A personal blog should not just be a business endeavor. In order for it to truly succeed at the ‘personal’ side of things, it has to radiate your personality and values. On top of that, it also has to have a business strategy behind it. It’s one feature to just include a personal diary and pictures of your day-to-day life, but it has to offer value to those who read it. You need to ask yourself: why should people read my blog? With this in mind, here’s how to start strategizing your blog.
Passion
To put it plainly: if you are not passionate about your blog topic, you will not have the motivation to post about it. Writing passionately will effortlessly put across enthusiasm about the topic you’re discussing. Without investing genuine passion into your personal blog, you will not have the incentive to keep posting regularly – which is essential to ensure that visitors have a reason to keep returning to your blog.
Image
While it’s hugely important to invest plenty of time into making sure that the quality of your writing is high and that it’s readable and informative, it will have a lot more impact if you (the author) are seen as an authority. Developing your personal brand and showing it off to the world will allow you to portray yourself in the best light and gain the most traction from your audience. Organizing professional photos and actively promoting your blog in the real world goes a long way to improving your image and reputation and assisting your online presence.
Network
Reaching out to other peers in your field is a good opportunity to build your presence and establish links within the industry. Being recommended by other media professionals and bloggers can be a very significant career move. On top of this, you may also get some advice from other experienced bloggers in your field and pick up some tips of the trade. Learning about mistakes before you yourself make them can save you plenty of time for the future. Seeing different approaches to blogging in your industry can also help you to carve out a niche and discover a topic that isn’t being discussed online.
Link building
SEO techniques, such as link building, help to boost your blog’s rankings in search engine results. Using keywords as hyperlinks will help to signal your blog as reputable to Google, who have quite thorough standards on which blogs should be valued as relevant. In order to ensure that your blog is seen as reliable, you should double-check that all links used on your blog are not broken and that they link to equally reliable websites. The keywords you use should also be well-researched and relevant to the topic at hand.
Creating a blog from scratch can leave you feeling quite vulnerable as someone providing expertise in your industry. Even if your blog is a personal diary, it can cause a sense of imposter-syndrome. However, practice makes perfect when it comes to blogging – as does a keen eye. Before you post, be sure to double-check it for spelling errors and grammar mistakes. Taking a moment away from your work can help to reassess any last minute glitches, or provide a moment to add in any other important details.
