In March 2019 I published my first blog post and I was completely clueless about which resources and tools a new blogger should use. It can be a real challenge to know what to write about, how to write, without even starting to think about SEO.

This is coming from someone with a good education, a good job and a decent background in my niche (at least I like to think so. I felt I had so much knowledge and experience I wanted to share with potential readers.

However, getting my content right and knowing how to reach this potential audience was another thing entirely. There are also a whole host of things you need to do to optimise your blog’s design, speed, security and sharability. Download my favourite 15 plugins at the end of the post to help with this.

The Best Blogging Resource

I’m pretty lucky that I started listening to the smart passive income podcast and over time I gathered great tips and tools and free advice. This helped me to find some amazing tools and approaches to blogging, that I now want to share with you.

Before we even start with the 5 resources I think you should use, I implore you to start downloading episodes of the SPI podcast. Start from the beginning you will learn so much, not just about blogging but business too.

It might not seem like you need this ‘business knowledge’ but this will help you to direct your blogging journey. In general. This is information that will seep into your everyday life, even your day job.

What Are The Best Types Of Blogging Resources

I want to make a disclaimer here, that I am by no stretch of the imagination an expert. I’m obviously not the most successful blogger out there but sometimes that makes it easier for me to put myself in your shoes.

Blogging Topics Include

• SEO resources & tools
• Advice on content writing
• Marketing tools & Tricks
• General writing structure and philosophy.

1. What Is It That You Are Trying To Accomplish

This is a massive question and probably the hardest one for a new blogger. You might know you have an interest in a particular topic or some niche knowledge. However, I think that when approaching any article you need to ask yourself, “What specific problem or question am I trying to solve”.

Therefore my first recommendation is to ‘find the pain’ that people are experiencing. This is exactly what I didn’t do, instead, I wrote yet another post on the topic of saving money on coffee.

Granted I do love coffee and dislike high-street coffee chains, so this seemed a good place to start but it’s not what I needed to be writing about. However, this wasn’t where the pain was, and people really didn’t need to know the obvious fact, that if they save money on coffee, they will have more money.

However, people do need to know:

• Ways to save money without giving up what they love.
• What money habits can they build that will set them up for life
• What stock market funds might be suitable for them

2. Blogging Tools To Help You Quantify The Demand

You can look on Reddit, Quora, or Facebook groups or Twitter for examples of questions that people ask. This is a good starting point for understanding the need people have for information.

However, three other tools I can recommend (aside from Google Trends I personally find that a little too high level) are:

Ubersuggest:

I love this Ubersuggest but outside the free trial you are only allowed 3 searches a day, so use the free trial wisely. Please keep this one a secret, otherwise, I will soon be outcompeted!

Using this tool, you can identify how many searches a word gets per month and more importantly the search difficulty on a scale of 0 to 100 of trying to rank for the post.

This tool has been my single most important tool in getting to grips with how I can stand out in a crowded internet space.

Answer The Public

Answer The Public is a free to use tool and offers cool visualisations on what people are asking, and all you need is one keyword to get started. It will tell you the questions, prepositions and comparisons on the search term you want to look at.

3. How To Write About The Problem

Ray Edwards in Episode 182 of the Smart Passive Income Podcast is one of the biggest influences on my writing style. I’ll admit I am yet to perfect it and sometimes I’m simply too lazy to integrate it into all of my posts but the ones I do are the most popular.

I’ll outline the framework for you here. To write a sharable, readable and impactful blog article you can use the PASTOR framework of copywriting. This stands for:

• P – Problem: Define the problem
• A – Amplify: Explain in more detail, narrow down on the fine points
• S – Story: The story and solution of the problem
• T – Testimony: The process of transformation you experienced
• O – Offer: Your offer to the reader, do X and you will get Y
• R – Response: What you want the reader to do. For example, download the 15 WordPress plugins you absolutely need.

Approaching a complex concept or idea can be challenging and you may feel like you lack direction when writing. This frame-work will help you to define the problem and give your reader targeted and actionable advice.

4. Build Up Your Email List

The ‘Offer’ aspect of ‘Pastor’ brings me to my 4th point and I will admit, I’m a complete idiot when it comes to this. You need to offer your reader any easy way to come back to your site, and to do this you should get their email address!

For about a year, no matter how many times I got told to “work on building an email list” I did not take it seriously. This was until I finally decided to sign up to Convertkit, although to be fair I was using Mailchimp (I still am to a lesser extent).

This is how you will get people back to your site, long after they may have forgotten they were even on it. More than this you can use it to provide extra value on top of what you have already given them.

