Top 10 Blogging Tips For Beginners In 2015

If you are new to blogging, marketing, online entrepreneurship, etc., trying to get your first traffic, leads and sales can be pretty overwhelming. I know, because I've been there.

I never had a personal mentor. I never had any family or friends that knew anything about internet marketing or starting a business online, so I had to just hustle and figure it out.

I built this blog to hopefully help people with this problem. Many people sell themselves short and give up on pursuing their dreams of being a business owner and choosing a lifestyle by their own design.

My goal is to help YOU get off to a better, faster start with your business than most of us entrepreneurs did when we started.

Recently, I got an email from a Self Made Success fan who was having this very same problem. He was struggling with his website and sent me this email (I've made him and his business anonymous for his privacy):

Justin –

I have watched your YouTube video and thank you for the valuable information. I currently have my own site called _______ which is based on ________.

However, I started blogging everyday, which is hard with two kids, work, etc. and now it's about once a week. The lack of traffic is hurting me and my brother invest in the website ourselves.

I am on Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, Google Plus, even spent some money using GoDaddy adding us to search engines, etc. What other good was can we expose our website out there?

I feel like we are losing here. We have been running since Feb. 2014. I have also used reddit from time to time and get called out for spamming at times, which is hard to take in. Any help would be great.

Over all I'd like to make this a part-time thing and earn some money having fun while doing it.

Thank you,

________.

This is a common problem for thousands of people. You may can even relate to this story. So, what I did, is take a look at his website, and gave him these 10 tips for boosting his traffic and increasing his site's popularity:

10 Blogging Tips For Beginners

1. Write blog posts that have a minimum of around 1,000 words each.

If you write short posts every time with little depth, they won't get as many shares on social media and they won't rank in search engines like Google.

Ultimately, the goal for each post is to get as viral as possible on social media and then have the right SEO optimizating for eventually ranking and getting organic traffic.

This is how you get the most traffic squeezed out of each blog post. Not only is there a correlation between content length and SEO, but with social shares as well. This chart from OkDork proves it:

2. Spend More Time Promoting Than Writing.

A great article is only going to get you results if a lot of people see it. Otherwise, it's useless. You need to market your posts on social media and other content sharing sites for maximum exposure.

Here are a few tips for promoting your blog posts:

• Share them on Viral Content Buzz. This site is built to help you get shares for your content from Stumbleupon, Twitter, Facebook and Pinterest. Plus, it's free.
• Share them on JustRetweet. This is a free site somewhat similar to Viral Content Buzz, but it focuses on promoting tweets to Twitter, Facebook and Google+.
• Share them on Empire Avenue. This is another great community for getting lots of social shares and engagement for your content. You can create a free account or a paid one.
• Share blog posts once on Tumblr, Pinterest, Stumbleupon, Flipboard, Facebook, Google+, Scoop.it, Reddit, and Digg.
• You can share blog posts more than once for a little more exposure on Twitter and Linkedin. You may even check out Hacker News if your blog is about technology, marketing, etc.

For more on promoting blog posts, here are some other great social media strategies.

3. Don't leave out email marketing.

When it comes to online sales, your best option for monetizing your blog is with email marketing. In fact, 91% of consumers check their email at least once per day.

On top of that, for every $1 spent on email marketing, the average return on investment is $44.25. If that doesn't convince you that email marketing is effective, I don't know what will.

You NEED to be collecting emails from your blog. It is not only essential for sales, but for steadily increasing traffic. Collecting emails is how you ensure people keep coming back to your blog once they have been there once.

I recommend creating a GetResponse account and going through the walkthrough on setting it up. Learn how to create an opt-in box and put it in your widget area of your blog.

Then, every time you publish a new post, send an email update out to your subscribers with a link to it, so they can check it out.

You might want to also look into getting popups, Hello bars, lead magnets, etc. to help you collect more leads. For more on collecting leads, here's a great article by Neil Patel.

4. Model after other big-name sites in your niche.

I know, I know, I talk about this all the time. But, I need to hammer it in your head to make sure you don't forget to do it. You should ALWAYS be studying other successful sites.

This is how you pick up on patterns that you can implement on your site to get better results. If you have a sports site, study ESPN, Bleacher Report, NFL, NBA, etc. to see what they do that you don't.

If have a fitness site, study Bodybuilding.com, Men's Health, etc. to learn how to model what they do right. This can make a HUGE difference for your blog.

5. Add at least one image to every post.

If you want your posts to go viral on social media or grab more attention, you need to use images within it. People actually process images up to 60,000x faster than words.

Posts get 94% more engagement when they have relevant images within them. On top of that, web pages with images get 50% more shares. The lesson here: USE IMAGES.

At the very least, have a relevant featured image, so that when your post is shared or appears on your blog's front page, it will show the image next to it and people will be more inclined to click it.

I also recommend using screenshots, infographics, graphs, etc. to make information more visual and backup claims with social proof.

According to OkDork and Buzzsumo, articles with at least one image get almost 3x more shares. Take advantage!

6. Make your website fast.

If your website loads really slow, people will click the dreaded “back button” and go look at another article instead of yours. Google knows this and has made site speed one of its ranking factors.

So, not only will you rank lower in search engines, you will also lose a lot of potential visitors, leads or customers because of your slow site trying their patience.

The first thing you need to do to speed up your blog is to analyze it to see where you are at. I recommend using sites like Pingdom or GTMetrix to do this.

For a full list of quality performance analyzers, here are the 6 best free tools for testing website performance. If your site takes longer than 3 seconds to load on average, you might want to start optimizing it.

You can install the Yoast SEO plugin and W3 Total Cache for starters to make your site faster. Here's 10 more tips for increasing blog speed.

7. Use the best blog resources.

Luckily for you, I've been through a lot of the hard parts of creating a successful blog through trial and error. I've tested out and researched a ton of different softwares, plugins, extensions, services, etc. to help take my business to the next level.

I decided that I wished someone would have done all that time researching and trying out different resources and just putting all the best ones on a list for people like me.

So, I did that for you. It will save you a lot of time and energy to use my top resources page here to figure out which ones you should use for which functions for your business.

I will always be updating it with the highest quality tools and resources for you to use.

8. Build up your social media following.

I've seen people on the internet create extremely profitable businesses just using social media and little niche blogs they create for selling affiliate products. Social media is EXTREMELY powerful.

Here are the top social media profiles you should be building up for your blog:

• Facebook Page
• Twitter
• Google+
• Pinterest
• Flipboard
• Tumblr

Of course there are other sites that I mentioned earlier that are great for sharing your content on, but building up your following on them is either impractical or a waste of time.

9. Make sure Google Analytics is setup for your site.

How are you supposed to know what is and isn't working if you aren't keeping track of the numbers? Google Analytics is free and effective for tracking where your website visitors come from, what device they use, what conversion rates you get, what country they're in, etc.

Make sure you go to Google Analytics if you haven't already and set it up with your site. It's pretty much impossible to keep growing your traffic if you don't even know how much you're getting or where it is coming from.

Don't play the guessing game with your blog.

10. Keep up with SelfMadeSuccess.com.

I have one of the fastest growing entrepreneurship and marketing sites on the internet for a reason. I am devoted to helping people just like you build businesses and websites that are successful.

I will always be publishing consistent content that will teach you strategies you need and will be coming out with countless resources in the future as well.

I'd love to have you along for the ride as SelfMadeSuccess.com rises to the top of the industry and helps more internet entrepreneurs succeed in less time than ever before.

Conclusion

If you're new to marketing, blogging, entrepreneurship, etc., follow these 10 tips and you will start seeing much bigger traffic and sales numbers that you never could have imagined.