11 Blogging Best Practices to Help You Turn Your Blog into a Business

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Blogging is fun and it is a lifestyle. But blogging is also a business. If you want to turn your blog into a business many bloggers have to slightly change their blogging approach. Blogging best practices can help you to do that.

Instead of writing what they want, and how they want to write it they suddenly have to consider another point of view on their blog: Their audience and customers.

Where previously your blog could be anything from a collection of stories to a journal for thoughts and a colorful mix of topics, you now have to put more focus into your blogging and consider how your audience will perceive and like what you do on your blog.

What is more, you have to think about how you can reach an audience. You have to do all the necessary tasks to reach a larger audience, even when you are starting out. You may not see instant results from some of your efforts, but they are necessary to have a chance to succeed in the long run.

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Blogging is not a sprint. You will have to keep going. And what you do right from the start and keep doing decides if you can succeed over time.

Make your blogging life easier with the following 6 blogging best practices and tips that will help you stick to blogging – and make it grow!

1. Stay On Topic

Think about the blogs you follow? What are they writing about? Are they mixed topics where you only follow because of a small part of the topics or are you concentrating on blogs with a clear topic focus?

In reality, it is much easier to grow a loyal and interested audience if you concentrate on ONE main topic. The reasons are manifold.

• If you have a clear topic you can concentrate on finding an audience for exactly this one topic.
• It is much easier to explain what your blog is about.
• People are not bored or even annoyed with all the other stuff they are not interested in.

I know that sometimes it may seem easier to find enough ideas for blog posts if you choose a variety of topics. But in the long run, it makes everything else about blogging a lot easier if you stick fairly closely to one topic – or rather one target audience.

2. Focus on your audience

A blog is not a diary. A blog is written for an audience – or it will never have an audience. If you want to grow your blog audience, you have to provide something on your blog that some group of people wants to have and consume.

The more you know about this group of people that you want to address with your content, the better can you get at creating exactly what they are looking for.

Blogging is not about creating content that you want to create. Blogging is about creating content for a group of people. If you excel at that you will be able to grow an audience for your blog (if you work for it…)

3. Find a Schedule/Frequency

Once you have a significant number of blog posts on your blog that are still relevant, you may not have to create a new post every day. In this case, you should rather focus on two other things:

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FREE Beginner’s Guide: START A BLOG

1. create high-quality blog content instead of just focusing on the number of posts you can create. Rather create one post that is important and includes a ton of information, is well researched and uses some helpful images. This will get you further than a handful of posts that have no real value for your audience.
2. Find a schedule that works for you: Publish a post every Monday, or twice a week, or on the weekend. Whatever suits you as a schedule can be ok, but make sure that your audience knows what they can expect. When does it make sense to look for a new post?

A schedule will also help you to stick to blogging regularly. If you know your next post is due on Tuesday, you will find a way to create it. If you have a loose schedule like “ Oh, I will need a new post soon,” there will come the time when everything else will be so important that you keep postponing your new post – and for your audience, your blog looks almost abandoned.

4. Solve Problems

If you can solve problems that a group of people has – these people will not only like your blog, they will need your blog. The more important and pressing the problem is the more impressed will they be if you help them solve their problems.

If it is a big enough problem, this may be the best starting point for turning your blog into a business.
Talking about problems that your audience has, will often also inspire engagement. Questions, comments, hints, and tips will come in if you address a common problem. (if you are not talking about something very embarrassing, that is…)

5. Promote the hell out of your content

This is what many bloggers are not aware of when they are starting out. A large part of the time you spend on building and growing your blog needs to be spent on promoting it.

Writing posts is only a small part of your blogging life. And even before you publish your first post, you need to have a first idea where and how you start getting visitors to your blog.

The times when new content on the web found an audience naturally through Google are long past. No matter which niche you are in, there is already someone there who wrote blog content about it.

Google and search engine optimization will need some time to build up for a new blog. And if you do not promote your blog, Google might not even notice that your blog exists – or rather ignore it because it has no audience so it is not important.

If you need some tips on how and where you can start promoting your blog and get traffic, start with this blog post.

6. Build an Email List from the start

Do not put off starting your email list until later. Your email list will become part of your sales funnel. If you want to turn your blog into a business, your email list will be one of the most valuable assets.

Do not put off something that important for later. Even if it is only one subscriber at a time, your email list will still turn into your highest converting traffic channel.

Even if you have no clue what you can sell to your subscribers, having subscribers brings you one step closer to converting them to customers.

Do you need an email tool to start your email list? Here is the tool that we use: ConvertKit. We think that it is your best choice!

