How to use WordPress for Blogging: 10 Best Tips for WP Bloggers in 2023
By James Flarakos | December 13, 2022
Table of Contents
The 10 best tips for blogging in 2023 with WordPress to grow your audience, out-do competitors in your niche and create a blog that can also make you money online.
Why Does Using WordPress Benefit Bloggers?
WordPress is and has been the number 1 blogging tool for a number of years. This is due to its ease of use rather than having to code a website yourself. Using WordPress will give you all the tools including a fully functional blog that you can create your website and start writing on straight away. This can easily be done at the start when you choose for your blog posts to display on your homepage or on a separate page you have designated.
Another reason why its best for WP bloggers is the way its designed, its read well by google and other well known search engines. By this I mean that the structure they give you to use when writing your blogs is specifically developed to be read well for its data by search engines, this will then help display your pages or posts to people searching.
As well as this, the blog customization you get really makes you stand out better than other website builders. Using themes or doing it custom with results in a varied displays of your blog in the way you want your audience to see it.
1. Using SEO Plugins To Rank Higher
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is where you optimize your blog so that search engines will read your page better and display you higher up the search results for people searching for similar subjects to what you have written about.
By increasing your blogs SEO you will definitely find yourself growing your audience as they are able to find your content easier rather than your article being displayed on the 7th page of the search results. By using a number of free SEO plugins they can guide you to optimize your blog in many different ways.
Personally I have found this is key and a number 1 tip for any blogger. As no matter how many good links you have or how good your site looks, with out good content that is optimised you simply wont rank as well as other blogs.
This can be done in ways of adding better researched keywords to your blogs so that google and other search engines can understand your page better. But it involves a lot of little changes such as naming your photos with keywords, checking your titles, descriptions and headings ect. If you are serious about blogging in 2023 I highly suggest you start looking at how to optimize your blog and keep it optimized with well written articles created with SEO in mind.
2. Using Image Optimization Plugins
There is a good reason for this tip. One thing that bloggers use a lot is pictures to bring out the best of their blogs post. Whether its instructional, informational or even a news blog. The best way for your readers to visualise your story is by adding visuals in to help them.
Unfortunately this can then lead to slower page loading times and inevitably some visitors that wont be happy and potentially will leave the blog for another answer. By optimising your WordPress images you will make the visitor experience better and keep them reading your posts. Personally I use Smush as it will automatically compress all images I upload with out me having to optimise them myself with websites like imagecompressor.com.
How ever image optimization plugins will do a number of things such as lazy loading on your page, converting image formats to different more beneficial types that load faster or help by caching pages so that visitors get better page loading times after their first visit. By compressing your images it will not only benefit your blog loading times but it will also decrease the amount of space used by your blog for your hosting. Saving you money as well!
3. Using Free Themes For Blogging
Themes on WordPress are a great resource for a number of reasons. Firstly it gives you a pre designed look to your website, whether its a different style menu, widget areas or just a different colour design. This means you can change the look of your blog within minutes and often for free as they offer so many free themes to choose from.
Free WP themes also provide you with different looking blogs. They might look differently in terms of layout of what they display. Different themes also give you different options to change up your blog display page. One of the benefits of using WordPress for blogging in 2023 is that you can choose a theme or use the Astra theme along with page builders to create a truly unique blog page that no one else will have.
My best tip for blogging is using a theme that suits your niche and gives you the best available features for what your blog is about. Whether you want better navigation, clear categories for posting or any other benefit. Spend time researching all the themes until you know your happy with it. Alternatively to go custom, I would suggest using Astra theme as well as a page builder like Elementor to get a truly unique and great custom design for your site. This includes creating your own theme.
4. Getting Paid From Your Blog
Creating a blog on WordPress will allow you to make money from it in a number of ways. The best tip for this is creating a plan and identifying what the best money making method would be from what you offer.
Different Blog Money Making Techniques:
- Affiliate Links/Sales
- Selling Merch
- Google Ads
- Paid for Advertisement Areas
- Guest Posting
- Paid Subscriptions
I recommend making a business plan no matter how small your blog might be. From there, determine who your audience is and what would benefit them most. Perhaps a paid subscription to get your latest posts first. Maybe its adding a selling element for merch and branded content. Or it could be that you review a lot of products so using affiliate links to products you review can earn you much more as the visitors might click through and buy this.
5. Creating Great Content
Content is always key for blogs. Along with other search engines. Google looks for great and unique content rather than re used content. A benefit of using WordPress for blogging is that it allows you to create content easily with help from SEO plugins for you to optimize your content.
My top tip is always write about things you know about or have researched well. Don’t copy other blog posts and certainly don’t use AI tools like chatGPT to create blogs as google will punish you further for having AI written content. Thats right, they can tell.
