If you are hunting for a career in blogging, you might think career options are thin on the ground. But it’s important to remember that if you want to be a great blogger, it’s not necessarily just about starting your own blog, but it’s about having a wide variety of skills that you can utilize. Naturally, many bloggers are freelancers, but they diversify their efforts, and work in graphic design, consults with other businesses, but continually add strings to their bow. Let’s show you the skills that you need to make blogging a viable career choice.
Marketing Skills
When you are blogging, you are, in essence, marketing yourself. But this can transfer to other areas. When you learn how to promote yourself, you are distilling the very essence of who you are in a way that you can put it anywhere. Marketing comprises so many little skills, from converting traffic, to content creation, as well as social networking. And this is why it’s important for you to realize why those little skills work together to create a fundamental whole. When you look at influencers like Rainey James, these are people who have agencies do a lot of the work for them to give them that edge. If you are to learn how to promote, the best thing to do is to see how those digital agencies do it. Digital agencies work with influencers, and use a variety of tools to promote properly. This boils down to the ability to convert traffic, work with analytics effectively, using SEO, and many more. The fact is that marketing is not just one simple task, but it covers dozens, if not hundreds, of smaller ones.
Coding Skills
Bloggers will look to outsource web development but if you see CSS and HTML as incredibly intimidating things, it’s a good idea to head onto WordPress, and slowly build up your skills in coding. It’s valuable, especially at the outset when you have limited money, where you cannot outsource your content. And when you have a very specific vision of how you want to see your content, having some knowledge of coding is going to make all the difference.
Photography Skills
Everybody can take a selfie these days, but what does it take to be a Robert Capa or a David Bailey? These are people who absorb the image, and it’s something that you have got to consider if you’re going to make your blog a standout piece of content. When you start to visualize yourself as a brand, you need to learn the skills in order to attain that visual component. Because we see so many bloggers and vloggers out there doing selfies on top of a mountain, we immediately think that this is all it requires to look good. But these people know how to present themselves in a certain way, but if you want to promote yourself, it requires something different. We are all masters of our own niche and when we start to visualize our perfect webpage, this is where technical skills become invaluable. Creating photographs is not just about pointing and clicking your phone camera, although this can help at the outset. There are a wide variety of photography courses online that you can use to your advantage.
The Blogging Skills
If you want to be a blogger, you can learn the ropes of creating a blog, but if you want to go one step further, you need to pepper it with SEO components but you also need to make sure that you are creating a blog that is inherently you. As a career choice, you start by developing your own voice. Once you have got this down, you can apply this to other blogs and platforms. However, everybody has their own unique style. This means that you have to, in essence, learn to emulate other styles, while also making sure that you don’t lose that human component. This is key when you are writing for other blogs. There are many blogs that require technical information which is bereft of life, but if you want to be a blogger that works with other bloggers, you can always guest post, and use your own tone of voice. One of the best things you can do, rather than sitting at a keyboard is to dictate your blogs. There are many programs that you can use, such as Dragon Dictation, or even on your iPhone or Android, there are great dictation tools. If you want to develop your own voice, this is a great shortcut.
As you can see, the importance of a wide variety of skills is integral to creating a blog that you are happy with. It may seem overwhelming, think about what you want the final product to be, and truly focus on this in your mind’s eye. You then need to learn what skills are essential to realizing that vision.
