You Can Schedule Posts for Future Publishing
We all know the importance of publishing new blog posts on a regular basis — well, most people know this, at least. But what if you are unable to log into your blog to create a new post every couple of days? Thankfully, WordPress, Blogger, Tumblr, and other popular blogging platforms have a post scheduling feature. Using this feature, you can schedule your posts to be published at a later date, eliminating the need to manually log into your blog to publish them.
Visitor Comments Matter
Blogs are unique in the sense that they place an emphasis on visitor engagement, which is why it’s important to allow visitors to comment on posts and pages. With commenting disabled, visitors won’t be able to share their thoughts about the subject; thus, your blog sill suffer from a low level of visitor engagement. Granted, you can expect to receive some spam messages with commenting enabled, but wedding out the genuine from the fake comments is relatively easy. Just set up your blog to have all comments moderated before publishing, and be sure to use an anti-spam plugin like Akismet.
Your Blog Won’t Rank Immediately
Optimizing a blog for higher search rankings isn’t something that happens overnight. It’s not uncommon for Google to initially rank new blogs and websites, at which point their rankings are dropped down for a “Honeymoon” period. Don’t feel discouraged if your blog isn’t ranking in the search results for its target keywords. Continue to publish new content while building links and you’ll see your rankings climb.
A Good Blog Post Contains More Than Just Plain Text
This is pretty self-explanatory. Check out some of the top posts from the net’s leading blogs and you’ll notice they all have one thing in common: they contain more than just plain text. A good blog post should contain text with varying formats (e.g. headings, sub-headings, bold, italics, etc.), as well as links, images, and the occasional video. Diversifying your blog’s content will go a long ways in making it more appealing to visitors. And when visitors are attracted to your blog, it will usually boost its search ranking.
You Must Update Your Blog’s CMS
Assuming your blog was built on a content management system (CMS) like WordPress, you’ll need to update the files each time a new version or patch is released. Why is this important? Well, blogs are often the target of hackers, simply because they run outdated software with unfixed vulnerabilities. Failure to keep your blog updated to the latest version will open the doors to hackers, increasing the risk of an attack. To prevent this from happening, update your CMS, plugins and themes anytime a new version is released.
What things do you wish you knew before starting your first blog? Let us know in the comments section below!
Image attribution: https://www.flickr.com/photos/gogri/
I wish I had strategized a bit more. I was so excited to get started that I didn’t really have a plan. Having a clear direction is very important.
I have to agree with you Abby. I didn’t spend enough time planning upfront and was disappointed down the road.
I wish someone would’ve told me to seek a mentor. I did a lot of research online, but nothing compares to having a successful mentor to help guide you and give you constructive criticism as needed.