11 Things I Wish I Knew Before Starting My Blog

Never before in the history of mankind, has reaching out to potential customers been so easy and cheap as it is today. With the penetration of Internet growing by the day, the cost of reaching prospective clients has come down drastically.

As I write this, out of the total 7.3 billion people on Earth, 3.2 billion have access to the internet. That’s almost 50% of the total mankind alive today. For someone like you, who’s looking to scale a business, this is a huge pool of prospective customers.

Let’s take a step back from here and think about how many people are trying to tap this huge market. While it’s not possible to arrive at such a figure, we know that marketers constantly try to reach this pool through creative content which includes the blog posts.

And knowing that 2 million blog posts are published every day, speaks for itself of the effort put up by business owners in marketing their products.

If you have just started building your online presence, these numbers are sure to appear daunting. Even more challenging is the task of creating content that stands out and draws users onto your website.

I would share some of the primary aspects that you should more than care about if you are serious about getting traffic on your website.

Gone are the days when you could write anything crappy and as long as it had certain keywords, your website could land on #1 SERP. Google has become smarter in order to serve its users better by throwing up more and more relevant search results.

Time for you to avoid certain pitfalls and use time tested techniques to start growing your blog from Day 2 (You will lose Day 1 in finding out whether the techniques I have mentioned here are really worth implementing).

1. Take absolute control of your blog. As a newbie blogger, you might not want to spend money on setting up a website since you might only be testing the waters. To achieve this, you can start a free blog on WordPress.com or Blogger.com though I would strongly advise against doing so.

Going for a free Wordpress blog may be alright for someone who doesn't want to market themselves as a brand. But in case you are not that person, I recommend you set up your own blog on WordPress.org (note that the extension here is .org and not .com), which is the self-hosted platform from WordPress.

It offers many advantages vis-à-vis the free WordPress.com.

2. The content on your website has to be engaging. It should compel the people landing on your website to stick around for a few more seconds, if not minutes. Creating compelling content is more of science than art. Content is king. Period. When I started blogging, I wrote content which I loved reading, only to realize later that that is not the way of making people stick around. No sooner did I start publishing content that users liked, voila, the Bounce Rate for the site went from 80% to less than 45%.

3. Submit your website to Google Search Console (formerly Google Webmaster Tools) to build its authority. It is a free tool from Google. Once you submit your website, Google knows that you are the owner of the site.

It helps you build organic traffic and provides you with invaluable analytics data. You should also submit your website to Bing and Yandex, which are the other two major webmaster tools.

4. Alexa is another tool to build the authority of your website. The basic version is free so I recommend you to claim ownership of your website on Alexa. Alexa is the most comprehensive, freely available, ranking tool with a database of over 30.0 million websites. It is a tool extensively used by advertisers and marketers to find out the popularity of a website and this makes is extremely important.

5. Content is king, but it’s not Rambo! Content alone cannot get traffic on your website, no matter how engaging it is. It has to be shared extensively. Post it on Facebook and Twitter (assuming you have friends and followers on these platforms, respectively). Use Instagram or Pinterest if your content is primarily image based. Start following people and groups who are from the same niche as yours to promote your content.

6. Sign up for Google Analytics. It is the most comprehensive, free analytics tool available on the Internet.

Everyone knows that, duh!

What’s important is to retrieve valuable information from Google Analytics. One of the most important things to make sure that you remove the spam hits from your analytics report before you start believing the numbers in these reports.

7. Use plugins to boost your SEO. Running your website on self-hosted Wordpress.org allows you to install and use various plugins to make your site user-friendly. Two of the most popular plugins are SEO plugin from Yoast and social sharing plugin from Shareaholic.

8. Use Customer engagement tools to increase engagement on your website. These tools help to increase the reach and popularity of your website. Most of these tools offer a free trial of their premium versions for a period of 7-30 days.

I strongly recommend that you sign up for the trial version before paying for the premium version.

9. Identify your competitors and do keyword research. It is important to know what keywords do you want your website to rank for and who your competitors are. Google is the best tool to identify competitors.

A plain Google search of the keywords should give you a fair idea of your competitors.

Use Google Keyword Planner to identify more keywords that you should target.

10. Know the right social media channels for your website. To start with, identify 2-3 social media channels which you will use to promote your website. Do not spread yourself too thin by targeting 4-5 social media channels. You may not be able to do justice to anyone of them.

As Guy Kawasaki says, “Facebook is for people, Twitter is for perspective, Google+ is for passion, LinkedIn is for pimping.”

Some quick facts:

• Facebook has a bias for paid posts. This makes it important for you to master the science of running paid ad campaigns on Facebook.
• It would help to follow some of the well-known influencers on Twitter for some great advice and information.
• Reddit should be a part of your social media strategy. You need to take out time to understand Reddit.

11. Create a clean website. Take a little professional help if required. Do not spend a bomb on the website. If your content is good, people will come, but a good website will help them discover more content on your site, making them stick around that much longer. Reddit is one of the ugliest looking websites, but that does not stop it from getting 200.0 million unique visitors per month since the content on the website is super awesome, and content discovery super smooth and intuitive.

Establishing a website takes time and effort. Building traffic to the website takes much more time and definitely much more effort. Running a blog is never about get rich quick.

Remember, your website should be valuable to your readers and should compel them to read content on your website and keep coming back for more. While it’s important to build traffic on your website, what’s more important is to sustain and grow that traffic.

Will share traffic sustenance and growth strategies in my next post.

Are you ready to build and grow your website now?