Blogger

3 Sets of Silly People Every Blogger Should Ignore For Engaged Readership

Do you Want More Loyal Readers?
Do you Want More Loyal Readers?

Wouldn’t it be more awesome if your blog readership triples within a short period of time?

These fans can’t seem to get enough of you and you love it.

If this is your goal as a blogger then I have to tell you this: you have to intentionally ignore and snub some people too.

Don’t get me wrong, we all want a large and huge readership but the honest truth is you can’t please everybody.

You have to make the choice now. …

Do You Lack These Vital Blogging Skills? Here’s How to Fix Now!

Blogging is like climbing a mountain, it should be done safely and precisely, one wrong move can kill you, but if you do it in a right way, you’ll definitely succeed to reach the top. ;)

You might have stumbled upon internet and found out a thing called ‘blogging’ and the advantages of it, and then you decided to become blogger, right?

Well, many of us have started blogging like that; without any background knowledge about content writing and the other vital skills that required for long-term blogging.

Blogging is not that easy as it seems, there are some vital skills we need to have to be a good blogger. Having these skills will help you grow quickly in blogging.

Blogging Skills

So, if you’re just starting your blogging journey and wondering what are the vital skills that you need to be a blogger, then you’re in a right place. In this article, I’ll explain the major skills that you need to have/adopt to be a good blogger.

If you can write, you can be a blogger – Writing Skills

This is one of the essential and first set of skill that you need to have to be a blogger. As a blogger, you can’t just write whatever you like. Blogging is all about sharing quality information that will (should) help readers. And to do that you need to have a good set of writing skills.

It is utterly impossible to become a blogger without having some basic writing skills. So, Improve your writing.

Don’t have a good set of writing skills? Adopt it

Genuinely speaking, I’m not a good writer, but over the period of last few months, I have improved it a lot. So, as a blogger, it is vital to improve your writing skills on a daily basis. I know it is very difficult to be perfectionist, but we can always improve to some extent.

Tips to improve writing skills

  • Read, Read and Read; There is no shortcut to improve your writing skills, you have to read as much as possible
  • Take English courses
  • Write; keep writing even if your writing is terrible

Ability to think out of the box – Creative skills

Blogging is a Continues process of sharing fresh and unique information. What if you run out ideas within a month? Then you might quit blogging. So, you need to have this quality called – creativity; Ability to think and come up with new and fresh ideas every time.

Gone are the days where you could write some 300 words and rank your articles. It is a Panda, Hummingbird era; to stand out from the crowd, you need to write in-depth quality articles. An in-depth article doesn’t mean you can fill your content with anything; Google Hummingbird algorithm might sue you.

Creativity is the second important quality to be a blogger; you can’t write articles without having the ability to think out of the box.

How to adopt creative skills?

Well, creativity is a unique set of quality that not everybody has it. It is a quality that we see mostly in entrepreneurs and freelancers. So, if you’re a blogger then you can adopt creativeness in blogging.

Tips to adopt creative skills

  • Try to invent something of your own
  • Read Interesting stuffs
  • Play with words

Ability to bring audience – Promoting skills

Recently, I read a status on a Blogger Confession page, where the confessor said; he is not getting any traffic to his blog even after writing quality articles. Here the problem is that the confessor doesn’t realize the fact that traffic doesn’t come of its own, and if you don’t know the ways to promote your work, then you’ll fail. Promoting is another skill that you need to have to be a successful blogger.

So what are those promoting skills you need to have?

Ability to write guest posts

If you want to be recognized in blogosphere, then you need to write guest posts quite often. However, many novice hesitate to write guest posts because of varies reasons like; fear of rejection, fear of critics, or shyness. It might look difficult initially, but once you start writing guest-posts on top blogs, it’ll get easier. However, you need to adopt the first skill that I mentioned in this post, i.e. writing skills; without this it is hard to get your guest post published.

Guest blogging also helps you to build links naturally, and the backlinks will help you get good traffic from search engines.

Blog commenting

As you know blog commenting is one of the easiest way to promote your blog, I don’t think blog commenting needs much more explanation.

Once you get the recognition, your blog will be in a spotlight and the traffic will flow.

Tips for Promoting

  • Be Everywhere; show your online presence
  • Be fearless and write guest posts; don’t hesitate
  • Use Social media as much as you can
  • Don’t leave an opportunity to Interview pro-bloggers

Conclusion

These are the vital skills that you need to have to be a blogger, apart from these you need to adopt some other skills like reading, proofreading etc. If you’re just starting your blogging journey, then make sure you have these major blogging skills. Else try to adopt these skills and qualities from now.

