Now that you have your blog name, how can you best position yourself to be a successful blog?

Starting a blog is easy, but convincing busy readers that you’re contributing worthy information takes effort and time. Then, once you have their eyeballs, keeping your blog interesting and active requires consistency and persistence.

Hint: when most people hear that a successful blog takes time and persistence, they give up. It is easy to let a blog languish and die. This is where you’ll set yourself apart.

5 Easy-to-Follow Steps to Make Yours a Successful Blog

1. Develop strong headlines for your blog content.
   This is how you will draw your reader into your story. Let the reader know the information they will gain before they open your narrative.
2. Add visuals.
   Blogs obviously require written content, but many bloggers focus so much on the text that they forget the “sides”. Complement your story with videos or photos to also give your readers visual information.
3. Act like a newspaper editor.
   Grammatical errors, typos, and misspelled words make you look less professional and credible. When you take a few extra minutes to proofread your work before posting, you develop a higher standard for your blog’s content, and readers notice.
4. Update your blog frequently, possibly daily.
   If you want a captive, returning audience, give them something to look forward to everyday. If you can’t contribute daily, use the scheduling features of WordPress, or an app, to plan out a steady stream of content.
5. Develop a plan to promote your blog on social media platforms.
   Keep in mind that demographics vary between platforms, so change up your approach a bit for each one. Check this handy study from the Pew Research Center to determine which social networks fit your ideal readers’ demographics.
   — Most blogs will see better engagement rates by setting up a Facebook page and sharing posts. Your audience will provide feedback and be able to interact with you, which helps them forge a stronger connection. Oftentimes, commenters even offer up some additional topics that you might not have thought of.
   — Embracing Google+, LinkedIn, Flickr, Pinterest, Instagram, and/or Facebook Live will give you added resources for reaching and expanding your audience, and keeping them captivated.
   — Set up a Twitter account to drive interest. You can tweet out quotes from your posts throughout the day with relevant #hashtags, linking back to your blog.