Most of us aspire to start a blog at some point in our lives. Whether you want to use it as a personal diary, show off your hobbies or skills, or promote your business to billions of people around the world, blogging has a lot to offer.
If you’re planning to start a blog soon, there are a few things you need to do sooner to avoid any hassle later. We’ll take a look at the most important things to keep in mind when starting a new blog.
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1. List Down Your Goals for the Blog
Write down all the reasons you started a blog before diving into the technical side of blogging. By listing your blogging goals in advance, you will be able to direct your efforts in the right direction.
Your goals may include making a monetary profit, improving your writing skills, building your brand, growing your network, or just documenting your life.
Get a piece of paper or use any to-do list app to jot down anything you hope to accomplish while blogging.
2. Narrow Down Your Niche
The niche relates to the topic you will be creating your blog about in blogging. If your goal is to document your life or improve your writing skills, you can skip this step and go straight to choosing the right hosting platform.
However, choosing the right niche is crucial if you want your blog to be ranked in search engines.
If you haven’t already specified what topics you will cover in your blog, take a look at your education, expertise, and hobbies, and filter out the areas where you think you are strong.
Once you’ve filtered your selections, narrow them down to what you like to do or write about. Then choose a topic that you enjoy and have a passion for teaching others, which has the potential to add value to other people’s lives.
If you choose the wrong niche, you may lose your interest in writing and stop working on your blog after a short period of time. However, if you enjoy teaching others on a specific topic that you are already good at, your passion will fuel your efforts.
3. Analyze the Competition
The analysis of your competition will show how easy or difficult it is for you to position yourself in search engines on the topics you want to write about.
The best approach would be to use the most popular search engine (preferably Google) and search for the top rated pages on the topics you want to discuss.
If the top ranked pages cover these topics in detail, it makes no sense to include them on your site as the chances of ranking will be low, mainly if you are unfamiliar with SEO.
Therefore, continue to research the topics you intend to write about and filter those topics that either cannot find an answer to your query or think you can cover them better than the top-ranked pages.
Watch the video above to learn how to find topics and analyze your competition. After you have collected over fifty topics like this, you are ready to search for a suitable hosting platform.
4. Choose the Right Hosting Platform
In the same way that storage devices save files on your computer, your blog requires some server space to store content and related files in order to be available online. Think of it as the room your website lives in and hosting services give you space.
Without going too far technical, choose one of the best web hosting providers within your budget, and you’re done. You can also host your website on a variety of cloud storage services if you’re on a tight budget, but there are a number of downsides to it.
5. Choose a Domain Name
A domain name is the name of your website that will be used by others to refer to. So choose an easy domain name for your website that is also memorable and branding.
Various domain name lookup tools can help you brainstorm based on the data entered and choose the right one.
Once your domain name is finalized, the next step is to register it with one of the leading domain name registrars. Additionally, before registering your name, you should check the availability of handles on social media, especially if you want to develop your brand on social media.
To check if social media handles are available, go to the official namecheckr website, enter a domain name of your choice and click the search icon. The tool will notify you of the availability of social media handles for the same domain name.
Consequently, if the social media handles on the most popular social media platforms have already been taken, you can try a different domain name.
7. Plan Your Monetization Strategy
You should plan your monetization strategy before starting your blog, unless you only intend to document your life with no intention of making money from it.
Regardless of whether you want to sell products as an affiliate, generate leads for companies, sell your products, services, courses or consultations, or run advertising, you need to decide in advance.
Creating a plan will help you meet your financial goals and redirect your blog to topics that you can more easily monetize.
7. Have Some Basic SEO Knowledge
While you can hire an SEO expert to help you blogging, it’s worth having some basic SEO knowledge to track search engine rankings and analyze your blog’s performance accordingly.
Moreover, learning SEO will help you take your blog to the next level and will come in handy with some of the steps we’ve covered earlier, such as researching niches, analyzing your competitors, and choosing the right monetization strategy.
For people who are completely unfamiliar with SEO, we recommend taking the following free SEO courses:
In addition, some famous SEO blogs such as Backlinko, Search Engine Journal, and Ahrefs are good resources for learning search engine optimization from scratch.
Start Your Blog the Right Way
Make sure you follow all the steps above and don’t skip any. If at some point you get stuck, it makes sense to hire a professional SEO expert to help you get started with blogging.
In addition to the factors mentioned in the article, choosing the right blogging platform is also important. While WordPress and Blogger are widely used blogging platforms, Medium, Wix, and Joomla are just as easy to use. So you should use the one that works best for you.
Top 5 Blogging Sites Other Than WordPress And Blogger
Shan Abdul
(185 published articles)
Shan’s brain churns words all day long, and that is his daily bread. Every day he learns something new, teaches the audience of MUO and lives off it.
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