[Image Credit: Chris Frick ]

Why You’ve Not Been Getting Your Desired Result from Blogging

You’ve read a lot of Internet Marketing and blogging tips out there including some other things but, how many of those various tips that you’ve read have you tried on your own?

I’m speaking from my own personal experience here and, I think you really have to start seeing this the way I’m seeing it. Now, if you really want to start seeing amazing results from your business then, you have to pay attention and read this blog post from start to finish.

Reading

I started blogging about 18 months ago and, it might interest you to know that I love reading a lot which is good but, do I also put the things I learnt to practice? Of cause NO.

When I started blogging, I subscribed to almost 46 blogs RSS FEED which means that I’m always notified via email whenever these blogs published a new post and I’m sure you know what that mean…. Always reading blog posts.

For the first 7 months of my blogging career, I was busy reading all the blogging tips and tricks that comes my way and the funniest thing is that I was enjoying it .

Every day, I must read about 28 blog posts and, that’s the only thing I will do for the day after which I will be praising myself for working hard.

I continued like that for about 7 months and my own blog was not doing well at all until I decided to change what I was doing.

Now, I’m not saying that it’s not good to form the habit of reading but, don’t overdo things and, after reading any tip out there, see how you can practice what you’ve read on your own blog and if it didn’t work well, you can always reverse it. It will always make a difference and, it’s more honourable to try something and fail than to not do anything.

Don’t Mistake Activity for Achievement

Now, do you know that most of the things people always see as achievements are only activities? Yes, believe it or not.

Reading all the blogging tips and formula out there will never take you anywhere rather, it will only leave you with lots of confusion because, you will just be reading for reading sake and not to learn something new.

When you’re starting a blog, instead of reading articles about How To Build a Blog ranging from keyword research, registering and hosting your domain to installing the blog, you go and start reading articles about How to Drive Traffic to your blog then, you will only be wasting your precious time and that’s what I call activity.

This is because you don’t really need that information at that moment and reading it will add no meaning to your business. Bet me that you would have forgotten the tips you read from that post by the time you will need it.

Reading

So, everything in life has a process and for you to succeed on anything, you must follow the required process else, you will only be messing around. Even the holy bible also made it clear that there is time for everything.

This goes to say that, if what you’re doing at the moment is thinking about how to monetize your blog then, it’s better to focus on that and all the tips you should be reading are ones that are related to that and when you’re reading such tips, you should also be acting on them so that the time you spent to read them will be worthwhile.

Reading weight loss articles when you’re struggling to learn how to get your adsense account approved is just madness. This was the same thing that happened to me during my first 7 months of blogging, if someone has told me I was making a mistake then and show me the right thing to do just like I’m showing you now then, my blog would have grown passed the level it has attained now.

Is your blog stagnant? Are you not seeing any result from your efforts so far? then, its time you seat down and analyse what you’ve been doing and know where you’re doing it wrong, know if you’ve been mistaking activity for achievement.

Henry Ford defined insanity as doing the same thing over and over again while expecting different result so, if you really want things to change for you now, if you really want to start seeing your desired results then, you must also start changing the way you do things.

Stop reading all the articles out there now and start practising the ones you’ve learnt so far, this is the best thing you can do for your business right now.

Mind you, I’m not saying you should stop reading blog posts entirely but, all I’m saying is that you should always read less and practice more :)

Thanks

I’d like to start discussion on the comment section below, I’m here to answer all your questions, just ask my any.

It will also be kind of you to tweet and share this post with your friends if you find useful.

 

Photo Credit: Freedigitalphotos.net

Show Me Your Blog Design and I’ll Show You Your Blog’s Future

I won’t agree with you if you tell me that your blog design has nothing to do with your traffic and how you make money online.

If I should show you two houses, one with a beautiful design and the other with a rough design and voluntarily ask you to choose one out of it as a gift (I wish I could), you’ll definitely go for the one with a beautiful design.

Let’s draw this back to the aspect of blogging.

Your blog design has a great role to play; it’s the first thing to consider before thinking of writing quality content, generating traffic or making money online.

Definitely it can affect your blog in a positive way and also in a negative way, a good design attracts visitors while a bad design bids them farewell.

blog design

What are the blog designs that can affect your blog and how can you avoid them?

