The Complete Beginners Guide for Effective Blogging | Part 1

With over a decade of experience in the art of blogging, I’ve decided to make a guide based on effective blogging for beginners.

This will be a multi part series with each part covering one topic.

This will prevent you from getting overloaded with information and will also give you an opportunity to apply what you are learning.

Once you apply these methods you’ll have them ingrained and be ready to move on.

This is called a beginners guide but there are plenty of advanced tips ahead that are reasonably simple to apply.

Everything you’re about to read will have an impact and make your blog posts effective.

First of all, there are exceptions to effective blogging guidelines. However, these exceptions come about for good reasons which we should not ignore.

We see these exceptions all the time with celebrities. They open up a social media page and BOOM overnight they have a million followers.

Examples of Exceptions in Digital Marketing

An excellent example of this can be seen when Sir David Attenborough opened an Instagram page – reaching over a million followers in just over 4 hours.

Are we to think wow, all these years Sir David has been an online content creating genius, a social media whiz and a digital marketing master?

Obviously not, there is nothing Mr. Attenborough did that you can copy. His online success is an exception.

This is exactly why we don’t look for anecdotal exceptions and try to mimic them.

Likewise, if Will Smith writes a blog post it would get millions upon millions of viewers. No matter what he writes. It could be pretentious, arrogant, self-righteous, bombastic drivel and people would go nuts for it.

Why then do these exceptions occur and what can we learn and apply from these “digital wizards”?

Effective Blogging | Perceived Credibility

These celebrities have what I call perceived credibility. This is discussed in my article The HIDDEN Reason People don’t Click on your Articles.

It’s the notion that because you are credible then what you write about will also be credible.

If you don’t have this, it really doesn’t matter what you write. Generally people will not care about what you have to say. Not because you have not got heaps of value, but because you don’t come across like you are someone worth listening to.

Celebrities have perceived credibility in abundance. This is why they are so influential. This is why advertisers constantly want to leverage them to convince you to buy certain products.

Wherever your publishing platform is, you must dedicate your energy to profiling yourself, referencing your experience, and presenting yourself in the most professional light.

If you ignore all this, then generally the public will ignore you.

This is why I have my Who is Scott D. Renwick page. This is why I put my face on my blog posts to show people I stand behind what I say and that I am a real person.

Reference Your Own Experience

I regularly reference my own experience to get away from the idea that I’m talking from the top of my head.

That’s why I’m about to tell you, I’ve published about 3,000 articles as a writer and as an editor.

I ran the most popular niche website on the internet for my niche of landscape architecture, generating up to 500,000 visitors per month. During this time I ran a team of over 60 writers and 4 editors.

I’ve also been a guest blogger for many publications covering a vast array of topics.

Once you know how to blog you can pretty much blog competently about anything. It helps if you are passionate about the topic, but sometimes passion can lead you astray.

Am I bragging? No, not at all.

I’m laying the basis for credibility so that when you read my words you will be more inclined to think I am worth listening to.

Your words alone are not enough. They will never be enough because what matters is so much more than just what you say, it’s how you say it.

Ask yourself the very important question – why should people care about what I’m saying?

There will be many reasons because everyone has value, no matter what their experience.

Now ask yourself are those reasons coming across in your article or in the platform overall.

If not you’ve got to rethink what you’re doing. You need to build up that perceived credibility.

Credibility is greatly valued because we live in a world with so much SPAM and so many people trying to grab your money. Finding someone with credibility is like finding gold.

Everybody has that gold inside them. Your job is to bring it to the forefront of your story.

If your perceived credibility is strong enough, you can get away with a lot. Poor images, a low level of writing, a poor headline, bogus facts and perhaps much more.

Perceived credibility is almost hypnotic in its ability to get the reader to pay attention to what you are doing.

Here’s the summary:

1. People generally won’t care about what you write
2. Unless you have perceived credibility
3. You build this by showing the world you are real and by referencing your own experience.
4. These factors should be obvious for anyone who reaches your blog post.
5. Avoid as much as possible the idea that you are solely writing from the top of your head – you will do this but aim for a balance.

That’s is for part 1 on effective blogging.

In part 2 we will discuss headlines and why it may be the most important element of everything you blog about.

This will be followed by part 3 where we discuss the use of images within your article.