Blogging Blueprint to Create a Successful BlogWhat You Will Learn!
The Blogging Blueprint To Create & Running A Successful Blog
Before starting this blogging guide I want you to have a clear idea of what exactly is a blog and how does it work?
What is a Blog?
Blog is nothing but online journals where you can read, write and share your writing or knowledge or experiences with other like-minded people
A blog is much like us they have their own personality and unique style.
There are some recommendations that are considered as a fundamental part of creating a successful blog.
Note: This post is for creating wordpress.org blog. This blogging tutorial is for both beginners and people who have already started their blog but got little success till now.
Let’s get started with our blogging blueprint:
Create Your Blog
Choose your niche
One of the important things is to choose a niche to start a blog.
People often commit the mistake by choosing lucrative niches like Fashion, Automobile, Gadgets, Sports which are already crowded and are highly competitive, thus after few day with less to no success they close their blog.
Don’t go for a niche that does not excites you to write awesome blog posts. Choose a niche based on your interest and hobby, if you do so you’ll get success in no time.
Keyword research
Another vital step in your blogging creation process. Keywords are phrases that people might type in a search engine to find results.
So you have to perform a detailed research on finding keywords and writing blog posts circling those niche related keywords will transform your blog into an authority blog in that niche.
Use your niche related keywords in categories, tags, meta description, blog title, and obviously in blog posts.
Use tools like Google keyword planner, keyword.io, and lisgraph.com for keyword research.
Niche product Research (optional)
This step is for people looking to create a blog for affiliate marketing, after finding your desired keywords now it’s time to do research about the product you’re going to showcase on your blog.
See what other blogger has written about that product, do people buying the product, why people are searching for that type of product try to address their problem with a solution then promote your product in front of them.
Set up your blog
Buy a domain name for your blog for this go to godaddy.com or namecheap.com after buying your desired domain name now buy web hosting for your blog go to bluehost.com or siteground.com and buy hosting for your blog. For beginners start with a web hosting plan that gives you at least 1 GB of web space and 10+ GB Bandwidth.
Read also: Web Hosting Guide 101
After getting web hosting log into your cPanel, login details will be provided by web hosting provider and change your domain name servers with your web hosting service provider’s name servers.
(you’ll find tons of tutorials about how to change nameservers on YouTube refer to them)
Now, install WordPress, while installation it will ask for Blog name, title, admin name and password fill those and start the installation.
After successful installation it will provide you with two URL’s one is of WordPress admin dashboard and other is the URL of your own blog.
Customize your blog
- Go to settings >> general in your WP dashboard: here you can change the Site Title, Site tagline, Date format, email id etc.
- Go to setting >> Permalinks and change the URL structure to Post Name
- To change theme go to appearance >> themes >> add new
- To install plugins go to plugins >> add new >> select a plugin >> click on install now >> then click on activate
- To create a page go to pages >> add new
- To create a post go to Posts >> add new
Drive traffic to your blog
Content is the king
In each and every blog you’ll find that the blogs have emphasized about writing good quality content, do you know why?
Simple because people visiting your blog just to read the information you are providing your content. Content is what talks to your reader and urges them to share your blog posts and visit your blog on occasions.
If you write poor content that provides little to no value to your reader then your reader will leave your blog and probably they will never visit your blog.
So, writing quality content and providing much value to your reader should be your USP. Well structured blog posts can bring you unmeasured traffic from different sources.
Content Writing Tips:
- Try to write lengthy articles about 1200-2000 words (article above 1000+ words ranks well in search engines)
- Try to writing content using paragraphs and bucket brigades, this makes readers read your post without any having any difficulty.
- Use images and videos (if applicable to the post) in your content.
- Write great titles for your blog posts because they are like 80 cents of the dollar. A good title means getting more clicks from people and thus increasing your post CTR (click through rates).
- Use Call to Action elements at the ending of your post like a subscription form to build your email list.
Social media sites
Use sites like Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Google Plus, LinkedIn, YouTube etc. to increase your brand awareness and drive insane traffic from these sites. You cannot rely only on one source of traffic.
These social media sites get tons of visitors each day, you can use them to drive traffic to your blog also.
