This is a guest post contribution by Muddasir Ahmed. Mudassir is the founder of his blog at BloggingExplained.com. He has already helped dozens new bloggers get started blogging. His step by step guide to starting a blog is a must have for every new blogger. In this post, Mudassir shares helpful time saving blogging tips.
Are you finding it difficult to drive better results even though you spend more time blogging?
Maybe you’re draining attention in activities that are absolute of no use in growing your blog and turn a blind eye to important ones. It is required for you to know your priorities in blogging and work through them over time.
In order to become a successful blogger, you must learn to use your time wisely on productive things and cut loose the less-important ones. Hopefully, in this article, you will find some useful tips regarding this aspect.
Let’s start.
#1. Getting obsessed with keyword strategy
Keywords are crucial and they make you rank on search engines. True that!
But don’t let the keyword research tools eat your big time to generate so-called money-making keywords. Spending so much time on keyword strategy could only tempt you to use various keyword variations and eventually make your content spammy and low valued.
Instead, focus on crafting information-rich content that matches the human intent and not to manipulate algorithms. Let your keyword placement be natural along with the content flow.
#2. Spending creating long-form content
Long-form content does rank as it covers the topic in-depth and undoubtedly this fact is driving the new bloggers crazy. Most of them are filling their blog post with bloat, unnecessary words and sub-topics just for the sake of word-length. Such a practice not only hurts blog SEO but also the reader’s trust.
So don’t fall for the myths like “Long-form content is better than short-form.” No matter how long you take to create a 10k+ word guide, if the content is not answering the user’s main intent, then you’ve wasted time creating it and going to waste time changing it.
Knowing your user’s search intent will help you understand the ideal word-length for your content and help you deliver the value. For example, if someone searches “how to create a blog on WordPress,” that’s what they’re doing to be looking for – an answer for that specific question, not creating a blog on wix or blogspot as well.
#3. Designing your blog
There’d be an excitement for newbies to develop their blog design appealing. They spend lots of time making their blog good-looking by trying various themes, customizing blog layouts, adjusting font styles, logo designs and so on.
Frankly, your theme and blog layout is not going to make much difference while you’re new to blogging and have a little or null content on your blog. Having over-concerned about your blog design is going to kill you a lot of time.
As you grow as a blogger, you will not be surprised to learn why the popular bloggers and marketers prefer extremely simple blog layout over a shiny one. As you develop more engaging content and tribe, you will have better way to organize your content and then can start working on the design and branding part. Until then, just go with free versions from themes like Astra, Generate Press, or schema lite, etc.
#4. Improving your blog numbers
Jumping into your analytics dashboard is a good practice and I’m not denying that. As a matter of fact, analyzing blog stats helps you understand your performance.
But what good it is if you keep checking the stats for every hour? Does your frustration help directly or indirectly in improving your blog’s domain authority overnight or in a day?
I’m sure the answer is NO!
Blogging is just like sowing a seed today and waiting patiently months or years to watch it growing and yielding.
Moz is not going to reward you with the big D.A number like 60 or Google is not going to hand you over 50,000+ visits per month just like that. It takes a lot of time and effort to earn such milestones. So don’t be curious about numbers and waste your time by checking them frequently. Shift your focus from growing numbers to adding value around and you shall see the better numbers gradually.
#5. Covering multiple niches
Blogging various topics on one blog wastes your time and energy because you don’t make the connection with any audience at all.
Imagine a finance blogger all-a-sudden started publishing content about losing bodyweight, bitcoin mining, or even about a web series review. He fails to connect with the core audience that he made via finance content.
As my friend, Ryan Biddulph says, covering specific niche content gradually makes you a specialist and people prefer to listen to specialists when they need a solution but not to generalists.
Get clarity and target only a specific audience base instead of all.
#6. Running behind blog monetization
Making money via your blog requires strategic planning. Here’s the blueprint – you need to create helpful content, engage with your audience, earn their trust, and then start monetizing your blog.
Don’t try to lure your audience to click your ads or affiliate links without offering value to them.
I feel so real when pros say how they patiently worked years on adding value in order to generate a regular income stream. That’s true, good things take time.
If you skip this advice and jump into monetizing your blog, I’m sure you will have a hard-luck watching the money falling into your pockets and end up frustrated wasting your time and efforts.
#7. Jumping to building OFF-page SEO
I don’t deny the fact that off-page strategies like link building will take your blog’s digital presence to the next level.
Think of all the hours that you spend building links to your blog. Whether they’re from authority sites or PBN’s, they’re not going to benefit you unless you have the quality content that supports those links.
I see how newbies are getting obsessed with building backlinks for their blogs without having a decent topical authority in their niche. Believe me, this is no help.
First, get your on-page SEO in order before you move to an off-page strategy.
Conclusion
The only reason I came up with this topic is to help beginners prioritize the right THINGS in order to be rewarding. Learning the right things at the right time will earn you a lot of time and opportunities to become successful.
Connect with pros, learn how they’ve been blogging these many years, and opened multiple income sources.
I hope you’ve enjoyed reading it.
Thanks much cori for having me at your community, I feel great 🙂
Thank you Mudassir for your quality post contribution! It’s great to have you join our growing group of authors! Super helpful points here. Beneficial for the beginner blogger and those seeking to save time so they can accomplish more. Amazing how much time we can waste on the things that don’t matter as much! 🙂
#3 about spending too much time on customizations and design is something many bloggers use tons of time on. End result as you point out here is less content and too much focus on design. Simple blogs are best especially in the beginning. So true that blogs are like sowing seeds and take time to grow. Thanks again Mudassir and have a great rest of the evening!