Starting a Blog but don’t know How to Start a Blog 2017

It’s great to know that you are starting a blog.

And I am immensely glad that you are here.

Most of the times it happens that people jump in the blogosphere without caring to know how to start a new blog.

Most importantly, you are not one of these people.

You have taken care to know the essential things before starting a blog.

That’s superb.

It will help you to build a successful blog.

And I am sure you want to be successful.

So, just stick in.

This guide will take you through the steps of starting a “successful” blog.

It is set-up in an easy and simple format and provides you step-by-step instructions about how to start a blog.

I also used the process to start my blogs.

Why should you use this guide?

Following these simple tips will not only help you to create a successful blog, but you will also be able to save a lot of your valuable time and energy.

By following this guide, you come to know the essential things you need to do for starting a blog.

The key focus points covered in this guide are as follows:

• Benefits of starting a blog.
• Why you want to start a blog.
• How to start a blog.
• What you want to blog about
• Choose a Blogging Platform
• Blog Traffic
• And Much More

Benefits of Starting a Blog

The Internet is experiencing exponential growth. It gives you a tremendous opportunity to gain more potential readers for your blog.

You should start a blog to gain the following benefits:

Blog to earn: Blogging can turn out to be an income generating source for you. Many bloggers are already earning quite big with blogging. Even newbie bloggers can expect a good earning if they
follow the correct process.

Business Blogging: Blogging gives an opportunity to have more exposure for your existing business. By blogging, you can reach a large number of people and that too at a very low cost.

For example, if you are a Yoga instructor, having a blog can promote your business. You can come up with interesting posts on yoga benefits and exercises. Your readers come to know you and get influenced by knowledge.

These readers can then endorse your services or products. It gives you more exposure and helps to establish your brand or image. Moreover, your readers can become your actual customers.

Brand Building: Blogging can be a source of recognition in your chosen field. You can be known as an expert in your field just because of your blog.

Idea Sharing: Blogging can turn out to be a great platform for sharing your ideas with like-minded people. It is one of the best ways to communicate and spread information.

A Better Writer: Blogging provides you an opportunity to become a better writer. You get to learn new things and can implement them in your blog. By having your blog, you can share your story, encourage others, and build a community.

To know the detailed benefits of Blogging, you can always refer to one of my earlier posts, “The benefits you can avail from online blogging”.

The Basic Steps for Starting a Blog

Here, I have detailed the steps that you should take to create a successful blog. Remember to follow these steps for starting your blog.

Why do you want to start a blog?

It is the first and foremost step that you need to take for starting a blog. You should figure out the purpose of starting a blog.

You want to start a blog because you love writing and want to share your ideas, knowledge or information with others?

If writing is a natural passion for you, then blogging can prove to be a perfect platform for sharing your knowledge with like-minded people over the Internet.

Or,

Is it that you want to take up blogging because you want to promote your business?

Blogging for business helps to strengthen your brand value and customer relationship. You can promote your business by starting a blog.

Or,

Is it that you want to make money out of blogging?

Blogging provides you a perfect platform for making money through the Internet. However, it demands a systematic approach. You have to remember that are millions of blogs and you to make
your blog stands out from the crowd.

It requires you to figure out the niche in which you have interest or command. If you do not have any particular area of expertise, then you can research online to find out the niche which has low competition. That way you stand a better chance to figure your blog among the top results on search engine results.

So, you may have to adopt different approaches after deciding the purpose of your blog.

The purpose of starting a blog will change the situation and strategies for promoting your blog.

One of my earlier posts, “Setting Purpose and Goals for Blogging” can prove to be a valuable resource for you.

What you want to blog about – Research your Niche

It requires you to know what your blog would talk about.

An essential blogging principle is that you should blog about something you enjoy.

You should choose a niche in which you have authority or command. It would give you a plenty of room for topics, and you can then discuss them at length.

So, if you want to become a successful blogger, then it is very important that you select such a niche on which you have expertise, interest or liking for the subject.

Then you need to do a proper and thorough research on your chosen niche.

For this, you can refer the popular blogs on the same niche. You get to know what topics they are writing, which of their posts are popular. This way you can gain knowledge on your chosen niche and get an insight into what you should be writing.

