Do you know why some blogs perform better than the others? It is because those blogs follow important blogging rules and etiquette.
If you too want your blog to succeed enormously well, then check here the golden rules of blogging.
Golden Rules of Blogging:
1. Give Your Blog an Informative and Appealing Title:
The first thing that a reader notices about any post is its title or headline along with the thumbnail photo positioned at the top of the page.
The readers will continue to read the post and will be enticed enough to click only if the title is appealing to them. For such reasons, it is essential to create a good title for your post.
It is great to play with the words and use them in a way so that they appear familiar. In comparison to numbered lists, question-based titles work better.
2. Select a Proper Theme for Your Blog:
Your blog can reap the desired benefits only if it is structured around a specific theme.
No matter what your blog talks about, you can design a unique theme for it keeping in relevancy what you are blogging about. Moreover, you can create a broad theme so that it appears interesting and appealing.
3. Keep the Length of Your Blog Short:
Your blog is a question, an idea, or can be thought. The more succinct and direct you are, the better your blog content is.
4. Change Your Blog Theme Without Confusing Readers:
If your blog receives a lot of readers or traffic on a regular basis, you must definitely want to offer them something refreshing and rich.
Make sure you change the theme of your blog in a transparent and deliberate manner. Also, avoid making the change overnight as this may confuse the readers and will resist them from coming back.
5. Avoid Following and Be a Leader:
You must write your blog with a genuine intent of reaching out to a particular target demographic with a message, which makes their lives better.
Avoid following around some common stories and emulate drivel as it will not go viral and will not help you, especially if you are selling products or services.
6. Be Consistent in Posting:
It is great to decide in advance how many numbers of times you want to be online. Most individuals begin blogging but soon they don’t maintain the seriousness and hence avoid publishing blogs online at regular intervals.
In order to be successful, you must post blogs on a consistent basis. This is essential so that you always stay in front of your readers and never go away.
7. Publish Original Content:
Readers will click and read the content, which they believe is worth reading. Hence, create original content that the readers would want to click on, share, and read.
8. Don’t Post Only Once in a Month:
It is essential that you add content to your blog post on a regular basis. Mostly, companies create a single lengthy post and publish it once in a month. This is the worst thing they can do to their readers.
It basically lets readers believe that they are not much interested in interacting with their clients and this is something far down on their list.
9. Stay Human While Writing:
Be self-deprecating, funny, and authentic. Make sure you admit all your mistakes and you act like a genuine human.
People on the internet are interested to read something that is written by real humans and not by a robot. Give your blog a personal touch and a sense of appropriateness. Don’t write anything that hurts their sentiments and this can be done only when you write with emotions and understanding the emotions of your readers.
10. Don’t Consider Blogging and Social Media Content as the Same:
A social media campaign does nothing more than pushing around the messages, ideas, and links of other people and not your own.
Along with being regularly posting on social media, it is essential to generate high-quality content and the same must be presented in a correct manner. There must be a balance of content marketing and social media.
Remember, the content is king and the platform is queen, which needs to be treated well.
11. Avoid Focusing on the Incorrect Things:
Most of the bloggers and website owners fall into the trap of being highly concerned with too many followers or likes. Their aim is to set up as a reliable expert, develop trust, and bring clients into the sales funnel.
All the impersonal metrics on social media would not conquer and would not take the place of a few amazing client relationships.
12. Add Relevant Photos:
Make sure you always include a photo in your blog. Including appropriate photos enhance the function of ‘mind mapping.’
You can also post tweets with a photo, which are clicked 350% more than just the links, which implies they are 350% more likely to grab interest than the text alone.
13. Integrate a Call to Action in Your Post:
Your post must motivate the readers to do a particular thing. Such as clicking on the link, submitting a contact form, answering a question, signing up for updates, taking benefit of an offer, and more.
If your blog is offering highly interesting and rich content, but it does not incorporate a CTA then it means the blog is leading nowhere.
14. If there is Need, Hire Other Experts:
In order to commence professional blogging, you have to be a professional blogger.
In an attempt to write your blog in the free time it will result in mushy, inconsistent, and unfocused content. This can change your audience and can result in the devaluation of your brand by not speaking out professionalism.
For such reasons, make sure you hire a professional blogger if it is really needed. Moreover, you can hire other industry experts belonging to sales, IT, marketing, and other divisions so that each aspect of your blog is executed in a professional manner.
