12 Tips For New Bloggers

Hey lovelies, I’ve been getting a lot of messages and comments lately from my lovely readers and followers asking me a lot of questions about my blogging startup, asking for tips, why I do my best to try and message everyone back it really isn’t always possible, so I thought I would share with you 15 tips for new bloggers. I’ll be covering a wide range of topics, as I know you’ll all be wondering how I developed higher page views over there year check out my How I Tripled My Blog Views This January.

I do want to mention I started blogging/writing online in September of 2015, which is almost five years ago. It takes time to build things, so please don’t get discouraged if you’re currently not where you want to be, you will get there I promise.

Social medias can be a massive way of driving traffic to your blog, and you don’t want to miss out on that. Make sure that you’ve got a twitter and Pinterest account, instagram is a bit of an off one if you ask me, I know people who have had massive success with it but personally I don’t use Instagram for blogging. I’ve always found twitter to bring in the biggest views for me. I’m currently teaching myself Pinterest.

Consistency is key with blogging, make sure you are regularly posting on your socials, it will help you build up a following. Make sure your quality of posting is consistent, you don’t need to post all the time, but having some regular paternities of posting will really help. I know not everyone blogs full time, and won’t have the time to post all the time, but find what works for you.

For me my tribe has always been Twitter, I’ve been using it for six years and blogging almost five. I found it so easy to make friends, and some of the girls I knew when I started blogging are still blogging now, and we still get on really well. Finding people who inspire and encourage you will keep you on the right track.

I know a lot of people find facebook really good for this reason, because there are quite honestly hundreds of blog related support groups. I personally have only ever joined a few, and the one I’ve found the best was the Grow and Glow one.

I can’t stress enough how understanding SEO or Search Engine Optimization makes a massive difference to your blog. Work on your DA (Domain Authority), make sure you have links to previous content in all your posts, build up strong links, make sure your posts are a good length. It’s taken me a long time to understand how SEO affects my blog and I wish I learnt more earlier.

I can not stress the important of having back links to other websites, especially those with a higher DA. Advertising on blogs is a really great way to achieve this, and many bloggers offer this service. If you don’t want to/ or can’t afford to, then there is always an option of guest posting on someone else’s blog. Advertising is a service I will be running from the March 1st too.

If you’re going to be blogging long term, or you want to make a career, or even a side hustle out of your blog then you need to think about investing some money into it. Whether that is a bold theme, buying your domain or paying for advertisement. The investment can be so worth it, especially owning your own domain, as the length of time you own your domain can affect your DA score.

Guys, this is honestly where I have shot myself in the foot with blogging, in almost five years I’ve never had the subscribe via email option on my blog. Which is a bad move on my behalf, those years would have allowed me to build a following, it is a known way to increase your blog views gradually and I should have been smarter, don’t be like me.

When it comes to blogging I always believe in quality over quantity, but I did go through a stage where I thought quantity over quality was thing. I let my standards slip a little bit, and I didn’t always check my writing before hitting publish, showing some really silly spelling errors. Proof reading is something that you need to do every time, be better than me in 2016.

Google Analytics is by far the best way to measure the traffic to your blog, if you’re with blogger like I am the view count tracker is not as accurate at Google Analytics. Understanding your analytics will allow you to see where your traffic is coming from, and if you’re looking to improve your views it gives you the tools to understand your audience and why people come to your blog. Apparently for my blog the keywords “skinny-dip” and “Urban Decay” still bring in the most traffic to posts for me.

You don’t need to start running ads on your blog from day one unless you want to, but I would suggest thinking about your blog long term and how you want to make money from it, if you want to make money from it. Affiliate marketing is not a strategy that works for everyone, as some affiliates do require you to have a certain amount of viewers, or unique users per month. If it is something you want to do I really suggest doing some research and finding one that you think fits your blog the best. I recently wrote about this in How I’ve Started To Monetise My Blog.

This is the first tip I would give anyone starting out blogging, it is so easy too all into a hole of wanting to improve so badly that you literally spend 23 hours working on your blog, and 1 hour living. That might be an exaggeration but you all know how easy it to fall into a hole of checking your stats every five minutes, chucking out content on 5 platforms every ten minutes because you feel you have to get better numbers. Working hard is fine as long as you have breaks, and realise that there is a life outside of blogging. I fell into that hole massively once, and I wrote about it here when blogging becomes an obsession.

I hope that these tips are helpful to those of my following/ readers that are new to blogging, if you have any questions do leave them in the comments and I will try my best to get back to you with any help I can provide!