Blogging may sound simple on the outside but running a successful blog requires time, knowledge, discipline, and the willingness to make mistakes, and learn from them. You see, when I started blog despite of all measures I had taken, I kept failing and failing until that time came when I got everything right. So with all that experiences I would like to share with you these 12 critical things to consider before you start blogging so that you don’t get caught off guard like I was in the beginning.
1. Reason? Why You Want to Start Blogging.
There are thousands of bloggers out there blogging out of their own reasons. In fact you can blog for whatever reason, but you need to know the purpose of your blog after'all, because that is going to determine your actions. For personal blog, setting up a Blogger account might be an option. However, on the hand Wordpress is much power platform for those who want to make money blogging.
2. Your Blog’s Niche
Another obvious reason is selecting a blog niche. It's best to pick a niche or a topic you are an expert on, or at least to have enough passion for it to make up for your lack of knowledge. Also, if you are trying to monetize your blog, you’re going to want to use
Google Trends for keyword research, which will allow you to find out how your niche is performing.
3. Time, Money, and Effort
Time, money and effort, you must be wondering why all these. Well if you are thinking on how to start a blog, you should know that you will spend countless hours -That's time consumption, nothing comes easy when sharpening your writing skills, promoting your blog on social media, and making sure you remain consistent. Furthermore it will cost you money, too, because you will have to pay for your marketing campaign, domain name, and hosting at the very least unless if you prefer going with free choice of sub-domain which somehow has an odd look to me. Blogspot provides free sub-domain while wordpess also have free domain much can be done with premium style.
4. Content- A Prominent Key
Writing prominent content requires a set of acquired skill from academic level unless you are super good without it. It’s not that easy to figure out how to write great blog content, but you should definitely start by producing content that is informative and which provides something of real value to the reader. Somehow make your content to have conversational tone not like lecturing your visitors. That will encourage them to be your regular audience, post consistently. Also take advantage of
Headline Analyzer and
Plagtracker to make sure that your posts are outstanding and well-formed from a headline to conclusion.
5. Copyright Laws
Infringement can be a worst case scenario, don't even think of just copying and pasting someone's work you find out there. Author of those content take much time producing them there it worth's no stealing and before you start blogging, learn how to protect your own content, and what to do in case someone steals your work. On the other hand, while it’s OK to be inspired by someone else’s work, make sure you just don't get consumed in every detail about the content. Try and make your differnt in some sort. Also, learn when and how you can use photos you find online. Simply taking an image and crediting the author may not be enough. you can edit you own photos or use
TheStocks.im which offers plenty of royalty-free stock photos for you to choose from.
6. Blog’s Design-Simple and Sleek
Most users will respond to blogs which are built around a simple and elegant design. Also, you need to make sure that your blog features responsive design, which is optimized for display on mobile devices. In both cases, navigation should be as easy as possible.
7. The Basics of HTML and SEO
Not every blogger has knowledge in HTML and SEO. This is because you can get pretty much everything done on your blog without having to know the basic HTML or CSS techniques, However learning both will allow you customize themes and plugins to your own disire, as well as changing the looks of your posts.
Simple Guide to HMTL Tool will teach you all you need to know. As for
SEO, you will be able to drive more visitors to your blog, because your blog will be more visible in the search engines also this
beginner's guide to SEO might help. You can
download the PDF of it too.
8. Image Editing
I wouldn't prefer you to freely download photos from the web or paying someone else to do it for you, instead you can learn the basics of image editing, so that you can enhance your texts with eye-popping visual content like photos, infographics, and GIFs. I would rather recommend you to creating your own original designs with
Canva.
9. Using of Social Media
Social promotion is all you need for your blog. You need to let people know about your work, and the best way to do it, is through social media. Placing ads on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter is the key to generating traffic.
10. Personal Branding
All of the knowledge and skills above can help you establish a unique visual identity for your blog. But you shouldn’t stop there, because it is important for all of your social media accounts to reflect that same identity if possible. People respond to brands, and you need to respond to their needs. Make sure to create accounts on most widely used social media platforms, so that you are in control of brand and its name.
11. Build Connections Linking
One of the things that can launch your blog into the stratosphere is the people you know, fellow bloggers. Now, we are not suggesting that you should start sending emails every day, and then end up spamming them. But, you can share some of their stuff you liked on Twitter or Facebook, and let them know about it. Reach out to influencers and start a collaboration.
12. Learning Never Stops
You will never have any time to rest on your laurels. New blogging platforms are being introduced every day, search engines alter the way they rank websites, SEO requirements change, and so on. Everything is changing constantly, and you need to stay on top of all that if you want to succeed.
To wrap with this article today blogging is a lot more complex than people think. It requires you to be a jack of all trades, such as writing, design, marketing, coding, and master of most, the coming of this blog was inspired by
blogpress and you wonder how to start you own blog and needing some extra tips, the comment below will be very useful