1. Use a simple theme

Too much of everything is bad, there’s this saying that goes thus “one man’s food is another man’s poison”. You might optimize your theme in a way that will look good to you but do you know if it looks good to your readers?

I have an idea, why not ask friends or other bloggers you’ve created connections with to check out your blog and tell you their opinion about your design.

If you get a negative answer from three different bloggers then you must make a change to your blog design. Make your blog design simple and avoid over optimization. It’ll not only make your blog look good but will also welcome visitors to your blog.

There’re many sites that provide premium WordPress Theme. But Below I’m sharing 2 top and best, affordable WordPress Club That provide great Premium WordPress Themes!

ElegantThemes – Looking for great, professional looking, elegant style wordpress themes? Elegant themes have it all. They provide great quality wordpress themes. Get 100% complete access to their entire collection of 76 themes for only $39!

Theme-Junkie – ThemeJunkie provide best wordpress Themes for very low price, Professional looking, Fast loading and great lifetime support.

2. Navigation counts

You’re building an empty desert on your blog if readers find it difficult to navigate through your blog.

I’ve received few messages from bloggers contacting me to check their blog if it’s eligible for google adsense and to my surprise, most of the blogs have no navigation at all. I managed to type “/contact” after the blog URL in order to get to the contact page, I know that’s a no-brainer.

If a visitor visits your blog, will they find it easy to contact you or know more about you? Those pages are very essential, you also need to group your blog posts into categories; this will make it easy for readers to access your blog. You can make navigations easier by placing your pages at the header and at the footer of your blog, it really counts.

3. Font types and size

Of course, you want to make your blog beautiful and attractive by using fancy fonts.

Before doing this, the question you should ask yourself is; will my readers be able to read my blog content?

If yes, then you’re safe but if no, there are two things involved. It’s either they put on a google glass for easy readability or they won’t bother stressing their eyes thereby leaving your blog. The size and type of your font matters a lot. There are fancy fonts that can slow down a blog and of course, you know we’re all in a hurry. If I should visit your blog and find out that it has a lazy load, I won’t hesitate to leave your blog. So try as much as possible and optimize your fonts for your readers and not for yourself.

blog design

4. Using multiple colors

The eyes naturally gets attracted to anything colorful but too much of it is a distraction to the eyes. The maximum number and range of color you can use on your blog is around 4 – 6 major colors, it depends on the theme of your blog. If you’re using a red theme then the background of your navigation bar and sidebar title must be red, your blog background color can be different and your footer color can be different too, making it a total of 4 colors on your blog. This makes your color a uniform and professional. Avoid multiple colors on your blog; it’s nothing but a color riot.

Conclusion

Go back and do some architectural work on your blog, I’m sure you know how it looks like. Try to make some amendment if you fall on any of the categories mentioned above.

Remember, a bad blog design welcomes a high bounce rate and a high bounce rate can get your blog de-ranked.

I’m sure these tips are definitely incomplete; I would love to hear your view.

Have you previously fall into any of these categories? How did they affect your blog?

6 Reasons Your Guest Posts Will Be Rejected For Sure

Probloggers and authority sites don’t hate guest posts like you may want to believe. But there are reasons your guest posts are sure to be rejected on their websites or blogs. These guys are human; they have catalogs of issues to attend – they need to attend to their teeming readers, customers, family, other businesses, and also attend social functions. So sometimes they are overworked and need time to rest.

Your guest post would go a long way at enabling these bloggers observe their siesta. They don’t have all the time in the world to do everything including writing daily posts for their blogs.

That is where you as a guest poster come in. They need rest, yet they also need to update their blogs. So who should update the blog at that time of need? It is you of course! So why think they don’t love your offer?

There are certainly some reasons your guest posts are sure to be rejected even at such time of intense need. We shall find that out later in this post.

guest posts

Why blogs accept guest posts

Blogs accepts guest posts for various reasons. They are not accepted just for the fun of it; they have a void to fill, they have a role to play, and they have needs to meet. Like I mentioned earlier, guest bloggers have workloads to take care of, hence there is need to accept guest posts on their sites. So the reasons include:

  1. Maintain regular update for their readers
  2. Provide their audience with new experience
  3. Give new bloggers opportunity to express themselves
  4. Have time to rest and attend to other pressing issues
  5. Get more traffic to their blogs

Now the question is, does it mean your post does not meet any of the afore-mentioned needs? There is certainly a reason why the blogger would gladly accept your offer because there are at least 5 needs I have identified, one of which your article should take care of.

