One of the hardest things about starting a blog is finding various resources to work with. From platform to pictures, from plugins to publicity, there are all sorts of things which need to be done with a blog to make it work. Content alone is not enough to fill a blog ironically enough. You need images, ways to share your site, and ways to see if what you’re doing is working. SEO and other traffic shaping techniques are also extremely important.
Platforms
WordPress
WordPress is basically the most well known blogging platform and service. WordPress makes it easy to spin up a blog with little effort and just a minimal knowledge of any kind of web coding to get going. You can even get away without knowing any coding, though certain things may not be as easy or secure.
WordPress is FOSS which is a huge boon for me. It is built off of PHP and MySQL (for most typical setups, there are also other options for the database) which are also open source and well tested. Many cheaper hosting platforms offer WordPress as an option so it really doesn’t cost a huge amount to get started. I like WordPress best out of any platform due to its easy usability and flexibility combined with its high adoption rate.
Medium
Medium is another well known blogging platform, but it isn’t really one which is used for independently hosted blogging. Medium is good for reblogging pieces of content in order to get links back. Medium allows shared content, but it is prudent to post segments in order to drive traffic back to your blog. It is a good idea if you want to build a following before you build your own blog.
Wix
Wix is a closed source website creation tool. It is arguably more flexible than WordPress for general website creation, but it is also arguably a bit harder to use for traditional blogging than WordPress. It is useful for an all in one website generator though. A lot of smaller web stores use Wix and it works a good bit better than WordPress for a storefront without heavy tweaking.
Plugins
This section only covers some of the more generic WordPress plugins I feel are indispensable. This is by no means an exhaustive list. Some plugins are very focused, some are very much motivated by personal philosophies or needs, while these next few are basically essential to almost any blog.
Yoast SEO
Yoast SEO is a plugin which helps with more than just SEO. Yoast SEO gives you a quick breakdown of readability, allows you to generate sitemaps, to edit extra resources and many other features. Yoast SEO is one of the few plugins I feel is just plain indispensable for a blog. There is a paid version which adds extra features, but the free is more than enough for a basic blog.
Monsterinsights
Monsterinsights is another great plugin for a blog. Almost every blog uses Google Analytics unless one is actually against Google in general (I use the lowest collection policy and assume anyone who objects to general collection uses an ad blocker). Monsterinsights make seeing your analytics in the context of your blog much easier. Ultimately, it’s not necessary, but it does help make collating data much easier from a single pane and helps one make better sense of some of the data.
Pictures and Resources
Project Gutenberg
Project Gutenberg is a great project dedicated to making public domain resources available to the general public completely gratis. There are other sites which host similar, but Project Gutenberg is the first and foremost for literature. Public domain works are all fair game for grabbing content and reuse however you want. There is a treasure trove of old fiction and non-fiction to look into.
Archive.org
Archive.org has far more than Project Gutenberg, but also has some content which is not completely public domain. Archive.org is also a good place to shop for content to either write about or to use as the basis of other projects. At the very worst, you can grab some cool materials you can enjoy for your own use.
Pixabay
Pixabay is a site dedicated to providing free, attribution-free images (though there are some exceptions, I’ve never seen one in the wild). The only real restrictions are not reselling the images wholesale, and not use it for slander or similar. Basically, don’t just try and resell the image and don’t smear the people or brands represented in it. Stock imagery with easy licensing was the biggest obstacle to upping my content for a while.
Promotion and Social Media
Most of the options are pretty common sense, but I want to write about some less commonly used social media and promotion options. I’m going to skip Facebook, Reddit, and LinkedIn, and other common avenues, and include some less common use cases for other common platforms (namely Twitter).
Twitter is a very common platform, but it has some use cases which are a little less commonly employed. Most everyone knows Twitter can be used to promote one’s own content, but most brands focus entirely on promoting their own content. It’s easy to fall in this trap, but my most effective campaign on Twitter never really even plugged the site it was promoting.
Twitter is great to reach new people and new followers by targeting trending keywords and specific brands. A carefully orchestrated climb can help a brand find stability as well as to shape opinion. A campaign I ran made even competitors slowly sing praise to pieces of our business they opposed by carefully riding trends and targeting specific accounts. This was during peak Twitter, but this is still possible for certain demographics today.
Flipboard is a site where content creators and other publishers can make “magazines” to promote or “flip” content. This site makes pushing your blog mixed in with other sources near trivial. I have gotten some traffic from this and seen it as a good, passive source of content for cross-posting with Twitter and others, but also as a good way to get a simple place to drop articles. It’s basically RSS on steroids with an easier accessibility factor and a much sleeker design.
Pinterest is well known for being a more graphic heavy, lighter blogging platform. It is known for recipes, DIY, crafts, and similar, but it is extremely good for promoting more artistic content or interesting content with more graphics. I don’t use it for my personal blog due to my lower priority on developing graphics and artsy content, but it is extremely useful if you have that kind of content. It’s a good way to bring in traffic with infographics and other graphic media. If your blog is heavily text based, you probably want to go elsewhere however.
