If you are thinking of setting up a blog (do it!) then here is everything I know about how to become a successful blogger….

I am addicted to blogs. Reading them, writing them, analysing them, you name it. If my screen is open on a blog page then I’m happy!

My blog, The Ordinary Adventurer was set up in 2016 as a way of sharing my journey and advice on adventures. Within a year of blogging (I don’t count the first few months where I was just learning how to actually use this site) I reached 10k page views a month.

This is small fry in the blogging world but not for me. My blog was instrumental in allowing me to create a career and a life that I love on my terms. It brought me loyal followers, sponsorship opportunities and speaking gigs.

Reaching a readership beyond just my family and friends didn’t happen by luck. It took a lot of practice and learning the best way to approach your blogging.

You might also want to check out:

• How to write the perfect blog
• 6 Basic photography tips for bloggers
• Ultimate social media guide and how I got 20k followers in a year

Building your website

Don’t waste your time with a free blogging website. It won’t get you anywhere. It’s vital you have your own domain name and a simple website.

Building a website might seem like a really complicated thing but it doesn’t need to be. My step by step guide to Building a website in 10 minutes will have you set up in no time. From there you can use YouTube tutorials to help you with small details or glitches until you have the website looking how you like.

A few tips for your website to get right from the start:

• Get it looking nice! Find another website you like and use that as a template
• Make sure your website is optimised for mobile….more readers will access your blog from mobiles than laptops
• It needs to be organised and easy to navigate
• All your photos need to be great quality. Use a website like Unsplash if you need free professional photos

Find your niche

If you want your blog to be successful you have to find a niche. Especially nowadays when the market is so competitive. I think in the entire process of setting up a blog, this really is the hardest part!

We as individuals have lots of things we enjoyed and different likes. It’s only normal that, as the blog is a reflection of you, you want to put that all in. But you have to have a unique selling point that will summarise your blog in a nutshell. Work out what is most important to you and what makes you special! It doesn’t mean that you aren’t allowed to write about other things, it just means that you are branding yourself and making it easy for readers and companies to understand who you are and where you fit.

Here are blogs with examples of good USP’s:

Never Ending Footsteps – long-term travelling with Anxiety
Seanna’s World – Mental health and adventuring
25 Before 25 – Trying 25 careers in a year
La Vagabond – Sailing around the world for beginners

The only way to find your voice is to write

I think my blogging journey was pretty similar to most. I wrote dozens of blogs, read them all back a year later and full of cringe deleted them all. My blogging was HORRIFIC. I could see the influence of all my favourite bloggers without defining my own style.

Like any skill, blogging takes time to develop and get good. It’s really important that you find your own voice (blogs are brilliant because they are personal after all) and the only way to do this is to write, write and write.

So don’t waste any time getting started.

Get active in the blogging community

There are loads of benefits to be gained from joining blogger communities. Reading other peoples work is a great source of inspiration. If you support other bloggers (with comments, likes and shares) then you will get supported in return. It is also a good place to be introduced to brands or to hear about opportunities if you are interested in moving into sponsored posts.

I signed up to join Travel Blog Success and have found all their webinars, articles and access to their online community incredibly helpful! I’ve taken loads of tips away but also found that being able to pitch questions to blogging experts has been invaluable.

For outdoor and adventure bloggers I can also recommend checking out the Outdoor Bloggers group.

Learn how to take good photos

Blogs are more than just writing. There are lots of bloggers that put a huge amount of emphasis on taking incredible photos (like Alice in Wanderland, the Girl Outdoors and Bridges and Balloons). Photography doesn’t interest me enough to put this level of effort in (plus I don’t have a photographer boyfriend which seems to be the common theme!). But I do know how to take half-decent photos. It makes all the difference!

My photos are taken on with my iPhone or my compact camera (Lumix LX100 – which is also amazing for taking video, I really love it!). I understand the basics of photo composition and put a lot of emphasis on the pictures being bright. If there’s a choice of using a bad photo or none at all, I’d go without (unless the picture is showing something that might be genuinely helpful to the reader).

Check out: 6 Basic photography tips for bloggers

Be serious

Get yourself some business cards with your blog name on. Start handing them out to people you meet and asking them to check out your blog.

This is a great way to build a following early on. You might feel a little embarrassed but you shouldn’t. You should learn to feel proud of your blog…..this is an important step to get over because that embarrassment will show in your work.

SEO in a nutshell; keywords

SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) is basically a game that you need to play so that search engines will recognise you as a useful site. If you get this right, it means that your relevant blogs will appear high up when people search. Organic searches make up about 70-80% of my traffic….the rest coming from links on social media, forums or people going directly to my website.

Before working out if SEO is good on a blog you have written, you first need to find a keyword. This is a group of words that someone might use to search a particular subject.

Do NOT waste your time on using free keysearch tools. I used them for ages and it was only when I switched to a paid platform did I see results. I use a site called KeySearch and I love it. Most SEO Softwares cost $100+ a month but KeySearch is just $20 a month and it’s worth every penny.

Follow this link and use this code for 20% off: KSDISC
This is an affiliate link so I’ll also get 20% off – don’t worry though, my recommendation is genuine!!

You want to look at the ‘Average monthly searches’ and the ‘competition’. You are looking for keywords that have high monthly searches with low competition (as a general rule aim for keywords that get over 400 searches a month and have a competition score of 25 or under). Pick the best one and make that the keyword for the blog you’ve written.

