Here are the hottest tips you need, with a little help from us, to become an expert in your field starting with tips on how to blog effectively.
1. Know your objective.
What is your blog trying to achieve? Speaker engagements? Press quote opportunities? Brand yourself or your company’s expertise? Amuse your customers? Sell to a mass audience? Drive subscriptions to a newsletter? As with any product, you’ll want to know what you’re trying to do, target your audience, research what is out there already, find your niche and give it to them.
2. Be style consistent.
Whatever you’ve decided, you’ll have to sustain it over time. it’s best to be consistent or consistently inconsistent. Scholarly, playful, research based, issues driven, for example — if that’s what you want to have as your blogging “persona.” But you’ll have to sustain this.
3. Be focused.
Examples show that success in blogging, at least from a business perspective, comes to those who focus on whatever the blog is about. If it’s a blog about gas and oil explosions, stay focused on that niche. If you’re a video blog on gauging the property market, keep doing that. You want your audience to keep coming back, and for new people to find you and then be pleased with what they see, and want to keep coming back as well, and liking what they see time after time.
4. Have the energy.
Even the top bloggers struggle to find something to write about regularly. But if you get the audience, you will want to keep going but don’t beat yourself up for not finding the energy.
It takes energy. And if you get an audience, then you’re doing what they want for you to sustain it. Ask for feedback, ideas and suggestions if they is what you struggle with. Let them help you.
5. Choose your platform wisely.
There are a lot of good platforms out there paid, free, ads, no ads, flexible templates, locked in to one design or multiple flexible designs. Any and all of them are valid, depending on your needs. If you’re after ad revenue from third parties, you’ll need a blog that handles those. Or maybe you want to be as simple as possible, and just get a blog up, so people can read it.
But also remember that whatever choice you make, you can change it over time to something else. The change is not without pain, but you can do it.
The main thing is to get going, and then refine it over time. WordPress works for me.
6. Comments or not?
A lot of publishers worry over whether to allow comments, whether to allow commenting freely, how much to police them, and so on. Relax. Yes, you may be liable if someone posts something libelous and you do nothing to fix it. But you can easily set you blog to notify you every time a comment is posted, you can take action if you see something untoward, and the chances are that if your blog is a niche type of content without a huge mass audience the biggest annoyance will come from automated commenting software that can be filtered more than from belligerent individuals.
7. Don’t overdo the writing.
Say what you have to say have your writers say what they have to say and be done with it. Make your point, and go. Short is, generally sweet.
8. Don’t force yourself into fixed lengths.
Yes, short is sweet, but you may have a blog where something needs to be explained at length. If that’s the nature of your blog and the nature of what your audience expects, go ahead and write longer. Some blogs, especially ones by academics, can be long and complex discussions of complicated issues, highly nuanced and run on for a long time. You can post long if it’s called for. And your next post can be three words, if that makes sense, then.
This isn’t a magazine or newspaper where you have a fixed length to which you have to adhere. But you do need to be mindful of when you’re no longer giving value, and figure that over a certain length (200 words? 250?) you’ll start to lose readers unless what you’re writing is gripping.
9. Decide if look and “feel” is important.
Some blogs are very “raw,” pretty much just text on a page. If there are images, they’re pasted somewhat at random, links and bolds and italics are also inserted as the spirit moves. Others are highly composed, with colors balanced, photos uniformly sized with drop shadows, videos placed “just-so,” titles carefully chosen, so it looks magazine-like, carefully composed. Either is fine. But decide what matters to you and the face you’re presenting the audience. Then stick to it. The more composed, of course, the higher the cost, especially in time.
10. Start small, think big.
You can start with a single blog, a string of posts, about something you’re passionate about, the particular niche of your business, a subject that interests you but if this is a business, you should also from the start carefully make sure to tag and categorise and assume that, if you get an audience, you might launch all kinds of offshoots, niches within niches, related topics, maybe even other languages. You might add video, e-commerce, ads, speaking engagement suggestions etc, etc. Don’t let all the thinking keep you from getting started better to launch than wait. But do, where possible, think of how things will go if you do expand, and how much you’ll save later on by planning from the start
Go for it! We can help.