Blogging requires a number of different skills that go way beyond writing.
As a blogger, you need to know how to effectively create content that not only resonates with the target market you’ve chosen for your niche but also search engines and authoritative entities.
In this post, we list several skills every blogger should learn to enhance what they’re able to accomplish in search engines and on social media as well as to help them earn more revenue.
First, let’s discuss whether or not you need to actively learn these skills to be successful with your blog.
Note: We’ve included a bunch of resources to help you with each skill. Most of these are from right here at Blogging Wizard. There is one exception – photography. That’s not a topic we cover so we’ve found a great external resource to help you get started.
Do you have to learn specialized skills as a blogger?
When you first start blogging or try to launch a small business, you may wonder if you need any special training. You may even look up night classes and online courses you can take.
The truth is that you don’t really need to learn any skill to be successful as a blogger. You’ll learn a lot by doing and googling anything you’re struggling with.
However, there are numerous skills that don’t hurt to learn in some capacity.
You don’t need an English or business degree, but you should make yourself more aware of the skills we list in this article by following blogs that talk about them, subscribing to YouTube channels that teach them, reading books about them and maybe even taking a few online courses to sharpen your skills.
The point of this article is to make you more aware of these skills. It’s up to you to decide what learning technique works best for you: learn by doing, learn by reading/watching or learn in the traditional sense with an instructor (online courses).
The skills every blogger should learn
- Image editing and graphic design
- Photography
- HTML/CSS
- SEO
- Copywriting
- Social media marketing
- Advertising
- Product development and sales
1. Image editing and graphic design
This is one of the first hurdles you’ll run into as a blogger. Coming up with quality images for blog posts is hard.
Sure, there are plenty of stock photography sites out there filled with high-quality, well-shot images you can insert into your posts.
Unfortunately, stock images do nothing to set your blog apart from all of the other blogs that use them.
If you want to truly impress your readers and make sure your images have more of an impact, you need to learn enough about image editing and graphic design to come up with unique graphics for your blog.
Learn more:
2. Photography
Some niches benefit really well from using their own photos on their blog.
Digital niches benefit from screenshots, but what about niches that can’t be screenshot? These include the food niche, fishing, volleyball, car repair and anything else you need to do in the “real world.”
Bloggers from these niches should consider learning more about photography so they can take more impactful photos for blog posts.
It’s certainly okay to whip out your smartphone, take a few shots and include those in your posts, especially if you’re already struggling to get content out on time.
But you can really do a lot for your brand by taking a more artistic approach with your shots, especially when you post them to social media.
Learn more:
3. HTML/CSS
This one isn’t super important to learn given all of the point-and-click, drag-and-drop website builders that exist these days.
However, there may be instances in which an editor or tool you want to use suddenly has small bits of HTML and CSS for you to edit. HTML and CSS are coding languages that make up the majority of the web. They control the way your website looks.
You can see what these languages look like if you right-click on your mouse while viewing any page, and click Inspect. This feature should also be available on whatever mobile browsing you’re using.
HTML and CSS may seem complicated at first glance, but they truly are the simplest coding languages to understand.
Plenty of bloggers get by without ever learning them, but doing so may make you feel more confident about editing certain sections of your website.
4. SEO
SEO, or search engine optimization, is one of the most important skills all bloggers need to learn and keep up with.
SEO will always have a major impact on how much traffic your site is able to generate.
Having other traffic sources, such as social media, is important, but the majority of successful blogs receive most of their traffic from search engines like Google.
There’s a lot you can do to optimize your entire site for Google, but as far as on-page optimization goes, that changes whenever Google’s algorithm changes.
It’s these changes that make keeping up with SEO so important for bloggers of all skill levels. Even blogs that produce high-quality, reader-friendly content get rocked by updates to the Google algorithm.
Learn more:
5. Copywriting
It doesn’t matter if you started your blog with the intent to make money or if you started it as a simple hobby. At some point, you’re going to wonder how to make money from it.
Affiliate marketing, sponsorships, and selling your own products and services are popular sources of revenue for bloggers.
This is where adding copywriting skills to your repertoire can be useful.
Copywriting is a specialized form of writing in which a piece of text, or “copy,” is written in a way that gets the reader to make a purchase or subscribe to something.
A skill like this is normally used for marketing materials, such as advertisements, but it’s just as useful for a landing page, product page or a blog post that promotes a specific product.
Learn more:
6. Social media marketing
You may have started a blog instead of a YouTube channel, TikTok profile or podcast because you want to write, not make videos or talk.
However, if you want to make money from your blog, you need to treat it like a brand, and in the digital age, brands need to be on social media.
This means creating long and short-form videos, uploading stories, and posting images.
If all you do is upload a link to your latest blog post to Facebook or Twitter (X), you need to change that.
The best way to learn what type of content to create for social media is to actually use social media, so start by consuming social media content in your niche. It can be on a private or branded account.
Learn more:
7. Advertising
Promoting products, whether they’re your own or affiliate products, isn’t just about the copy you write to market those products.
It’s also about the target market you choose to advertise to, the way you design your images and where you actually place ads.
Plus, “advertising” can even be the blog posts and social media content you create to promote products. It can also be the ads you place on your site from sources like Google, Mediavine and Ezoic.
You may want to learn more about advertising to ensure whatever promotional content you do create is optimized for whatever platform you publish to.
Learn more:
8. Product development and sales
Every blogger should create their own product at some point in their careers.
Ads, affiliate marketing and sponsorships are fantastic sources of revenue for bloggers of all experience levels, but each one is dependent on someone else’s business.
If you create your own product, you can always rest assured that you have at least one revenue source that’s entirely dependent on your own brand.
Not only should you learn about the types of products bloggers can create, you should also learn how to market those products.
Learn more:
Final thoughts
One of the best things about being a blogger is the skills that you learn in the process.
These skills are all highly valuable and you can offer any of them as a service. They’re all in demand. Every single skill on this list. And you can niche down within each one.
Some are more monetizable than others, however.
So, if you want to offer skills you learn as a service, focus on the ones that can make other people the most money.
Those are the ones that you can charge a premium for.
