Here are the top 5 lessons I’ve learned from 7 years and 600 articles worth of blogging!
But firstly, a recap on the lessons learned 200 posts ago….. 5 Lessons Learned from 400 WordPress Blog Posts
- Lesson 1: Don’t mess about with WordPress themes (too much)
- Lesson 2: Speed!
- Lesson 3: Use Google Search Console often.
- Lesson 4: Manual Adsense ads earn more than Auto Ads.
- Lesson 5: Be wary of auto-updating plugins.
I should really listen to my own advice more, but I just couldn’t resist tinkering with both my theme and Auro ads. The conclusions are exactly the same.
So what have I learned since the 400th blog post? Mainly things I should already know, but up until now haven’t executed to any meaningful degree.
1. Publish articles frequently.
Blogging is really just a numbers game. The more articles you have and the more frequently you publish, the more views you’ll get. Simple. The fewer articles / higher traffic strategy is what we all aspire to, but going viral is never guaranteed. I’ve come to accept that the only way to consistently get traffic is to keep up the publishing frequency of, at the very least, one article a week, and preferably a lot more, even daily.
2. Share articles far and wide.
After the sometimes lengthy task of writing an article, I have a tendency to neglect the crucial final stage of the social media blast. I’ve found Reddit and Facebook groups to be the most effective at gaining you traffic at this critical time.
3. It’s all in the title.
My most successful article this year has been Should I Buy a Gibson SG? and I think the reason behind its success is in the title. First of all, it’s a question. A very simple, direct question about a very specific thing. Now that thing may have been trending at that particular point in time. This is something professional content creators and SEO experts monitor and react against. For me? I mostly got lucky, but it’s made me consider titles, questions, and searchable terms much more when putting articles together.
4. Build and connect your communities.
I’ve finally got my YouTube channel up and running and now have over 60 videos to complement the blog. It’s been great for guitar gear reviews, tips, and rambling over guitar in general. But what’s been effective in gaining traction for both the blog and the YouTube channel has been to cross-publicise them via a YouTube subscribe button in a prominent position on the blog and numerous linkbacks from YouTube back to the here.
It doesn’t end with YouTube though. I’ve also built up followers on WordPress.com and LinkedIn, which again act as funnels back to the mothership of the blog. Every little helps.
5. Focus on what’s working for you.
The stats have made it obvious from day one, Guitar gear reviews are where it’s at, or at least anything related to Guitar. That’s my main source of traffic and always has been. Finding a niche and focusing on it would be my advice, and although I do enjoy writing about many other themes, I know at some point I’ll need to knock out a guitar-related article to keep things ticking over and keep the blog visible.
Identifying a niche is key here, and your goal should be to rank on the first page of Google for a niche that generates sizeable traffic. That’s going to be virtually impossible for something as broad as, say, for example, Travel, or Film, which generate billions of hits, because there’s too much competition. On the other hand, a very specific niche like ‘Pilots in North Shields’ isn’t something anyone would be searching for, so yeah, you’ll get on the first page of Google, you just wouldn’t get any traffic!
Guitar and in particular guitar gear reviews seemed to strike the perfect balance for me. It’s popular enough to get traffic but not so popular that the competition drowned me out.
I hope these latest 5 blogging tips have been useful. Please drop me a comment below if you’d like to share your own, and best of luck with your own blogging efforts!
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