Are you a blogger and need some helpful blogging advice? These fifteen tips are perfect for beginners and will help you drive more traffic to your blog.
Starting a blog can be really difficult, with so many learning curves and difficulties along the way.
I thought I would make a post that includes fifteen blogging tips for beginners. These tips will help you to avoid the same mistakes that I made when I first started blogging.
Let’s get started!
Disclaimer: This article contains affiliate links, where I may receive a small commission on purchases at no cost to you. All of these tools are ones that I thoroughly recommend. You can read my full affiliate disclosure here.
Fifteen Blogging Tips
1. Choose good web hosting
Web hosting is where all the files of your blog are stored. Choosing good web hosting is vital for a solid foundation for your blog.
The web hosting you choose can be a hard choice as a beginner blogger, with so many options to choose from. As a beginner, I would highly recommend going with Cloudways. The price is a bit steeper than competitors, but if you want a speedy blog from the get-go, it’s a perfect choice.
I moved from Bluehost to Cloudways and haven’t looked back. Cloudways hosting is so much faster, and I’m able to run multiple blogs from one server.
↪ Try Cloudways Today ↩ (7-day free trial)
Recommended Read: How to Start a Blog in 2021 (step-by-step guide)
2. Don’t be afraid to invest in your blog
Investing in your blog is a great way to speed up your success with blogging. I was always scared to spend money on my blog or spend money on expensive courses.
My second blogging tip is not to be scared to invest in your blog. You have to treat your blog like a business from day one.
I highly recommend buying courses and improving the overall look of your blog. Blog design is essential if you want to stand out from your competitors.
I personally run my blog with the Salient theme and have absolutely loved it. Salient is a multipurpose theme that’s fully customizable and responsive. It costs $60 for the lifetime + 6 months of support.
While I do say not to be afraid of investing in your blog, don’t go overboard. Buying a theme, good hosting, and a course or two is enough to get you started on the right path. Don’t spend too much money thinking you’ll make it back quickly.
3. Build an email list from the start
A crucial piece of advice I’d give to all beginner bloggers is to build your email list from day one of blogging.
It may seem daunting, but it’s really not. Email lists are a surefire way to make money through selling courses, driving traffic to your blog, and building trust with your audience.
Make it a goal to get at least ten email subscribers within 3 months of blogging. Create opt-ins, freebies, and printables that will incentivize people to join your list.
I feel like this is an excellent spot to plug my own email list 😂
I used ConvertKit for my email marketing and got my custom email from Namecheap (it was super cheap).
4. Don’t spend too long customizing your blog before launch
All bloggers fall into the trap of making their blog look ‘perfect‘ before launching it. I highly recommend against doing so.
Why?
Because you’ll barely get any traffic in the first month, so, instead of spending days customizing your blog to your liking, get the bare minimum done (home page, blog page) and start writing.
You can customize the blog throughout the first few weeks of posting; what truly matters is that you’re writing content.
When I launched this blog, it was wholly incomplete. I learned from my first blog not to focus too much on aesthetics initially and more on writing high-quality content.
5. Break up those sentences
An easy way to make your blog look more professional from day one is to break up sentences on your blog posts.
As a blogger, you need to ensure that your posts are easy to read and skimmable.
If you include large chunks of text (like a book), it may be harder for your audience to read, and they might get lost on where they’re up to.
Look at this example below. Would you instead read this:
Or this?
6. Page speed is crucial
Page speed is a crucial factor that a lot of bloggers tend to forget about.
If a page is super slow, it will take longer to be indexed by Google, will have higher bounce rates and lower time spent on the page. Google also uses page speed as one of its factors in the algorithm to rank pages.
Make sure that your site and pages load fast; otherwise, your content might never rank.
An excellent place to start is by using a fast web host like Cloudways. They are one of the fastest WordPress hosting platforms.
I also recommend using a caching plugin like WPRocket to optimize your page speed.
Tools to test website speed:
– Pagespeed Insights
– GTMetrix
– Pingdom
7. Write posts like how you talk
A good practice of blogging is to write like how you usually talk. Don’t try to use big words and keep it as simple as possible.
Writing like how you talk will allow you to come off more human through your posts. It will also let your audience be able to connect with you better.
What I like to do after I’ve finished my blog posts is to read over them out loud. This catches so many mistakes that I usually can’t find when reading them silently.
8. Use social media to drive traffic
Instead of waiting for Google SEO to kick in (could take anywhere from 6 to 12 months), an excellent way to drive traffic to your blog is from social media.
