Some years ago many looked at blogging as a career for those that do not have any job and some don’t even believe that bloggers can make a substantial income from the comfort of their homes. Blogging these days is more than publishing contents and waiting for visitors to click on your PPC ads so you can earn some few bucks.
The internet is growing and a lot of things have changed about blogging, the industry has picked up tremendously. In some capacity I will attribute the success of blogging to the massive growth of the social media. The social media has played a very big role to the development of blogging in the last few years.
Blogging is simply more than writing as I said earlier, you really need some skills to succeed in blogging these days as Google and other search engines are evolving the methods every now and then. You need skills such as how to find topics that your readers will find interesting, how to maintain relationship with your audience, how to promote your blog and drive targeted traffic to it, how to keep your blog in line with the required SEO standards etc.
Skills you need to succeed as a blogger
How to find a topic: Some bloggers find it hard to come up with interesting topics always to keep their audience engaged and asking for more. Sometimes it’s not easy to find topics to write about, that’s why some bloggers decide to publish few times in a week but coming up with great topics day in day out requires some skills. So here are some tips that will help you find interesting topics everyday to write upon and succeed as a blogger.
Write about real life problems you encounter everyday related to your niche, for example if your blog relates to relationship/family/marriage niche, you may encounter relationship problems or you may see others with such problems, write about it giving solutions to how such problems could be solved. It could also be in the technology niche where you encounter technical problems always, write about it giving solutions to the problems in the article, that way you will be helping your audience who may have such problems and such posts always brings them back to your site asking for more.
Other methods you could use in finding interesting topics to write about includes Youtube videos, reading other people’s articles and noting where they didn’t cover well and writing on such areas, blog commenting, being active in internet forums related to our niche, spending quality time on the social media interacting with your audience and finding out what types of topics they prefer you to write about etc.
So you need to stay alert, pick up ideas from your everyday interaction with people and nature/things and turn them into something concrete. This is definitely one of the skills you need to succeed as a blogger.
Translate your personal skills to blogging: The way you handle your blog and your audience/clients will definitely decide how successful you will become as a blogger. Maintaining relationships with your clients/visitors is a skill required if you are to succeed in this business. Many bloggers even with all their great reputations in writing fail to achieve their potential, just because they could not handle their relationships with their audience.
How to handle public relationship with your audience is a lesson I have learnt from Ryan Biddulph of Cash With A True Conscience over the months, he is an expert in handling relationships with different types of people and yet still find time to write thousands of articles on the internet.
Build relationships with your clients/audience and maintain such relationships, help them as much as you can afford to and they will always run back to you. Your relationship maintaining skill is one of the valuable skills you need to succeed as a blogger.
How to promote your blog and drive traffic it: Are you wondering if this requires a skill? Oh yes! I see a lot of bloggers ask on social media and internet forums everyday “how can I drive traffic to my blog?” Traffic is one of the main deciders if your blog will succeed or not, even if you write the best contents and no one reads them, then you have definitely failed as a blogger.
So it requires skills to be able to promote a blog and drive good traffic to it. There are so many ways one can promote a blog but the best practices remains quality content first, search engine optimization – SEO, Social media promotion, forum posting, blog commenting, guest posting, content curation etc. The skill required in all these are much and to succeed as a blogger you need to be able to come up with great content as stated above, optimize your post properly in line with the SEO standards so it can rank well on the search engine results, engage meaningfully on the social media networks and keep your audience asking for more etc. This is definitely one of the skills you need to succeed as a blogger.
Must Read: 4 Important Tips To Building A Successful Blog
Conclusion:
Many people think blogging is a make-money-quick-scheme, well to disappoint you it’s not as easy as you think and it requires a lot of skills if you are to succeed as a blogger. The bottom line is that to succeed as a blogger a lot of skills are needed. Stay relevant, stay informed, stay on top of things and most importantly stay connected.
