Skills of a Professional Blogger

As I mentioned in the beginning of this series of articles, it is not very easy to establish yourself as a professional blogger. Millions of folks begin the race but only a few thousand make enough money from blogging and other online work to be able to call it their profession. Rest of the folks found themselves wondering “why exactly it did not work out?”

On TechWelkin, I have been guiding you through the answer of this question. One of the reasons why it doesn’t work is that the blogger does not possess certain skill and attributes. It is not necessary that you begin blogging only after acquiring these skills. You can develop them over a period of time while blogging. Readers, today I am going to speak about the characteristics of a professional blogger!

No matter what you write, research is always going to be the inseparable part of your endeavor. And blogging is no exception. You need to be habitual with information search, facts verification, notes making, collate pieces, do value addition and then present it all in an interesting form.

You should develop the ability to efficiently find relevant information from Google, the king of search engines. However, depending upon what you blog about, your research may not remain confined just to online search engines. You may also need to refer to books, print magazines, libraries and meet expert people. Only then you’ll be able to write something worth its salt.

Once the research is done and in your mind you’re clear what you want to write about, now is the time to actually key it in. Different people have different degrees of command on language. Writing style of everyone is also different. If you’re not good enough in writing -you wont be able to make the cut.

But don’t lose heart! Everybody goes through a learning curve. You can definitely develop writing skills if you have inclination for it. Just read a lot and see how other authors write. Analyze their sentence construction, vocabulary usage and general style of writing. If you can do this, you’ll soon find yourself writing much better.

Success in blogging would need you to develop many important skills.

To be a successful blogger, you would need to deal with computer code. If you have money, you can always hire someone to do this stuff for you. But it is recommended that you do it yourself. Just try and pick the logic of programming and rest will fall in line pretty easily.

You don’t need to be a geeky programmer of languages like Java, C or C++ or C# … for tweaking blogs, you would just need to use simpler stuff like HTML, CSS, Javascript and PHP. It does make a blogger’s life much easier if she knows how to deal with these languages.

As a successful blogger, you have to be a bundle of multiple skills. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is another such skills that you should possess. This skill can slowly be acquired by reading and research. Keep reading TechWelkin regularly and you will soon be an SEO expert yourself!

It is important to learn SEO (at least basic SEO of blog posts) in order to fetch traffic that your blog deserves. Just piling up good articles in your blog will not do a lot of good. To gain traffic, you must make your blog friendly with search engines.

As the saying goes, a picture says a thousand words. Inserting relevant images in your blog post is a very good idea. It not only provides graphic visual information but also makes your post look more interesting and beautiful. Graphics are also useful in catching eyes when you post links on your social media channels.

Over a period of time, you should learn a bit of Photoshop (and/or other image editing programs). It helps in creating images customized to your needs. You don’t need to be an artist or professional graphic designer -just having the ability to edit images will do the trick.

After lingual and technical skills, let’s talk about some soft skills. Maintaining a consistent and good rate of writing posts will go a long way in favor of your success. But how will you be able to write so much? Obviously, discipline is required. As a professional blogger, you would have to consider blogging a full-time job. You can not afford to be lazy or complacent. You should stick to a time-table and write/publish posts accordingly. Also, wasting time online (aka wilfing) is also a great problem that you must not get trapped into. Just jumping from one useless website to another costs a blogger more time than they think.

Blogging does not offer money overnight (or over month or even over year!). Blogging is a business that does not require much of monetary investment but it does require a lot of time and patience. Getting frustrated and losing hope is not what a blogger should do.

You would have to work hard, especially if you doing part-time blogging. Maintaining a day job and a regular blog is not an easy thing. By the time you come back from your office, most of you’ll feel exhaustion and writing something sensible in such a situation becomes very difficult. But you’ll have to do this if you want to succeed in blogging.

This is it for today. Do let me know what you think of this articles. As always, feel free to comment, suggest additions or ask questions. Happy blogging!