Blogging – Newbie Experience

It’s been almost two weeks since I started my blog and it has been a very exciting experience. As I write each post I get excited and get motivated to write more. The feeling that someone reading our content gives an excitement to write more. Even though I am a full-time employee, I thought I will have enough time to write, but once I started it seems time is not enough, because we always keep thinking about what to write, how to write and always thinking what’s next? how to make it more interesting to read? how to be more precise yet more descriptive? and many more thoughts and ideas. In short I am enjoying it and hopefully my readers are enjoying and will enjoy going forward. 

I did have couple of hiccups in beginning with the themes I selected, had to change couple of times due to issues which were no longer supported to fix. And our Happiness Engineers from WordPress are always there to help, their timely assistance is awesome. Fellow bloggers content and sites inspire to write better and also helps to gain more knowledge on blogging itself. Other bloggers visiting our site and liking articles is always an encouragement and a boost to continue. 

I believe most of you have taken steps to increase traffic and optimize your content to reach more readers and also to make it better experience for readers. Here are few things I followed and hope it will help you, if you have not already taken these steps,

Marketing: Obviously promoting increases traffic, so make use of social media to promote your blog content via YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter and so on. Let readers know there is an article or blog which can be of their interest.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO): This is a critical feature to gain more traffic to our blogs, so we need to make sure that we are making our site search engine friendly. It will take some time to master, at least if we do it by ourself without professional help. Few things I followed to optimize search, 

• First step is to index your site on Google Search, Bing Webmaster and in Pinterest. You can get all the details here if you want to refer. 
• Adding appropriate keywords as alt text to images, captions and descriptions, so that search engines can easily identify content. 
• Use as many key words as possible based on the content, key words which people use to search in google for the content you are writing.
• Tags and Categories also help to get more traffic as search engines can easily know what type of content your blog contains.
• Permalink which by default uses your post title as URL can also be modified to have appropriate keywords.

Images: Pictures speak louder than words, this is known fact to all. I believe adding images to our content enriches the post and also conveys the content more effectively. Getting appropriate images related to our content is very difficult even though we have billions of images online. We need to make sure that we are not breaking any copyrights by using images available online.  WordPress has Pexels integrated within its media gallery which has vast library of photos for free. Even though it is free, it is courtesy to credit owner of the photo. We can credit using caption when we add it as image, but in some cases we cannot use captions like when using galleries or as cover image and so on. 

I found Watermarkly a web-app where we can add watermarks, resize, crop or compress our photos easily. It is available for free with limitations, but you can get paid service which is very low cost and can make use of all the features for life long. You can use it to design your images by adding watermarks (text and logos) and make your own banners, posters, and so on. Other features include resize, crop and compress of images. You can use these features on Videos too. You can also use those designed images/videos in your social media to promote your blog posts. Visit Watermarkly to try and get more details. 

I just started my steps in blogging and have a long way to go, hope I can convey my thoughts in a more interesting way to readers. Follow my blog for latest updates and please provide your feedback in comments section. Thanks.