22 professional blogging tips

Professional bloggers don’t reach success by accident. They have in-depth strategies and adopt effective practices. They work hard to perfect their arts and craft.

Whether you’re new to blogging or have years of experience under your belt, you're bound to find some takeaway tips in this long list of strategies that have proven effective for top professional bloggers.

1. Develop your ideal personas

A professional blogger creates detailed personas to describe an ideal reader. Useful personas feature both demographic and psychographic details. The goal is to know what pushes the reader’s buttons, intellectually and emotionally.

2. Follow and learn from leading bloggers

Like any craft, you can learn fast by analyzing and observing the best in your industry. If you aspire to become a top blogger, begin by identifying the most in potential bloggers in your niche and tune in closely to how they operate.

3. Look out for the problems and questions

Try to interpret your prospects’ interests, concerns and challenges as queries. Give close attention to them. Interact and discuss with people from different departments across the company. Spend time with the same media your prospects do, make and maintain a list of their questions, and of course, answer them on your blog.

4. Stay updated with the latest news

Stay tuned into what’s going on in your industry and niche. Join those conversations and bring your perspective to bear in your posts.

5. Monitor your space

Keep close tabs on everything you can with alerts, feeds, and media monitoring tools. You need to know and feel the pulse of your niche - from breaking news to the activities of your contenders and anything published about your company.

6. Invite guest bloggers

Bring guest bloggers to your blog. Consider new authors. If you’ve made in potential friends on your blogging journey, offer to trade guest posts. Or find someone with writing chops who would welcome the opportunity to find a new audience and who could breathe new life into your blog.

7. Modify and use older posts

With time, it may be useful to you and to your audience to return to an earlier piece of work. Something in the present scenario may make an older post worthy of updating and republishing. You might have written a complementary piece of content that wants to be rolled in. You could make changes to the title and give it a new life. Chances are, as your blog expands, you could easily find opportunities to cross-reference material with new links.

8. Survey your readers

Ask your readers what content will help them succeed. You can do this from time to time via email invitations to surveys as well as with on-site survey tools, groups, and forums, and yes, in conversation.

9. Write several headlines

Uninspired bloggers write a headline and then a post. Even if you like the headline you started with, it is advisable to try different headlines and improvise. Once you finished with writing entire post, revisit what you wrote and try writing five to ten alternative headlines. I am sure you’ll arrive at an even stronger one.

10. Maintain a decent grammar

Your blog posts don't need to be pitch perfect with the grammar. So you need not obsess about grammar like you would with a report. Understand what does and doesn’t abide by grammatical standards, but don’t be afraid to bend the rules in the interest of style.

11. Proofread, proofread, proofread

Writing a post and editing all by your lonesome is a daunting task. If an editor or proofreader is an expensive option for you, step up your internal checking system. For spelling, try proofreading your posts backward; that is, one sentence and word at a time. It also helps to nurture your posts. Let them lie for a couple of days and return with a fresh mindset, and you will come up with better ideas and corrections. You may fall short of perfect, but fewer mistakes will slip by.

12. Comment on others blog

Make a list of the best blogs in your niche and subscribe to them. Read them regularly and join the conversation in the comment streams. You can do better than simply complimenting the authors of posts you like. Write meaningful comments to get on the radar of influential bloggers.

13. Respond to comments

Big blogs sometimes do away with comment streams. You shouldn’t. As an up-and-comer, you should encourage readers to leave comments. Pay close attention to the comments, thank those who applaud your work or foster even more conversation, and respond to any questions you asked.

14. Live conferences & seminars

Look closely at the websites of top business bloggers. They have speaking pages and create content about what they’ve done, seen, and learned at industry conferences. While you’ll need to carve time out of your schedule and dollars out of your bank account to get involved in conference and seminars, you will be rewarded for the investment. When you’re aiming to build influence by associating with business leaders who author prominent blogs, nothing beats getting to know them.

15. Content Curation

Curation is the process of presenting the work of others. It doesn’t mean a copy/paste job. If you want your readers to get much out of the content, you curate, put some effort into it. You can build up favorite stories with an interpretation of what made you like them, roll a collection of proofs and links together to support a story you want to tell or present opposing views.

16. Keyword research

Keywords remain the key to getting discovered via search. Learn how to identify long-tail keyword phrases for which you have a chance to earn high rankings. Include them in your headlines. Tune them with derivatives in your posts. Tag your images with your keywords too.

17. Earn backlinks

Explore the opportunities to be a guest blogger. Guest blogging is an off-page SEO tactic. The hosts of the site you contribute to will give you backlinks in your author bio. Provided you don’t overload your post with loads of links; your host will happily allow you to include links to posts and on your website.

18. Ask for feedback

A good blog post should make your readers think and inspire them. With the evolving of social media channels, it’s time to interact, to invoke the two-way component of blogging. An excellent way to end your story is to ask questions and request feedback.

19. Make video a part of your blog strategy

Including video in your blog post is an effective way to attract traffic, engage visitors, increase time on site and simply mix it up a bit. In general, it is recommended writing a short post for longer videos and a longer post when presenting short videos.

20. White space

You can compare a page densely populated and cluttered with the copy to another with generous white space and readable, and you’ll choose the latter every time. Pay full attention to breaks, margins and leading to ensure your page is generously white.

21. Sharing is caring, encourage it

Install a social media share bar on your blog. Though your share numbers may be small, turn the counters on and let it be visible. Ask your readers to share your posts.

22. Conduct Interviews

Interviews are a great platform to get valuable and a variety of feedback on a subject. You’ll get many points of view from diverse personalities. You can conduct them from different places with a range of approaches.

Put some of these suggestions to work, and get ready to share your thoughts and wisdom with a soon-to-be developed audience that can’t wait to read your next post.

Do you find any other professional blogging tips? Please share with us as sharing is caring. Leave feedback and ask if any questions, we are here to help with your queries.