Tips for a successful blog

From finding a niche to building a community, Katy Cowan shares her top tips on starting and running your own successful arts, culture or creative blog

Reveal more about who you are in your blog posts and your audience will love you for it, says Katy Cowan. Photograph: Cultura Creative / Alamy/Alamy

With so many amazing arts, heritage and creative blogs out there already, how do you make yours stand out? How do you get people returning for more, and how do you increase visitor numbers and build a loyal following?

There are plenty of tips and tricks to get your own creative blog rocking and therefore raising your profile and helping you to win more business. Here's my top 20 tips for a successful creative blog, but if you can think of any more, please comment below and help me make this the best list on the web.

Getting started

Choosing a blogging platform is your first challenge. There are lots of free options out there including Wordpress, Tumblr, TypePad and Blogger. All of them offer free design themes so you can customise your own blog so it's very easy to get started. And if you're not sure how to use them? There's plenty of online video tutorials to be found on the web – for example, Wordpress has its very own lesson list to help get you started.

Consider integration

From an SEO point of view, it's worth getting your blog integrated with your existing website to build content and make the search engines love you even more. After all, SEO (search engine optimisation) is all about content. But if you're not able to do this or can't afford to hire a web developer to sort, then start a free blog and make sure you include links to your main website or other links, for example to your artistic portfolio.

Find a niche

When choosing a creative topic to blog about, try and find a niche. Make your blog about something very specific and you'll please both the search engines and your readers. Try not to be too general and really focus on one specialist topic and stick to it. Find your own niche and go for it – just remember to stay on topic.

Write about what you love

Write about something you love, otherwise you'll show no passion in your writing. And if there's no passion, your content will suffer, so find a topic you are comfortable with and only write about that. For example, if you're a museum curator, talk about the industry, emerging trends and other museums or exhibitions you love. And if you're a theatre director, you could write about industry folk you admire or share your working day with your followers.

Offer value

It goes without saying but if you don't provide something the public wants, your creative blog will never be a success. Give people what they're after and offer real value to their web browsing experience. What do I mean by this? Well, value is demonstrated in the content you publish. If your content isn't valuable people won't read it or return to read more. Really think about what you're putting out there and give the people what they want.

Focus on marketing

You won't get anywhere if you just launch a blog and hope that people will come without any marketing effort. You have to actively market your blog and you can do that through a variety of ways. You can start chatting with other bloggers by leaving valuable comments on other people's blog posts – this will help draw people back to your own site. Or you can make use of the search engines and write about topics that are popular in the searches, like this very feature. Or you could even offer to contribute to influential e-zines or blogs to help raise your profile. Whatever you choose to do, just get out there and market yourself like mad. There's really no excuse not to.

Encourage interaction

Get people talking on your blog. Ask them to add their comments on various articles, like I've done with this post. Encourage interaction wherever possible. Ask for feedback, respond to people's contributions, build a community and be nice. People love to interact, so make sure you're friendly and welcoming.

Make commenting easy

Just be aware that there are many reasons why people might not comment on your blog posts. It could be anything from not providing easy access to log a comment to writing about negative things people don't want to be a part of. Bottom line? Make commenting easily accessible and write about stuff that gets people talking positively. If people can interact on your blog, they'll keep coming back for more.