Blogging for Dummies: Professional Blogger Do’s and Don’ts

How many times have you searched for something online, only to come across a blog that’s obviously been abandoned by its owner-no new posts, bad design, and outdated content. What happened-you may ask? Well, it could be a number of things. Blogging has become a way for hundreds of thousands of everyday folks to quite their jobs and chuck the deuces to their employers. However, the hard work and dedication needed to actually make a blog successful involves much more than just tossing up 10-15 posts and hoping that the cash comes flowing in. In this post we’ll discuss some of the biggest pitfalls that new bloggers fall into and how to avoid them. Here’s the breakdown:

• Hobby Blogging vs Professional Blogging
• NOT Email Marketing & Getting Subscribers
• Using Free Blogging Platforms vs Paid Blogging Sites
• Bad Blog Design
• Bad Blog Posts Headlines

Hobby Blogging vs Professional Blogging

When it comes to deciding if you want to be a hobby blogger or a Professional Blogger it really boils down to whether or not you want your blog to generate income for you. And if so, HOW MUCH income you’d like to see generated from your blog. Are you looking for the touted $10k a month? Or maybe even $50k or more every month? If so, it’s a professional blog that you’re looking to create and not a hobby blog.

Let’s define these more clearly.

Hobby blog: A blog that created mostly for interest in a particular subject matter. While it can provide a steady (and substantial) income stream it’s not a dependable source of income for the blogger. In other words, its not “full-time job money”.

Professional Blog: A blog that’s created for interest in a particular subject matter or to solely provide income for the blogger, with the ultimate goal of creating a dependable revenue stream…like that of a full-time job.

Being clear about the purpose for your blog make it easier for you when you start to build out your blog. Why? Because the approach that you’ll take as a hobby blogger is going to be totally different than the approach that you take as a professional blogger.

It’s often that a hobby blogger will become a professional blogger over time as they realize the income potential with blogging for a living. But if you know for a fact that you want to want to blog for profit then it’s important to set yourself up for success by outlining the important aspects of profit-earning blog.

Things Needed When Blogging For Money:

Good Blog Niche Ideas

Starting a blog without a specific topic that plan to cover isn’t going to fair well in terms of building an audience. People search online for specific topics and if you’re blog isn’t centered about a particular subject (or a variety of subjects) it’s going to be pretty hard to get steady traffic. Not only that, but Google will simply overlook your blog posts and rank them lower because there are other blogs with posts that are more concentrated in respect to specific keyword search terms.

Finding the right blog niche can be as simple as doing a bit of brainstorming about your passions. What things do you love talking about? What are you an expert in?

Once you define your blogging niche, you’ll need to determine whether or not it’s a niche that’s viable for profit creation. Blog niche ideas such as Marketing, Health/Recipes, Travel, Productivity, Technology, Music, etc. make excellent niches because there are scores of people interested in these topics.

It would be especially challenges to profit from blog niches such as Typewriter Maintenance, Ferret Pet Care, and Whiskey Bottle Collecting because while there certainly would be people interested in these subjects, chances are they wouldn’t drive the amount of traffic as the previously listed topic-they’re just too specific. To see if you’re niche is profitable, try searching for other blogs related to your niche idea and determine its level of visibility online.

SEO Knowledge

SEO (search engine optimization) is the cornerstone of Google page ranking. This is what will drive the traffic to your blog and provide Google with an incentive to rank your blog for specific keywords. The better your knowledge of SEO and how Google works, the faster you’ll be able to rank your site. You don’t need to spend $300/month on a SEO consultant to get 1^st page rankings on Google (most professional bloggers don’t anyway), you really just need quality content, SEO-optimize post, and a bit of patience. You can brush up on SEO on sites like Search Engine Land and Moz.

Blog Promotion

While having SEO-optimized posts is definitely necessary for blogging success, any professional blogger will tell you that promoting your blog can you get traffic WAY faster than waiting for Google to rank your site. Why? Because of word-of mouth. Think about it, how often have you had a friend recommend a product or service to you because they tried it and found it to be helpful? More times than you can imagine, right? Well imagine someone reading one of your blog posts and then sharing it on their own blog, which has a monthly viewership of 20,000 people. You’ve just reached a whole new audience. This is how posts, videos, images, and other content goes viral online. The more you promote your blog, the more you increase your chances of having others share its content and promote it for you. And you can do this for free via social media, blog-sharing communities, online, forums, and other mediums.

