12 Blogging Tips to Help You Succeed In Your First Year

The first year of blogging is often the most difficult. In your first year of blogging, the learning curve is likely to be the highest as you will be learning new techniques and trying out new methods to see what works best for your blog.

Although there are many hurdles to overcome in your first year of blogging, it can be a fun journey getting there. Blogging is dictated largely by passion. Very few start blogging unless they are passionate about their niche. Unfortunately however, our passion and knowledge of our field are not sufficient to become a successful blogger. Running a successful blog involves much more than writing quality content. Your first year of blogging is important and if done correctly, can lay the foundations for  generating significant revenue directly from your blog.

Following are 12 Tips to help you succeed in your first year of blogging. To set the record straight, these tips do not guarantee that your blog will become successful within a year. However, it will help set you on the right path.

1. Set Realistic Expectations

Blogging requires far more work than what most people initially imagine. Blogging is not a get rich quick scheme; in fact it is far from it. Many bloggers make the mistake of under estimating the amount of work and effort required to run a successful blog. Setting realistic expectations will help you deal with temporary failures. If you want to start a blog primarily to make money within your first year, then I suggest you reconsider.

2. Don’t Quit

Lack of results can be frustrating. This is particularly true in your first year of blogging. From experience I can share that that there will be times when you will feel frustrated due to lack of results at least in terms of the direct revenue you are able to generate. In terms of generating traffic, you should see results within first 3 months. Many bloggers quit within the first year. If you can cross this threshold, you are already in the percentage who are likely to succeed.

As Darren Rowse from ProBlogger points out, most bloggers have at one point or another been close to giving up.

3. Hard Work and Determination

Following realistic expectations, expect at least a couple of years of hard work without much reward at least financially. If you want to earn a living from blogging, you have to be prepared to work part-time on your blog for a couple of years at least before you can consider giving up your day job. You need certain level of determination before being able to generate reasonable revenue from your blog. It took me three years before I could even begin to see some signs of success and benefit financially in any way.

4. Be Patient and Persevere

In my 12 years of professional career, I have not found perseverance and patience to be more important in any other profession than in blogging. There are many reasons why not all blogs make it into financially rewarding businesses. Lack of perseverance and patience are the most common reasons. If you carry on building your blog even when the chips are down, you will succeed eventually. Some do it in 1 year, some in two or three.

Although success will not come overnight, your productivity and efficiency will increase with time and you will begin to see some results within 6 months, although this will mainly in terms of growth and traffic. Generating substantial revenue from Ads, etc may take a few more months.

Take a look at a study below. Those who blog for SEO for over 6 months, reported a 300% increase in growth and traffic.

5. Publish Quality Content Frequently

Content is the most important real estate for a blog.  Although posting daily is not mandatory, it can help establish your blog faster. Write compelling Blog post titles. Publishing quality content frequently improves search engine ranking and allows you to build a loyal readership who will keep coming back for more.

Don’t make the mistake of writing purely for search engines but focus on meeting the needs of your readers instead.

This 12 Point blog post check-list can help you make the most of your content.

6. Participate in Discussions and Conversations on Other Blogs

Building and expanding our networking outside your blog is an integral part of successful blogging. It is important to find the time to comment on other blogs and forums related to your niche. Blog comments can have a big impact on SEO and can improve your overall online presence. It is a great way to get the attention of other bloggers.  Moreover, if you contribute something useful in your comments, other readers are likely to notice it and click on your comment link to visit your blog.

Leave genuine comments only that add value to the discussion. You can even use commenting tracking tools.

7. Be Active on Social Networks

Blogging is all about sharing information and networking with others. Social media is a great way to get your brand noticed and build your authority and reputation. Joining conversations is not limited to leaving comments on other blogs or forums. There are a number of social networking social media sites that you can participate actively on. At a most basic level, you should share new posts across all social networks you use.

Tips for Social Involvement:

In addition to promoting your own content on social networks, you should find the time to share content of other bloggers. The power of joining or creating groups or lists on social networks should not be under-estimated. Joining groups that target your market allows you to get your message in front of a much larger audience. Your profile views, page views and fan base will increase if you do so.

Find out more on Top 7 Tips for Social Media Opitmisation.

8. Plan Your Work

Writing new content is only a small (although important) part of blogging. If you aspire to be a successful blogger, you will need to balance a number of activities including writing new content, SEO, promoting your content, building your network, etc. It is very easy to get caught up in one task and overlook the others. New bloggers often make this mistake.

Making a list of your weekly tasks is a good way to ensure all important tasks get done. Planning helps you to maintain focus on important tasks.

9. Follow a Schedule

Freedom of blogging can often turn into the biggest reason for its failure. Whilst you don’t necessarily have to follow a 9 to 5 schedule, it is important to ensure tasks are completed in a timely manner. Timing and frequency of tasks are important to achieve success in blogging.

Consistency is equally important to become successful in blogging. Not publishing any articles in one week and publishing two posts a day the next, will not produce the same result.

10. Don’t succumb to Burn-out

Blogging can be tedious. No matter how much effort you put in, there will always be more that can be done. Burnout is quite common in blogging and many have suffered as a result of it. Trying to do or achieve too much at once is often the main reason. The impact of burn-out varies from person to person. However, it is bound to have a negative affect on your blog.

I have suffered from burn-outs personally. Just after my firs year in blogging, one of my posts went viral. My technoratti rank shot up to over 400. However, the next few months saw little to no activity on my blog due to general burn-out and ongoing project commitments. As a result my blog suffered significantly. My Technorati rank dropped to 80 just as fast as it had risen. Even after 2 months of writing daily, it is still over 100 now.

11. Use the Right Tools

Use of right tools will not only save you valuable time but also improve your efficiency and productivity. Try to stay away from fully automated tools for anything from SEO to publishing your content. HootSuite is a great submission tool you can use to post to multiple social networks as once and it also allows you to schedule your posts.

There are a range of free tools you can use. Google Analytics and Google Webmaster Tools are important for statistics and analysis of your traffic. Tools like Klout and Technoratti are great for measuring you social influence. Hootsuite is a tool that can improve results by allows you to schedule your social submissions. Feedburner is a tool that improves delivery of your RSS feed by offering more control, better statistics and the ability to offer website updates by email.

You can also use social bookmarking tools and tools to mesaure your social influence. The list of tools that can benefit your blogging efforts is endless so it is not practical to cover them in detail here.

12. Refine Where Necessary

You need to work constantly towards improving your blog. Monitoring your performance and statistics is important but if you do not take action where necessary, you are not likely to benefit. In addition to refining your site in response to monitoring your performance, feel free to try out new things to see what delivers the best results. Keep on top of new plug-ins or tools that can improve your blog. Keep track of what’s new in social media or new techniques or methods to promote your site. If the current design is not working for your needs, think about a new theme or template.

Conclusion:

The first year of blogging is very important and often the most difficult. The 12 Tips discussed above can help you make the most of your first year of blogging. It will help set you on the right path for the long term success of your blog. But don’t forget that every blog is different. What works for one may not necessarily work for you. Fee free to try out new methods and find out for yourself what works best for you.