Best 15 Tips about Blogging for Beginners and Dummies

While the internet today is abundant with number of sites explaining in very minute details about Blogging, we would try to just guide you showing you a route map for exploration if you are a new beginner and probable Blogger in the making! Over 5 years of our occasional Blogging and much more research done on this interesting topic of Blogging, its scope, its advantages and the competition involved, and many other features, finally we came out with these 15 useful tips for ‘Blogging for Beginners’:

1. Good hobby: Blogging is a good hobby for many who are interested in writing. But all that we write should be our own content, we should not copy it “as-it-is” from other Bloggers. This leads to infringement on their copyright. As I read from some professional bloggers, all that we write on our blog is copyrighted to us.

This is not just a good hobby, but you can also signup to money making programs like Google's AdSense, Chitika, and many other affiliate programs. But all those work varyingly depending on the type of your blog and depending on the quality content and interesting content on your blog. The money you earn may range from $0 to $0.10 to $1 to $100 or $100,000 depending on how well you construct your blog, how well you write to help and guide others, and on many other factors. You will explore all that later, once you take the first step of making a blog first!

2. Link to your Profession or Interest: Blogging should be linked as much as possible to our profession, because we need some niche topic like ‘management’ or ‘engineering’ or ‘digitial photography’ or ‘architecture’, etc. At the same time we can have many niche topics as possible.

Have something which gives you lots of insights to create blog posts and systematically guide your readers. But it is not advisable if you expose your office secrets, business plans, etc which could put you in trouble. The sensible matters are not directly to be written without the expression permission of your company. Further you may lose an opportunity to use your blog to bring readers to your business as customers!

3. Have a brand name: Blog’s name should be like a brand name if you would like to make it professional. Unless if you are in a manufacturing industry producing a tangible product, it is always better to have a brand name like ‘ViprasCraft’ which should be entirely unique or a combination of words easy to remember. That was the reason why named our blog as ViprasCraft because people won't feel uncomfortable in joining with our team as it is not based on a surname or an individual.
4. An aim for your blog: The blog should have an aim. For ViprasCraft, it is to help others in many diversified areas. We write what we know very well, so we write with inspiration. So our tag line is “Works of the Inspired”. In fact, we chose the name ‘Vipra(s)’ not just because it is a name that sounds like VIP (very important person) but also because it gives the meaning ‘inspired’ in Sanskrit.

5. Inspiration and Consistency are important: We as bloggers should have so much of inspiration to write. At the beginning we will have so much interest, but for many people who just create blogs and leave them, it is because the interest dies down sooner or later. The best way to not let this happen is to always maintain a journal or a word file offline in which we record our ideas as we think. And we should keep many ideas even if each of them just contain a single phrase. When we have good mood, we can keep writing about them as much as we can.

6. Quality content and number of posts: To make your site more successful is just by writing quality and unique content, even if small paragraphs on a regular basis. As a thumb rule, if you write one post a day for your blog, in 3 years time, you make it reach a large number of readers. Just a simple math, if you write 365 posts in a year, you’ll make 1680 posts in 3 years. By that measure ViprasCraft just made 101 which is far below par, but we at ViprasCraft are all part time bloggers and are not full time or professional bloggers!

7. Gain Backlinks: Backlinks are the life of a blog. But it is not so easy to get them. That means if someone else links your blog’s homepage or any other page to their page naturally, you will have a bonus. For that our website must be really genuine. And if a site which refers our blog on their site is a popular website than ours, then it is a huge plus for us. In that way, ViprasCraft is very new and hasn’t got sufficient backlinks yet.

8. Give proper Credit: We should provide proper reference to the others’ pages or sites if we have no option but to copy some of their content but that should be limited to few paragraphs and we should provide a backlink to their website. If we fail to do that, they could even complain about us to the search engines like Google.

And basically, it is not fair and not ethical. Apart from that if you simply intend to copy the stuff from other sites, the search engines like Google will brand your site as 'supplementary' which is detrimental to your site's performance with the Search Engines.

9. Think about your strengths and try to help others: One way to get some topic for writing a blog is to think about your strengths, even if you are just sending a mail to your friends for helping them out in some issue, you should think of making the same in a generalized way so that it also serves the public who are at the same state of mind as your friends.

10. Submitting your site to Search Engines & Social Networking for promotion: When you finish writing your important posts, it is important to inform various search Engines like Google, Technorati (Technorati claim token for ViprasCraft 39FGSPBK2FWT for verification), Alexa, etc.

Another important way to promote your site is to start a Twitter and Facebook account for your blog and then start posting only the URL (website page path) on these social networking sites, which grab the attention of the readers so quickly.

11. Have something to sell: It would be a great idea to use the blog to sell something. This would generally drive more traffic as your product becomes more popular. Many professional bloggers have something to sell.

12. Topics to attract readers: Political issues or news related to celebrities or sports, etc generally drive more traffic. But as blog authors we should be careful not to land ourselves in trouble. Probably stressing on the topic instead of the individual pays us good dividends in terms of number of readers and traffic to our blog.

13. Evergreen posts: Evergreen posts which unlike current affairs are the foundations of your blog. You can keep your blog rolling with fresh updates everyday maybe on political articles, but there must be some evergreen posts like tips for the freshers’ jobs, tips to make a food item, tips about beauty, health care, etc would greatly help.

14. Proper keywords in URLs: When you finish writing some quality articles, it is important to chose proper key words for each of your blog post. This generally happens when you post your article keeping a post title. In some blogging platforms you will have the option to select those keywords.

In Google’s Blogger platform such provision is not available currently because it generally takes the keywords based on what you type in the title. While you are free to change the description of the post title, the words that got entered into the URL of that page wouldnot change. Hence the tricky way to do this is to first create your post using four or five keywords for your blog post and later when the URL for that page is formed, you can go back to settings and then change the post title with a meaningful sentence.

15. Offline copy of your Blog: Always think of maintaining an offline version of your blog posts along with the URL you have created for each post because, once in a while you can have a lot of opportunities to publish a book from a category of your blog posts.

The “Noble Thoughts, for the right way of life” book published by ViprasCraft is just the same tweaking a little bit all the posts to make them suitable for the book. Probably when you create a book, you can reedit all such posts making them short and creating the references in those old posts to your new book.

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