What are things to keep in mind before starting your blog?
Table of contents
Introduction: Take Your Story Online
Choose a Domain Name
Choose a Web Host
Choose a WordPress Theme
Design Tips for Customization
Create Content
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Introduction: Take Your Story Online
You have stories to share: small stories, large stories, expressive stories. But not knowing the strict steps to take, you’ve been hesitant to start a blog. If you’ve never left through the process, it can seem threatening to design your blog, find the right host, create content, and become smooth in SEO. And you can earn thousands of dollars per month by blogging.
But when you know the process, there’s a straightforward path. So far, there are hundreds of millions of blogs worldwide, many with active bloggers posting at least after a month.
The only downside to blogs being so easy to create and update is that they are all vying for a limited amount of consideration. You will want to create an attractive blog with perceptive content to stand out. And that content must be posted regularly because people are drawn to the latest and most relevant blog posts.
Taking the course step-by-step can rapidly grow your audience and a meaningful portion of the content to the world.
Choose a Domain Name
Before you design a killer blog, you must take a domain name — and catch a place to host it. A domain name is what users type into the address bar to get to your website. It’s your home base for your entire product. The best domain names are not the funny ones or the showy ones; they are the domain names that people remember easily. Good domain titles also support Google in knowing what your blog is about.
For example, “Thedigitalpro” for a blog about freelancing is better than “SawasdFromSiam.” However, the second domain name connects with the resident language and is “clever” public will struggle to figure out how to spell sales & mdash plus, and the name does not tell what the website is about.
Through Bluehost, you can buy your domain name (make it yours) and use their web hosting facilities.
Choose a Web Host
Once your domain name is selected, you essential someone to host it. Though there are dozens of options, you will prefer to choose a hosting provider specialising in WordPress — the most prevalent blogging platform in the world. Backed by a bulky public of dedicated users, WordPress is open-source, which capitals you directly use from all the hard work its reliable following puts into the platform.
There are hundreds of free plugins and theme designs that you can select from, providing a template and the tools you need to confirm your blog is on point with your brand or content. However, WordPress isn’t just for home-based bloggers. It’s controlling sufficient for some of the world’s biggest organisations — so it’s maybe going to have enough giddy-up to keep your blog running easily.
Bluehost offers a range of WordPress hosting packages, from a regular plan for first-time bloggers to a fully-managed hosting plan for those planning on creating a business everywhere their blog.
Choose a WordPress Theme
When figuring out how to start a blog, a vital period of designing an effective one is taking the accurate theme.
Your theme is your website’s general expression, feel, and style. This includes things like the colour outline, layout, and grace elements. In essence, your website theme is a direct representation of your brand and has a direct impact on your users’ experience.
With thousands of themes, selecting the right theme for your blog can become awesome. Gratefully, you can use the WordPress article filter to narrow down your hunt. The theme filter feature allows you to sort by focus (in this case, you’ll want a blog theme), layout, and other imperative design features.
These include (but certainly aren’t limited to):
- Buddy Press
- Custom Background
- Custom Logo
- Flexible Header
- Front Page Posting
- Post Formats
- Sticky Post
- Translation Ready
Once you have found the perfect theme for your blog, start customising it to stand out from the troop as uniquely yours.
Design Tips for Customization
You will want to modify your blog for functionality by adding many WordPress plugins. But initially, following some simple design guidelines will take advantage of you in the long run.
Increase White Space to Decrease Clutter
We are decades past the initial days of web design. Recollect the flashing buttons and cluttered websites?
You do not want to make a website that distracts viewers from the emotion of your content. The best way to keep people motivated on exactly what you are saying in your blog is by creating what’s named white space.
White spaces are the unfilled spaces around your duplicate and images that keep your website design fresh, simple, and effective.
Don’t Use Stock Photos
The realism is that stock photos don’t do your blog any favours. You want to contain additional media with the text in your posts, but using someone else’s pictures doesn’t allow your blog to be single.
If you have the money (or skills), including professionally-taken pictures is the best way. Of sequence, that can grow expensive.
Gratefully, your phone is now powerful enough to capture pictures that complement your blog posts. This is the coolest solution when you are major figuring out how to start a blog and what to post.
Consistency with Icons
The devil is in the details. Though your regular blog visitor is not going to consciously notice if you have selected your social icons from a variety of places, unconsciously, it will impact how proficient they think your blog is.
