10 Best blogs for bloggers: Summary of their blog tips for newbies

Let’s go through 10 blogs for bloggers which will help you to make your blog more professional, bigger and better. Though I should tell you that this list of ten best blogs for bloggers is not a countdown of any sort.

It’s just the list of blogs which I feel every new blogger should study as they start their blogs.  I’ve also made a little summary of their blog tips for newbies to spare you from the trouble of browsing through their archives.

Study we should, and a lot but sometimes we miss out the most important tips or don’t understand them even when they are right in front of our eyes. This usually happens when we are into a new field, we can’t grasp the totality of the experience and that’s when we get lost.

Blogging is about shooting away with our feelings as words and pictures, that’s right. Usually most bloggers start their blogs with that mindset, but as they move on they realize that there are lots of factors involved in this mere shooting of words.

Statistics say that there are more than 181 million blogs shouting loud and meek in the world-wide web. Just imagine the number of  bloggers behind these blogs and the number of people viewing blogs daily. I don’t mean to discourage you but when you decide to become a blogger and start a blog, your blog has to be something absolutely unique.

So instead of shying away from starting a blog or getting disappointed with the blog you are running, look at our list of the 10 most studied blogs for bloggers and get all their latest blog tips in a nutshell. Get ready to rock your blog with the latest blogging and SEO tips.

These top 10 blogs are specially written to help bloggers. They are here to help us grow our blogs bigger, help us have massive traffic (readers), earn money from what we post or, who knows, start a six figure income from our rooms!

Usually when new bloggers get on the scene, most of them don’t know the basic technical things like which font pleases the eyes of the readers, how big the header should be, why should the picture be re-sized and to what size, how come somebody’s blog loads so fast whereas yours takes an eon to load, how to use keywords……

There are also problems in the posts not appearing in Google search, no subscribers for one year, sometimes you become the only reader at your blog, you don’t understand any fuck about SEO, you don’t understand the Google algorithms named after so innocent looking animals and birds (heard Panda and Penguin?), don’t know the right time to share your post……

Be dead sure that I haven’t mastered all these tricks. I know all this because I have gone through all these problems. If only I had read beforehand (or when I was just starting) the essential blogs for newbie bloggers I am listing below, I’d not have much of the headache. Pretty sure, applying these little tips at the blog, I have seen lots of changes and blogging has become a bit easier for me (technically).

But in the beginning we don’t understand these things and we don’t even guess that there are bloggers out there whose main aim is to help bloggers like us at specific points of our journey in blogging.

Something like the native Americans not being able to see the ships of the Europeans, though they were  standing huge and tall right before their eyes.

The only thing that matters is, when we do actually find them and start understanding the technical jargons of blogging.

There are two ways of learning all this blog business:

1. Do it your hard way, and learn as you move on –  Usually starting a  free blog at wordpress or blogspot, searching for solutions to your specific problems on Google.

or,

2. Do it as more experienced bloggers tell you what to do - Read from the top bloggers and do as they suggest, saving yourself a lot of time for the real blogging.

Choosing the second alternative is the wisest for everyone, because it will help you deduct all the time you spend on searching as the problems arise.

To help you save your time, I’m also giving you the basic blogging tips which I implemented in this blog. I’ll also be discussing about some fascinating results from those tips.

There are thousands of helpful blogs for new bloggers like us and my opinion is that you should study them even before starting a blog. This is highly recommended to those people who are thinking of starting a blog. Feel your ground before stepping on it.

For those bloggers who are already on the scene but unaware of these helpful resources, it is a must. For newbies, the suggestion is to eat up all these blogs, their latest posts and their whole archives…….. and try all the tips on your blogs.

Enough of this preaching, now let’s get down to business.

List of must-study blogs for bloggers and how they help us

MyBloggerTricks If you are blogging on the blogspot platform, then this site comes in handy. It helps you solve almost all the problems related with blogspot blogs. Mybloggertricks gives you solutions for designing your blog, adding beautiful buttons, slides, comment boxes, subscription boxes, banners, music players, pop ups, related posts thumbnails and much more.

