Are you gearing up for your blogging? have you read my how to start blogging guide?
Do you want to improve as a blogger and want to see quick results.
You know what!
Why Blogging?
Blogging is a long term game unlike Freelancing (read : How to Start Freelancing guide). You might have heard this a lot. It’s true actually.
But, interestingly there is something you can do to start seeing results on the daily basis. This is the topic I want to dig in and showcase the ideas that can help you establish yourself as an authority blogger in the next few years.
When we start blogging — in the beginning of the career — we tend to dream about the early success, some affiliate sales, a sudden hike in PPC earning, or a direct ad opportunity. Well, in most of the cases, this doesn’t happen. It’s for your own good because when you move forward, you get to learn lessons that you might not learn otherwise. What if an early success removes the concept of SERP, Google Adsense Suspension [Do you know i have a guide on how to make money with Google Adsense?], SEO backfire, Bad backlinks? What would you do then? How would you face that after the seeing early success?
It’s hard to see those conditions after enjoying an early success in blogging…
Because our mind isn’t trained and ready for those challenges.
We only see good things coming…
And when unexpected tough situations come through, the bloggers start to feel depressed.
I don’t want that to happen to you, which is why I decided to write this blog post. I want to discuss 4 ways to improve your blogging with the passage of time — and surprisingly, you will start seeing the results of these strategies in a month.
Four Ways To Improve Your Blogging in a Month :
Here are four ways to your improve your blogging in a month:
Create Helpful Content
There is no alternative to creating helpful and educational content. Don’t mix helpful content with evergreen content — because both aren’t the same thing — because the latest update can be a helpful piece of content, whereas an evergreen post could also be helpful for the audience for a long period of time.
One of the simple methods of understanding the helpful content is that see whether or not it helps the audience and makes people open it. There are certain characteristics of helpful content such as:
- It gets shared more on social media
- It’s likely to rank well in search engines
- Such content always has better CTR on social media
- It gets more comments than the other content
- People start linking to it as a good relevant content
You can’t write a long article and expect all these things happen to your content. It doesn’t work like that.
A solid plan is required in order to get that kind of result. For instance, do following things in order to achieve that — but it won’t guarantee that it will be ranked — because there are certain aspects of search engine ranking which search engines look after before ranking any site’s page at the certain position.
There are a few things you could do:
Start with keyword research:
It means you have to use the specific keyword software like SEMrush or Long Tail Pro to actually analyze the keywords. Once you finalize the best among the bunch of keywords, then start working and use those keywords in your content creation process. Make sure those keywords are your niche relevant and have low competition.
Develop a publishing calendar:
It’s often called that you should train your subscribers and followers to read your content at the specific time or day, meaning, your publishing calendar should be set and you must be consistent on your calendar. For instance, some bloggers publish on Sunday and some of them post twice a week and they convey that schedule to the subscribers through different ways.
Write problem-solving content:
When you focus on creating content that does nothing but solves the problem, everything would seem to be working for your blog. A bulk of content that doesn’t help your audience would be a waste of time and resources. Just write and publish content that genuinely helps your audience.
Follow Top Blogs in Your Niche
This is something sensational and much more important, specially if you plan to start event blogging. There are always benefits attached to this. You can’t keep moving forward without following professionals and experts who are doing the same thing and have started way before you. So always try to select those blogs and follow them. Following doesn’t mean just follow on Twitter and subscribe to their feed and forget them, in fact, try to get engaged with them, read them regularly, and try to learn from them.
Use the tool like Feedly to manage your blog subscriptions on the go. When you get time to read a blog, you can quickly read on your smartphone..
There are three things you should take care of:
What blogs to follow:
You must clearly make decisions on what kind of blogs to follow. This means you should be following the blogs in your niche. In fact, you should go further in this and choose the best ones in your niche.
[Note, If you don’t know what niche to go with, checkout the list of my evergreen niches to work with]How to manage subscriptions:
Email subscriptions via newsletter might not be enough in today’s busy world when we don’t regularly open newsletters. You must use the apps like Feedly and Pocket to follow and read the blogs on the go.
How often you read them:
This is an important thing to do as well. You must decide how much content you want to consume in the specific time period. For instance, how many articles you read in a week? Decide this and try to stick to the plan.
Build Connections with Other Bloggers
This is something many bloggers learn over the course of time. But once they realize that how important it is to build the connections with other bloggers, they never compromise on this. The reality is that if you don’t build connections, you’d be isolated and blogging is all about helping others, meeting people, and giving value.
