You might have recently started (or be thinking about getting started with your own blog) or you may be an established blogger. Either way, I am sure you are keen to learn some key tips on how to develop and manage your blog? In this post, I am going to give you 10 really useful blogging tips for beginners! Let’s do it!

1. Start by Tidying Your Site

One of the very first things I recommend to do if you already have a lot of posts, pages, and categories on your blog, is to do a tidy-up!

Giving your site/blog a spring clean is actually very important because search engines such as Google, look at your site and expect to see a clear and solid topic throughout the site.

If your site has a clear theme, it makes it easy for the likes of Google to evaluate what your blog is about and what kinds of terms they might want to include you in searches for.

Cleaning and removing old tags, categories, posts that are no longer relevant, and updating the information on the older posts, is a very good strategy for SEO (search engine optimization). It sends very positive signals to search engines if you have a clearly defined and up-to-date site.

2. Build Your First 10 Links

There are two things that are really important if you want your blog and site to be seen and to get lots of traffic.

First, you need decent content on your site and to optimize the pages and site for search engines.

Secondly, you want links on other people’s sites, pointing to your site. The benefits of external links are that you will get:

• Your site noticed by search engines. As they crawl other sites on the web the search engines will come across your site.
• Some natural traffic because people might click the link and end up on your site.
• Your site to be seen as a greater authority if others are linking to you. Links to your site (but from good quality sites) are a very positive signal to search engines that your own site matters.

Get more blogging tips and tricks. Just subscribe to our YouTube Channel!

It is actually really quite easy to build your first 10 links and the video above provides you some examples such as by using profile links.

You can also read our post on 7 stupidly easy link-building techniques.

3. Build Your Email List from Day One

One of the biggest mistakes many bloggers make is to not start building their email list from the very start. Do not make this mistake yourself.

Let me explain!

By collecting a list of names and email addresses of those who follow and are interested in your site, you will always have a direct connection to the people who matter to you. Your followers!

The problem is that search engines such as Google and Pinterest (yes Pinterest is a search engine) can change their search algorithms overnight.

Your site might show high in search engine results and then the next day you show nowhere.

How do you protect against search engine changes AND also against search engines and social media platforms going out of business? (And many such as Altavista are now defunct).

The solution is to build and keep an email list and then you remove the over-reliance for your online business, on any particular search engine or social media platform.

You can also read our post on is ConvertKit the best software for mail lists or not.

4. Do Not Be Afraid To Share Your Knowledge

There is a certain school of thought that you do not want to give your very best ideas and knowledge away for free, especially to your competitors.

Why would you? Well…

The opposite actually works better online. By sharing your very best tips and knowledge, you gain TRUST.

By being seen as an expert and willing to truly try and help and share with others, you will find it far easier to gain followers (for your mailing list) and this makes it much easier later on when you are selling products.

By sharing quality information, your followers and readers will know that you:

• are genuinely knowledgeable and that any products you sell offer value
• will help them keep learning useful things if they follow you

You can share knowledge by providing great quality and information blog posts!

5. Engage With Your Audience

One of the very easiest ways to engage with your followers is to allow comments on the bottom of your blog posts.

Some bloggers close comments because they worry that allowing comments can have a negative impact because users might add their own links in the post and create spam comments.

Comments though are great for SEO (search engine optimization) because:

• Google love to see social engagement
• Your users can include their own website URL and this helps you be seen as sharing outbound links (another thing Google likes to see)
• You also get to know your readers and followers and reply to them and build a rapport with them
• Additionally, you get to understand more about your followers through their questions. This helps you to plan future content!

You will notice that many successful bloggers allow comments and actively encourage it including Abby Lawson, Kevin Duncan, and Jon Morrow! In fact, I also invite you to give a comment (hopefully a positive one) at the bottom of this post! Make sure to include a link to your own site!

To avoid getting spam comments just install the Akismet plugin. This fantastic plugin does a great job of stopping spam comments.

You can also moderate any comments so any that are inappropriate you can just simply delete.

6. Avoid Free Web Hosting and Here’s Why

When you start a blog you understandably might want to do things on zero cost or thereabouts. Paid hosting though, only costs around £20 (USD$30) a month and the benefits are significant!

With paid hosting you can:

• use WordPress plugins (which you can’t with free hosting)
• have much more space on your hosting
• include your own ads and make money (such as via Google Adsense)
• add in Google analytics code (a very useful free plugin to get valuable data)
• own the site (and you do not if you have the hosting free such as on Wix).

If you are new to blogging then we recommend Bluehost because they offer:

• 24-hour customer support (many hosts only offer office hours support)
• a free domain name when you buy hosting
• they are cheap (the rate does increase on renewal but this is the same with most hosting companies)

7. Use Tailwind

One of the quickest ways to build traffic to your site is by pinning your images from your new posts to Pinterest.

Pinterest is a search engine that you need to post regularly to though (i.e. every day) to get results and Tailwind is the solution.

With Tailwind, you can load dozens or hundreds of pins in one go and, by using Tailwind, you can schedule pins to be posted to your Pinterest account every day.

You can learn more here:

• How to Use the Tailwind Scheduler
• How to Make Pinterest Images for Free and Quickly
• Try a FREE trial of Tailwind!

8. Be Yourself. Be the Brand

Do not be afraid to be yourself and open up to the world on your blog. In fact, I would recommend it!

Making it clear that there is a real person (you) behind the post and letting your readers get to know you (that is us above in the photo by the way) is a great way to build trust.

It is much easier to engage with your readers when they can visualize who you are.

Try sometimes to include pictures that tell a story and personalize your posts to show the great personality that you are and who is behind your blog.

Do not, by the way, think that it is a competition to look good. Readers will engage more when they see real people talking about real things. Just be yourself!

9. Blog Regularly and Consistently

As hard as it might be to produce content consistently, as a blogger it is certainly good because:

• Your followers will get used to expecting your content regularly and providing something consistently. This means that you can keep building rapport with your readers.
• Search engines will rank you higher if you blog regularly.

One tip is to write a bunch of posts in one go.

Spend a week or two weeks, for example, creating 10 or 12 posts, and then you can begin posting one a week.

Mass-producing posts at the start means that you can easily then consistently post weekly and you will have enough posts to cover holidays and breaks.

10. Make Sure You Back-up Your Blog Regularly

And for the last of our useful blogging tips, let’s talk about protecting all the hard work you have done or will do!

It is very easy these days to install a plugin that will back up your site in full.

A tool such as BackupBuddy will back up not only your posts and images but also the database and your complete site.

Backupbuddy also then enables you to easily set how often you want to schedule a backup (I suggest weekly or bi-weekly) and if your site ever needs re-installing, it’s really quite easy.

Whatever tool or plugin you use, the key is just to make sure that, one way or another, you at least use some tool and ensure you back up your site often.