It seems like everyone has a blog these days. Even if your friends and family don’t have one, it’s highly likely that you know (or follow) someone that does. And that’s super cool because blogs are really fun to read, write, and just enjoy in general. Whether you love to write or not, maybe you’ve been thinking about launching a blog recently.
But maybe you’re not sure whether blogs are old now and over. Or whether anyone would even read what you have to say. But they’re not and they will! So, if you want to launch a blog, you’ve come to the right place. Because we’re going to walk through some of the basics of blogging and what you need to know before you get started. But that’s not all.
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Maybe you already have started a new blog and you’d love to be a bit more informed about what to do to make it a success and grow it? We’re going to cover that too. Blogging is so much fun and it’s a great community full of people that love to write and create content and even make money in the process.
So if this sounds like something that you’d love to do this year, read on. Because we’re going to delve into everything you need to know right now.
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Before You Start
Before you begin, it’s a good idea to make sure that you’re doing this for the right reasons. If you want a quick way to make money, then this might not be the best idea for you. Because blogging can take a while to build up – even if you will be able to make money at some stage.
Instead, you’ll want to be sure that you want to do it because you love to write or have something to say, have a passion for a set topic or want a hobby you can dedicate your time to.
It’s also a good idea to be clear with yourself on why you’re doing this. Feel free to set some goals on what you’d like to achieve within the first year or overall. This can help you to feel focused, motivated, and driven to get this off the ground.
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Finding Your Niche
When you know that you really do want to get started, the next thing for you to do is decide what you want to write about. It’s best to do this now because you’ll find that it influences a lot of your later decisions. Choosing a niche can seem hard but it should come quite naturally.
Ask yourself – what are you interested in? What do you know a lot about? What are you passionate about? And you can be as broad or narrow as you like. Whether that’s food or healthy living, books or all things lifestyle! Choose what feels right to you.
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Choosing A Name
And now you need to choose a blog name and this can be the fun part. It could be your name, something related to your niche, a name you like, a play on words or anything you like. You’ll want to make sure that the domain name is available so that you can register your blog with it.
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Getting Hosting
Alongside a domain name, you’ll want to get hosting too. You can opt for a free blog but if you want to do this professionally long term, it’s much easier just to get hosting and a domain right off the bat. So choose a hosting provider that you like the look of and sign up.
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Designing Your Blog
The next thing that you’re going to want to do is design your blog. It’s important to choose a blog theme that you love or that fits with your chosen niche. You can find free ones online, choose to purchase a template, or even work with a designer to get something custom built. It might be best to go with one of the first two to start with and then consider something custom in the future.
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Writing Your First Post
At this point, you just want to get started. Don’t worry so much about it all looking perfect. Once you’ve sorted the layout and it’s looking good enough, just start writing. Because you just want to get some content out there. And don’t put too much pressure on yourself either – have fun writing the post and publish it. You’ll feel so proud when you do.
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Using Great Imagery
But there’s not just the words that you need to be thinking of, you’ve also got imagery too. And you can do this in two ways. You can take your own that relates to what you’re talking about, or use stock photos. If you’re taking your own, decide whether you want to use your phone, get a camera, or even a https://www.drdrone.ca/pages/dji-air-2s, depending on your niche. Or you can find free or paid stock websites that you can take images from to use on your site.
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Promoting Your Posts
You’ll also want to think about how you’re going to promote your posts too. It’s nice to be able to sign up to a social media platform and promote what you’re doing. Whether it’s Facebook or Instagram or Twitter, sign up and start sharing your posts so that others can find them and enjoy them too.
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Being Consistent
One of the most important things you can do when it comes to blogging is to be consistent. You don’t want to post for three days in a row and then not again for a month – it won’t allow you to build momentum. Plus, you’ll also confuse your potential readers too. Instead, when you blog consistently, readers know what to expect from you and you will start to build some traction with your blog too.
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Generating Ideas
But then you also need to make sure that you’re generating as many post ideas as possible. You don’t want to find yourself not posting because you don’t really know what to post or when. Make sure that you have a steady stream of blog post ideas. Make a note of them when you can so you have a bank to refer to whenever you need them.
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Making Friends
Another incredible side to having a blog is that you can also connect with other bloggers and make friends. So don’t be afraid to reach out to other bloggers who’s content you enjoy and respect and start a conversation. It’s always so nice to be part of the blogging community.
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Learning New Things
You will also want to try and learn more and more about blogging as well. Try to read as much as you can about the software you’re using, photography, graphic design, writing, marketing and more. It’ll help you to grow and improve as a blogger over time.
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Getting More Visitors
It’s also fun to think of ways to get more visitors on your site too. If you love the idea of growing your traffic, you’ll want to make sure that you’re promoting your posts and working on optimizing them for search.
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Working On SEO
Another thing that you might want to try and learn more about is SEO. SEO is something that you’ll want to implement in your blog as early as you can. While you may not always be able to master it right off the back, learning SEO will help your blog posts to be found via organic searches and deliver you more traffic. And, it doesn’t have to be a long-winded or time-consuming thing.
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Making Money
And it’s usually at this stage that you might like to think about the ways that you can start to make some money from your blog. There’s plenty of online blogging resources and advice on how to make more money, so you can definitely read up on specific options. But in short, you can think about earning affiliate income, doing sponsored posts, or even having advertising on your blog. It’s important to try and work out what will be the best avenue for you.
Happy Blogging!
And that’s all there is to it. As much as this can all seem really scary and overwhelming at first, now you know where to start. Of course, you might want to read up a little more on some of the sections but remember not to study or plan too much – you just need to start. Get your site set up and just start writing. And don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good. It doesn’t have to look established from the start. All you need to do is start posting.
So get started and good luck! Enjoy the journey because a year from now you’ll be so glad that you just began!