Blogging Do’s And Don’t’s 2022 – How To Be Successful For Beginners

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Blogging is more competitive now then it ever has been before and that means we need to be more clever in how we approach it to be successful.

The benefits of having a successful blogging business are endless but it is going to take a lot of hard AND smart work to make it happen.

In the old days, you could write about whatever you wanted and would inevitably gain traffic but those days are gone.

These days we need to work super hard, have laser focus and persist long enough to see some initial success, so we can double down and turn it into a full time living.

Benefits Of a Successful Blogging Business:

Enjoyable
Passive Income
Location Independence
Scalable
Repeatable
Sellable
Leads To More Opportunities
No Boss

The Do’s and the Dont’s Of The Blogosphere

Just like with every business, there are key factors and ingredients to success and there are things we need to avoid.

Below are some of the mistakes we see new bloggers making all the time.

Do Pick A Solid Niche

Blogging starts with the niche selection as this can be make or break for the business right off the bat.

We need to think long term and not box ourselves into sub niche that is too small that it is going to stifle future growth.

It’s all about planning where you want to go, long term and not limiting yourself with you domain name.

Focussing on Kitchen Improvement might be great right now but what if it is a roaring success and you want to incorporate the rest of the house into your site down the line?

There is nothing wrong with a kitchen improvement site but if you can select a domain that isn’t going to cut you off from expansion, but still sounds ‘dope’, it can save you from a big problem as you look to scale.

Think carefully about your domain name and don’t let it be a limiting factor in the future.

You may want to write about one particular type of snake right now but want to expand to all exotic animals down the line.

Chose your domain name carefully!

Do Select A Good WordPress Theme

WordPress is the only platform we would recommend for creating your blog.

If you have a Shopify store (Hugely neglected opportunity currently) you want to blog on, it is perfect but otherwise go with WordPress.

You have complete control over every aspect of your site and that is pretty important.

You need a solid theme that can handle your blog and all the display ads/marketing you want to add down the line.

We suggest buying a quality theme from Themeforrest.

This blog and most of our others, run on Enfold which I am very happy with.

Acabado from Income school is also a great theme when it comes to speed.

Do Proper Keyword Research

Picking the Right Titles To Right Is Make Or Break For Your Blogging Efforts.

We want to write articles that address question and queries people are actually searching for online.

Google Auto Suggest is the number 1 way to see what people are searching for.

This is where you start writing a search into google and it autocompletes.

Use Autosearch to come up with the titles for your posts.

You don’t want to over complicate it, just come up with 30 titles that sound interesting, related to your niche and record them on a spreadsheet.

Do Competitor Analysis

“We don’t want to try to climb Everest with impossibly competitive search terms, especially with a new blog but if you are established, by all means, go for it!”

Once we have our initial blog titles picked out, we want to check out the competition for each of them.

Type in the search query, click on the top three results and see how good AND long the answers are.

If there are forums like Quora and Reddit, you can easily outrank them with quality content.

Pick 10 titles where the competition is weak and write these as your first 10 posts.

Move onto the second ten least competitive and if there is any super competitive terms, you may be better off leaving them to them.

Do Create Long Form Content

It is no secret that Google favours longer form content.

They know that the longer the content, the more users will engage with it and the longer they will stay on the page, that’s why they tend to rank it higher in the SERPS.

We would suggest never writing a post under 1,500 words and sometimes even up wards of 3/4,000 for bigger topics.

This doesn’t mean to waffle just to fill the space, we want to draw the user in at the start and then pre-empt what they are going to ask next and answer it for them.

Make Your Content Scannable

You want to read to be able to scroll quickly through your post and pick up all the key points.

It’s like the 80/20 Rule where 80% of the nuggets are in 20% of your content.

Blog readers don’t usually read every word that is written, they scan the blog post for the most useful info and skip over the rest for the most part.

Make sure your content stands out with Tables, Headings, Short Paragraphs, Bolded Words, Unique Images, Lists and Quotes.

Make sure they can easily see the most important content at first glance while scrolling through.

Always Aim For Number 1 Spot

“Aim for the stars and you’ll end up among the clouds, aim for the clouds and you’ll hit the roof.” – Unknown

We always want to aim for number 1 with our blog posts.

We want to write the best content in relation to every query we address.

If we always aim for number 1 we should always end up in the top 3 and that is a recipe for a successful and profitable business in the long term.

Plan Your Monetization Strategy

Making money off your blog is what it is all about and it is very achievable once you have traffic.

