#5onFri: Five Tips to Keep Your Blog Healthy and Vital for Many Years

by Valentine Ferrari
published in Community

If you’re serious about blogging, and you want to find success with it, you’ll need to make sure your blog continually remains valuable and engaging to your readers and subscribers. The more value your blog offers your readers, the healthier it is. The more engaging the content, the greater its vitality. A healthy and vital blog is one that can last for years to come.

Here’s how you can work toward achieving this goal:

1) Always write with passion – choose a topic you love

When it comes to blogging, never forget you’re not just writing for your audience, you’re writing for you, too. This is why it is imperative to focus your blog topic on something that you find interesting. The topic of your blog needs to be one that is well suited to you (your passions and/or your expertise) so that you can add your own unique flare and make it stand out among the masses.

With that in mind, avoid choosing a topic simply because it is trendy or popular. If you don’t find value in the topic, it doesn’t matter how popular it is, you won’t make it fly. Your readers will be able to tell if your content isn’t genuine. Stick with what you know and what you passionately want to learn more about. Readers will respect this and will be able to better connect and relate to you.

2) Don’t rush quality – take time to build your audience

A healthy blog is one that has a strong community. That said, building a strong audience is so much more than having a large number of subscribers. It’s about growing the number of loyal readers you have who return to your blog and actively engage with it (e.g. comment, share, etc.). This is best achieved by connecting with your audience via effective marketing channels.

As Neil Patel’s guide to building your blog audience points out, this includes more than the potential members of your “blog marketing community” (e.g. your subscribers, readers, the people who comment on your posts, share them, etc.). It also includes reaching potential readers as well as the people who know your potential readers.

Take the time to reach your community via various popular channels like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, email, etc. Choose the social media channels that are most widely used by your target audience for best results. Building your audience is about quality, not speed.

3) Don’t force your content – it’s okay to post only once a week

If you think you need to post a blog every day to keep your audience happy, guess again. The reality is that posting daily will likely lead to a lot more work with very little reward. Here’s some reasons why posting everyday is a bad strategy.

For starters, unless you have the time and drive to post daily, posting this much can take the fun out of blogging. Instead of creating content you love, it’s forced, and you’ll resent it like a chore.

You’ll also reduce your social proof if you post too often. A post will receive more exposure, and people are more likely to interact with it if it’s at the top of your blog for longer than one day. Plus, if you add content daily, your subscribers aren’t likely to read every post you write.

Instead of posting every day, you might find that you’re more likely to boost your traffic, subscriber count and income goals by consistently posting once a week, on the same day, in around the same time. Be reliable.

4) Stay on top of the latest SEO trends

SEO is vital to maintain a healthy blog. It’s one of the key ways your blog will get traffic, and how potential readers find you. If you think SEO is a daunting challenge, you’ll be happy to know that there are free tips and tools for making SEO easy, readily available online.

A good idea is to check updates on Search Engine Land, which is a daily publication that covers all aspects of the search marketing industry. You can discover the latest SEO trends, discover SEO how-to guides, and more.

The bottom line is that you can’t afford to ignore SEO if you ever hope to find and maintain success with your blog.

5) Take breaks, but stay connected

Ensuring your blog remains healthy and vital means making sure you stay that way, too, both physically and mentally. If you ever reach a point where you feel the need to take a break, do it and do it guilt-free. You owe it to yourself and to your readers.

Keep in mind: taking a break from blogging doesn’t mean you necessarily have to take a break from your audience. There are still other ways you can connect and keep readers engaged and interested, such as social media and email.

Just make sure your followers know you’re taking a break. This way they won’t be left out of the loop and they can look forward to your return.

Above all, remember, forcing content doesn’t work. If your heart isn’t in what you’re writing, your readers will know and your blog’s health will suffer for it.


A freelance writer and avid blogger, Valentine Ferrari is a regular contributor to Socialnomics, VegasMaster and 60SecondMarketer. She enjoys sharing her tips, diverse interests and experience as a writer with fellow bloggers, readers and those who have a passion for writing. When she’s not typing away at her computer, you can usually find Valentine curled up on her couch with a book or planning her next travel adventure.

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