10 Rules that Successful Bloggers Follow

Rules allow you to stay organized and function in a proper manner. This applies to life, and also to blogging.

Here are 10 practical rules for your blogging life. Nothing new, but we often tend to forget. So, here I present you the 10 basic principles of successful blogging as a refresher guide.

1. Stay Informed & Aware: Don’t lag behind the world. Conversations, radio programs, news items, opinions from others can all be triggers for future blog ideas. Keep a list in a small notebook and transfer the ideas to your computer from time to time.

2. Follow The Trends: Subscribe to the most successful blogs and stay tuned to what others are doing. Absorb their success strategies, and incorporate them in your blogging. If you have a tutorial and guide blog such as Source Digit, a blog specializing in Ubuntu & Linux tutorials, you have to keep yourself at the top of latest developments in your niche. For success in blogging, you need to become an expert in your niche.

3. Prolific Writer: The key to successful blogging is to write, and to write prolifically. Write as often as you can, and publish engaging content as frequently as possible. The more you write, the more content you have on your website, which in turn generates more traffic. Publishing articles often means readers visit your website more often to check what’s new. However, don’t publish garbage content. Great bloggers put serious time into researching, writing, editing, and planning posts for their blogs.

4. Be Precise: Be precise in grabbing attention of your readers. Brevity is of essence when trying to engage reader within a few seconds. Don’t beat around the bush. Come to the point immediately before your reader turns away to another website.  Top bloggers know how to quickly get people’s attention, how to keep it, and how to make their posts easy to digest. You can start your opinion later in the article. Start with the point that your reader want to see.

5. Analyze Regularly: Don’t just dish out articles. Analyze the results. See which articles are getting most love from your readers, what keywords are driving traffic to your website, etc.

Successful bloggers look to their readers to see what readers care about and respond to. They study their statistics, so they know where readers come from — what sites, what search engines, what search terms, and even what countries. They tailor the timing, content, layout, and images of their posts to suit their audience.

6. Keep Learning: If you’re new to blogging, you’re probably on a steep learning curve; hang on, that doesn’t change! The internet keeps changing. Just when you’ve got one element sorted out, something new gets released. Or becomes obsolete. If you want to stay ahead in blogging, you have to keep learning.

7. No Distractions @ Work: Stay focussed. Don’t start working at muultiple things at one time. Tackle on problem at a time for the best results. Choose a topic or niche and stick to it. Write consistently about your chosen subject. Point of view posts can almost always be tied to any current event by an effective blogger. Top bloggers are also consistent about timing, posting on a regular schedule.

8. Plan Ahead: Successful bloggers know where they’re going. They have a master plan and they stick to it. Top bloggers don’t waffle for months about the typeface on their upcoming ebook. (Hard for the perfectionists among us). Our team advocates 20% planning/learning and 80% doing!

9. Stay Persistent: Don’t just give up! Keep working until you succeed. Success doesn’t happen overnight, it comes gradually after lots of hard work. To get to the top takes consistency, hard work, serious study, and lots of persistence. Successful bloggers don’t give up.

10. Stay Organized: Working from home doesn’t mean you can do what you please. As a professional blogger, you need to stay organized and take blogging (or your online business) seriously. Set aside your work hours, and don’t leave your work desk during it. Keep your work life organized.

Do you have more ideas about what it takes to become a successful blogger? I would love to hear them!