Never use a free blogging platform for too long like Blogspot or free hosting. People use it in the beginning for just learning. To get complete control over blogging and build the reputation, go for a paid platform like WordPress self-hosting blog.

You need to buy paid hosting as well as paid theme. This is must for every serious blogger. Read below post to find why I use paid theme and hosting.

How To Start a Blog in 60 minutes

Why I Switched to Genesis Theme

I recommend you to try Bigrock or Bluehost for your Self hosted WordPress Blog

Everyone is not perfect in writing a post in English. But there are tools available in the market to check grammar, punctuation, and spelling mistakes. 

Use tools like Grammarly which check the blog post grammar error and suggest the correction.

Read below post to find how to improve your writing skills.

7 Awesome Tips To Improve Your English Skills For Blogging

Gone are those days when people just write only long texts. This is the time to add pictures to your blog to make it interesting and interactive.

A picture is not only Google friendly but also explain the concept very well. Try to add more pictures and infographics relevant to your blog post.

Read this post to understand how to find picture for your blog

How I create Pictures for my Blog

This is very important. Start concentrating your email building from day one. This is one of the things people often miss to focus in the beginning.

Create a free ebook, course or any other free gift and get email leads from your readers. 

You need email management tool like Mailchimp, Aweber, Getresponse etc and also email popup builder like Thrive Leads.

Read this post to understand how I generate email leads for my blog:

Thrive Leads Review – How it Different from Optinmonster

Blogging is a field where you cannot be successful alone. You have to promote or help others to be successful.

Connect with the fellow blogger with the same niche. Comment on their blog, join blog directories like Indiblogger, Klinkk, and other directory and make friends.

You can also follow them on social media and promote their content.you can also create a personal touch by emailing them.

This has also been told by other great bloggers. Your article has to be detailed and well explained.

A good detailed article has to be more than 2000 words. 

Google rank them better and people more likely to share and use these articles in another post. Look at one example below from Neil Patel Blog:

Beyond Followers: How to Create a Killer Instagram to Funnel Customers

This is very important for your long-term success as a blogger. Focus on a single niche and write detail articles.

People trust you and make you a guru on a subject when you write on a single niche.

Select niche based on your interest and write 30-40 detailed articles.

Here are some quick tips to build expertise in your niche

Here are some of my Guest post on other blogs.

Giveaway is a great way initially to get followers and email subscribers.

Based on your budget, run giveaway on the weekly or the monthly basis. Ask the participant to follow you for entries.

Some of the giveaway examples are amazon coupons, hostings, domain name etc.

I personally recommend Gleam to create Giveaways for your blog.

People love when they see something which is new. As a blogger, the sky is the limit.

You can try different things like organize Webinar, host podcast, create videos, Instagram and many more.

Do not afraid to try new things and ask feedback from your readers.

Yes for most of the people money is the primary reason for blogging, but do not focus only on Money while starting the blog.

First, build some authority and then monetize your blog on top of that. Remember, you need to have some traffic before you can generate any income from ads or affiliate marketing.

Don't shy away from participating in events. Find nearby events and meet new people. Never miss a chance to promote other's article. Share and comment on blog's page and tag them. Focus on Google, Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

Try to connect at least 5-10 new people every day.

Create your blog's social media pages on Facebook, Twitter, Google etc and regularly post useful content there.

Make sure you post regularly on socila media. Add your friends and other fellow bloggers to the Facebook group and try to grow it.

Social media scheduling is also a good way to maintain social media presence. Here is a guide to social media scheduling.

The Fundamental Guide to Social Media Scheduling [Infographic]

Promotion is important for the success of your blog but do not over-promote. In short, do not spam. 

It is so uncommon that new blogger spam in forum or blog directory. Before posting anywhere make sure you read the rules.

Do not try to spam by inserting your blog link everywhere.

There is various way to promote your blogs including comment on other blogs, add videos and images to your blogs, ask your friends and family to share content and many more.

I have recap all the tips to promote your blog post here:

8 Unbelievable Things You Never Knew About Promoting Personal Blog

The Email signature is a great way to promote your blogs. Make sure you include your blog name and link to every outgoing email you send.

This will create your brand and let people know about your blog. There are a lot of free tools available in the market to create the free email signature.

Read this post to find how to Create free Email signature:

5 Great Tools To Create Your Email Signature

These tips are recommend by all major blogger. In the beginning, you may not get chance to interview top blogger, but that is fine. Go ahead and post interview of mid-level and startup blogger.

People want to hear about them. Below are the benefits of taking interviews of fellow bloggers on your blog:

• You will get backlinks from other bloggers, as they will use your blog post in the testimonial
• The person you interview will share the post with their followers, resulting in more traffic to your blog
• A good way to create networking
• Helps you to build a brand.
• Other bloggers may reciprocate and take your interviews

Check out some of the interviews I have taken on my blog:

Interview With Travel Blogger – Shalu Sharma

Interview With Archana Kapoor [Podcast]

Long Tail keyword is required to rank better in Google and other search engine. In this competitive world, you need to rank better in Google to get more traffic.

Before your write an article, you need to find long tail keyword and make sure you include those keyword in the article.

I recommend using Kwfinder and Spyfu to find long tail keyword.

Read this article for more info:

How To Quickly Double Your Blog Traffic Without A Penny

Research is required before you start writing on a topic. To get better ranking in google , you need to write a well researched article with over 2000 words.

Read articles on the same topic from top bloggers. Find relevant keyword and include it.

For example look at article from Neil Patel and Harsh Agarwal Blog.

Ads are a great way to get more leads and visitors. With the self-promotion, ads can get more fans, followers and visitors for you.

You can try Facebook ads, Twitter, and Google Adwords.

The Blogging Events all around the world. Attend your local Meetup and seminar and connect people from your niche. 

Personal touch always weighs more. Once you have a personal connection, people share your content. Chances are to get more followers and visitors.

Facebook group is a great way to get regular traffic to your blog.  Create an exclusive Facebook group for your blog and invite people to join. 

Make the Facebook group for fellow bloggers for discussion. As more people will join the group, you can share promotion and products with them.

Some of the examples of Facebook Group are Pradeep Hellboundblogger group, Jitendra's Digital Hacks Mastermind.

A Blogger main focus should be on to create content, but there are a lot of other jobs a blogger has to do. For example creating logo, landing pages, ebook, Infographics and many others. you can't do everything alone and you need to outsource some of the work.

Fiverr is great place to find freelance people who can create gigs for you like logo, book, images and many more starting just $5.

Here is a Review of Fiverr you will be interested:

10 Quick Tips About Earning Money from Fiverr

For Every Article you post, make sure you create a video tutorial or introduction. It will give you traffic to your post and also help you to increase backlinks.

You can use exmple Youtube Channel from Neil and Pat.?

There are a lot of ways to create manual backlinks for your blog post. Once you create your blog post and published, try article and post submission site to get useful backlinks.

Some of the site I use to submit recap of my post is Medium, Scoop, Klinkk, Slideshare(create slides from post), Inbound, Growthhacker, and Quora.