So you want to become a successful blogger, right? You also want to become a Pro Blogger and take your blog to the next level? If yes, then you are not alone, there a lot of bloggers who want to become popular and successful.
But making a successful blog isn’t easy. Starting a blog and making it successful are two different things. You can set up a blog in less than half an hour. Whereas making it a successful one and earning money from it can take years. (On an average.)
More than a thousand blogs are started daily so what do you think makes the pro bloggers stand out from the rest? It’s easy to answer – their blogging skills and experience. Almost every successful blogger have these qualities.
You can’t gain experience overnight, but you can sharpen your skills from day one. There are some blogging skills which you will need if you don’t want to fail. Most of the people quit blogging in 6 months. You don’t want to be like them. Right?
Surely, you aren’t like the ones who are not serious about it. It’s important to treat your blog as a business if you want to become a pro blogger. People who are blogging as a hobby will not try to become a pro blogger anyway!
Like real life, it’s also important to have skills in blogging. Those who are having skills find it much easier to succeed than those who don’t want to do anything about their skills. Strong skills are the things which will have an effect on your success.
So now, we must focus on the blogging skills which will make you an amazing blogger. Let’s start.
8 Must-Have Blogging Skills To Become A Pro Blogger
#1 Content Writing
No matter what your blog is about, there will be one thing that’s the essence of blogging i.e. your blog content. Only when you have well-written blog posts you will find more readers. And for that, you must be a good writer.
Blogging is not only about writing but how well you can write surely has an effect on the mind of your readers. The better you write the more they will carve for reading your blog posts. It’s hard to find a successful blogger who isn’t a good writer!
Having content writing skills is very important because it’s your content that makes your blog stand out. Just think if it wasn’t, the same information is present almost everywhere. Both your readers and search engines love great content.
You can’t become a good writer in a single day. You will need to write a lot daily to master this skill. Try to write at least 500 words daily and you will start seeing improvements in some months. Reading blogs about writing will also help a lot.
#2 SEO
SEO is the skill you need for ranking your blog much higher on Google. There are many reasons to learn about SEO but one of the main reasons is to get more organic traffic. To get more quality traffic to your blog you should do SEO.
One of the common mistakes that new bloggers make is they think that they just need to put more and more content on their blogs. And, people will come on their own. They just sit and write, while writing is important it’s not all.
It’s one of the most essential blogging skills you need. Or, would you like to pay a ton of money to others for doing SEO on your blog? I guess you wouldn’t want to, SEO experts charge thousands of dollars per month. As a new blogger, it’s too much!
And why pay someone else when you can do everything by yourself? SEO is a skill which is not only limited to blogging. You should read SEO blogs to learn more and more about SEO. But it’s best when done with trial and error. (To gain experience.)
#3 Strong Will & Determination
Blogging is something which requires that you learn about it daily. It’s not something that you can learn in one day because in the digital marketing world thing changes pretty quickly! One day you feel like you know something, the next day it’s gone.
After to learn something more, you need to unlearn it. To become a pro blogger you must have a strong will and determination. Because you will definitely face a lot of problems, then you will know if you’re cut for blogging or not.
It’s not something that’s very easy. Like most of the bloggers say blogging is easy, they are only telling the half-truth. Blogging is easy yet hard at the same time. You need to go through a lot to become successful. Don’t you?
Also, blogging is a mix of skills like writing, marketing, SEO and much more. To become a good blogger you must know the basics of everything. Sometimes you can do everything right but still, fail. So, keep your head high and keep trying.
#4 Networking
There are two main ways to promote your blog – SEO and SMM. We know about SEO but what is SMM? SMM or Social Media Marketing means the process of getting traffic from social media sites. It’s as important as SEO.
When used correctly, social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, etc. can drive a lot of traffic to your blog. But to succeed in these sites you need to be good at networking with other peoples. You must have amazing networking skills.
One of the best things about social media is – if you can build your following then your followers can easily share your content with their friends. This way you can get more and more traffic. And, you can also run ads on these platforms.
Most of the bloggers often neglect social media sites, that’s why they miss on a lot of traffic. There’s a misconception that traffic from social media doesn’t convert well. But, it’s not the truth. When targeted correctly it’s as effective as organic traffic.
#5 Marketing
Just like any other form of marketing the main aim of blogging is to market yourself. And for that, you need to learn the art of marketing like a pro even if you’re not one. Blogging is a business (for most) and like every business it requires marketing.
Marketing your blog is damn important! If you won’t then you will not be able to find readers for your blog and fail miserably. To build a loyal reader base you need to put efforts into promoting yourself and your blog.
When you learn the art of marketing (or selling) you will know how easy it is to influence people and sell them something. After all, we bloggers are always selling something through our content while providing value to our readers.
You should master this skills as it’s not only limited to blogging and will be of very much use. Waiting for people to come by themselves isn’t a good idea, whatever you do try to promote yourself and your blog as much as possible.
#6 CSS & HTML
Although coding skills are not necessary it is better if you know the basics. I’m not saying that you need to be an expert developer to succeed in blogging. I also don’t know much about coding expect the basics. (Which is some lines of code.)
Even though with WordPress, you can handle all the HTML stuff and almost everything, but knowing how things work is good. Learning HTML basics like – Alt tags, headings, paragraphs and much more will be good for you.
There are also a lot of WordPress themes from which you can design your blog as you like. But to make some additional design changes you should learn the basics of CSS. Learning CSS will allow you to add amazing design to your blog.
Learning the basics of coding will help you to make your blog stand out from the rest. Your blog design is the first thing that your readers will notice. You can learn the basics of coding from some blogs about programming.
#7 Photo Editing
You would have heard “An image is worth a thousand words”. Right? It’s true, without images blog posts seems kind of boring. including images makes your blog post more appealing and also boosts it’s page views.
There are also a lot of other benefits of using images in your blog posts. Some of the other benefits are – making content easier to read, increasing white space,. You must use at least one image in your blog posts. (If not more.)
It’s clear that using images is very important, so you must improve your image editing skills. Again, I not saying you must be an expert but knowing the basics will be good. You should at least, know how to resize, crop and format the images.
Set your blog images according to your blog and your blog will look much better. Your images should be related to your blog posts. Also, you can also find images with no copyright restrictions from many stock images sites.
#8 Hard Work & Patience
Well to be successful at anything you need to work damn hard. (Without a doubt!) No matter how much skill you have, if you don’t work hard then it’ll lead to your downfall. There isn’t any shortcut to success, blogging is no different.
In fact, if you want to make money online you will have to work much harder than other people. Here you get results for what you do, and you are responsible for yourself. If you mess up then you will have to face it yourself.
And also. you can’t make money online in just a few months. The ones who are making a living through working online have been doing this for quite a time. I’m not saying you can’t do it, but it’s as hard as doing a job. (If not much harder than any job.)
Most of the bloggers quit too early because when they start they think it’s too easy. Blogging requires patience, sometimes it even takes years to earn a single penny from a blog. But, when a blog starts growing it just goes upwards.
Final Thoughts…
These were some of the most important blogging skills you need to succeed. Just remember – “Every expert was once a beginner”. You can’t master these skills in a short time. Even I am not an expert at anything.
The thing is – you need to practice everything daily, even it’s a little bit. Practice makes a man and women perfect. (Gender equality.) And also, never compare your beginning with someone’s max. stage. Every pro blogger has struggled a lot.
So, what blogging skills do you think are the most important? Which skills do you wish you learned much before when you started your blog? Let us know in the comments below.