You will not only hunger all your icons to be using the identical design and font, but you will want to keep all the fonts on the perfect website within the same type — with only a couple of exceptions.
Strong Colors
However, you will want to rely heavily on the white galaxy; they should be highly opposing when you use colours. A well-designed blog types it easy for someone to use, read, and share.
By using different colours, you increase readability and retention.
Don’t Go Crazy with Design
You will want to use several basic design conventions when figuring out how to start a blog. You do not want to brand your website so eccentric and original that it falls small of the basic functional expectations of a user.
There is still plenty of room to be imaginative within these basic web design parameters. But when you are just getting what is happening, you are best off working within “the box” rather than thinking outside.
Some standard blog conventions to type use include:
- Headers
- Footers
- Search bars
- Sidebars
- Social media shares
- Author attribution
- Subscription options
Create Content
Now, it’s finally time to share content!
No matter what your blog will be (unless it’s a for-family-only affair), there will be blogs already out there. They won’t have your voice, but they will likely tackle similar topics and target similar audiences.
Given this, you need to create exclusive, powerful content that grabs readers’ attention and keeps them returning for more.
Here are a few steps to stand out:
Create compelling headlines to make them click
Use attention-grabbing introductions to keep them reading
Share meaningful advice to draw them back again and again
Include sub-headers and bullet points for easy scanning
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Now that you have an attractive blog with killer content hosted on a top-flight service, you want people to find it.
Barring any public social media posts going viral, organic searches will result in popular traffic headed to your site. This is especially true if you do not plan on spending any money marketing your blog with paid ads.
This means that it’s vital that you implement an SEO policy for your blog. SEO is a shortening that stands for search engine optimisation — it’s what reliefs your blog show up when your target audience searches important topics online.
The Black Box of SEO
Google and other search engines (yes, there are other search engines) do not want bloggers and vendors to game the system. The area of a search engine is to deliver the best, most related content for any given search to a user.
If the firms explained exactly how they did this, marketers would exploit weaknesses in the scheme and undercut the search engine’s primary service goal.
To the best information of anyone who is not part of creating Google’s algorithm, there are more than 200 search ranking signals. As Google trusts more heavily on artificial intelligence and device learning, some of these signals are becoming more dynamic.
When you are just trying to shawl your head around how to start a blog, this all might sound like a share to keep track of. However, there is no need to get tense about it. Despite the difficulty of SEO as a whole, for starting your 1st blog, there are a few key pieces to understand and implement.
Powerful Core Tenants of SEO
Despite the closely daily changes in Google’s search algorithm and regular renovations, the core tenants remain mostly the same.
The base has always been (and will most likely always be) quality content. Most of the changes to Google’s algorithm are the corporation trying to identify better quality content related to a query.
To support Google finding your blog, you will need to focus your SEO efforts on three areas:
Content
- Backlinks
- Website technical structure
- SEO-Friendly Content
The best technique to make your content SEO-friendly is by using keywords. Keywords are single words or phrases likely to be comprised in queries relevant to your blog post.
Long absences are the days you would want to awkwardly stuff a keyword into your writing as much as possible. If you can work one or more keywords into a 1000-word blog post a few times (including in the headline), you are responsible for a great job!
You will want to do keyword research to certify that you are targeting the right keywords in your posts.
There are countless tools to support you doing this (some are free). One of the best-paid options is the SEO tool Ahrefs.
Long-tail keywords are keywords that contain multiple words and, as a result, represent more exact search queries — and capable search traffic.
When coming up with long-tail keywords, use some of Google’s search topographies to help flesh out your use of related keywords and potential subheadings. For example, use Google Autocomplete when typing in your keyword to see popular differences in the search.
Then, connect, enter and look for extra insights under the “People Also Ask” section and the “Searches related to” section at the bottom of the SERP.
However, the strategic use of keywords is incredibly significant for coming up in relevant searches; you will catch that if you write quality content, it will frequently naturally include supportive keywords.
Building with Backlinks
A backlink is mostly a clickable portion of text on a website that receipts a viewer to your website.
“The extra backlinks your website has, the better.”
This is because search engines adopt that other entities would not link to your website without your site’s value. Ideally, you will get backlinks to your blog from websites that Google identifies as having a specialist in your niche.