How to start a blog is a question every blogger asks before they start. Blogging for beginners is not as scary as it seems, however, you must decide and understand the purpose of that blog as it will guide you.
Knowing how to start a blog for free isn’t always the goal but rather, how to start a blog and make money if you have financial goals for your blog.
Whether it’s how to start a blog on Facebook, how to start a blog WordPress or how to start a professional blog, there are guidelines that can make the journey clearer for every beginner.
A blog is short for weblog. It is a log that exists on the world wide web.
This log can contain texts, visuals, audio and more. You can blog about travel, poetry, art, lifestyle, fashion, politics, technology, whatever you want, your blog is a reflection of your thoughts.
A blog in its actual sense is a diary-style platform where entries are referred to as posts and posts occur in reverse chronological order. That is to say that the most recent entry comes first.
Blogs have gone from being the online diary of an expressive individual, to be a full-time workplace.
Blogging is now taken seriously and with more passion as it exposes bloggers to great career opportunities and a wider audience reach.
In 2014 blogging platforms Tumblr and WordPress gained prominence, almost every teen had a Tumblr or WordPress account. Individuals were able to build online mood-boards and express themselves.
When starting a blog. it is normal to wonder if your target audience will like you or your content, however, there are things to consider when starting a blog.
Why Start a Blog?
As a blogger or potential blogger, there must be a reason why you wish to start blogging or have decided to start blogging. Everything is done with reason, if there is no good reason, then blogging may not be a good choice. Your reason for blogging is what will keep you blogging if you feel the reason is still valid long term.
Identify Your Niche
A niche is a comfortable or suitable position for you in life. With regards to blogging, your niche is a comfortable or suitable position for you to blog or blog about.
Niches fall under categories; your blog could be multi-niche or about one subject. Having a multi-niche blog just means you explore different themes in your blog.
Also, under niches, your niche could be politics, news, fashion, food, photography etc. identifying your niche will help you build your content better and have a more organized blog. Also, it will help you focus. Also, some bloggers struggle to identify their niche.
You can do this by considering the reason you want to start blogging, what you’re passionate about and who your target audience is. It is very possible to start with one theme and expand your blog by entertaining other themes, hence becoming, multi-niche.
Content Is Key
Blogging is not as simple as it looks, a systematic thought process goes into generating content for your blog. Before generating that content, you have to decide the kind of content you want to feature on your blog. Your content must appeal to the mind of your audience.
Also, there is usually a mental struggle between quality and quantity. Though content quantity will help create and maintain traffic, you mustn’t sacrifice it for quality. Blog content must be quality content to maintain a loyal and interested following as well as pull new ones.
Your Domain and Preferred Blogging Platform
Your domain name is how you will be identified. Your domain name should be unique so as to stand out and not be confused with a competitor.
Also, it should be easy to remember, especially when your name does not form your domain name. A domain is nothing without a web host. Online there are web hosting platforms that support blogs. These platforms provide a host environment where your blog can thrive.
Hosting could be free or come at a price depending on the services you think your blog needs. Your domain and web hosting preferences should be taken into consideration when starting a blog to choose the right packages that will work best with what you want to achieve and your available resources.
You must also bear in mind that a web hosts loading time affects conversions and the overall ranking of your blog. Also, with web hosting, you must consider the web host’s recorded uptime, customer service, backup services, storage, and overall price.
Traffic! Traffic! Traffic!
We all hate land traffic, but web traffic is gold. Traffic is what keeps your blog alive, without it, your blog is as good as dead. Traffic translates to readers and viewers and ads.
However, bloggers are in two categories, hobby bloggers, and income bloggers. If blogging is a hobby, traffic may be the least of your worries, but if you blog to earn an income, traffic would be a top priority.
Traffic ensures you’re found online, and the more traffic you get the more ads and ad clicks your blog will provide which will heighten ad costs on your blog.
A key to increasing blog traffic is understanding SEO and how it works. With the knowledge on how to use appropriate keywords, you can optimize search engines as a blogger to become more visible on the web. The lack of traffic will be a complete disaster.
Design Theme
Your blog is your workspace, it is the home of your thoughts. Your home must mirror your thoughts and vice versa. Your blog’s design theme must suit the service you’re trying to create with your content as your theme must support the nature of your content. Your blog’s theme design must also suit the atmosphere.
For example, a blog centred on rock music should not have a powder blue and pink floral design. A rock music blogger would want to go for a theme that screams, electric and loud sound.
Asides that, the artistic features of your blog will help give an aesthetically pleasing look to your blog, one which your audience will remember, associate with you, and love to come back to.
Blogging Takes Time, Effort and Money
Blogging seems so easy and effortless when you look at the pros, but it takes time, effort and money. It takes an ample amount of time to develop your blog for it to become a go-to site and for people to recognize your work.
To achieve this recognition, you must put in the effort as a blogger to put out quality work your audience can relate with. You must also put in the effort to keep up with the blogging trends, maintain traffic, stay afloat and most importantly, grow.
Depending on the nature of your blog, outings you wish to document will cost money, the restaurant you wish to review is not free, just like most thing bloggers blog about, access to them come with a price.
As time goes by, a good blog will start earning an income from ads, sponsorships and other blogging financers, this will ease the financial burden of being a blogger but will increase the amount of effort you put into the blog.
