7 Simple Blogging Tips For Beginners To Make Their Blog Stand Out

In contrary to what a lot of people believe blogging is far from dead.

Yes. It’s harder to build a successful blog than it was 8 years ago because of the competition but if you know how to stand out you’ll be successful.

In this post, I’m going to give 7 simple blogging tips for beginners to make their blog stand out.

Let’s get into it!

1. Narrow down your niche

You might’ve heard this advice a thousand times but don’t underestimate it. Narrowing down your niche makes it so much easier to stand out.

The fewer people you are competing with, the easier it’s going to be to break out and start a successful blogging career.

For those that don’t know what narrowing down your niche means. It’s basically selecting a niche within a niche.

Example:
Let’s say you want to start a personal development blog. I can tell you right now it’ll be hard to stand out with the millions of general personal development blogs that are already online.

To stand out you might have to start narrowing down your niche more. Let’s take a look at how to do that.

List different aspects of your niche
You can divide personal development into productivity, meditation, meditation music, coaching, motivation, habits, management and more.

Find out what subsection is a winner with Google search
You might have noticed that whenever you try to type something into Google the search engine bar always try to guess what you mean.

They make these guesses based on popular searches which means you can use this function to find out if a niche might be a winner.

The way I do this is by taking one of the aspects I came up with earlier and adding that it’s for a specific group. If you don’t know what group to add you can use the alphabet and make Google search do the work for you.

You can even use the alphabet to get hundreds of sub-niches.

[subject] for a

[subject] for b

After that, you just put them in a keyword planner and find out how many websites you’re competing with.

As you can see here there are only 44 websites competing for the keyword “meditation music for anxiety”(QSR is the metric for determining how many websites are competing for the same keyword.) but it does get a decent amount of searches.

This could be a winner!

2. Embrace the way you communicate

It’s true that you have to adjust the way you communicate depending on your niche but that doesn’t mean you have to completely change the way you communicate.

If you like to joke around in real life do the same when you’re writing your content. The most enjoyable content to read in my opinion is “oozing” with personality.

If people can recognize your writing without needing someone to tell them that it’s you then you’re doing a great job.

Important to keep in mind while you’re writing is that even though you might joke around it still has to be relatable to your readers.

If you have a dark sense of humor for example when you’re writing you have to set up the context first so that people understand that’s kind of part of the “act”.

A great example of someone making his style relatable to people is Andrew Schulz. He’s a comedian that walks a fine line when it comes to his standup.

He prefaced everything by calling his style “unsafe comedy”. He’s of the opinion that political correctness takes a lot of the “funny” away in comedy this is why he’s purposely trying to go the opposite way with his comedy and it works.

3. Create an in-depth “about me” page

I believe people underestimate how much you can do to stand out with your “about me” page if you take a strategic approach.

Most blogs will have an “about me” page with this structure:

• Who am I?
• Who is the content on this website?
• Why did I create this website?
• Content
• Call to action

While this is absolutely fine and it works our mission is to stand out which means we’re going to add a few things.

Attack stereotypes in the “Who am I” section?
This is where people tell the story about who they’re and what they have been through. This is an excellent way to convey who you are but it often doesn’t separate you from other bloggers in your niche.

You’re going to have to do some research to find out what stereotypes there are about bloggers in your particular niche and let people know you don’t belong to that group.

Example:

I’m in the “make money online” niche but I personally don’t share a lot of the interests of my colleagues and often go into a different direction.

Most “make money online” bloggers like to travel the world while working from their laptops. I’m not into travelling the world.

I’d rather be at one spot with warm weather and chill.

It’s these things that you can put in your “about me” page to stand out.

Make your journey visual

Telling people about your experiences is one thing showing them is something entirely different. Add pictures and videos of your past that provide your readers with more context.

The more context you add to your “about me” page, the more people get to know about you and why you’re different from all the other bloggers in your niche.

Add a mission statement
Readers will get a lot of information thrown at them at once when visiting your website this is why I’ve noticed that one-liners work pretty well when trying to stand out.

Create a mission statement that is catchy and put some emphasis on it in the rest of your content and people will remember it.

4. Customize your home page

While a lot of people will come to your website through articles you ranked for the homepage still remains one of the most viewed pages on a website.

This why having a customized homepage is a great tool to have to convey what makes you different from all the other blogs on the internet.

Most blogs just have a simple free template that lists the most recent posts. This makes it easy to stand out by doing just a few things different.

These are somethings you can add to stand out:

• Logo
• Custom images
• A consistent color palette
• Quotes
• List of organizations you have worked with.

Add these things and your blog will stick in readers their minds.

5. Go in-depth with your content

You can do millions of things to make your blog stand out but in the end, it all comes down to creating quality in-depth content. The other things will draw readers their attention but your content is what is going to make people stay.

A lot of people have the wrong idea when it comes to writing blog posts in 2019. In the past, you might’ve gotten away with writing simple 10 tips to… but nowadays people want detailed in-depth or highly entertaining content.

This means viewing your blog posts as masterpieces that should be sculptured. Where you can add as much context as possible.

• Use statistics to back up your claims
  2 great sources for statistics are Statista and KOmarketing
• Add quotes from influential people for social proof
• Use your own pictures to explain your concepts
  Get free stock pictures from Pixabay and edit them with Canva.

You’ll notice most people that are ranked on the 10th page of Google often don’t do these things which makes it harder for them to stand out between the bloggers that do.

6.Include your experiences in your content through stories

Everybody is different and has gone through different experiences. This makes your stories the biggest strength when trying to stand out.

When you go on YouTube, for example, the most popular videos are often those based on their own experiences.

“How I did [experience] in [time frame] without [standard practice]”

This doesn’t mean your entire content has to be about your experience but using your experiences to illustrate how or why something works can be extremely powerful.

You’ll notice a lot of people that create good product reviews always add their personal take on the product because they know people value other people’s experiences with the product.

7. Show your face!

Simply showing your face is one of the easiest ways to stand out.

Is it necessary? No.

Does it work? Yes.

It barely takes any work to take a picture and put it on your website but it’s extremely effective because people remember faces.

Final Words

The truth is there aren’t a lot of technical methods you can use to make your website stand out because 90% of what makes a blog work is standard practice.

The only true variable that affects your ability to stand out is “you”. The more you can insert your personality into your content, the higher your chances will be to succeed.