You need to have a strategy for how you are going to make that money from the start to optimise the returns.

A lot of these ways go hand in hand and some are more applicable to certain niches than others.

Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate Marketing is the sexy one right and it is an area where you can make a ton of money.

You basically direct your audience to buy certain products based on the needs, you know they want filled because of the blog post they are reading.

When the user clicks your link, a cookie is placed in their browser and if they buy, you can earn anywhere from 1% to 50% commission on the sale.

Display Ads

Many people have heard of putting Adsense on their site and they know that it makes barely any money.

And they are right, but there are plenty of other Ad management companies that will take you on once you start getting a bit more traffic.

Ezoic will take you on at 10,000 visitors a month and will give you 3X over Adsense.

Once you hit 50k visitors per month, Mediavine will allow you to use their platform and they can pay up to 10x what you will earn on Adsense.

At that kind of volume and earnings, it can quickly escalate into a full time salary.

Don’t rule out Display Ads as a viable source of income.

Info Products

Depending on the niche and you level of expertise, people may want to learn from you and be willing to pay for the knowledge you have accumulated.

One you have traffic built up, you can direct toward info products like E-Books, Video Courses, Membership Site and more.

What’s great about these is that you make it once and can sell it infinite times, it’s quality passive income.

Blogging For Ecommerce

This is an opportunity that I feel is hugely overlooked by a lot of E-Commerce Owners.

You can generate huge amounts of traffic to your site through Blogging, collect emails or start remarketing campaigns when you blog for E-Commerce.

You can show your products throughout the blogs, get people to connect with your brand and even if the conversion rate is low, eventually you will still be generating considerable sales and brand awareness.

Find A Gap And Go All In

As you start to write Blog posts, some will rank better and more quickly than others.

You can take it that Google wants to rank you for the content it indexes and ranks quickly and there is a good gap in the market.

If you can find queries related to this, similar queries, comparing one product against another or just covering that full area more completely, it can lead to much faster rankings, traffic and income.

Check Google Search Console regularly to see what is ranking and find related topics until you exhaust that area.

Have An Abundance Mindset

Blogging is a tough game just like any business, it’s not going to happen overnight and you may end up thinking you’ve written about every topic in your niche long before you actually do.

You have to understand that there is an unlimited amount of articles you can write once you pick the right niche.

There is also an unlimited amount of money you can earn in this world.

Embrace Other Platforms

Blogging has changed and Youtube has become a major part of the game now whether we like it or not.

Having a combined audience through Youtube AND Blogging is extremely profitable.

We need to embrace being on camera or at least creating screenshare or slide show videos to create a presence on this platform as it is crying out for quality content.

Pinterest and Social Media can also be an excellent way to boost your presence, traffic and build your brand.

Take a holistic approach to offering your audience as much value as possible!

Don’t Just Be A Scraper

Scrapers are people who just scrape bits of the competitors’ articles without adding anything new themselves.

Try to add some unique information like comparison tables, infographics, video or additional information from your personal knowledge and experience.

There is nothing wrong with doing your research and writing the best article possible but it’s best to avoid simply parroting what others have said.

Don’t Rob Images

One of the biggest temptations when starting out is to just rob your images from Google search and you will probably get away with it for a while.

Once your blog becomes successful, you are bound to get complaints about using other peoples photos, along with a bill in most cases.

Worse still, you could end up facing legal action.

Your best best is to get you images from free stock image sites like Unsplash or use Amazon Affiliate images for products.

It’s a headache you’ll be glad you have avoided if you start early.

Don’t Have Unrealistic Expectations

Don’t expect to have a full time living in 6 months with blogging.

The truth is that it is going to take that long for Google to even start ranking your blog posts and giving you some traffic.

Realistically you can be earning a good income within 12 months and most people could have a full time income within 18 months.

If you outsource writing and have a lot of affiliate, you can do it quicker but you need to be in this for the long haul to see success.

What happens from months 18 – 36 is where you can really start making a lot of money per month and it is continually scalable beyond that too.

Don’t Give Up Too Soon

The only way you can fail is if you give up to soon.

You need to create at least 50 quality posts to start seeing results, so you should aim for 100.

Don’t Start Without A Plan

Fail To Plan, Plan To Fail

If you are a newcomer to blogging, you should watch all the youtube videos that you can for knowledge or even take a paid course.

Once you set off with enough legitimate advice, you can take over the world with blogging and it is a career path with a ton of opportunities.