Once you’ve signed up to KeySearch spend some time on their tutorials so you understand the functions. It’s well worth investing a day learning this properly as it will save you hours of time down the line wasting effort on blogs that aren’t going to rank in Google.

I usually write my blogs first based on advice or stories I’ve got to tell. I then look for the keyword afterwards and find a way for it to fit naturally into what I’ve written. A lot of people do it the other way round and find a keyword to write a blog about. I find this a lot more contrived and I think it can show in your writing.

SEO in a nutshell; tailoring your blog

So you’ve got your keyword….how do you now get that into your blog so it ranks highly on SEO?

The easiest way to understand the backend of SEO is to download the plugin called Yoast SEO (assuming you are on WordPress). This puts a box at the bottom of your posts and lists if your blog has good SEO. It measures it on readability and the familiarity of the keyword in your blog. It appears at the bottom of your blog post like this:

You then need to click on the drop-down box. Below is an example of the ‘focus keyword’ box. On this post ‘adventure tips’ was my Keyword so I have put that in. The tick box below shows all the different ways you can follow SEO to make sure your blog will be found in searches using this keyword. This should be self-explanatory – green is good, amber is ok but could be better and red is not good.

It’s hard to get them all green but try to get most of them. It can be as simple as adding the keyword to the description of a photo you’ve included, or in the title of your blog post.

A few words on SEO

This really is a very simplified version of SEO but if you can follow the above suggestions it will make a huge difference. When I started using good SEO, my blog posts went from having a handful of readers to hundreds and then thousands. It’s boring and can feel contrived but it is just the game you have to play. All art forms have constraints in which they need to work.

I’ve seen so many good bloggers who don’t get any growth or visitors because they can’t be bothered to spend the day or 2 it takes to familiarise yourself with SEO. If you want to reach people there is no way around this!

I’ve devoured a lot of SEO books but 3 Months to SEO is the best I’ve read by far!! It really does break down the process in simple steps. Nothing is left out. If you want to get more traffic to your site, go buy it now…it’s a no brainer!

Be genuinely useful

Following the post about sticking to the rules and playing a game to get more traffic…..I also want to add the importance of being genuinely useful. You have probably read blogs ‘top 10 things to do in Paris’ which have clearly just copied and pasted the top 10 on trip advisor with stock pictures and no genuine insight or useful details like costs or why it’s worth visiting.

On pages like this, you click, scroll for a few seconds and then never visit again. Writing genuinely useful and insightful content will encourage people to then become regular followers and to see what other blogs you have on your site. This helps your stats and also helps you with SEO as search engines recognise you as a popular and useful site if people are choosing to stay.

That’s why QUALITY is your biggest friend. Aim to write long blogs (I aim for 2,000 words but minimum 1,500) with lots of useful genuine information. This is how you stand the test of time against Google.

Create a newsletter

I often repeat the importance of collecting emails from your readers early on with a subscribe button. These are your most loyal followers and having direct access to their inbox is a great way for you to stay in touch, share what you have been doing, what blogs you’ve been writing.

Remember that Google and social media platforms can change their algorithms at any time. You are in control of your subscribers though and can contact them as and when you like.

I use MailChimp and try to send out an update every 4-6 weeks or so.

Here are some different ways to collect email addresses:

• Have a sign-up box on your website
• Include a link to subscribe at the bottom of your email signature
• Collect email addresses if you are at an event of are giving a talk
• Remind followers on your social media platform to subscribe
• Entice people to subscribe by doing exclusive giveaways or revealing ‘first to know’ information on your newsletter

Analyse and repeat what works

Make sure your site is set up with Google Analytics. This means you can access lots of important information on who is visiting your site, when and where they are going to.

Although it can be a bit tedious looking at this (with the exception of seeing traffic to your site each day which is quite addictive!) it provides you with really valuable information. You are able to see what your most popular blogs are. Where people are heading on your site after finishing reading the blog and how they got there in the first place (i.e. via Facebook or a search engine).

Once you’ve got this information you can then start repeating what is working. Seeing what is attractive to readers and how you can provide more of it.

Blogging is just the first part

Great, so you’ve written a killer blog. It’s got great pictures, a catchy title and the perfect keyword/SEO combo. Once you click ‘publish’ your job is not yet done. To drive that initial traffic to your page you are going to need to get your blog out there in the world. This is why having a good social media following really helps (more tips on that here).

Here are some ideas of how you can share your blog….

• Post about it on social media…straight away and then schedule posts for the future
• Send out a newsletter to your readers
• Contact any companies or people who might be interested in reading or sharing your blog. Did you make any recommendations on your blog? Let them know!
• Go through your website and find previous relevant blogs you have written then add a link to this new blog
• Find forums on your topic and post a link to your blog on these discussions
• Join relevant Facebook groups and share your blogs here

The more creative you can get with sharing your blog, the more it will be read. The more it is read, the higher up it will appear in search engines and the more followers you will get.

This is an important step not to be missed as it will build what is called a ‘backlink strategy’. Basically, if Google can see others are sharing and reading your post then they will rank it higher.

How to become a successful blogger

Really I could go on forever about blogging. But this list covers the fundamental basics. If you follow all these steps consistently you will really start to see big changes in your traffic.

If you found this blog helpful, follow me on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. Or you can subscribe to my YouTube channel. I give all my advice out for free on my website. If you want to say thanks, you can buy me a coffee!

*Any women reading this?* I founded a women’s adventure community called Love Her Wild. Check out our private Facebook page and see what adventures we have coming up.

Any questions at all…..just ask in the comments box below!