By using unique content and images, you will make sure that your blog stands out from the rest and gives your audience the information they are looking for. Often the longer the article is, the better it does. But also remember that readers don’t want to hear waffle as that might make them leave the page which does worse for your blog.
Make sure you have enough of the RIGHT information along with navigation ways for them to find more specific subjects. The more interaction with any element of your page will benefit your blog. Along with how long the viewer stays on your site.
6. Building Links To Your Blog
Link building for any WordPress website is a must as long as its done correctly. To describe the benefit lets first explain why this would benefit you in case you haven’t heard of link building before.
Firstly all domains have an authority. Lets say you create www.myawesomeblog.com and its never been used before. It will have a 0 authority score as its new and there is no data to show if its any good. So by growing your website with great content, other links and time spent online it will give it some authority.
One way to grow a smaller blog is by getting links from website that have higher authority and getting the link to a page or post on your website. This will then raise your blogs authority as its been linked to from a high authority site.
Link building can be done in a number of ways:
- Reaching out to blogs in your niche.
- Guest posting on other blogs.
- Buying backlinks (be vary careful and research the seller)
Alternatively you can create content that is so good and useful that it becomes something other blogs will link to as it benefits showing their viewers also, this is the most natural and probably the best method of link building as you can build links naturally.
7. Using Different Page Builders on WordPress
WordPress is the number one page builder and due to this it provides you with lots of different ways to create your pages or posts. You get the default editor to start with which gives you many customization features, especially with new elements constantly been added in the form of updates.
How ever you can then choose to use a variety of page/post builders to really customize your content. Depending on the page builder you use you get different elements. I personally recommend elementor as it gives you a huge amount of customizability. It also has many free add on plugins you can download from the WordPress repository. This will allow you to create a better and much more customised website compared to other bloggers.
My tip is to always aim to create pages and posts that are straight tot he point and continue your colour scheme through out. Also making sure that your post or page is responsive to mobiles is essential. Many of these plugins will let you use conditional displays so you can choose elements that only show for large screen or only show to mobile screens to perfect the viewer experience.
8. Pick a Subject You Know & Enjoy
Picking a subject to blog about that you know about, love or are willing to do a lot of research about is key. If you plan to grow your blog and become a successful blogger you need to make sure you can consistently give your audience great information. This can be hard if its about a subject you don’t know much about and aren’t willing to research. As well as just loosing interest in writing about the subject due to you not really enjoying it.
Its a simple fact people often forget about when starting a new blog and trying to find trending subjects. If you aren’t interested in the subject it self then its very hard to give your readers a great experience also. And if you do its hard to stay consistent with subject that you don’t know much about. By having knowledge and giving tips that others might not have known, you can really benefit your WordPress blog.
9. Creating Subscriptions For New Posts
Subscriptions are an excellent way of keep viewer engagement by sending them emails once subscribed with new posts you have posted or other general information your looking to update them about.
If you have a great title with eye catching posts and the subscribers get an email, they are also quite likely to go to your site if they recognise the sender. This means traffic that has already engaged with your posts (enough to subscribe) will also get alerts when a new posts come out. You can also analyse how many people are opening and clicking through and adjust your content to be well optimized.
This can be done for free (depending on subscriber numbers) using plugins such as MailPoet to create subscriptions lists, then forms to get subscribers and finally set what email you want going to them as well as a regular schedule set up to fully automate the process.
10. Picking Trending or Evergreen Subjects In Your Niche
Research into what is trending within your chosen topic is important if you want to come up first for results. With trending topics its hard not to get drowned out by the amount of posts that come out after the first few big ones. So research your topic and try to be the first to bring out trending topics or write it the best so that your content will our rank other posts.
There are two types or content, the trending topics and the ever green content. For trending topics you can see a higher amount of visitors during this period but can dramatically drop once the trend if over. This is also something you will need to keep up with to keep your readers happy with new and updated trending topics.
Alternatively, evergreen content will be good for a while to come as its on a subject that people will search for going forward. An example of these type of content are:
Trending Title
Find out the best way to make money in 2022.
Evergreen Title
Find out the best way to make money online.
As you can see the difference is simply that one refers to a specific year, where as the other one is general so it can apply for anytime in the future also. Its is very unlikely that someone in 2025 will ever search for the top title with 2022 in the title, so its most likely to hit higher numbers to start with and the phase off. Where as the ever green title might be slow to start with but consistently brings in viewers of that subject for years to come.
Conclusion
We hope that these WordPress tips to create or improve your blog for 2023 will help you reach your goal. Feel free to take any tips or al of them to optimize and your blog and grow your audience.
If you are looking to start blogging and haven’t started yet we highly suggest you research a good domain name for your blog as well as get free or cheap WordPress hosting depending on the size of your blog.