Using social media is a great way to diversify your blog traffic streams; just make sure not to rely on it entirely.
I personally drive traffic to my blog from Pinterest while waiting for SEO to optimize. An excellent course that’s helped me learn Pinterest is Pinteresting Strategies by Carly Campbell.
Carly uses Pinterest to drive 200,000+ page views a month to her blog, all from manual pinning. I think it’s a super helpful course that will help you drive traffic to your blog from day one.
↪ Buy Pinteresting Strategies ↩ (use code ‘PINNING5‘ for $5 off)
9. Don’t promote products you don’t believe in
A big no-no with affiliate marketing or sponsored posts is to link to products that you don’t use or like.
There’s absolutely nothing wrong with making money from blogging, but at least try to make money ethically.
I would never link to a product or service just for the affiliate commission. It’s an easy way to lose trust with your audience if you recommend a terrible product.
10. Do keyword research
One of the more critical blogging tips for beginners is to do keyword research for your blog posts.
As a new blogger, you write about topics you like and assume others are searching for the same issue.
I have to break it to you, but blogging doesn’t work this way.
Beginners need to do keyword research to determine how many searches a keyword gets a month, the difficulty of ranking for that particular keyword, and what other blogs are ranking for that term.
It sounds daunting, but you most likely will never get enough traffic from Google alone without doing keyword research.
Free keyword research tools:
– Wordtracker
– Ubersuggest (4 free searches a day)
– Wordstream
11. Post consistently
Make sure to write consistently and treat your blog like a job from day one. I cannot stress this enough, get into a rhythm and stick to it.
Whether it be two posts a week on Tuesday and Thursday or one post on a Wednesday, the most important thing you can do is maintain consistency.
I am on this blog every single day of the week. I am consistently on this blog, whether writing a post, optimizing older posts, posting to social media, or updating pages.
Writing 5 posts in a week and then none for a month isn’t a good habit, so remember to post consistently and get into a habit of treating your blog more like a business.
12. Use Spell & Grammar Check
One of the more critical blogging tips for beginners is ensuring that your spelling and grammar are correct.
Lousy spelling and incoherent sentences stick out like a sore thumb, so make sure to revise your blog posts and look out for any incorrect spelling. It’s such a simple fix but will make your blog look more legit and reliable.
A great tool I use is Grammarly for my spell and grammar check. I use the free version and have found it to be life-saving.
13. Provide quality content
If you’re serious about blogging, you need to provide high-quality content to your readers. Don’t try to bulk up your articles with nonsense or fluff.
Writing low-quality content is an easy way to get higher bounce rates and lower audience engagement.
Many people think that giving away lots of high-quality information is a way to lose money, but it’s quite literally the opposite.
If you provide free high-quality content, your audience will have a lot of trust in you. This could lead to them potentially buying an affiliated product you recommend or a course from you. This is because you’ve built that trust from giving out valuable information for free.
14. Stop making excuses
Another one of my blogging tips would be to stop making excuses when it comes to your blog.
If you have the idea of making a blog but are too scared of failing or thinking that you aren’t knowledgeable enough, just take the plunge and create the blog.
Treat your blog like a business from day one, stop making excuses, stick to your writing schedule, and push forward.
Too often, we see bloggers making excuses and giving up because they aren’t making money from their blogs. All I have to say is that if you’re expecting to make a full-time income from your blog, you should also expect to work some full-time hours.
15. Don’t give up
The last of the blogging tips for beginners but probably the most important one.
Don’t give up!
It’s so tempting to give up, I know. I think all bloggers have thought about it at least one time throughout their experience.
Blogging takes its time. You have to wait months to start ranking in Google and even longer for your audience to trust you.
You’ve probably read income reports for bloggers making thousands in their third month of blogging. It’s highly unlucky and unrealistic that you’ll become that lucky.
So continue doing keyword research, writing your content, and promoting it. You’ll hit your break along the way, and you’ll be glad you stuck it out.
I believe in you 🙂
Conclusion
Hopefully, you’ve found one of these 15 blogging tips for beginners to be helpful!
I wish I had read something like this when I first started blogging; it would have saved many silly mistakes I made.
Which was your favorite blogging tip?
What to read next:
– How Much Do Blogs Make [2021 Edition]
– 10 Best Free WordPress Themes for Blogs
– How Much Does it Cost to Start a Blog in 2021