Create an FB page for your blog, customize it properly, upload high quality images for the profile picture and cover picture, create a username for your page.
Regularly post on the page and keep your followers updated.
Tips to increase Facebook page likes:
Invite your friends to like your page and tell them to invite their friends also to like your page.
Join Facebook groups related to your blog niche and post there to drive traffic and to get likes. (Please do it authentically don’t overdo it else it will result in spam and you’ll be banned from the group.)
Or you can occasionally boost your FB posts to increase post engagements and you can also run ads to increase page likes.
Open a twitter account and create a username same as the name of your blog.
Tips to increase twitter followers and tweet reach:
Use hashtags in your tweets to increase tweet reach beforehand google about the top trending hashtags for Twitter and choose from them, for good results mix hashtags i.e. use highly used hashtags with some medium and less used hashtags.
Engage with your influences they might get you a follow back, always re-tweet their tweets and mention them in some of your tweets also.
[Cheap method] Follow as many people you can those are related to your niche some of them will follow you back unfollow those didn’t follow you and again follow them, if then also they don’t follow you finally unfollow them. Twitter allows you to follow 150 – 200 users per day. Follow as many people as you can till your follower base reaches at least 5k.Pinterest is a catalog of ideas, it is mainly useful for bloggers/people who deal with cooking, DIY, fashion, tattoos, art, photographs etc. Pinterest can bring a lot of traffic to your website even sometimes Pinterest pins ranks on Google’s first page for low competition words.
Tips for Stealing Traffic from Pinterest:
Upload high quality images as pins, write good descriptions and used related hashtags.
[Cheap method] Follow as many people as possible the daily limit is 65 users, so follow 65 users each day until you get a follower base of at least 1k.Google Plus
Google Plus is a great place to generate traffic and also one of my favorite. You can joins communities related to your niche and start posting in each of them. Google+ members will +1[like] your posts if they find them to be good will also give your blog a visit.
Tips to get traffic from Google Plus –
Join Communities and share your blog post but mind it don’t spam there.
It is the social media for professional people here getting success depends on your connections. But you can publish posts on LinkedIn’s Pulse platform to attract visitors to your blog.
LinkedIn Pulse is a great platform to publish posts because it ranks very well in search engines can bring some good traffic back to your site.
YouTube
YouTube which is the second most visited site in the world with 35 Billion visits each month according to Similar Web, you can assume the potential of this site to drive insane traffic to any website or blog.
Publish tutorials, how to, product reviews, transform your blog post into videos using PowerPoint and upload them to YouTube.
Leverage YouTube’s huge traffic and try to drive them to your site.
Viral sites
This is one of my favorite way of getting free traffic. Viral sites can generate an insane amount of traffic to any sites. Sites like Buzzfeed, WittyFeed, ViralNova, UpWorthy etc. gets millions of traffic from social media.
Post viral contents in these sites and if any of them makes their front page and gets shared on their social media accounts boom you have hit the jackpot, you’ll see that hundreds of people visiting your blog and maybe some of them can subscribe to your blog also.
But before getting excited and starting dreaming one thing you need to stick in your mind you have to be damn creative to hit the traffic jackpot.
News Aggregator Sites
You can also use Reddit to drive traffic to your website, Reddit is one of the very few sites that can give you hundreds or even thousands of target traffic for free of cost.
Reddit – the front page of the internet is like a forum consisting of topic related threads called subreddits, where people can post links to articles or some other stuff they find interesting o the internet, popular subreddits have up to 30 million followers each, see the opportunity 30 million of niche related people in one place man it is a goldmine for bloggers.
Share a post link in a related subreddits and if people like it they will upvote and your post link will get promoted up in the thread and eventually to the front page of Reddit which receives close to 30 million visits a day.
Excited huh?
But here is the catch Reddit has very strict rules for posting please check them before posting anything promotional in the subreddits.
Search on google “how to dominate Reddit”, you’ll get many articles read all of them and plan accordingly.
Other notable news aggregator sites are Digg.com, Voat.co, Fark.com etc.