15. Engage:
Your blog alone must not talk to the audience. Rather, it must serve as a platform to let you talk with your audience. Hence, consider your blog as a way to begin a conversation.
This is essential to keep your audience engaged and start an awesome professional relationship with your readers.
16. Place Your Blog on Your Site:
It is quite difficult to motivate people to read as well as share your blog. But definitely, you are seriously hindering the chance of them taking the further step by not showcasing your blog on your website.
It is best to exhibit your blog on your site so that even those who visit your website can know about it.
17. Avoid Using a Sales Tone:
Using overtly pushy words and transactions is not going to please the readers. It would not solve any problem. Rather, it fills needs and gauge opinions.
It is, therefore, best to explore values, challenges, and issues in your blog. You must target a specific demographic through the way of your blog. But never give the blog readers a chance to let people talk about you and your brand.
Avoid using a sales tone and cheesy infomercials. Present your readers with rich and high-quality content.
18. Break the Text In Proper Sections:
Readers are not interested to read simple text. They are looking out for an information-rich article.
Readers consider reading an article or not, right after going through the very first line of the content. The initial lines of content are the lines that definitely readers read.
Rather, create a blog that is comfortable to read for the readers. This can be done by breaking the text of your content in a proper manner and into an adequate format. Break the content into manageable text with photos, bullet points, sub-headers, and add a list to make it more interesting.
19. Keep Tracking and Measuring the Results:
You can link some kind of analytics to the blog so that it is possible to measure the total number of people who read your blog.
You must know about the readers from:
- Where they came from
- Who shared the content
- How long the readers stayed on the site
- The valuable information that has been shared or offered.
By estimating the results regularly, you can know what works well.
20. Include Links:
Another important rule of blogging, which you must follow and that can provide huge success to your blog is including numerous links of other blogs you have previously written.
You can also include links of outside articles, referral partners, community resources, and your business.
21. Educate as well as Entertain Readers:
The aim of a blog is to not only offer many technical details, which can make your reader an expert in the subject. But your blog must also aim to prove and present you as an expert.
Write your blog in a way so that more people can build trust in you. Your readers must believe that you are an honest person who can solve their issues.
It is good to write technical content, but at the same time, your post must answer reader queries. Also include testimonials and mentions of other blogs to keep your post entertaining and interesting.
22. Try to Write Evergreen Content:
If you write about the ongoing affairs, you will receive a lot of reviews on your page. But this is only for the short term. Over time, this information will become irrelevant and in order to gain traffic, you have to keep writing again and again.
For this reason, it is best to offer your readers a mix of blogs, some of which are evergreen content. Evergreen content is one that does not lose its value even after years and years. it contains information, which never becomes outdated.
23. It Must Not Always be About You:
Don’t consider your blog as a forum for you to talk about your company, yourself, blab, complain, or other things. Your blog must be a haven for the target demographic to read content, which is entertaining, interesting, universal, fascinating, and helpful to them.
Make sure your blog is always about your audience and not about you.
24. Have a Unique Voice:
One of the great things about blogging is that it highly encourages you to write as yourself. You don’t have to follow anyone else’s tone or get into those technical details if you actually don’t want to.
Hence, keep it unique and make sure you write it in your own unique style. If your readers love your unique style then your writing can always be a treat to them.
25. Maintain a Nice Blog Length:
A decent blog length is somewhere around 500-700 words. But if you have enough information to share or you are writing something of substance, you can go for a longer post.
Keep it short and concise if you don’t have too much information to share. Avoid using repetitive sentences just to increase the blog’s length.
26. Credit Other Bloggers:
You might be inspired by blogs or posts written by other bloggers and hence you might be writing something similar. In such a scenario it is always best to mention them in your post.
Give them some credit. This will also help you make friends in the industry.
27. Mention You Email Address for Inquiries:
If you are asking people to send their feedback or inquiries, then you must mention an email address in your blog. You can introduce the email id at the bottom of your post. If people find your post thoughtful or want to share their inquiry, it would be easier for them to reach you.
28. Create an About Us Page:
Don’t forget to create an ‘About Us’ page which is comprehensive and easy to find. Most people search for this page as soon as they visit a blog.
29. Integrate Social Media Buttons:
If there are social media buttons for your blog, position them in your blog at a place so that it is easy for people to find them.
30. Use Tagging:
This is a great way to keep similar posts organized and to make it easier for people to reach out to a particular post on your blog.
Summing Up:
You now have the top rules of blogging with you. Apply these golden rules to your blog and surely you will be impressed with the results.