Creating a successful blog requires a combination of skills. It is only after you have mastered the basic skills that you will have a chance to succeed as a blogger.
Most bloggers fail because they give up learning these skills too early. Unless you have prior experience, most of these skills will take you a few years to master.
The beauty of it is that once you master these blogging skills, you can start a blog at any time about any topic and make money with it.
When you embark on learning these skills, know that you will reap their benefits for the rest of your life.
Skills required in Blogging
1. Writing
Of course the first and most important skill that you need in blogging is writing. A blog is only a blog because it has articles. Those articles need to be written.
Every single letter of an article must be punched on the keyboard. Sure, there are only 26 alphabet letters but trust me punching them day in day out takes a toll on you.
There are many bloggers who gave up because writing became hectic. Unfortunately, writing a few blog posts won’t make your blog popular. You need a few hundred articles before you start seeing serious results.
Those several hundred blog posts need to be typed letter by letter.
Grammar
In writing, you need to pay attention to your grammar. Since your blog will be read by many people from different countries around the world, you need to write grammatically correct sentences.
Your sentences must observe universal grammar rules. There are some rules that vary from region to region but you must use rules that are acceptable by majority of your readers.
Learning grammar as a blogger takes practice. The more you read other blog posts and write your own, the better you become at grammar.
You don’t need to have been a good grammar student; you can learn and perfect it.
Knowledge
You may have writing skills but if you don’t have knowledge, you will have nothing to write. A huge part of blogging involves informing your readers.
You may not surprise your readers with deep knowledge but at least your articles must offer knowledge that can make someone visit your blog.
If the knowledge on your blog can be found everywhere else, why would someone bother coming to your blog?
As part of gaining knowledge, you need to do a lot of research. While some argue that curiosity is inborn, I believe anyone can raise their level of curiosity.
It is curiosity that will push you to do research. As you read and watch many videos, your knowledge will increase and you will have many things to write about.
Speed
Many people can type using a keyboard. But typing fast with minimal errors is a skill that not many people have.
Since blogging requires you to write many articles, you need to be fast in typing. On average, you should be able to write at least 1000 words per hour.
At that speed, content on your blog will grow fairly fast.
Learning to type fast is a blogging skill you learn when you do daily practice.
2. Marketing
Perfect writing skills will take you nowhere in blogging if you can’t market your blog. Marketing is not for the faint hearted. We all hate marketers but when you become a blogger, you must be a marketer.
Once in a while you will be hated for marketing your blog. A few times you may get banned from groups. But it is certainly necessary to market your blog.
There are two main skills when it comes to marketing a blog; SEO and social media.
Search Engine Optimization
Search Engine Optimization is tuning your blog to be ranked high on search engines such as Google. It involves targeting the right keywords, building backlinks, interlinking your articles etc.
You don’t have to master all these skills but at least you must be good in picking keywords. If you pick the right keywords, you will rank high on search engines and get visitors without coercing anyone.
Many bloggers who fear asking people directly to read their blog focus on SEO.
Social Media
Social media is the straight forward way of getting visitors to your blog. There are tens of social media channels where you can market your blog.
However, only a few of them can bring you traffic that can make your blog popular. The most common are Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, Reddit and Quora.
If you want your traffic to be majorly from social media, pick one of these platforms and learn how to market on them.
Some platforms are blogger friendly while others do their best to make sure bloggers don’t get readers from them.
Either way, there are many courses online that teach you how to get traffic to your blog from any of these social media channels.
Articles
While you can get lucky with SEO and social media, you cannot get lucky with selling products to your readers on your blog. You can have readers on your blog but if you don’t know how to market products to them in your articles, you will struggle to make sales.
Learning to market products and services in your blog is a skill you need to have as a blogger. Some bloggers avoid this hurdle by putting ads on their blogs.
With ads, you don’t need to do any marketing within your article to make money. But if you can learn to market in your blog posts, you will make extra money. Who doesn’t want extra money?
3. Graphic Design
No matter how good your writing skill is and how great you are at marketing, your blog readers will rate their experience on your blog primarily by how it looks.
Having great content that is written in a bright colored font won’t benefit you in any way. You don’t need to have spectacular design skills but you must be good at basics.
Simple design elements like picking a readable font, using few colors on your blog, aligning your text properly and using good looking images are necessary if you want to be a successful blogger.
If you create your blog using WordPress, you can buy a theme that is already configured. All you will need to do is activate it.
While some blogs succeed with little design skills, it gets to a point where graphics on your blog cannot be avoided.
For your blog to become a brand, your graphic design skills must be put to work.
Blogging Skills Conclusion
These are the three skills that you must have as a blogger for you to succeed. Each of the skills has many other sub-skills which you may need depending on the direction you choose to go with your blog.
At the end of the day, each blog will need one skill more than another. It is only after you have started your blog that you will be able to tell which skill is needed more than the other.
Focus on the most important skills and create a successful blog.
All the best!