Micro-blogging sites
Micro-blogging sites are quite useful for some to promote their blogs and a high traffic bank for some. It depends on how well you utilize them. These sites receive a great amount of traffic some of them even gets 200 million plus and wordpress.com & Tumblr receives close to 1 billion visits each month.
See the potential?
Some good micro-blogging platforms are medium.com, tumblr.com, quora.com also allows you to create a blog, wordpress.com etc.
Write posts on these platforms twice or thrice weekly regularly to keep them update this will, in turn, help you to grow a good reader base.
Guest Blogging
A very powerful and genuine way of getting traffic, increasing the branding of your blog and getting powerful dofollow backlinks is by doing guest posting on other blogs occasionally.
Guest posting is right now the fastest way to rank your blog in search engines for very high competition keywords.
By Guest Posting, you’re leveraging the traffic of the blog or website to divert them to your own blog.
How to do guest posting on other blogs?
It is quite simple, search on google about blogs on that has the same niche as yours, visit them and see if there anywhere in the blog they have mentioned about guest blog posting or not.
If not then message them via contact forms on their sites. Tell them about yourself, your blog and provide some links to your best performing posts and tell me that how you would like to contribute to their blog and how your article will help their readers.
I have an affiliate blog where I receive guest posting offers frequently, here are some the emails I got.
Quick Tips on How to find blogs that allow guest blogging and approaching them the right way:
Use search operators like:
“Your Keyword” + “Guest Blogging”
“Your Keyword” + “Write For Us”
“Your Keyword” + “Contribute”
Message them via contact forms.
Use free email extractor tools and find out the email address of the blog owner and reach out to them for guest posting.
Don’t forget to show them your work.
Mention how their readers will be benefited by your article.
Guest Posting is an essential part of this Blogging Blueprint.
Link Building
What is a backlink?
Backlink is nothing but an incoming link from one website to another website.
Blog submission Directories
There are some website directories where you can submit your blog to get a backlink and free traffic. The traffic doesn’t come :p but the backlink does.
So, submit your blog to blog submission directories to get good quality backlinks that will help you to increase your blog’s citation flow.
Blog commenting
This technique is used by almost by all bloggers and spammers. People visits blogs which allows you to comment on by filling up details like Name, Email, and Website URL.
If your comment gets approved then you’ll receive a backlink from that blog. And if your comment is good and gets a reply from the author, then there is a chance that some people including the author of the post might give your site a visit.
Article submitting directories
Article marketing/content marketing is one of the effective techniques to grow a blog or any online business till date.
Article submitting directories allow you to submit articles, they will host your articles for free. You can leave a hyperlink to blog in your author resource box and one in the article so that people who are reading your article might visit your site and also to get a backlink to your site. A win-win situation for any blogger.
While visiting some article submitting websites you’ll see that some sites showcase their top authors you’ll find that some of them have submitted 1k+ articles.
Some sites that allow you to submit your articles are EzineArticles, HubPages, Article.org, articlecube etc.
RSS Feed Submission sites
RSS feed is Rich Site Summary. RSS Feed helps you to send automated weekly newsletter emails to your blog subscribers also. Create an RSS feed URL go to Feedburner and create one for your blog.
And submit the RSS feeds to RSS submission directories.
Profile creation sites
The idea of creating a profile on different sites is to create backlinks to your blog to increase its citation flow, MOZ DA PA and overall authority of your blog.
Create backlinks only from good quality sites having DA 40+ and PA 40+. Use MOZ ose to check the site’s DA PA.
Note: Don’t write keyword related bio on every site you create a profile otherwise google will take it as spamming only write on 2% of the total number of sites.
Social Bookmarking
Social bookmarking sites also provide you with quality backlinks and they are now mostly used by spammers to get backlinks but that doesn’t mean you should not use them.
There are thousands of social bookmarking sites on the internet use only the legitimate ones the bookmarking sites you find genuine.
Every story has a silver lining there are also certain social bookmarking sites like netvouz, del.icio.us, Slashdot, Diigo, fark etc. that still gets thousands of visitors each month, find them leverage their traffic.
Search top social bookmarking sites on search engines and you see a ton of results go through each of them and select your top 50 social bookmarking sites based on DA PA, traffic and Spam score.
