Long term blogging

Many  bloggers start blogging with great aspiration to build an online empire.

​Most of them fail or give up.

On the other hand,

Many  bloggers run behind the get-rich-quick blogging methodologies. By this they will be ruining their online image and reputation.

As you may know , Google being a giant big-data company, has every information about you.Your behaviors and browsing patterns are all spied upon and stored under your profile.

It’s clear that the next trend we see is the Google rankings based on the person behind the content.

If you’ve used blackhat strategies in the past, it may carry forward to your new domain. It can hurt you in long-term.

That’s the importance of aiming for long-term success.

Enough said.

In this post, I’ll explain some of the things you need to follow to get long-term success in blogging or your online career.

Tips for long-term blogging success

Blogging takes time

Patience is the most important thing when it comes to blogging. Blogging is not an overnight job. It requires dedication, patience, and hustle.

You need to put content regularly and moreover, promote your content strategically. You’ll gain gradual traction to your blog.

If your blog is building slowly and consistently over time, it means you are on the path to long-term blogging success.

Blogging is a crazy ride. Once you start up blogging, there’ll be no search traffic for you for 4 – 12 months. Then suddenly, you witness a surge in traffic to your blog.

Bloggers quit

Patience matters a lot. Long term blogging takes time. Once you get traffic, it’ll be stable, strong and the graph is unbendable.

Don’t hurry up

Many bloggers tend to follow blackhat or aggressive manual backlink building to see their results earlier.They may get their desired results, but not for long-term.

Your backlink profile should be natural. It should naturally build along with the rate of content growth on your site.

Red flag
Good link velocity

Always maintain a good link velocity. Prevent irregular spikes from happening in your backlink profile.

Maintain consistent posting schedule. Stick to a pattern, post accordingly.

Keep track of everything

Monitor everything related to your blog, via Analytics, Alexa rank, domain authority, etc.

Data is gold.

Activate Google Analytics on your blog on the day of creating your blog.

Once you notice the gradual improvement of metrics and readership on your blog, it motivates you to continue blogging and never give up.

Gamify your blogging journey.

Keep a goal or a milestone. Achieve it. Feel the surge of adrenaline.

Without goals and goal tracking, you develop a feeling like – “I am going nowhere”.

Build networks

There are many benefits of building relations.

  • You share ideas among yourselves.
  • You can start a new venture, that starting alone seemed impossible.
  • You gain backlinks.
  • You drive traffic.
  • Human beings are social animals.

In the initial days of my blogging career, I neglected this aspect.

But soon I realized that blogging would be a lone journey without relationship with other like-minded bloggers.

I started to say thank you for the people who shared my content. They, in turn, appreciated my content. I felt the warmth.

I started building social media connections with influential bloggers in my niche. I chatted with them. I learnt a lot of things.

These connections help you in long-term. You can share the experiences with them. They can give you supportive hands for you when needed.

Long-term blogging without relationships may be difficult.

Building personal brand

Building personal brand is the best thing you can do online.

It is nothing but making your name, a brand. Make people follow your personal brand. Make people follow you.

The beauty about this is that, when you establish a good personal brand, no matter how many blogs you start under your name, people start creeping in.

Tips to build personal brand:

  • Be everywhere. Tap all the platforms to grow.
  • Participate in expert roundups and interviews.
  • Return value and help your community
  • Be transparent about your online business.
  • Leverage social media.

Track the performance of your competitors

There are certainly some of the blogs similar to yours and having the traffic or popularity almost same as yours.

The first thing you have to do is to determine who are your competitors. Determine, how they make money online. What are their unique strategies? What promotional techniques they follow on their blog?

The final question is – “What you can do to overtake them?”

When you have something to compete with, you are unlikely to give up blogging.

Stress on visual aspect

Get a good design or theme for your blog. Be professional. It increases your interest to create content on your blog. Readers also find it very happy to read content on a blog, which has a good design.

Along with your quality content, learn to include visually appealing images. This is important for the success of your blog in social networking platforms.

I realized the importance of great visuals on blogs lately. It’s been about 5 months I started to focus on creating good images for my content.

I’ve been certainly witnessing a huge improvement of engagement in social media (especially Pinterest) and also readership on my blog since then.

People love sharing content that is packed with attractive images.

Create evergreen content and update them

Creating evergreen, long-form content is the best way to succeed online.

Evergreen content is something that stays relevant throughout years on your blog. I even have a separate post on how to create evergreen content for your blog.

Along with this, the important thing is to update the existing content on your site regularly. It helps in keeping the content on your site relevant, and returning value to the readers. Updated content ranks well in Google, because of the freshness of the content.

I spend at least 30 minutes daily to update my old posts with new information and ensure that they are relevant to date. Content is your online asset. You should learn maintaining and taking care of it.

Content strategy

You have to stick either to one of the strategies; long form or short form.

Short form content works well for news sites, entertainment sites, which requires frequent updates.

On the other hand, long-form content works for almost all sorts of niches. Try to create content that’s best in class. Have an edge over all the generic content by delivering great value and unique perspective in your content.

Long and insightful content ranks well, gets a steady stream of traffic, social shares, and eventually backlinks.

Nowadays, I publish blog posts that go past 1500 – 2000 words. In this way, I’m attracting a lot of natural links to my blog.

Get good backup and security measures

Backing up your database and files regularly is very important, to ensure that your hard work will not be wasted if anything goes wrong.

Some of the hosting providers offer free backup services. If not, you can use WordPress plugins like UpdraftPlus and Duplicator.

You should also make your blog hack-proof by following some of the guidelines. They are by limiting login attempts, IP-based logins, etc.

Akshay strongly recommends: Complete WordPress Security Guide

You need to upgrade your knowledge

Blogging is a never-ending happy-journey. You need to share and deliver unique value to your readers.

You need to take your blog to the next level. For this, you need to keep learning any thing that is new in your niche.

Learning new things, adopting, and then sharing the things you have learnt is itself the purpose of blogging.

With blogging, you can be a student for the lifetime. That’s the beauty.

If you spend an hour daily writing content, then spend at least 2 hours researching what’s new in your niche. You may also consider upgrading your key skills that will be helpful to take blogging to the next level.

Like:​

  • Content marketing
  • Copywriting
  • Graphic design
  • WordPress development

Like those. Learn all the things that greatly complement your blogging business.

Final words

Once you cultivate a skill, it will be there with you for the rest of your life. It’s the starting trouble that prevents you from learning new things.

In a nutshell

These are some of the ways by which  you can make your blog bear fruits for you in the long-term. Always focus on doing things that are beneficial for your blog in the long-term.

I think this blog post has helped you build a blog for long-term success.