What Skills I should have in order to be a Successful Blogger?

Any business or job needs a specific skill set. Blogging is no exception.

In order to write a successful blog, you will need to develop a specific set of skills and will have to continuously nurture and innovate your skill set, expertise, knowledge and presentation. Newbie bloggers have this doubt on what are the essential skills needed to become a blogger or the skills needed to earn money from your blogs. In this post, I will elaborate the basic skills you need to make your blog successful.

Knowledge Of Your Niche

First and foremost is knowledge.

You must know your industry in and out and must have deep expertise regarding a subject. If you don’t know what you are talking about, your readers won’t take you seriously and they will not keep coming back for more information. It is not a mandate to have the knowledge when you are starting out. You can start without the expert hat but it is essential that you eventually acquire the knowledge and expertise of your niche and industry.

You must continuously learn new things and deliver value through your blog. This value can only be delivered when you have hands on experience and knowledge about the subject you are talking about. Using the internet to outsource knowledge and then blogging about it won’t take you far. You will just be adding to the noise and it will be difficult to gain authority among your audience.

Take the example of this blog. I started writing this blog only after I have built successful blogs, websites, worked in different companies, started my own and only after I was armed with all the knowledge it takes to make a website successful, I started writing about this subject. I could have started it without having the knowledge, a lot of bloggers do that and are successful at it. They eventually learn the things on the way but it is recommended to gain at least some knowledge about the industry and then start the blog or website.

Interest of Learning New Things

Next comes the drive and the interest of learning new things.

If you want your blog or website to remain successful, you will need to continuously learn new things and blog about it before anyone else does. When you establish yourself as an expert, people will expect new things from your blog every day and you will need to satiate their thirst. If they don’t find anything new and interesting, they will slowly drift away.

This is one of the problems many bloggers face in their career. They start with great enthusiasm, take the blog to a level  but eventually, they fail to keep up with the drive of learning new things. Somehow, the energy fades away and they find it really difficult to generate new ideas for the blog, driving traffic, giving value and creating content people want to read.

When you are starting out, you will have lots of ideas. However, these ideas will fade away once you reach somewhere. You will face Writer’s block and may hit a Non creative zone after a while. Your interest may take a nosedive, there are so many possibilities. In order to keep the blog successful, you will need this skill set in your kitty – the passion and drive to learn new things and then blog about them on a consistent basis.

Writing Skills

The third most important skill needed to make a blog successful – good writing and presentation skills.

By good writing, I do not mean writing that is just error free. By good writing, I mean writing that is easy to read, easily comprehendible, easy to understand and digest. Good writing comes naturally with enough practice so if you are starting out today, don’t expect to master this craft within a few months.

This skill will gradually develop as you keep walking the path. You will make lots of mistakes but if you keep hustling, you will eventually learn how to articulate your thoughts which people can easily understand.

Creative Thinking

Blogging is a creative profession. Every single post is basically a display of your thought.

You will need to be creative and think like a creative. This means, thinking what your readers want from your blog and then composing your blog post to meet that need. You will need to understand your readers and come up with content ideas. You will need to analyse what kind of post works for your blog and what kind of post does not work and keep working on the type that does. You will need to check your blog traffic statistics and analyze the areas of improvement.

All of this involves creative thinking skills and an analytical mind. Don’t worry if you don’t know how to develop this skill set, you will eventually learn the nitty grittiys overtime with repeated hustling and dedication. But the ability to think creatively is a necessary aspect and the blogger must posses it or develop it to make the blog successful.

Web development and SEO

No you don’t need to have software engineering skills to develop a blog or website. But acquiring some web development skills is a necessity.

As you keep working on your website, you will need to understand a lot of technical things which are required to keep the blog running. You will need to understand what web hosting is, how it works, how to tweak your web server, how to change the design of your blog, how to customize your design, how to add a specific functionality  to your website and so forth.

You will also need to learn and understand search engine optimization. Things like how the search engines view your site, what kind of content works, how to optimize your posts for search engines, how to acquire organic traffic from search engines, best practices and so on.

All of this requires some knowledge of how the web works, knowledge of web server, knowledge of scripting languages e.g HTML, CSS, JavaScript. You can learn this overtime though, it is not necessary that you first need to acquire this knowledge and only then you can start your blog.

No it is not.

You can have no knowledge of these things and still acquire them as you walk the path. However, you will need to acquire these skills to keep the blog successful. Outsourcing is one way out but it is not recommended since you will need these skills every other day and dependancy on another person or a company is not a wise decision.

Dedication

There is no substitute for hard work, passion and drive.

Any business or profession needs dedication, hard work and persistence. You will need to be dedicated and patient before expecting any results. It is perfectly okay if your writing is not attractive but you will need to work on it and make it work. You will need to write hundreds of thousands of blog posts before expecting to be a better writer. You will need to dedicate enough time and energy into acquiring the skill sets that I have mentioned in this post.

This comes with repeated hustling, persistence, hard work and patience.

I would love to hear your thoughts, and If you have specific questions on any skills that are needed to make a blog successful, please write to me in the comments below.