You have friends who have blogs and you have started thinking about starting a blog yourself. Should you start a blog and is it as easy as your friends say it is?
Before we even look at starting a blog, there is one secret you should know before you go down the path of starting a blog.
Think About Starting a Blog Before You Leap In
What is that secret? That you do not have to be a great writer to have a successful blog. Many good writers have blogs as a way of self promotion, but being a great writer is not a required skill for a blogger.
Blogs are conversations, not great works of fiction. A blog is a chat with a friend. Not a grammatically correct novel studied by students. People read blogs to connect on a personal level with the person providing the information and advice.
So if you have not started a blog as you feel you can’t write well, then stop worrying about it. As you progress as a blogger, your writing style will change and you will become far more confident as a writer anyway.
Key To a Successful Blog
The real key to having a successful blog, is not whether you can write well, but that you have a desire to help people. The more helpful you are, and the more value you provide, the more popular and therefore successful you will become.
Have you ever read any of Neil Patel’s posts? Quite, frankly they are ridiculous. He provides a huge amount of information in a free blog post. I believe that he sets the standard to aspire to.
If you have products to sell, whether physical or electronic then you really will benefit from a blog. A blog will maximize the opportunities for you to interact and engage with your prospects and customers in a meaningful, and personal, way.
This means you will be connecting with your audience in a way that not only fulfils their needs but also provides the essential human interface that builds trust and keeps those customers and prospects coming back for more.
Always remember that people do not connect with businesses – they connect with other people. That’s why personalizing your communications is the key to success in an increasingly sophisticated online marketplace.
Your blog provides your visitors with a central hub to your website so they can peep behind your business curtain. You can then connect with these visitors on a day-to-day basis. Simply having a blog button on your site will prove irresistible as people have become used to this as a chance to discover more and stay up to date.
A Blog As Your Platform
Done correctly, your blog can act as a platform for news and announcements about your products. It can answer the questions that most frequently arise and can even pre-empt complaints by dealing effectively with those that may have arisen in the past.
It also serves as the spoke around which the wheel of your social media marketing revolves. A blog can be one of the most powerful branding tools of all, delivering the image and essence of your business that you want to convey to the wider world.
It’s not only big brands and business owners who reap the rewards of running a blog. There are many small business owners and entrepreneurs who are also profiting from this essential form of marketing and you can do the same.
Customers Connect Through Your Blog
Your prospects and customers will feel connected to you through the things you share on your blog. Connection leads to trust and it is trust these days that results in sales. A blog gives you the chance to connect in a way that previously was only open to bricks and mortar enterprises. With a blog you can reach out in a way that is the closest thing possible to face to face interaction by sharing your thoughts and reflecting your personality in your posts.
You will also be able to counteract the often-justifiable mistrust with which prospects treat information online.
An increasingly Internet-aware audience knows that the web is far too frequently used to sell, sell, sell. They are bombarded with adverts when carrying out searches, when surfing social media and even when checking their emails.
Retain Your Visitors
If you provide a valuable, personal resource in the form of a blog, you are far more likely to retain that visitor who will come back time and again to read your updates.
This, of course, means that they will be exposed time and again to what you have to offer. Provided you present your offer with an intelligent, human touch and follow the other tips you will find here, it is highly likely that at some point they will choose you over your competition.
How To Start a Blog
Now that you know how a blogger blogs, and you realise you don’t need to be a great writer, what next? You might be wondering how to start a blog. I won’t lie to you and say that becoming a blogger is easy. It isn’t. However, it isn’t as difficult to blog as you probably imagine.
If you would like to know how to become a blogger, you are in the right place. As long as you can follow steps in a process, you can start a blog quite easily. How do you start a blog? You take a look around this site, and other similar sites, and you learn as you go! You can also read about how I started my blogging journey.
It is not just a question of starting a blog though. Your blog needs to be in what is known as a niche. This is just an area of interest. To find out more about niches, read this post about how to pick a niche with profit potential. This should definitely be your first step.
How Do Bloggers Make Money?
The next question you may be asking yourself, is how do bloggers make money? Do bloggers even want to make money or are they just blogging for the love of it. Well there are probably bloggers you fit into both camps. But yes, you can make money by blogging.
Possibly not enough to quite your day job, but you can earn through a blog. If you are interested in knowing how to make money blogging, you can research the topic on blogging sites. But be careful and don’t believe everything you read.
If you want to learn about how to start a blog, and how to make money blogging, you really have 2 options. You can pay for training courses or you can search the internet.
You must take care with both these methods though. The first job is to find ethical and useful sites. Like this one. But I would say that, wouldn’t I! Don’t fall for some of the lies that you can find on the internet. Remember the old adage that if it looks too good to be true, then it probably is.
However, if you want to start a blog, you should be able to find most of the information for free. Most bloggers are quite happy to answer questions so don’t be afraid to comment on their blog with your questions. We are a helpful bunch.
In summary, you don’t have to let the fact that you are not a great writer stop you from starting your blog. Your audience is more interested in the value you provide and the personality you show through your free content available on your blog. Before you post anything, ask yourself ‘how does this help my audience?’. If it doesn’t help your readers, then it has no place on your blog.
So yes, now is the time for you to be starting your blog. Worry about ‘helping’ and not ‘great writing’.
Use the comments box if you have any questions and I will be happy to help.
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Post this 1 Secret You Should Know Before Starting a Blog article to your favourite Pinterest board!
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Hi Penelope:
RE:Key To a Successful Blog
Your emphasis on helping people and providing value is a great starting point for any blog.
The Internet thrives on the sharing of quality information. If you consistently help people solve their problems, your authority status will grow over time.
One problem for everyone is that we suffer from INFORMATION OVERLOAD. So, sorting out the valuable info from the mediocre content is a great benefit to all concerned.
When creating your quality content follow the 20/80 rule. Spend 20%of your designated time on creation and spend 80% of your designated time on promotion of that content.
Here is a link to a list of quality social bookmarking sites where you can easily gain much wider distribution of your best content: http://trafficnymphomaniac.com/83-social-bookmarking-sites-with-high-prthat-can-make-you-a-power-on-the-internet/
Focus on 4-6 sites that fit your posts profile and build your authority status with a regular presence.
Finally, do not just promote your own content on these social bookmarking sites. There is such a huge volume of high value posts and resources that you can never run out of extraordinary info to share.
Best of success,
Robert
P.S.By the way, your posts are beautifully formatted. I particularly like the “Related Posts” feature.