Whether personal or dedicated to the company, the blog has become an indispensable marketing tool when it comes to digital presence, it helps you create vision and awareness, is a point of contact with customers and fans in the case of companies, or a connection with those interested in the same hobby in the case of people.
Blogs can turn into a daily lifelong commitment to spreading a particular message or be a random visual record of events and successes, and whatever blogging method you choose, there are some rules and practices you should follow before you start blogging.
1. Choose the right blogging platform
The word "blog" no longer means a collection of texts that form only daily publications, these days blogging platforms such as WordPress or Blogger have very wide potential, and some of the world's largest media sites rely on WordPress, with their own design and modifications that suit them.
The quality of content shared on the blog is different, so if you use WordPress, you can easily include photos from Pinterest or Instagram, or even include live streaming from Periscope or Video from YouTube using the link only.
There are a lot of blogging platforms on the Internet right now, most of which are available free of charge, although the most famous are WordPress and Blueger, although we always prefer to use WordPress thanks to its power and great customization capabilities, where you can design your blog template to suit your need, to be alone with the majority of blogs on the Internet despite using the same WordPress platform.
2. Identify the right audience for the blog
How you deal with the public depends on what you want to tell them, and who they are. In the case of personal blogs, for example, you should reflect your own voice, while in the case of companies, the company must reflect itself through the set of updates it publishes. At the same time, blogs updated across different groups of people can lead to diversity and unique perspectives mixed with each other.
Over time, you'll discover what kind of content attracts your followers, in which case you should continue to post with new ideas and information to keep followers interested in the content and continue to visit the blog. Infographic is one of the most important types of content at the moment, and it is not harmful to use them from time to time.
3. Correspondence of blog followers
Wherever you track your blog followers, whether, by subscribers, clicks, or comments, you'll always need a way to contact them to send the blog post or the company's latest updates. Follower data can be obtained through contact forms that always contain your username and email.
You can also encourage your blog followers to join the mailing list with a small pop-up ad that appears when the user stays for a certain period within the blog.
4. Building reputation
It's rare to find a blog with a huge number of followers all of a sudden, usually, it's a lot of time for the blog to reach a good number of followers, and then the pace increases as these followers share posts on the blog.
Whatever your blog's specialty and how big your audience is, it will come as long as you continue to provide the blog with your original content. Never go the easy way (copying and pasting) because it will hurt you and your blogs a lot, and it has no real benefit.
5. Share links with other blogs
The key to any real success is web links, having your blog link to blogs and other sites will increase in ranking in search results, and this can happen in more than one way, some share links and some write useful articles on other sites in exchange for adding links to their blogs.
Social networks are also one of the biggest places to share links, with a huge audience easily accessible if your blog's content is worth sharing.
6. Protect your blog
Successful blogs are always subject to full copying or partial copying of content in other less successful blogs, make sure you go through blogs similar to you in your specialty and report them if they copy you.
Make sure you back up your blog periodically on a different hard drive than the one on it, so you can restore the blog in case it is hacked, God forbid.
From my point of view, these are the most important elements that can be taken into account when you start blogging.
