Sweet and Easy-to-Understand Guide For Newbies

You are a new blogger. You want to be taken seriously. I get it. You write, and write, and you write some more, but despite this, readers are few and far in between. You are probably wondering what you are doing wrong. You follow everything that experts recommend. You regularly publish new content, share it everywhere across social media but still, it seems that you are the only one who is reading your blog. Oh, and also your mom and her cat.

It’s depressing. How do others succeed in having thousands of readers and subscribers and earn a lot of money …and you don’t?

You can be alone in a room full of people. To stop being alone, you need to interact with others. Only by building solid relationships with bloggers can you achieve your goals within a reasonable timeframe.

Join blogging communities. There are many places where bloggers get together and help each other. Facebook groups and Google+ communities are two examples. You will meet lots of bloggers with different experiences, be inspired, and you will get answers to your questions, maybe even questions you never thought of.

As a newbie all you need is guidance. Hiring a blogging coach is an ideal route that few of us can afford to take. So, the next best thing is to become friends with other bloggers that can help you. Friendship is free, and it’s much more valuable than money. Building a lasting relationship with a fellow blogger is worth its weight in gold!

The more connections you have, the more opportunities you will see. Let’s go through some examples and how you can benefit from these opportunities:

Guest posting. You may have heard of it, but perhaps you don’t know how you will benefit from it. It’s simple: you write an article that you will publish on a blog that’s in the same niche as yours. For free. You are probably wondering why you would work for someone else and not get anything for yourself. It may not seem obvious, but you are getting tons of benefits from guest posting.

What use do you have if you write the most awesome content, but nobody reads it? It’s like having the most luxurious hotel with no clients. It’s empty.

Put it this way: when you publish a post on another blog, all the readers that the blogger has will also get to know you. They will see the quality of your work and your expertise. They will click on your link and come to your blog to check what else you have written lately. Essentially with guest posting, you are sending other blogger’s audience to your website.

These are your first readers. But wait, there are other benefits to guest posting.

Backlinks. If you are a newbie that just started blogging, this might be an advanced concept, one that you don’t know much about. To make it easy, think of it like this: whenever a site links to another blog, Google sees it as a vote of confidence, a recommendation that you have quality content worthy of being read. Each site has a domain authority (DA). The DA is measured on a scale from 1 (newborn site) to 100 (huge authoritative site).

By getting relevant backlinks to your site you increase your DA and that directly impacts the way Google brings up your site in its search results.

Let’s give an example. You are passionate about gardening and you just wrote an article named “How to plant red roses”, and someone enters the keyword “red roses” into a search engine on the internet. It’s very unlikely they will find your website. By default, on each page, Google only displays ten results. For each topic, there are dozens of pages that link to 10 posts each.

Very few people read the second page, and almost nobody reads the third, fourth page and so on. The posts that are displayed on the first page come from authoritative sites, that have a lot of content, backlinks, readers and everything you don’t have (yet). If you publish a guest post on such a site, you will get a bit of all these benefits.

New readers will get to know you and also Google will see that a trusted site recommends you by linking back to your site. This will make Google place your blog in a better position in its search results.

Now that the advantages of guest posting are clear let’s see how we can make it happen. We already mentioned the first and easiest step that you can take. Join blogging communities. There are many Facebook groups in which you can find guest posting opportunities by connecting with other bloggers and internet marketers.

Read next week’s post as we will get more in-depth on what other opportunities you can find through blogging communities.