NOT Email Marketing & Getting Subscribers

You’ll often hear top bloggers say that growing your email list is something that you should do early on in your blogging journey-and it is. Email Marketing is the best thing that you can do for your blog. Here’s why.

When you’re able to get subscribers to your newsletter you’re able to increase your chances of converting them into customers 3xs faster than non-subscribers. Why? Because as you continue to email them useful information and quality content (which is important), you increase the level of trust and authority for your brand, which is the biggest factor in converting prospective customers. Even, if you don’t have your own products that your promoting (as with affiliates) your subscribers are more likely to purchase these suggested products because they trust your recommendations.

You’ll always get more conversions via email because they are “warm” leads. Meaning, they’re already familiar with your brand and the types of content (or products) that you provide. This is EXACTLY the type of audience that you want to keep engaged.

Top bloggers know this, which is why they make sure to make their email subscription offer worthwhile for their readers. And while getting your readers to subscribe isn’t exactly rocket science, it does take the right bait (offer) to hook them in.

Here are a few ways that you can turn your readers into subscribers:

• Create an exclusive offer for people that’s only available to email subscribers
• Give away something for free-this could be a piece of content, a list of resources, a free course-anything! Just make sure it’s of good quality
• Offer a free webinar to new subscribers and in it provide in-depth knowledge and helpful tips about the things that are important to them
• Create an offer centered about content from an industry expert (Q&A, interview, blog post, etc.) that’s only available if they sign up for the newsletter
• Create an “ultimate guide” piece of content that goes in-depth about how to do something (make sure to have a good idea of what topics would matter the most to your audience)

You can probably think of a ton of other things to get your readers to sign up. And once you do, be sure to do these 3 things:

1. Have them confirm their email address once they subscribe.
2. Let them know how often you’ll be emailing them, what content you’ll be sending, and what email address it’ll come from.
3. Include an “unsubscribe” button so that readers can remove themselves from newsletter if they change their mind.
4. Include your address at the bottom of each email (CAN-SPAM Act)

These things may sound small, but NOT doing them can cause a huge drop email subscription rate and/or you to get your email address backlisted-which is no fun at all.

Building your email list early on in your blogging career can do wonders for your revenue streams once you build up your audience base. To make things easy its best to go with dependable email marketing software providers such as MailChimp and ConvertKit which will allow you automate your email list-building and save you a TON of time.

Using Free Blogging Platforms vs Paid Blogging Sites

The truth is that it really costs nothing to set up a blog. You can go to platforms like Blogger and have blog up and running in a matter of minutes. Anything that you get for free usually has some sort of limitation, annoying attachment, or many times it just won’t offer you the same value as something that you’ve paid for.

Free blogging platforms are great if you’re not looking to monetize your site. However, if you’re looking to make part-time or full-time income from the traffic that your blog receives, you’re going to have to cough up the few bucks that it takes to get self-hosting.

Why? Because it’s all about giving your visitors the presentation of a professional website that they can trust (especially if you’re selling products directly from your site). With free blogging platforms you typically won’t have the ability to customize your theme, establish a custom domain name, or incorporate dynamic pages and capabilities that’ll make your site stand out. It’s almost like taking a cookie-cutter approach to blogging.

Think about it. Imagine that every clothing department store that you walked into had the same apparel, the same store décor, the same logo, and the same store policies-a lot of shopping malls would be pretty empty, no? What would distinguish one blogger from another?

Websites are no different. Most bloggers make money from either affiliate sales or selling their own products, and if you have a sight that helps you to establish trust with your audience, then you have a winner.

Bad Blog Design

You’d think that since most bloggers use WordPress as their preferred blogging platform that good blog design wouldn’t be an issue…but it is.

Having a user-friendly web presence is an absolute must if you want to be taken seriously as a professional blogger.

While good web design doesn’t encompass a specific look in order to be aesthetically pleasing, there are definitely elements of a website that can easily turn offer readers, resulting in high bounce rates and low overall engagement.