Unfortunately, there are reasons your guest post are sure to be rejected even in the midst of problems begging to be taken care of by a guest blogger. Once we can identify these reasons, your dream of having your guest posts approved with speed on any website would come true.

Why your guest posts are always rejected?

Your offers are rejected not because the host blogger hates your face, or because you offended him sometime in the past. It is simply because they do not meet certain criteria. So note these points and fix them, and then see what happens next time you make an offer

write article

Not playing by the rules

Every blog has set rules for anybody who wishes to submit a guest article to it. The rules for blog A are different from the rules for blog B. Every guest author is expected to abide to the rules.

Why?

It is because they are the ones who are desperately in need of help. The host blogger owns the blog, pays the bills, drives traffic, built the blog reputation, etc. You are just looking for a ready-made place to help improve your blog reputation and increase traffic. So you are to play by the rules, not the other way round.

So what rules do you violate? You hardly have time to read the rules set on the blog; as such when you present your guest post, it flouts some sections of the blog’s rules. Why? You never read the rules, so there was no way to keep the rules you didn’t know of. Some bloggers don’t have the time to point this out to you. The best thing they think they should do is to dump your article in the recycle bin

Poor content

Remember the site you are approaching already has reputation. It has maintained a quality that kept its readers visiting on regular basis. The fact the site owner is busy doesn’t mean he should accept junk for his readers. It is better his site is not updated for weeks than to provide poor quality that would drive away his readers.

When you present a hastily assembled article that is laden with grammatical blunders, incoherent sentences, etc, what should you expect? That the site owner should accept it out of pity?

Of course, you should know better. To avoid this trouble, find time to write quality piece, with extensive research and reference links, and something highly informative. No blogger would ever reject quality content that should benefit his audience.

Duplicate content

There is nothing as embarrassing to a blogger than a situation where he discovers that the content submitted as a guest post on his blog has already been published elsewhere before it was submitted to him. One may find oneself hooked in this web if one doesn’t have the time to do a copyscape check on an article before publishing.

Some smart guest bloggers (so they thought) had submitted articles to me, only for me to later discover they had been published elsewhere. So one reason your guest posts are sure to be rejected is because they are duplicates. Google frowns at duplicate content; webmasters/blog owners frown at it, and even readers also frown at it.

Deception

Do you ever submit a sponsored post to a blog owner and tell him the post belongs to you? Somebody submitted one to me recently and told me to provide a link back in the body of the article to a particular website.

He said he was a content writer without a website. But I couldn’t just understand why the insistence of providing a link in the content when he said he didn’t have a website. He only tried to make me believe he was writing as a content writer on that site and that he needed exposure.

In that case, I felt a link in the Bio should do; but he insisted and I had no choice but to let him go with his article. It was obvious he was writing for an SEO site because I did a whois check on that.

If you try to lie to a blogger in order to get your sponsored post published, he would do his little research and discover the truth about the site owner and every other information he wants. The next thing is to throw away your article for trying to present a deceptive front. So try to be plain to the website owner if you are writing on behalf of a third party and leave him to make his decision. Chances are that he might publish your work if it is good enough.

Unacceptable links

Some people want to see guest post as a way of promoting their affiliate links. So, they just add links to their affiliate products or to affiliate sites they are promoting. I

f you were the blogger, what would you do?

Leave the links or bring this to his attention? Unfortunately, these are spelt out in the guest blogging rules on the “write for us” page of many of the sites. This automatically disqualifies your post.

Poor formatting

Like I mentioned at the beginning of this post, bloggers are very busy; so most of them don’t have the time to proof read your article over and over again. They don’t have the patience to begin to try to reformat the content you formatted poorly. To save their time, they just dump the article in the bin.

You can see it is not the fault of the blogger that your posts are not accepted; it is actually your fault. If you avoid those pitfalls, the blog owner would jump at your offer because it has something useful for him and his readers. But poor formatting is one of the reasons your guest posts are sure to be rejected.

  • Why You Can’t Achieve Success in Blogging Career?

Conclusion

Provide the quality a blogger wants in your content, follow the set rules, be sincere while presenting your offer and you are sure to get your guest posts published on even the best of blogs and websites.