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This is a guest post compiled by Adegboye Adeniyi for OgbongeBlog
Do you want to become a successful blogger?
If the answer is yes, then read on. If your answer is no, you may wish to still read on if only to convince yourself that becoming a great blogger is much harder than we say and that you are justified in your wanting to quit blogging.
If you count the number of blogs that exists currently, they exceed over 300million according to Wikipedia and almost 61.8 million new posts are published every single day.
This means the amount of competition in any niche is high.
Yet blogging has been known to help brand people and businesses. When you blog consistently, it can quickly position you as a go-to-expert in your niche.
But the million dollar question remains
How do you become a successful blogger?
While passion is an important ingredient, there are some other spices that you need to help you become a great blogger.
These secret ingredients are:
1. You have to keep working at it
You just can't give up. Not now and not ever. When you give up, you are giving someone else one less spot to compete for. Successful bloggers have learnt to keep pushing until they achieve their goal. Life would happen. Anything that can go wrong will possibly go wrong but it is only when you are persistent that you can truly be successful.
2. Learn to promote others but promote yourself more
As a buddy blogger, you may think the secret to success is to talk about other people but you are wrong. When starting out, you need to get word out about your blog. This means focusing greatly on promoting your blog because you need to establish yourself as someone to reckon with. Granted you need once in a while to promote others in order to build relationships with them but do not make it an obsession or focus more on it. You are building your own reputation so talk about your stuff more.
3. Do not ignore all other marketing channels
One grave mistake most bloggers make is not leveraging other marketing channels to grow their blog. Once they push the publish button, they run off to start writing the next post but you cannot grow your blog that way. You need to drive traffic to and through your blog using various other means. Paid advert eg Facebook ads, can quickly give your blog post traction. Social media presence is a necessary evil and SEO is a must. For SEO, we do not mean all the advanced stuffs like link building etc but the most basic stuffs like including your keyword in your title and naming your images with the alt tag.You can download the Google SEO ebook to master the basics.
4. Be yourself
You must understand who you are and learn how to turn it into an advantage. What do you know best? Are you better at creating graphics? When and how do you write best? What kind of articles comes easily to you to write about? For examples, blog topics hit me at any time so immediately this happens, the first thing I do is to write down my first draft using my smart phone. When I think I have the skeleton of the post written only then do I transfer it to my desktop to complete. This has worked so well for me that I rarely ever sit down at my desktop to try to write a new post.
5. Identify your niche
Another grave mistake bloggers make is trying to be everything to everyone. Just because entertainment news is hot cake does not mean you should join the bandwagon. When you do that you can get lost in the crowd. To truly make a name for yourself, you need to identify which niche makes the most sense for you. It could be because of your passion. It could be that you are knowledgeable about the niche but you must pick a particular niche and stay with it. If you are writing about technology, write technology. If you want to focus on food, focus on it. Don't be a jack of all trade and master of none.
6. Start Collecting emails as soon as you can
Okay, these may sound a little advanced but from the very first day you start your blog, start thinking of how you intend to collect emails from your readers. Eventually these emails are going to remain the only medium by which you can build a lasting relationship with your readers. Not everyone will visit your blog every day and yet they would not mind hearing from you. So get into the lead generation game early. For starters, you can add Feedburner email subscription form to your blog.
7. Find a mentor or steal one
If you are lucky you may find someone to mentor you but that may not be the case especially if you are a newbie. What can you do? Steal one. Identify two bloggers in your niche that are successful then make it a point of duty to study them. Visit their blog every day. Follow them on social media. Understand how to write, what they write about and who their audience is. Then go replicate them only do it better.
To wrap it up the only difference between a successful blogger and the average blogger is the persistence, dedication, amount of time you put into your blog and the ability to keep going when everyone else gives up.