The site is regularly updated with posts which will explain you SEO, marketing, publicity, monetization tips and traffic increasing tips and tricks.

WpBeginner WordPress users are bound to visit this site during the search of solutions for the various problems that appear on their blogs. So why not visit the site beforehand and get a prior knowledge on running on WordPress smoothly?

While visiting WpBeginner, browse through the archive to learn the how to’s of fixing your wordpress blog and optimizing it for better performance and productivity.

Problogger This site will help you to understand everything about blogging. Go through its archives, you will surely find thousands of tips on how you can create a successful blog. Darren Rowse, the blogger at Problogger, has a great page with loads of tips for new bloggers.

BlogTyrant Go through the archive of Blog Tyrant. Everything about blogging is explained in a very simple way. Learn about 13 important things you need to do when you are not blogging.

ViperChill Don’t be afraid of the super long posts on this blog. Once you start reading, you won’t know when it has ended. They are not stories here that the fantastic blogger writes, but blog tips on viral marketing. If you are on WordPress, visiting this post will help you a lot.

Copyblogger  This blog has exactly what you are looking for i.e. how to write content. You will be enlightened with their copy writing techniques which will help you to make your writing readable, likable and share-able. Start with their 7 ways to write better tutorial.

QuickSprout Yeah! The same suggestion again. Devour everything that Neil Patel has written here. You need to, because he is one of the finest SEO consultants in the world. There are dozens of enlightening posts on this blog, but you can start with this post on how lengthy but detailed posts rank well in the search engines.

SmartPassiveIncome Don’t be baffled with Pat Flynn’s report of his monthly income from his blogs, just go into his archive and you will find out why he is such a successful blogger. You can start exploring the site from here.

SeoMoz Visit this blog to learn everything about SEO. You will get hints on how Google works and how you can take your posts to the first page when people search for things in the internet. For newbie bloggers, the first things to read are the posts on keyword research, copywriting, page titles, on page optimization………… For now you can start with a helpful blog post on how to write successfully about anything.

Blogging with Amy Helps you maintain your blog and understand different aspects of blogging. Amy has targeted this blog for novice bloggers and she explains things related to blogging in an easy way. Start learning  from her blog with this post on 10 tips for new bloggers.

Well, these are the ten best blogs for newbies with one very helpful post from each.. Since a newbie is someone who is new in a field, all he needs is a lot of study and practice.

Do you agree? How would you be able to play Dandi & Biyo, the traditional game of Nepal, if you have never seen it played? What would you do to master the art? Search on Google? Watch videos? Make the playing materials yourself? Collect friends to play with you?

Yeah! The same applies for blogging too. We need a lot of preparedness and deep study. Blogging is not just vomiting out your feelings on the web, the world is already full of the stink.

To say better, blogging might be throwing up an awesome pile of shit so that everybody notices and pukes with you.

Okay, the second part of the lecture is done. Now, let me tell you about all the blogging tips  from the awesome blogs that every newbie should implement on his blog.

Summary of the basic blogging tips every new blogger should read and apply

Choose your niche –  What are you going to blog about? Write about things you are comfortable with. Suppose, you are well versed in the ways of flirting, then start a blog with flirt tips and not a blog about your opinion on the political affairs of Nepal.

If you don’t choose a niche now,  then when you start visiting the hundreds of blogs written for bloggers for some specific advice, they will make you feel that you have committed the gravest of sin by not blogging in a niche. They will yell ‘niche, niche, niche’.

Doing a blog in a niche topic is way better than trying to write about all the things in the world. You can exhaust yourself on the topic and it will also help you in ranking properly in the search results.

That means when you choose your blog to be the resource for all the e-books you can download in Nepal, then you need to write just about e-books and nothing else.

