Blogging is a long journey that requires hard work and experience to become rewarding. Nevertheless, there are always shortcuts to reaching a professional level blogger status.

In this article, we’ll share with you seven quick tips to achieve more with your blogging and growing your business online.

1: Set Your Blogging Goals Before You Start

Assess your blog: what’s the point behind it? Is it to make more money? Boost your SERP rankings? Connect more people to your brand?

There is one bigger goal behind blogging: To grow your business. 
Your marketing strategy will differ depending on your desired results. You’ll use some plugins and avoid others. And you may even hire certain writers or designers and stay away from others. Your writing style will be different. You’ll write about some topics and connect with a specific audience.

Defining the reason you’re going to start a blog early on is crucial. You have to decide that early and make a flexible plan to rely on.

Examples: Two blogs with clearly designated goals

1. Codeinwp.com: codeinwp is a blog designed to help novice and professional web developers use the open-source WordPress platform. Codeinwp uses its blog to attract students and instructors to its freelance online courses on WordPress.
2. Nerdwallet.com: Nerdwallet is a financial literacy blog designed to educate consumers on anything and everything finance related. The goal of the blog is to help consumers make educated decisions and steer them toward the most beneficial financial products. 

2: Start With a Minimum Viable Blog

It’s true that you have to invest in your blog and pay for tools, premium plugins, unique images, etc. With that being said, if you’re just starting out, it’s better to focus on the quality of your written content at first, then you’ll grow from there.

For example, you can pay for someone to help you with your keyword research, but you can’t spend all your money on it. You also shouldn’t invest in high priced research tools, plugins, and visual content early on in your journey.

Your blog is here to help you succeed and not put an end to your whole business.

You can still provide value and create amazing content that helps you grow with a smaller budget. And then, as your blog starts to gain popularity and deliver positive results, you can take your efforts to the next step and spend on what you’re lacking.

3: Outline, Title, Subheadings, And Images

These are three important things to perfect with each article you create.

Outline

The outline helps you with topic research and crafting your articles. You need to start with it so you know where you’re going with the post and what value you want to provide. 

It’ll also minimize errors in what you have to say and make it easier for you to write and find inspiration.

Title and Subheadings

An amazing article can turn into a non-existent article if no one reads it. And that can easily happen if your headline is neither catchy nor optimized for SEO.

Your blog title is the first thing anyone will see before clicking through. 

It must be relevant to what you write in the content so that it enhances curiosity and encourages the visitor to click and read more. Then you can add in your main keyword so that search engines favor your articles and rank them higher.

Tool: Use online headline generators to come up with unlimited titles for your blogs.

Images

Not only do articles with images get more reads and social shares by online readers, but they also help with SEO and make your content richer and of a higher quality.

Choose unique images to use in your articles. Then make sure to optimize them so search engines to understand what the images contain.

You’ll be surprised at how successful your articles will be after implementing this simple trick.

Example: Two blogs using proven design elements to shine:

1. Goodwill: There’s nothing mind-blowing about Goodwill’s blog, but the use of trustworthy brand colors as well as images and a clearn design proves that your blog doesn’t have to be fancy to be successful. 
2. Mashable: Bold images and contrasting text help catch the reader’s eye instantly while the site’s clean organization creates a welcoming homepage experience. 

4: Publish Content Consistently

No matter how amazing your content and SEO are, unless you publish content consistently, you’ll never rank for competitive keywords.

If a competitor has 100 articles about “cat food” and you only had 20, they’re more likely to rank first if you were both to produce articles on the same topic.

Search engines put a lot of emphasis on websites that are rich with content and give them more authority to rank first. 

But not only that. 

Being in front of your potential customers more often will increase your chances of turning them into loyal customers.

5: Write In An Engaging Style

Professional writers and bloggers all write in a simple and easy to understand language. And they support that with a conversational tone to make their content highly-engaging.

People don’t care about how good your language is or how sophisticated you are. If you can give them easy solutions to their problems, they’ll love you and trust what you say.

They also want to feel like they’re interacting with a real human being behind the screen. Thus, it’s important to address them directly in your articles and call them to take some actions.

Tool: Use apps like Grammarly and HemingWayApp to edit and improve your writing and make it more engaging.

Example: Here are two blogs with an engaging style

• Crime Junkie: Crime Junkie engages readers with it’s storytelling narritive that is chaulk full of suspense, even on high-profile cases in which most the facts are widely known.

• Jonathan Gottschall: It should come as no surprise that storytelling master and author of The Storytelling Animal, Jonathan Gottschall, is the perfect example of how to write in an engaging style. His book focuses on why storytelling is so important to human nature. 

6: Break Down Your Content Into Smaller Texts

Long blocks of text are also discouraging to the average online reader who’s usually only looking for one piece of information. 

They seem complex, too long, and extremely hard to read — which makes your audience bounce off your posts and ignore your articles in the future. 

It’s crucial to break your content into small texts of three to four sentences because that makes your content super skimmable, shorter, and easy to read. 

Eventually, your visitors to consume more of your content and engage with what you have to offer.

7: Share Your Unique Insight

It’s important to value the tried-and-true and stick to what’s already working for everyone. But if all you do is follow others, people will no longer recognize you and your message. 

Your blog will be just another medium where conventional knowledge is shared.

There are tens of thousands of blogs online to read and subscribe to, and almost all of them say the same things. More often than not, it looks like they’re rewriting what industry leaders are saying.

If you want to differentiate yourself from the crowd, your value has to be different. 

Talk about what you know in your own way. Share your knowledge and expertise and back them up with stories and viewpoints that only you can tell. 

Sometimes your ideas will be out of the norm, and in other times your strategies won’t work for everyone. But what’s important is that you’ll leave your audience in awe. 

Everyone will be dying to learn more from you and your insight.

Example: Two blogs doing social media right

1. Social Media Today: It’s seems fairly obvious that a blog about social media would be good at doing social media, but Social Media Today is a clear winner here.
2. Neil Patel: Digital marketing guru Neil Patel has one of the best social media presences around. With spot-on content from video to infographics, Neil is a search engine and socail media master. 

Wrapping It Up

Writing and managing your blog can be quite the exhausting thing to do overtime. But with the right tips, tools, and tricks in your hand, it can be both fun and rewarding.

We hope those tips will help you reach your desired results and more.