Create a profile in each of the sites share some of your posts there, now do this weekly but not on all the 50 sites choose your top 5 or top 10 among them. It will work.
PDF & Document sharing sites
PDF and document sharing websites help to increase the SEO of your blog. Get high quality backlinks from this websites and improve your SEO.
Notable pdf an document sharing sites are PDFsr.com, Issuu.com, Fiiby.com etc.
PowerPoint sharing
Audiovisuals storytelling are the best that’s why videos and PowerPoint presentations are a great source of education resources.
Create “tutorials” or “how to” do this or that PowerPoint presentations and share them on ppt sharing websites.
Submit powerpoint slides to sites like SlideShare, slideserve, authorstream gets millions of traffic, showcase your creativity on these websites and generate huge traffic back to your website.
I assume while searching for topics on google you might have come across slideshare.net, you can easily rank you ppt on the first page of google using SlideShare.net.
Be creative. Be unique. That’s the mantra.
Image sharing
Don’t waste the images you have create or purchased or got from some other sources for your blog posts. In fact share them on different image and photo sharing websites just by uploading them to get valuable backlinks and free promotion of your blog images.
Use sites like Flickr, Pinterest, Tumblr and Weheartit to upload your images from your blog post.
If you’re thinking of being a photo blogger then you must leverage sites like 500px.com, photobucket, shutterfly, and Instagram.
Infographics submission
Top SEO and digital marketing professionals say that infographics can be used to attract visitors to any website or blog, people tend to share infographics more than blog posts.
In recent surveys it is found that posts that have infographics have been share 28% more than normal posts on Twitter and Pinterest.
Don’t forget to submit your infographics to infographics submission websites.
If you don’t know Photoshop don’t worry use sites like Canva.com, Stencils.com to create free social media graphics. They great free infographics templates.
Monitoring Blog
This the technical section where you need to know some technical kinds of stuff required to create a successful blog. Don’t worry no coding related stuff.
You need to know this to measure your blog’s impact that’s all.
Submitting blog to search engine via Webmaster tools.
After setting up your blog correctly, finish writing all blog titles, description, creating pages, categories and publishing at least one or two posts submit your blog to search engines like Google Search Console, Bing Webmaster tools and Yandex Webmaster tools.
Google Search Console
Google the no 1 search engine in the world with more than 60% of market share Google receives millions of search queries each day. The source of free unlimited traffic comes google itself.
Try to dominate Google search as much as you can.
Bing webmaster tools
Bing search engine still gets tons of traffic majority from the US, so may want to have some of US traffic flowing to your blog.
Yandex webmaster tools
Yandex is the popular search engine of USSR countries, though your target audience may not from the USSR countries still getting people visit your blog from different parts of the world isn’t that bad.
Submit site to Yandex Webmaster
Google Analytics
Install google analytics on your blog, google analytics let you see lots of useful metrics that is needed in order to run a successful blog.
It shows you how much time a visitor spends on your blog, which pages they are visiting, from where they are coming to your blog i.e. traffic sources and many more.
Google Analytics provides you with plethora of metrics and myriad of benefits.
Sign up for a google analytics account and go through all the options yourself.
Tools to grow your blog
SEMrush (Free/Paid)
The most popular and my favorite tool for SEO and PPC to social media and video advertising research. SEMrush is one of the best SEO tools. Its free version provides many useful features go check them out.
Buzzsumo (Free/Paid)
An effective social media analysis tool that lets you know what your competitors are sharing on social media and how many times your niche related articles have been shared on social media sites like Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest and Google Plus.
Thus buzzsumo gives you the idea of what kind of posts to write to make it share worthy on social media sites.
Majestic (Free/Paid)
Use majestic.com to check your backlinks and the trust flow & citation flow of your blog. It shows thing looks like this…
Moz OSE (Free/Paid)
Moz OSE is another backlink analysis tool which helps you to check the quality of your backlinks. Moz OSE provides you with metrics like Linkspam, the domain authority (DA) and page authority (PA) your blog has gained because of those backlinks.
This is a very handy SEO tool.
