch fellow bloggers? Well, there is no harm if you can keep your emails short and do it occasionally, but do you really know who you should contact when you have written something good and useful? You should contact someone who has previously commented on your story.

You should contact someone who has previously shared your story on social sites. These are the people who are really fans of your work and they will happily evangelize your content and I think it’s much better going after them than the influencers who are extremely busy and they may not even have the time to read your emails when someone lands On your website, for the first time, they are very likely to check your about a space to know more about you and whether you are really an expert at some topic.

So that’s your window of opportunity to impress him and to convert him from a casual visitor into a regular visitor, so make sure that you have written are really good about this page. But what should it contain? Well, it must have links to your most popular. Your most important posts that you have written you should make it easy for people to subscribe to your content. There should be a search button so that people can search your archives and, if you’ve ever been mentioned in the press of the media, make sure that you have a list there, because that will make your bio more credible.

To someone who doesn’t know you. This are probably the easiest way to get traffic on your website there easier to scan. They are easier to write and they’re more likely to go viral now, once in a while is okay, but if you are only focused on producing list post on your blog, readers are less likely to appreciate it if you’ve been blogging for a while. You know that there is old content in your archives.

That’s either not relevant or some of the links old articles may no longer be working. Now. I would suggest, keep updating your old articles so that they always stay fresh and relevant. This may be your personal preference, but if something is of no use, it can probably be removed from your blog, because you are not running a newspaper or a legal firm where every document has to be preserved. I will give you an example here.

I had a lot of Orkut related posts on my blog. They were relevant and useful when I wrote them few years ago, but now that Orkut is no longer available, those posts are pretty useless. So I had two options. I can either let them stay in the archives or I may get rid of them permanently and direct all that juice to something more relevant and more related. Think of the reader first and the revenue later now.

Advertising is definitely important, but if you only focus on the commercial angle for your blog, it is difficult to build a loyal audience in the long run. Adsense buy, sell ads and blog ads is some good advertising networks, but you should always stay away from those low and advertising networks that happily runs comets on the other side, because, ultimately, you are responsible for what ads are shown to your visitors on your site.

You can easily attract the attention of other website owners by generously linking to them, because your blog posts will show up in their site logs. They may check out your blog and ultimately help spread the word among their audience. You can also add depth to your post by linking to other websites that have covered the same topic, but may have a different perspective. Some people even suggest that Google prefers pages that have links and they see them as more trusty and more authoritative.

I will give you the example of a medical site here, so you have two sites that have almost the same kind of content, but in the first site, links to all the research papers, all the web sites that it has referred to before. Creating that page and the other site has no links, it has just text. So, if you’re reading these two pages, you are more likely to trust the one that has those links to the research papers and that has cited all the sources.

Right same is true. With Google, they may see pages that have links as most trustworthy, more authoritative, you’re, probably using Google antics to measure the traffic on your website. But are you looking at the right? Metrics pageviews are useless because somebody comes and just leaves that’s a loss visit. What you really need to focus is the returning visitor count, the bounce rate and the amount of time that people are spending on your website if they’re, just landing and leaving you got to diagnose, why that’s happening? Maybe they aren’t finding the information in your pages.

Maybe the title is something else, and the actual content is something else. Maybe they don’t like the layout of your site? Maybe the typography is bad. You got to diagnose the reason you should always strive to increase the amount of time that people spend on your web pages and there are a few ways to do that. You can add a related post section to your website so that once people are done reading a article, they can check out the other related articles on your site.

You can also try the approach that QC comment. Encom have taken up where the next article automatically loads. When somebody has finished reading the current article, Google is no longer sharing the search queries with their masters, but you can always analyze your internal search, queries through Google custom search and through Google Analytics to understand what kind of solutions people are seeking on your website.

You can then go a step further in Google custom search. You can use the annotations feature to automatically highlight such pages in search results and readers have limited time. So if you give them the information, they are looking for instantly they’re going to like you even more in all these years, I have tried to harness various publication blogs and I think that has also helped grow. My blog, I have written a book for the Kindle.

Our YouTube blog, I do a podcast on iTunes, which is essentially my youtube articles in downloadable format I curate stuff on Flipboard. I also upload my slides on SlideShare. Now only a few hundred thousand people probably know about my website, but these blogs are known to millions of Internet users. It does helps to have a presence there. You can automate all this with IFT tea and buffer, but always repurpose your content for other blogs.

Everyone can have a blog on the internet, but the thing that differentiates you from other blogs is, of course, your expertise, your writing skills and most important your credibility. The editorial should be completely separate from the business side of the blog, because your readers are 10x, smarter than you think. The blog world operates on the principle of transparency, and that should be a guiding principle as well.

Thanks you