You can create pop-up forms, top bars or regular forms to integrate into your blog post or sidebar like the one below:

How To Encourage Your Readers To Give You Their Email Address

Nobody wakes up in the morning and thinks to themselves “I wish I receive more emails today”. Therefore putting a random sign-up form on your blog will not be enough for 99% of readers to subscribe to your blog.

On the other hand, people will give you their email address in exchange for something that will add value to their lives. Therefore, In order to attain a reader’s email address, you need to create what is called a lead magnet. This is a free download such as an ebook, which you can also create with Canva.

You can then create the front-end of your lead magnet with ConvertKit. You can create a visual sign-up form and upload your insensitive to the landing page or sign-up form.

Once your reader puts their email address into the form, it will kick off an automated process where their email is added to your database, and they receive the inventive.

There are some automation sequences you can use if you buy full access to the tool, but as i’m using the free components I just use the broadcast function.

Ad clicks not only help to pay for my site but starting from 14.05.21 I’ll be giving10% of my ad revenue(track our progresshere) toGiveDirectly.Org

Segment Your Audience

Once you have an email list you can start to build a relationship with your audience. One great feature that might help you to do this is the segmentation function of ConvertKit.

Based on what lead magnet they downloaded you can categorise your audience into different groups. You can then customise your emails to these different groups based on what they might find more interesting.

In the future, this may also allow you to promote content or even products to them based on their segment.

If you are a beginner blogger then this can be a lot to think about, but if you put in the hard work now, then this will make things easier in the future. You might find it easier to build traffic or monetise your blog for example.

5. Don’t Just Write Your Blog Post – Market It.

There are a number of things you can do here such as Tweet about it, even schedule a bunch of tweets (bulking things up like this is usually much easier. This is a completely acceptable approach and very accessible if you are new to blogging.

However, if you really want to get serious then you can really level up your blogging-game without too much effort. This is because you can use two amazing tools to get the job done.

One is Canva, which you can use to design and download extremely visual pins or even lead magnets. You may have even downloaded one of my free ebooks I created using Canva.

Canva is free to use for an unlimited amount of usage. Although there is a pro option you can pay for to gain more access to stock photos and templates.

The second is Tailwind, which you can use to schedule an insane number of the Canva pins you will have created. Using Tailwind you can schedule them to publish at peak times to multiple boards in a smart loop. By doing this you can easily schedule in excess of 5,00 pins.

I’ve known bloggers used this strategy to generate 10m+ monthly viewers using this strategy. I intend to do something similar, wish me luck. I’m now paying for the Tailwind, but back in July when I used the free trial I increased my Pinterest impressions to a peak of 10,000 in one day.

You can get a free month of Tailwind using my affiliate link.

6. Use The Yoast SEO WordPress Plugin

SEO does not have to be especially complicated if you don’t want it to be. You can use the Yoast SEO plugin to basically tell how well or poorly your post is optimised for SEO, it will then tell you what you have done well and what you can fix to improve the rating.

By building your post using Ubersuggest and Yoast you can get your blog posts ranking. The types of things you will need to do are:

• Make sure you blog title contains the in-demand keyword phrase
• Make sure your other headings contain the keyword phrase
• Make sure you pictures contain alt. Text containing the keywords
• Make sure you reference the keyword enough times throughout your post
• Make sure your first paragraph contains the keyword phrase
• Make sure the meta description text contains the keyword phrase

Following this, you will want to ensure your site speed is quick and try to increase the number of people that visit the blog post and the amount of time spent on the page. As google likes position site stats when ranking the article.

By writing good quality content and marketing your post enough you can ensure this happens.

7. Track Your Traffic With Google Analytics

As a new blogger you don’t want to get completely obsessed with traffic. However, you do need both quantifiable feedback to guide you towards what works and what doesn’t.

• You will want to get a feel for which blog posts are most popular (so you can write more about that topic or use a particular style)
• Which content has a high bounce rate (people leaving your site after one page visit)
• Which pages or posts people spend the most time on
• The total page sessions, page views and unique visitors.
• Number of returning visitors

If you can then track these metrics over time to keep them moving in the right direction. You can also spot if you have any specific issues such as a high bounce rate with mobiles vs tablet or desktop.

Google Analytics is very easy to sign-up to and offers a broad suite of analytics you can use, but it doesn’t have to be any more complicated than you want it to be.

Plugins You Might Find Useful

I hope you found this blog post useful, remember to download the 15 of my most valuable plugins. These are free to use and you will find them invaluable.

For example, one of my favourites is AddToAny Share Buttons, an easy way to make your content sharable. It’s one of the most common ways my content gets shared. So, don’t miss out, get the other 14 now.