Hootsuite (Free/Paid)
This is a social media automation tool which enables you to post on sites like twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, Google plus automatically.
Schedule your posts in hootsuite and it will post on behalf you to your social media sites.
Great tool to boost your social media profiles and keep your followers updated.
For free user limited to 3 social media profiles.
Buffer (Free/Paid)
Another great social media automation tool to schedule your posts is Buffer.
For free user limited to 3 social media profiles.
Other notable tools are Socialadr and onlywire.
Blog title generator
Blog title generator tools help you to generate multiple titles for your blog post, it helps you to choose the most suitable title for your blog.
You can also perform A/B test using other titles also, and see which ones are performing better.
Sumome (Free/Paid)
All in one tool for blog, Sumome for me is the best tool out there, they have their WordPress plugin which you can install.
Sumome features social media sharing, image sharing, lead capture via opt-in forms, pop up forms, in-built heat maps and content analytics.
Sumome free version is enough for your blog.
Sumome alternative is Addthis.com
Email List building tools
Why is it important to have an email list of blog readers?
Long answer short – get instant traffic, showcase your product or service to your loyal reader and earn money
Mailchimp
To get started with email marketing, Mailchimp is great a tool as it provides free service for up to 2000 email subscriber.
You can build landing pages, create automated email campaigns, pop ups and track your campaign performances.
They have their WordPress plugin.
Mailerlite
A free mailerlite account let you have 1000 subscribers, its features are more advanced than mailchimp well I found some to be great.
Mailerlite also provides you with the same number of features as mailchimp, though it does contains more really cool email templates, landing pages and forms.
They also have their own WordPress Plugin.
Mailpoet
Mailpoet is also a freemium email list building tool, you have to use it from inside of your own wp dashboard. Just install and activate the plugin. It’s very simple to use. You can also send weekly newsletter from your WordPress dashboard, how cool is that!
Other notable email marketing tools to grow your email list are ConvertKit, Getresponse & Aweber.
Monetize your blog
It is the section you’re waiting for how to monetize your blog and converting it into an online business for passive income. So here it is.
Affiliate Marketing
It is the most significant way of earning money than any other way for a blogger. Endorse other people’s service or product on your blog and if anyone buys it you get a commission that ranges from 5% – 50% depending upon the product and in some case, you get 100% of the sales you made.
Top affiliate programs are Clickbank, JVZoo, Linkshare, Amazon Associate etc.
Sponsor Banners
Earn money by leveraging the traffic of your blog and put sponsor banners on some places in your blog like sidebar, in the middle of the post, on header section etc and charge money accordingly. But for this, you at least need to have more than 200K+ traffic (recommended) to ask for sponsor banners.
One advantage of sponsor banners are that you don’t have to worry about sales. Cool right?
Affiliate Banners
The concept is same as sponsor banners but here you have to get sales in order to earn money. To have affiliate banners on your site it is not mandatory to have a huge traffic.
Click bank & Jvzoo
These sites will help you to find the right affiliate product for your blog from their marketplace. Sign up for these sites, choose a product, get the affiliate link, promote it on your blog and monitor the sales from their dashboard.
Google AdSense
I bet you have heard of Google AdSense, the no. 1 blog monetization program. Here google places ads on your website/blog and you earn money when someone clicks on the ads.
The money you will be earning depends on many factors like clicks from US, UK, Australia will fetch you more money that clicks from India, Bangladesh, Philippines, Morocco etc.
Earning is not as good if compared to affiliate marketing.
Google AdSense alternative is Media.net, which is the advertising platform for Bing, Yahoo and AOL.
Other notable sites are chitika ads, buysellads, propeller ads etc.
Blogging Blueprint Summary
So, in the end I want to say that follow this Blogging blueprint on a routine basis and you’ll have a successful blog in no time. I have carefully examined all the steps, so don’t hesitate. Use this article as your blogging bible.
I will update this article if find more new ways to build a mega successful blog.
If I miss something or you want to know anything more please let me know in the comments.
P.S. If you like this post please share it on social media, so that this can reach to maximum people possible.
Happy Blogging ! 🙂
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