Blogging Cheat Sheet for Beginners – 10 Simple Improvements

Keep this blogging cheat sheet close by and use these tips and strategies to keep your blog growing consistently. 10 Simple blog improvements.

A Blogging Cheat Sheet to help you create and maintain a successful blog. 

Bookmark this blogging cheat sheet and use these tips and strategies to keep your blog growing consistently. 

You can easily improve your blogging by continually learning about and implementing small improvements over time.

Don’t try to do too much at once. Just make small improvements all the time and before you know it you’ve gone a long way.

So, let’s get started. Here are 10 simple blogging improvements you can make overtime to help you build a better blog.

Enjoy!

1. Write as if you know the person and be yourself. 

It’s easy to talk to a friend. So next time you write an article, write it as if you’re writing to a friend. 

And be yourself. Don’t think that people will enjoy your post more if it sounds like it was written by a professor or lawyer. They won’t. 

Be comfortable with your subject and your audience and you’ll provide much more engaging content. 

2. Write good length articles. 

The top-ranking blog articles on Google are between 1,400 and 1,600 words. So take the time to say what you need to say and offer value to your readers. 

As a general rule, you should never have an article of fewer than 600 words as this just won’t have enough information to be useful. 

3. Be consistent. 

This doesn’t necessarily mean tons and tons of content all the time. But it does mean keeping your posts regular. If you can manage one post a week then keep that up. 

If you can manage one post a day then keep it at that as much as you can. But don’t post ten articles one month and then nothing for the next three months – this will not build an audience. 

Keep this blogging cheat sheet up in your workspace to keep you focused on creating great content. 

4. Write valuable content. 

This was mentioned in writing good length articles, but ensuring they are full of value is even more important. This is the point of a blog – to provide something useful to the end-user. 

Take the time to research your topic well, use your own experience and give as much information to your reader as you possibly can. 

“99.9% of bloggers are not awesome on day 1. Their awesomeness is the accumulation of value they create over time.” – Darren Rowse

5. Choose engaging headlines. 

Headlines are your first contact with your audience. It will determine whether they read your article or keep scrolling past it. 

Try to make it interesting, controversial, exciting, etc. There are plenty of free headline generators out there if you get stuck. 

Statistically, headlines which include a number do better, so make sure to add a number where you can. 

6. Find attractive images. 

Blog articles with images get 94% more views. source

This is a must. There are several great places to get free stock images to make your articles more enticing. 

My favourites are Pixabay and Pexels, but there are more out there if you these sites don’t have what you are looking for. You can find a list of the very best free stock photo websites here.

7. Promote and share your blog. 

Get onto as many social platforms as you can manage. A few of the biggest ones are Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram, and Youtube. But there are many, many more well worth looking into. 

Share your blogs on all of these platforms and schedule them to be shared several times. 

Add social sharing buttons on your posts to make it easy for others to share your article as well. 

8. Grow your email list. 

Your email list has huge value in terms of growing your blog and whatever business it is that you blog about. 

Make sure that you do have some focus on providing something of value to your readers that they will give you their email for. 

Emails allow you to keep in touch with readers who are interested in your content and cultivate them into buyers. 

9. Speed up your site. 

Search engines place a lot of importance on the speed of your site. If your site takes too long to load it will not rank well. 

There are plugins to help speed up your site, but you need to also be wary of large images, fancy graphics and features on your site that will use resources and slow your site down. 

Check your speed here. 

10. Invest in good plugins and programs.

The functionality and usability of your site are more important than its looks. Looks are important – but your user experience needs more of your attention.

Good blog design will prioritize user experience. But top quality blog design will ensure your blog is not just user-friendly but also looks great. 

Get plugins that will increase your workflow, add functionality, etc. but be very picky with your plugins. Choose quality plugins from developers who offer excellent support. 

Also, try not to use too many plugins, they will start to slow down your site and this can harm your rankings. 

Conclusion

These are a few basic but key points to constantly keep in mind with regards to your blog. You do need to keep your blog updated with relevant plugins and keep checking the speed – these are not once-off points. 

If you don’t yet have a blog and would like to start one that already has great plugins and functionality set up, then get in touch.

By focusing on this blogging cheat sheet and really getting these points in you will start to grow your audience and increase your ranking on search engines. Then monetizing your blog becomes a much simpler task. 

Keep this blogging cheat sheet handy and refer to it often. After a while, these points will all become second nature to you.

Happy Blogging!

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