WordPress Photo Hosting: 5 Things You Need to Know
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1. Pick A Niche
When you’re starting off, it’s a good idea to pick a niche. This is the category of content that you will focus on. For instance, maybe you’re a lifestyle blogger and you decide to only post about fashion and beauty. Or maybe you’ve got an entertainment blog and you decide to cover only TV shows and movies. Choosing a niche gives you focus and makes your content more relevant to your audience. It also helps you establish yourself as an expert in your chosen field. When you become well-known and respected within your niche, it will gain you credibility elsewhere. For example, if you’ve got a lot of content about fashion, people may come to you for advice about different trends or items they’ve seen on your blog. Or if you’re an expert on TV shows, you might be asked for your opinion on a weekly basis about a particular character or storyline.
2. Build Your Audience
To grow your blog, you need to build your audience. This is a bit like marketing and sales in that you are actively seeking to persuade people to come back for more. You want your blog to be a place that people want to visit. The best way to do this is to consistently put out high-quality content that is interesting, well-written, and (most importantly) relevant to your audience. When someone comes back to your site time and time again, you’ve successfully built a rapport with them. They trust you. When they trust you, they will also trust your recommendations. So if you want to be taken seriously, you need to take the time to establish yourself as an authority in your field. And the way to do this is to simply provide the best possible content to your audience. If you want to be seen as an expert, you need to be an expert.
3. Customize Your Blog’s Look
Another important thing to do if you’re a blogger is to customize the look of your blog. You can do this through different widgets and themes that you can install on your site. For example, you can use the Akismet Contact Form 7 widget to have visitors answer a few questions about themselves before they can submit their content to your site. This helps you get to know them better and enables you to engage with your audience. Many blogs will use this method of customizing their blogs’ looks to make them more personal or to establish a connection with their audience. For example, if you run a food blog, you can create a special page where you feature recipes from different parts of the world. Or if you’ve got an architecture blog, you can give your readers a peek into the lifestyles of the rich and famous through interior photography and design.
4. Use Long-Form Content
Something else that helps establish credibility is using long-form content. People love reading and buying long-form content. This could be an article that’s longer than 1000 words or a recipe that’s a few paragraphs. People find it difficult to skim long-form content because they have to keep going back and forth between the sentences to understand what is being said. Using long-form content to your advantage means you have more room to talk about whatever you want. You can include multimedia content like videos, infographics, and galleries. It also means your blog posts will stay in the minds of your audience longer. They will be able to retain more information because they have to work harder to understand it all. This is why many experts prefer to write longer articles. If you want to write about fashion, you can write an article about creating a capsule wardrobe. Or if you’re a travel blogger, you can write an article about the best places to visit in the world.
5. Measure The Results
To track the results of your efforts, you need to measure them. This is a lot like marketing and sales in that you need to find out what’s working and what’s not. To do this, you can use various tools to track visitor interest and see which strategies are bringing in the most revenue. WordPress comes with several tools that you can use to measure the success of your blog. One of the most useful ones is Google Analytics. With this tool, you can see everything from how many visitors you’ve got and where they’re coming from to what pages they spend the most time on. You can even measure the effectiveness of different marketing and sales strategies that you’ve used. For example, did a particular piece of content bring in the most views? Did you get the most leads from a given campaign? Do you think the type of content you’re creating is bringing in the most revenue? These are all questions that you can ask yourself using Google Analytics.
As you can see, there’s a lot that goes into being a successful blogger. But don’t get discouraged. It takes a lot of work. And maybe most importantly, it takes time. But as you build your blog, little by little, these five steps will help you establish yourself as a leader in your field.