Choose the blogging platform

WordPress is the best, Google’s blogspot ain’t bad either. WordPress has thousands of plugins to ease up your blogging attempt, blogspot is owned by Google and that means they can take your site down anytime if you violate their policies.

WordPress here means self-hosted wordpress where you register your domain, download wordpress and start blogging from there.

You will have a domain name like flirtmaster.com  when you are self-hosted.

With Blogger you will have flirtmaster.blogspot.com and flirtmaster.wordpress.com with the free version of WordPress.

Which name do you think the readers can remember easily?

Design your blog

1. Before designing your own blog, visit around a hundred blogs and get the ideas from them. Don’t go for large headers with flashy colors, that distracts the readers.

2. Don’t forget to put in the social buttons for liking and sharing. The color combination of the blog should be pleasing to the eyes.

3. Font should be anything that is readable in black. Fonts experts say that Georgia (serif) and Helvetica (sans-serif) are the best fonts for screen reading. Proxima Nova Regular is also another good readable font.

But font viewing also depends on the system your reader is browsing through.

The font size should be 16 pixels or above. The space between two lines should be enough to give rest to the eyes. Background color should be white.

If you like the fonts and spacing of this blog, then you can play around at your blog with our code as an example.

WordPress users can go to Theme Options>Style Posts and Pages>Body Box to edit your fonts and spacing.

Have a look at the style we’ve implemented at our blog but please don’t copy and paste. You can change the numbers and letters manually.

The font you want to give importance on the visitor’s browser should be written at the beginning of the font family section.

margin: 0 0 25px;
padding: 30px;
color: #222222;
font-size: 16px;
font-family: Georgia, Sans-serif, Arial, Verdana;
line-height: 26px;

Play with them until your fonts and spacing look the coolest and, eye refreshing for your visitors.

4. Get rid of all the useless widgets from your sidebars; no blogroll, no radio stations and no flash animations. Keep the sidebars as less cluttered as possible.

5. When you have enough posts on your blog, you need to show your top posts and subscription boxes above the fold. It’s because that’s the exact place where their eyes get attracted to as soon as they land on your blog.

Above the fold is the area of your blog that is seen without a scroll when a visitor opens your site in his browser.

6. Have at least 10 blog posts to entertain your readers before publicizing your blog.

Design your urls (permalink structure)

Url is the address of your post that appears on the address bar of the browser. The url of this post is pakhribas.com/opinion/10-blogs-for-bloggers.

But if I had left out the opinion part while designing the url, it would have benefited in SEO.

Unluckily, I found out about this much later and now the urls can’t be changed. They can be changed but with a lot of redirections. They say a blog with lots of redirects won’t do good with SEO. So leave out the category part (opinion, how to’s, news etc. are the categories here at our blog) and keep just the post name with the name of your site, if you blog on a niche topic.

Before you start blogging, you can set the permalink structure to %sitename%/%postname%/ in the Settings part of your wordpress blog for a url structure without categories.

In blogspot blogs, this can be done easily in the Permalink Structure part of Settings, or from beside the New Post that you have created.

Maybe a post with flirting tips for 20 year olds would be something like: flirtmaster.com/Nepali-flirt-style-for-20-year-olds

The best bloggers say that tags are not very necessary these days but if you want to make your blog easily searchable then you can keep them.

Learn about SEO

Google up the full form of SEO and you will understand that it is an addictive game. Remember anything that is addictive kills some of your freedom and creativity.

The game is about how you can make your blog post titled “Ten must study blogs for bloggers: Summary of their blog tips for newbies” show up on the front page of Google when people hit ‘blogs for bloggers’, ‘ten blogs for bloggers’, ‘best blogs for newbies’, ‘top ten blogs for bloggers’ etc. on the Google’s search box.

You want your writing to be read, right? That’s what we write for, we write so that others can read our awesome stuff.

When you find that no one’s reading your posts, then you will start having headaches related to SEO.

Try searching for ‘seo headache’ on Google, you’ll understand what I mean.

