10 Tips for Becoming a Better Blogger

Regular blogging can take up a lot of time and energy. It can be difficult to get creative every day, and to maintain that creativity over time. It’s especially hard when you’re staring at the screen, not sure what to do, or where to go with your writing. You can, however, make it easy for yourself, by integrating some things into your process and workflow. Keep these tips in mind to improve your blogging and help to unleash your creativity.

Inspiration

1. Research

Rather just including your own opinion, do research to see what other people are saying about your topic. Include quotes from sources and links to relevant articles elsewhere. This transforms your blog form being simply your opinion into a source of knowledge that is helpful to your readers.

2. Get Inspired by Your Readers

If you’ve got an active comments section, this is a great place to look for ideas for new posts. Check out old discussions and see if there are any ideas that you can follow up on. Your comments should be treasure trove of ideas for new posts.

3. Learn

A resource like Problogger’s “31 Days to Building a Better Blog” is a fun route to improving your blog and increasing your readership. There are 31 steps, to be carried out over 31 days, after which you should have a super-charged blog. The course is a few years old, but still relevant, and if you are willing to spend some cash a commercial version has been updated in 2012. 

Content

4. Find your Niche

It’s hard to grow a blog which is just about you and what you do, and you’ll find it much easier to do if you adopt a niche. This could be writing about WordPress (like we do here), writing about fly fishing, writing about cooking, or whatever. Finding a niche will help to identify you to new readers who are interested in what you do.

5. Schedule

Establish a blogging schedule and do your best to stick to it. This helps both you and your readers. Readers know when to expect different types of content, and you can better manage your time to get your content out there regularly. This will help to integrate your blogging into your regular workflow.

Writing

6. Quality, not Quantity

Some blogs want to knock out two or three posts a day, but this isn’t conducive to producing quality content. Spend time on your posts and make them the best that they can be. One well written post a week will be more interesting to your readers than a piece of fluff knocked out every day.

7. Write for Humans, not Robots

There’s nothing worse than overly SEOed content. Remember that Google is trying to make its service as useful as possible to people. This means that they are refining their algorithm all of the time to serve up useful content to searchers. SEO trends come and go, but quality content remains.

8. Personality

Be yourself. Successful blogs convey a sense of the writer’s personality. Readers don’t just visit the blog to learn, but because they like the writer. This makes it important for your writing to convey a sense of who you are. Don’t be afraid to really let your personality shine through; it will only be good for your blog.

Community

9. Interact

Interaction is a hugely important element of running a successful blog. If someone comments on your blog respond to them, get involved in the conversation. By doing this you’re showing that you’re interested in your reader’s opinions and that you want to engage with them. It also increases the number of comments, encouraging more readers to get involved.

10. Get Social

Try to become the master of at least one social network. This doesn’t mean using a social network to broadcast when you have new content, but using it to interact with your readers. Twitter and Facebook add another level of interaction that people will love. But you need to be smart about it – people can tell if you’re just using your social network to feed them content.