What do you think of this topic “Skills you need to succeed as a blogger“? What other skills do you think are necessary if one is to succeed as a blogger? Please use the comment section below to share with me, i will be looking forward to hearing from you. Remember to subscribe to my RSS feed so you won’t miss my next blog post.
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Writing skills are defined first, but a close second is writing appetite. If you don’t have a burning desire to write every day and hit that publish button (even if it’s not a masterpiece), you should do something else.
Blogging demands consistency and passion to succeed if you are to succeed indeed. One needs to keep up with the latest trend on the internet and pull out content from within or around always to remain on top, else the traffic will dry up and the audience will disappear. This is indeed a great addition to the topic, keep adding your quality comments on Netmediablog.
You nailed the skills Nwosu! Practice makes better and better and better. Put in many hours – emphasis on MANY – improving your writing and networking skills and you can see great success. But you will have to push yourself beyond the point of being comfortable, to really grow and succeed online.
Thanks for sharing!
Ryan
Nice post Nwosu !
I feel that a blogger should have writing skills ,basic HTML-CSS skills (so that he can customize the looks and feels of his blog) without anyone’s help and the most important one – promotional skills ..he should know how to promote his posts . Thanks for sharing
-Pramod
Thanks Ryan for your contribution. Glad you could confirm my ideas.
Pramod as much as a blogger would be advantaged if he has some knowledge of HTML or any other web language required to build and maintain a blog, i do not think this is necessarily important as one can outsource his blog design and from there take off on his own even without having the slightest idea of coding and still be successful in blogging.
Hello
Nwosu Mavtrevor
I am a new fresher so after reading this post I really got more ideas and techniques. Hope that I will be able to be a successful blogger. Really, this post is helpful to new freshers as well as to those who want to become a successful blogger.
Thanks
niraj
Thanks SO much for the kind mention too ;) Really appreciate it man, you are a relationship-building master, one of the better commentors I know.
Yeah, completely agree with your concepts Nwosu :)
I too feel that the bloggers should have a set of skill to stay as a successful blogger.
If they miss any of the skill, which you’ve listed here, then it is hard for them to survive as a great blogger and would decide to quit.
Hope am having few skills, but am developing a lot to be a successful blogger.
Thanks for the nice post :)
Thanks Ryan for your wonderful compliment and its nice to read from you always.
Thanks Nirmala for your contribution and yes you already have a lot of skills i can say because over the past few months of blogging i have seen where you have taken your blog to from nowhere actually.
Hi Nwosu,
This is really wonderful, having what to publish everyday is not a small task, you need to make a lot of research, I read and read, even books that is not pertaining to blogging I do read and I gain some knowledge from reading books and this has really helped in publishing some content on my blog including the guest blogging I involved in.
Every day new blogger coming to blog sphere and disappear soon . Because they want to make money and they don’t have enough knowledge about the blogging . They only write about the things that give them more money not about their passion . And passion is needed to write your best .
This is really a nice post. Very informative and I’ve learned a lot from this. Thank you for sharing this.
Glad you found it informative, do visit my blog always.
Writing skills is definitely key but also is picking the correct topic to write about. The blog needs to have a topic that people enjoy but also has to have some characteristics that make it different than all the other competing blogs out there. I think that is where a number people get stuck is they can’t find a topic that they are passionate about, would interest other people AND have something different to offer than their competition. Great post Nwosu!
Thanks Joe for your awesome contribution, i am glad you fond my post interesting.
You just listed the most important skill every blogger need to suceed in the blogosphere.Coming up with a great post to blog about has never been so easy and this in addition to low traffic remains one of the reason why most bloggers quit.
thanks for the informative post
Hi Bamidele,
Marketing is an important thing. Since, in such an intense competitive world, where inspite of possessing wonderful traits, if you can’t showcase to the outer world, then you won;t succeed. Apart from that, you need to really come up with interesting topics and ideas in order to give boost to your sagging career of blogging as well.