Resize pictures -

Pictures should be resized for the sake of the speed of your blog. The pictures with bigger sizes (above 50KB) take longer to load on your reader’s browser.

So learn to compress or resize your pictures for your blogs with tools like Yahoo’s Smush.it, Photoshop, Windows Picture Manager, Skitch etc.

Length of post

The top bloggers say that for a post to be visible on the search engines, a post should be longer than 500 words. Now as the competition is so high, maybe 500 words won’t be enough. But writing a 20,000 words post without any sense also won’t help us.

A paragraph should have 3 to 5 lines. Short paragraphs help your readers to stick to the post and not get disheartened by the jungle of words.

So, I learned, if you blog thrice a week, you should write at least 1500 unavoidable words about each topic. If you blog daily, you can do away with 500 words. Remember it’s all about getting found when somebody searches.

Google shows up only the posts with quality. A post which ranks on the second page of the search result has no visitors.

Language style

Write as if you are talking to the reader.

Write in the language that even a 7th grader can understand. Don’t use sign language but pictures will do good.

Whether you are a Nepali blogger, Indian blogger, or an African blogger, understand that people search on Google because they don’t know something and if the answer you give is in Oxford University English then you will be putting them into another bigger trouble.

Marketing your blog

New bloggers shouldn’t rely only on Google. Network your blog with Google+,  Facebook and Twitter. Create a Facebook page for your blog and  ask your friends to Like your page. Create a group on Facebook, it is not necessary that the group should be related to your blog.

Then, share every time you publish.

Like Facebook pages with high number of members and drop in your related links when the comments on a particular subject seem to be growing. Remember the link to your post should be related to the discussion going on.

Join as many Facebook groups as possible, usually the ones with lots of active members. Whenever you publish something on your blog, share the posts on the page and the groups. Remember the timing when these groups are most active.

In the case of Nepal, Facebook users get quite active during the morning, in the afternoon after the schools and offices close and during holidays.

Google+ is a must for bloggers because Google is the God these days and will be for a long time. Follow people, befriend people, start a community and share them your best stuff.

The same rules apply for Twitter too. Find out for yourself when your friends and followers  get real active on these three social networks.

These days the SEO blogs that most bloggers read are saying that three things are going to be very important for bloggers on Google+, especially for their Author Rank:

1. Befriending and following top bloggers

2. Getting active in the interaction, like sharing posts, commenting on top bloggers’ status and links

3. Getting your posts shared by others

Understand about keywords

Keywords are words which people type on search engines to find a specific thing. I type ‘blogs for bloggers’ to find out about the various blogs which need to be read by bloggers to understand more about the blogging process.

Here ‘blogs for bloggers’ is the keyword and any blog post with these words or with content related to these words will be shown by Google.

But gone are the days when you could write a story with a character named ‘Howtomakemoney’ and create a long meaningless conversation between Howtomakemoney and Youcantmakemoney , the next day your blog would be visited by 1,00,000 people searching on the ways to make money.

That’s a thing of the past and called keyword stuffing in the present. Google hates keyword stuffing.

The latest trend in using keywords is the post you write should develop around the keywords and not the keywords developing all around and within the post.

Suppose, you are writing about Nepali leaders, then it is not necessary to write Nepali leaders a hundred times in a 1000 words long post to show your blog on the first page of Google when people type ‘nepali leaders’ on Google.

There are many more things other than keywords that contribute in the ranking of a post.

And I have experimented and found that a post written without thinking about keywords can get to the first page of Google’s search result.

Ranking is all about creating a good headline and elaborating it perfectly in the post that follows. The more user-friendly and informative your description is the higher are the chances of your blog post getting ranked in the first page.

So, it means that to use the targeted keyword wisely, all you need to do is use more of its synonyms and write an awesome post about it.

Another tip I got from the helpful blogs for bloggers is that Google doesn’t mind about punctuation in keyword usage. Suppose for this post, I can use ‘blogs’ in one sentence and ‘for bloggers’ in another sentence.