Other Platforms
There are plenty of other platforms one can submit niche content to and similar, but they require different strategies than the main juggernauts. Reddit is seen a great place for promotion, but Reddit requires a huge amount of work compared to other platforms in my opinion and generally frowns on self-promotion. Some people suggest targeting other blogs, but I disagree as this tends to come off as desperate unless implemented well. Research platforms to see if they match the demographics of where you’re targeting. A platform with very few people but a high number interested in your brand is far more valuable than the lowest common denominator who might not be.
SEO
SEO is a dirty word for many. SEO, or search engine optimization, is one of the most important things for organically growing a blog. SEO has grown to encompass so much more than just a simple meta tag. SEO is shunned in some circles, but some basic practices can bring in a lot more traffic without resorting to questionable methods.
Keyword Targeting
Keyword targeting is one of the easiest adjustments to an SEO strategy. Titles and descriptions can help with SERP (Search Engine Result Page) optimization. By adding more clarity to titles, the results will be higher up on organic search, and by tailoring a better description to the content via something like Yoast SEO, the CTR (Click Through Rate) will be higher.
Use something like Google Keyword Planner or similar to see how effective your keyword is and compare it to similar words in order to find what will bring the best results. By targeting more common searches one can get more results overall. By targeting niche content to more specific search queries, one can bring more long-term results as well. The strategy depends on the content and is almost a job in itself, but just some basic tweaks can make an article have significantly more traffic.
Internal Linking
Internal linking is one of the easiest ways to grow link juice. Link juice is the concept that links into a site carry some weight to how valuable the site is. Internal links play the search algorithms and similar on themselves in order to foster a slightly higher rank. By internally linking, you get better results for certain posts and pages. As a given post which links to others gets more and more ranking, so will the linked pages as long as they are relevant to the content in some meaningful way.
Site Speed
Site speed makes a difference for how high sites like Google or similar will place a link on a given SERP. If your site is tied on content quality with another, Google will most likely place the faster site higher up. Knowing what is holding your site back or what is slowing it own is important. Sites like PageSpeed Insights or similar are extremely useful. Even if you are fundamentally against Google, knowing what Google is looking for and how it sees your site is extremely important.
Analytics
I mentioned analytics with Monsterinsights earlier, but Monsterinsights is only part of the equation. Google Analytics is a great analytics engine, but there are many, many more. Bing also offers an analytics engine which is useful as well. There are other drop in analytic engines which do not send data to a third party for those who are fundamentally against it, but I will not go into those here as I don’t really have a preference on that front.
Twitter has an analytics engine as well. Twitter Analytics allows you to see engagement with your tweets and similar. I was not able to see it until I had subscribed for a while and do not know exactly when it became available. Twitter Analytics shows your tweets, the impressions, profile visits, and more. This is a good litmus of how well your Twitter is doing and combined with certain campaigns can be used to see what direction you should go.
Search Console
Analytics are the peanut butter and the various search consoles are the jelly, without the peanut butter, it’s a sad sandwich. Both Google and Bing have search consoles. Basically every major search engine has a search console. These tell you what people are searching for, the impressions you get, as well as the CTR. This can be useful to tailor campaigns as you see certain articles popping up with certain terms, and from there you can make follow up articles more in line with what you see working out.
For instance, I heavily deprioritized my Lua tutorial due to the complete lack of interest. I may still complete it yet as a matter of personal interest or if any other interest picks up, but the effort to interest ratio was just not there. Other projects, such as my Daodejing translation project had an uptake which made them more “profitable” to try and run. This blog is a pet project, so I have focused on content more than SEO or marketing.
Article Length and Other Tricks
In general, an article should be at least 500 words, but something around 1,000 and 1,400 is considered the ideal for basic content. As you get up a bit higher around 2,000, you reach the ideal for SEO and for pushing content. Google and others prioritize links similarly. Five 500-700 word articles may not be worth as much as two well written 1,000+ word articles. This doesn’t mean that a bad 1,000 word article is as good as a great 500 word article, but when everything else is equal, word count matters, especially for niche content.
Inbound links are important, but outbound links can help milk a little bit of extra link juice. Outbound links to good resources lends some credibility to content. An outbound link which a search engine sees as highly credible and a good fit to content can increase the ranking just that little bit. It’s not a night and day difference, but enough to get that little extra boost.
Conclusion
This is by no means a definitive guide, but this encapsulates all of the basics of my SEO and blogging strategy including where I find some of my content for reuse and more. A lot of more advanced SEO techniques will get better results faster, but require my knowledge and effort. These are just a few things to get you up and going quickly and easily without having to go down as many dead ends. Tell me what you think and what you think works and what might now.