Here are a few examples of bad blog design:

1. Bad Website Wireframe and Design Faux Pas

The wireframe of your website represents its visual blueprint as a source of information. Whether it’s a blog, online catalog, business portal, or community forum, the page schematic and overall structure of your website must make sense in order for visitors to be able to navigate it. If you look at most blog sites, you’ll often see the following menu setup (aka “Wireframe”):

• Home
• About/Who We Are
• Blog Roll
• Shop/Product (if applicable)
• Contact

This setup works as a common default for professional bloggers because it provides a clear and concise overview of where to go on the site to get to the information that they’re seeking. The first glance of your site plays a major role in visitors deciding whether or not they want to continue reading or hit the “back” button in their browser.  

Imagine visiting a site with the following setup:

• Home
• Inspiration
• Innovation
• Break Time
• Link Up

You’d basically have to guess which page offers the products and which page discusses who the blogger is. It’s confusing. People (and Google) don’t want to be confused when searching, they want information…and fast!

This is also why Google loves sitemaps, because it offers their algorithm on how to crawl your site in an effort to accurately display pages during search engine requests.

When choosing your blog design template, it helps to check out other similar sites to see what options are available and discover new blog design ideas.

Here are a few of the worst offenders when it comes to blog design:

1. Pages that take too long to load (over 5 secs)
2. Poor quality images or logos
3. Confusing layouts, too many colors, and/or too much clutter
4. Low-quality web and product copy
5. Annoying pop-ups on every page within
6. Too many typefaces and/or font colors

If your bounce rate is high, chances are that you could be committing one of the mentioned web design offenses.

1. Optimize your images and install a good cache plugin
2. Make sure that your images and logos are JPEG or PNG format (or GIFs if animated) for the best quality.
3. Find the best templates and designs for WordPress
4. Create high-quality content and if you’re going to use content mills for your blog writing, use reputable writers.
5. Create pop-ups only on specific pages and set them to appear after an allotted amount of time on the page as to give users time to engage in your content (before signing up for your newsletter).
6. Stick to headers and sub-headers for your pages/posts and a maximum of 2 font colors.

2. Poor Content Quality

These days you can easily go on Fiverr and pay someone to write a 350-word blog article post on anything for $5 with a 2 or 3-day turnaround. Not only is this a super-cheap option for building a blog, but it can be done relatively quickly. The downside, the content will likely be of poor quality: either spun content, and/or a bunch of fluff-filled pointers that lack depth and true value. You don’t want to go this route. Why? Because a blog with 25 solid, in-depth articles will perform better than a blog with 50 shallow articles that contain a bunch of regurgitated and generalized pointers about a topic.

Here’s how to avoid poor content:

Stay Fresh – Make sure to keep your blog updated. Posting at least once a week means that Google will be incentivized to crawl your site more often and the more it crawls, the more you’ll rank.

Avoid cookie-cutter post – Avoid writing the same thing that everyone is writing. Sure, there will always be competing blogs, but finding a way to stand out or present information in a new and refreshing way will help you to really build your audience.

Dig Deeper – Use your platform as a professional blogger means really digging into your content’s quality. Find out what your audience craves as far as content is concerned and then do as much research as possible (or draw information from your own knowledge) and give them substance. Provide them with resources, show them real-world examples and case studies, walk them through things step-by-step. This is the level of content that professional bloggers put out to keep their visitors coming back for more!

Bad Blog Posts Headlines

Bad blog post headlines (titles) can be detrimental to your reading rates. A good headline will grab the reader’s attention and offer a clear idea of what the blog post is all about.

Professional bloggers typically write their blog post headlines to align with whatever keyword they’re looking to rank for with a specific post. For example, if you’re looking to rank for the keyword term “used upright pianos”, you might write a post entitled “Where to get to find the best used upright pianos”.

The biggest mistake new bloggers make is not making their post titles match the content in the blog. Often times it’s unintentional, but nevertheless, it can result in low engagement for your posts.

Here’s an example of a bad blog post title. Let’s say you enter the keyword term “sound proof flooring ideas” for a new search. And in the SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages) you see a post entitled “10 Soundproof Flooring Ideas”.

You click on this post, but instead of finding “sound proofing ideas” you actually find a list of places that sell sound proofing equipment-not sound proofing ideas. See the disconnect?

Understanding user intent is important when writing blog posts and blog headlines, so it helps to take a minute to consider this when crafting new content. Remember, you can have super-great content on your blog, but if it’s not matched with an attention-getting, appropriate headline then it can easily go overlooked.

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