7. Consider Keywords

Yes, keywords are key to getting traffic from search engines. But there is more to keywords than SEO.

Keywords also speak to your audience. If you want to attract people from a certain target group, you need to use the words they use, search or expect to read. Speaking the right lingo in your content can tremendously improve your results.

In the long run, if you want to have any chance of getting traffic from Google search, you need to consider keywords in your content. The best chance are so-called long-tail keywords. These are keywords that may not have the big number of searches for those keywords the competition if often too big. What you are looking for are keywords with a smaller amount of searches and lower competition. You will need more of these keywords.

Image Source: Neil Patel

Do your homework and add long-tail keywords to your content. Long-tail keywords often are keyphrases or combinations of keywords with other words. High-level keywords may get more search traffic but there are far more long-tail keywords for one topic than high-level keywords. Even if your competitors are already ranking for some of them, your chances are high to get some traffic for some of the other long-tail keywords.

If you consider this principle of long-tail keyword research right from the start of your blogging venture, you can get search traffic even if you are new, small or have a lot of competition in your niche.

8. Learn about the power of headlines

How much effort are you investing in creating your headlines?

Often, bloggers invest huge amounts of time into content creation. And once the blog post is finished, they use the first headline that comes to their mind. Are you like that?

If you fail to create outstanding headlines, you can create the best content you may still lose out.

Why?

Because most people will see your headline long before they see your content. In fact, your headline will decide if people are interested enough to even visit your content.

The same piece of content with two different headlines will have two totally different stories. One may become a success the other may fail. With the same content, the same keywords and shared with the same audience.

Why?

Because some headlines are better than others. Some headlines inspire more shares. Some headlines get more clicks.

Learning about great headlines is an important step in your blogging journey.

9. Interlink your posts

As a blogger, you publish posts on a regular basis. That means over time, there is a large number of blog posts on various topics on your blogs. These topics are often related. Some posts have additional information to the content of other posts.

That makes linking from one post to another a natural thing.

Most bloggers think about adding internal links from a new post to related older posts.

But if you know more about internal linking, you will go back and add more links between your blog posts – and here is why.

Internal links are links that you add between posts on your own blog. These links have multiple benefits. Google uses these links to understand the structure of your website. These links have SEO power as the pass SEO juice from one post to another. These internal links can also help to keep your readers on your blog for a longer time – which again is a Google ranking factor.

If you earn about the power of internal linking once you already have hundreds of blog posts on your blog, you need to revisit most of your posts and add internal links to profit from this power.

Image source: Orbit Media

If you know about internal linking and its benefits right from the start, you should think about these links for each post that you create.

• link from your new post to older posts on related topics
• link from older posts to your new posts to give it additional SEO power

10. Use images in your content

As a new blogger, I was not aware of the immense power images have for bloggers. Or maybe I did, but I had no clue how to use that power, which images I could use, how I could create my own images and what images work best in social media.

If you do not add images to your content, you will miss out. And if you do not know HOW to add these images you will still miss out.

We humans are visual learners. Images help to make content easier to understand and they trigger our memory. Images also have their own marketing power. You need images for social media. Images can help to improve your search rankings and traffic from Google search.

Image source: Brainrules

Every blog post needs several images:

• title image
• social media images
• images that add value – infographics, screenshots, statistic images, and more

Images can be used to attract links. Images can even give you more search traffic through Google image search.

Do you want to learn how to use the power of images in your blogging and marketing efforts?

11. Find a daily routine

Blogging always includes some recurring tasks that you have to do over and over again. Whether it is posting to social media daily, or answering comments on your blog or writing emails. The most important truth about these things is: They need to be done. Again, and again.

Some tasks may seem annoying and won’t give you many results when you start doing them. Because success comes with continuity and consistency. (If you want to know more about what a blogger needs besides consistency, check out this blog post about successful blogging personalities.)

No social media channel was instantly famous or giving huge amounts of traffic. They have all needed time to grow an audience. And success came with consistency. Blogging habits will help you achieve your goals.

Final Words on Blogging Best Practices

The above 11 blogging best practices should be a must for every new blogger. If you are not aware of them you will have a hard time starting your blog and turning it into a business.

Starting a blog can be overwhelming and intimidating. Following the above tips will help you to make your new blogging life a little more organized and goal-oriented.

And whatever you do and wherever you are right now on your blogging journey, keep in mind that every successful blogger you see today was exactly where you are today a couple of months or even years ago. They (We) all needed time to grow and learn. No blogger was born perfect in every aspect of blogging. Some things we all had to learn.

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