It means that it is not necessary that the words from the targeted key phrase should be together every time. So it depends upon how you masterfully use the synonyms of keywords and separate them here and there masterfully.

Just think, if I wrote a blog post about  diabetes along with a specialist on diabetes,  and both of us published our articles on separate blogs……. whose article would rank higher?

Obviously the doctor’s and, the opposite if you think that Google is stupid.

But if I wrote the same article with tips on diabetes from all around the world, my experiences on diabetes, some homeopathic and Ayurvedic treatment tips for diabetes and I wrote in a clear and easy language making my headline and paragraphs understandable then I think my post on diabetes would stand a higher chance of getting on the top of Google search.

Well, it’s what I’ve learned about SEO i.e Search Engine Optimization.

SEO people say there are two types of keywords:

1. Short tail keywords – In the above example, ‘diabetes’ is the short tail keyword. A short tail keyword has 1 to 3 words.

The variations of this keyword can be ‘diabetes’  ’diabetes symptoms’ ‘diabetes treatment’ ‘diabetes ayurvedic treatment’ and so on.

2. Long tail keywords – The long tail keywords for diabetes can be anything. It depends upon how we search for answers on Google.

Like I could type ‘diabetes treatment centre in nepal’ or ‘diabetes and girija prasad koirala relationships’ or ‘which is better diabetes or bppv’ then Google would not show the same pages as it had shown when we typed just ‘diabetes’.

In one case, if the doctor from New York hasn’t written about the long tail keywords I typed.

As you can see, there are experts in every field and every one of them has a blog or a website, short tail keywords are not worth writing for. I can tell you this because I have experimented with that and, obviously failed.

Those keywords have already been written about by experts before you were born.

But if you are the master of that subject with a good writing style, you might succeed.

So what you need to do is, go for the long tail ones, write about diabetes but for different pattern of searchers. Then your keywords may bring you some traffic, otherwise your blog will be as barren as the valleys of Tibet.

Getting your post localized is another benefit you can get out of long-tailed queries. Suppose you are a blogger from Nepal, then while writing a post on diabetes, if you mention the Nepali methods of diabetes treatment (if any), the rise of diabetic patients in Nepal, or insert some information about Nepali diabetics, then there are high chances that when a Nepali person (using google.com.np) will find your post when he queries about diabetes.

The searcher will also find you on the first page if he is following you on Google+..

The next thing I’ve learnt about keywords from the best blogs I’ve read is this:

Keyword Density : The good bloggers I’ve read from say that Keyword Density is just a myth. But let’s first understand what keyword density is.

Simply, keyword density is the amount of keywords you place inside your post and it is calculated as ;

Number of keyword divided by the total number of words on your post multiplied by 100.

Suppose you wrote a post with 1000 words and entered the keyword here and there 50 times, then your keyword density is 5. Divide 50 by 100 and multiply that by 100.

SEO people have varied opinions about the perfect keyword density. Some say it should be below 4, some say below 3 and some say it should be below 1.

What’s the fuss about keyword density? Simply because keywords help the search engines to find what the post is about and that is a major factor in the ranking on search result page. The other thing is that when Google finds that the content you’ve written is keyword stuffed, your site will be penalized.

That means, no ranking for your blog.

No rank means no traffic and no traffic means no readers and subscribers.

So, I leave it up to you to decide whether you want to play with keyword density or try writing the good stuff.

If you want to do keyword research then you can sign up with Google Adwords. Once signed up, you can go to the Tools and Analysis section, hit the keyword you want to research about in the Word or Phrase box and  click Search, it will show you how many people search for the keyword along with other variations of the keyword.

Adwords will also show you the competition related with that keyword. You can also change location, language and devices of the searchers from the Advanced Filters and Options button.

Writing on topics where the competition is high is worthless for new bloggers. That competition is between the advertisers and how much they pay for the ads that appear through Adsense on the particular blogs where they write about those keywords.