For example, my relations with other famous bloggers helped me in getting a share on their social media profiles like when Hisham Sarwar did it :
Here my colleague and an old time friend, Inaam Ul Haq praised me, I appreciate his gesture.
and here is, Waqas Ahmed, founder of Bloggers Funda group and again, very humble and down to earth personality, who also appraised me :
So the question is how one can build connections with the other bloggers:
There could be dozens of ways to build the connections. Not every method works for every blog and blogger. So, you must try out and choose whatever you’re comfortable with.
A few ways to build connections with bloggers:
Get Engaged on Social Media:
It really means to get engaged not to just earn exposure but for actually deliver something valuable. You might do one comment on an opened social thread anywhere on Facebook which is so helpful and everyone start noticing you and getting connected with you or you may tweet something sensible or valuable in a twitter chat that catches so many eyeballs and people retweet it. It’s all about delivering some value and giving away some benefit to the people without asking them anything. Once you start doing that, you would start to see engagement around your social media profiles.
Comment on the blog posts:
One of the ways to build connections with the bloggers is reading their articles and commenting on them. Not only does it make you noticed, but you can also start a discussion, which may lead to building a strong social and online connection.
Guest Post on others’ blogs:
Guest posting is a strategy of building connections and reaching out to the new audience. It also begins with the delivery of value in the content. Make sure you guest blog on a blog that has the same niche as yours. The core purpose of your guest post should deliver a powerful message that helps the audience of that blog.
Sharing others’ content:
Do not underestimate the power of sharing others’ content. It’s one of the most important things to do when you’re a blogger. In fact, experts believe that you should share others’ content more than yours. There are two benefits of doing that. 1) You get to share value with your followers. 2) You build a connection with the person whose content is being shared.
Focus on Delivering Value rather than Earning Money
It might be shocking for you if you’re not a pro blogger or you’ve just started off your blogging journey. But it’s a fact that delivering the value is the most important thing you’re supposed to do as a blogger. In fact, it’s more important than earning money.
Are you surprised?
Are you thinking that why it’s more important than earning money?
You might think: Earning money is the whole reason one starts a blog and tries to establish!
Yes, but this isn’t how it works exactly.
Money Making is important but serving the audience is more important than money.
Because your audience is the whole reason your blog progresses and when it does, then you make money out of it.
So, pick money over the audience.
How can you focus on delivering the value?
It’s not a complicated thing to do. Actually, it’s quite simple. Just start delivering a little bit extra, so that your reader notices your passion and love for the effort. It shouldn’t be just for the show-off — in fact, you should mean it.
There could be certain things you could be doing as a blogger that would showcase the delivery of value:
Research on the Topic
Make sure whatever you present must be thought-provoking. In fact, adding up relevant examples from the leaders of the industry as well as successful people across the globe may help you present the cause.
Mention Others’ work
Don’t limit your content just to your point of views only. Always try to understand what other bloggers say and believe and if that matches your views, try to link them up in your content. They may start noticing you and they could reciprocate the linking and it would a blast.
Share Tools and Resources
You may be using a lot of online tools and websites that you found out while reading content from your favourite blogs. As a blogger, you should do the same to help out your audience. If they find out something helpful through your content, they will always trust your views and become your loyal readers.
Conclusion
I’m sure you know about the science of overnight success.
Trust me: It can shock you.
People started calling the ‘Pokemon Go’ viral game as the overnight success.
It wasn’t actually an overnight success.
This article tells us how many years a company worked to bring a product that took the internet by storm.
It doesn’t mean you can’t achieve something in a month.
Certainly, you can. But if you don’t, that doesn’t mean you quit and walk away. Maybe, the first month you work pays off after 6 months and you may not be able to understand that how it happened.
LUCK?
Remember that LUCK thing?
(Oh dude, I got lucky, I got this client and he referred me three more)
Maybe, it’s your effort that you put in.
The good news is, whatever and however you give your input in your first month, it will ultimately come back. You won’t waste your time unless you don’t take it seriously. If you think it’s not for you, then you can certainly walk away and don’t waste your time on something you’re not passionate about.
So, the question is:
Can we improve our blogging in a month?
Of course. We can improve a lot in a month.
Image, in that one month, if you make new blogging friends, what if you get a dozen of subscribers that love your blog, and what if you get a couple of readers that may turn into affiliate sales someday.
Things keep happening. When we keep on pushing them.
What did you achieve as a blogger in a month?
