You’ve enjoyed your Christmas and New Year celebrations. What next?
2019 has officially started. Once again another year-2018, with all it’s ups and downs has been wrapped up. It has come and gone and won’t be back. But it left you wondering
how you’ll get along in the coming years.
You may have been anxiously waiting for the New year to come as you have great plans to carry out. Perhaps you’ve written down your long lists of DOs and DONTs that form your
New Year resolution.
And now with 2019 offically open until 31st December again, you have high hopes of achieving a lot. Yes, this time you know you won’t miss a thing.
Blogging starts now
Blogging has started already, and this year, you are going to take your blogging seriously and the one thing you really need to do is work on it. You won’t need to start one if you have one already.
But if you haven’t started one yet, then you can alway create a blog by taking out a wordpress.com plan . Up until the 20th of January, you can use the discount code DISCOUNT20 and get a 20% discount off any wordpress.com plan.
Should you feel the time is not right to make that move, then you can create a blog with a subdomain and then choose an upgrade plan later.
But whether you choose to create a blog with subdomain or with an upgrade plan, you might be asking yourself if you even need a blog at all.
Do I really need a blog?
It’s 2019 and many are still going to ask this question. That’s because people wanting to engage in some kind of online activities want to be really sure they can do it with or without a blog.
Some will argue that a blog is not necessary, while some will tell you, you definitely need a blog. But here’s the thing, in today’s world,
business is being done frequently online, As more and more people use the internet and social media in their daily lives,
they use it for a wide variety of reasons, such as connecting with other people, seeking money making opportunities and doing online shopping. With online shopping, making a purchase decision is important and necessary.
It requires having knowledge of what you want to buy and this means if you like, say a pair of designer sunglasses,
you’d want to have more information about that product before you make a buying decision.
One way of getting information about those sunglasses is by doing an online search using the search engines. You can type in a specific keyword or keyword phrase and come up with a large amount of search results.
You can also get specific details from the product vendor’s website, but the best information you can get will come from people who have purchased and used the product itself.
These are the many reviews which buyers are going to leave on the vendor website and which pontentials customers can read through before they make a purchase decision.
Reviews are important
Reviews are important to buyers. An individual’s user experience of a particular product can influence the way other buyers will react when they want to make a purchasing decision.
In fact without a review, consumers are less likely to buy a product as reviews turn out to be helpful in understanding what they need to know about a product. The image below show that
35% of people are less likely to buy if there are no customer reviews, while 32% will HOLD OFF making a buying decison.
Businesses and online marketers know this and so they find a way to communicate with customers. One of the ways they do that is with the help of a blog.
Blogs have been helpful to businesses and in fact according to statistics,
55% of marketers say blog content creation is their top inbound marketing priority.
Companies that published 16+ blog posts per month got almost 3.5 times more traffic than companies that published zero to four monthly posts.Source
Look at the image above again and look at the 32% that hold off. You can understand that while they have intentions to buy, they won’t buy until they get sufficient, satisfying information.
And so they will keep scouting the web to find more information.
If you have a blog, it would be easy for you write a detailed review of a product based on your personal user experience. This way you can enlighten potential buyers of
what to expect when they want to make a purchase decision. You can consider this to be a good enough reason to want create a blog. But should you need another reason why you need a blog then it could be this other one.
Are you online?
Your expertise can sell itself and this means you most likely won’t need a blog to show off what you can do or what you are good at. But humans are humans and sooner or later your expertise will attract
people who would want to get in contact with you much more regularly. This is because they like what you offer and want to stay updated with whatever new developments you might have.
Here the question that could come naturally to them are, “Are you online?” “Do you have a blog or website I can reach you?”
When people that value what you offer want to reach out to you, would you give them your home address? Definitely not!
And so having a blog will allow you to connect and stay in touch with people that value your expertise. Having a blog, will help you showcase your expertise and stay connected to your audience.
If you have an eCommerce website and you don’t have a blog, you can always create one within it.
But you can also create a stand alone blog and direct your customers there through your eCommerce site. If you are about to start your ecommerce experience
you can get always try the WordPress WooCommerce platform. It comes with a 20% discount up until 20th of January using the discount code DISCOUNT20.
If you find having a blog useful and want to start your online blogging journey, then you can always start now. If you have already started and want to move on
then you need to know what blogging in the coming years will be like.
Blogging in the coming years
The start of a New Year always comes with great hopes and changes. 2019 is no exception. A lot of things will change in the digital world and blogging itself is going to change.
This is because everyday more and people are creating blogs and writing blog posts, and the numbers just keeps increasing.
See the stats in real-time on the number of blog posts published daily
As the numbers increase, so the need for quality posts also increases. Blogging is becoming competitive if it hasn’t already started yet.
This means whatever post you are going to put out for your audience to read, if it is too simple and carries information that is not of value, it may not be enough anymore to move your audience if you know the kind of results that you are aiming for.
Your blog in 2019 must stand out and this means you need to know what to do to make it stand out against that of the competition.
What you need to do to stand out
Whatever you do with your blog, you need to make an impact with it. The contents you put on your blog must impress readers and attract a huge amount of traffic. Here are 3 things you can do to stand out
a)Study your competitors
The current statistics of blogs being created is quite impressive. But what is more surprising is the number of posts being published. Statistics puts the number of post published on WordPress sites at 17 posts every second.
This goes to tell you that you are not alone. Simply put,in your chosen niche there are others doing the same thing,
writing about the same topics and also presenting the same products. But they are doing it differently. If they are obtaining results with what they are doing and how they are doing it differently,
then before you write your next blog post,tap into their successes and learn from it.
If you find your competitors successful at what they are doing, then its time for you to study them by reading their blogs, looking at their presentation styles,
understand how they write to their audience and see what they have left out.
You can also find out by reading their posts if they are using specific tools that bring in results.
b) Revisit already published blog posts
There’s no better time to move on than to take a trip back into the contents you’ve already written and see how much you can update them with new information. By updating your existing content
you can add new information that is in line with current trends thereby keeping your audience updated. In this you don’t need to write a new blog post, but re-package existing ones.
This can save you time, especially when you have difficulty coming up with a topic to write about.
c) Write long-form posts
Long-form post has been considered a favorable method of getting audience attention. This is because bloggers who reported writing long-form posts said they had strong results.
You may want to consider writing long-form posts if you want to stand out from the crowd. Statistics attest to the fact that only
In case you are wondering what long-form posts are, there is a post that talks about the difference between long post and short posts. This is a post that asks a simple question, “Is writing longer post better than writing shorter one?”
Considering that long-form posts are making an impact, and bloggers using this form are seeing results, you may want to try you hands on writing blog posts that are more than 800/900 words long for a start and then work your way up.
Conclusion
Blogging in 2019 starts right now. If you are asking yourself the question, “what is the best time to start blogging?” because you have the intention of starting a blog, then this is the time to start.
If you have already started and you need to work on improving your blog, then consider using the above three points when you want to write your next post.
Happy blogging
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