And certainly, experts are writing contents on their blogs and getting all those ads. Newbies like us don’t stand a chance in monetizing those keywords unless we try very hard.

You can try writing on low competition keywords and check how you fare in the SEO business.

Another way you can find what people are searching is quite obvious, just type in “dying blog” on Google and as you type the phrase, Google will show you what people are searching for which are related to ‘dying’ and ‘blog’. Those are the other long tails you write about if you feel relevant.

As the first result appears about ‘dying blog’, you can still get more keyword ideas if you look at the end of the page where Google shows you “Searches related to dying blog”. Well, that’s a well of more keyword ideas for your post.

When you search for things on the internet, if you find that the first page is filled with YouTube videos, Q&A forums and other blogs with low Page Rank and mediocre stuff, then there’s chance that your blog can shoot to the first place if you become more informative than them.

But again, if you have awesome content then who knows………….. competition may not be too tough for you.

Plugins 

A self hosted site running on Worpress has the choice of thousands of plugins which simplify the work for the blogger. But here we will deal with three basic plugins every WordPress blog must have. These plugins can be downloaded from the plugin directory within your blog’s dashboard.

1. Google Sitemap Generator Plugin – It helps to create a neat site map for your blog. A site map helps the Google’s robots crawl your blog efficiently.

For bloggers on blogspot, you can refer to this blog post on how to create and submit your sitemap to Google.

2. WP Super Cache – This plugin helps you to serve the cached version of your blog to the readers. For basic understanding, a cached version of your post loads within 3 seconds on the reader’s browser and it also helps you to lower your hosting costs.

Super Cache is a must as it helps improve your blog load speed and you should know that the load speed of a blog is also one of the factors in the ranking of a blog.

You can set up this plugin following this perfect way of setting up Super Cache.

3. WordPress SEO – The best plugin for managing your SEO. It gives you keyword ideas, analyses the readability of your post in the SEO viewpoint, measures the keyword density in a post, gives suggestions for your heading, post url, subheadings, meta description and images.

And above all, it analyses how good your post has become in the SEO viewpoint as soon as you hit the Save Draft button or the Publish button.

Don’t get deluded, having the Green circle in every post doesn’t mean that they should come up in the first page of Google for your targeted keyword. But your aim should be in getting that Green button of SEO success in every post you write.

Adsense

Most bloggers get into blogging with the attraction of making tons of money from their blogs. Google’s Adsense lets you have its ads on your blog when you get approved. So, to start this Adsense business, first you need to apply for it.

Read the Adsense policy which says that you can’t write about making bombs, you can’t create a pornographic site, you can’t write about making and abusing drugs……..

You also should be sure that Adsense is approved for blogs based on some languages only. You can click here to view the languages that Adsense supports.

Didn’t find Nepali or Hindi? So, you understand, to be approved by Adsense, you need to have content written in those supported languages.

Usually Adsense takes 6 months to approve Asian blogs.

I have an interesting experience with Adsense. I applied for Adsense about 7 times in total and got rejected each time. On the eighth time, Adsense said that it could fix the problem if I changed the language of my blog.

So, I translated each post written in Nepali into English and applied again. Umm..there were about 150 posts with the average of 800 words in each.

Hurray!! Adsense approved me, now I’m going to earn a sack full of dollars every month!!

Fuck it! Adsense sometimes just slows down your site and your productivity.

But there are thousands of blogs advising bloggers how we can maximize our income with proper placement of ads on our blogs.

Here’s Google’s heatmap which shows the most places readers are attracted to in a blog. The red and dark orange are the hot spots for getting more clicks.

Decide for yourself what you want to put there, your list of popular posts, your subscription box or Google’s ads.

So let’s wind up this little tutorial about the best blogs you can study to become a better blogger along with the summary of the latest blogging tips.

Intelligent readers can drop in their recommendations and their blogging tips via the comment box to help the new bloggers on the scene.

If you are new into blogging, please don’t forget to comment on how this post can be made better.