Moreover, you can also gather and compile a list of the topics you can write.

If you are a part of a business or organization, your blog should focus on the products or services you provide.

One of my earlier posts, “Which type of Blog Posts you should write” can prove very helpful to you.

You can also read my post, “How to get content ideas for your blog”

Blog Topic Research / Keyword Research

The basic purpose of blogging is to gain visitors. You want a huge and regular flow of visitors to your blog. Most of the times, you get a high percentage of visitors from the search engines.

Visitors essentially search through keywords and click on the related search results which appear on the search engines the first page.

So essentially you have to target such keywords in which there is low competition, and you can easily appear among the top results.

It can happen if you do proper keyword research.

For this, you can use Keyword Research tools like Google AdWords Keyword Planner or go thru this post 10 Best Keyword Research Tools

There is one more benefit of doing keyword research. You also get varied writing topics and hence can build your future topic lists, as well.

Learn from other successful blogs

At this point, I would suggest you learn from other blogs. You can learn all good ways to build a successful blog just by reading some good blogs.

There are lots of good blogs which will tell you how to build a successful blog. Their advice will make you rethink before building your blog, and this will be good for you. The best way is to start reading EarningGuys.com posts.

Here, you will find various posts dedicated on Blogging, SEO, WordPress, and Social Media that are so much essential for creating a successful blog.

It will help you to gain more knowledge about blogging and prepare you for starting a blog.

Other than this, you can study other blogs in your niche. It will help you to know what’s going on in your niche.

Find which blog is at the top in your niche and why. You can find most popular blogs and top blogs on a particular niche by searching on Google.

Choose a Blogging Platform

Starting a blog requires you to choose a blogging platform.

So, you have to decide which platform you would use to build your blog.

There are many blogging platforms out there.

They are listed below:

Blogger – It is another very popular hosted blogging platform by Google.

Tumblr – It is very easy to use. It is a combination of blogging platform and social network.

WordPress.com – It is one of the most popular free blogging platforms.

Hosted or Self-Hosted

It is one of the most important decisions that you have to make when you start a blog. You need to ascertain whether you want to pay for your blog or want to start with a free one.

Hosted

You can start a free blog on WordPress.com, Blogger as well as on Tumblr.

It is known as Hosted Blogging platforms.

In Hosted blogging account your website files are stored on blogging platform servers. There are no start-up costs involved in getting a hosted account for your new blog. It is easy to maintain and
requires no prior website design know-how.

Hosted Blogs are particularly good for people who have just entered the blogging world. You can experiment and learn easily.

However, hosted blogs have some downsides.

You would not be able to get your domain name.

Your website address will look like:

Yourblog.Tumblr.com
Yourblog.blogspot.com
Yourblog.wordpress.com

It is really ugly.

Then, you are not the owner of your hosted blog. You can lose your blog posts if the blog service decides to delete your blog.

Worst, you cannot fully monetize your blog.

In hosted blogs, you may not upload images and videos or can only upload limited images or videos. You may also not get access to use third-party plugin and themes.

Self-Hosted

On the other hand, with a self-hosted blog you become the real owner of your blog. A self-hosted blog resides on your web server (hosting account). You can also choose a web hosting provider to host your blog. You can get digital storage space by paying few dollars per month.

Self-hosted blogs have a professional look and are best for businesses. You can name your blog, such as yourblog.com, and can have any web suffix. You can get unlimited bandwidth for your website, images, and videos. Plus, you can use free as well as premium themes. Moreover, you can design your blog the way you want.

For the self-hosted blog, you can install WordPress on your website.

WordPress is one of the most popular and biggest Blogging Platforms in the world. It’s massive.

I use WordPress and advocate this powerful blogging platform. It offers countless plugins to enhance its power and provides infinite ways for designing your blog.

Moreover, it is easy to set up and is free to use. It provides numerous free themes and layout.

It also comes with a support forum. You can share your content and people can interact on your blog very easily.

Domain and Hosting

Here, I presume that you have chosen self-hosting to start a blog. In my opinion, WordPress would be the most appropriate blogging platform. I use WordPress for my blogs.

You first need to pick a domain name. It is the URL of your website. Example: eaningguys.com

You also need to choose a hosting company that can host your blog. It’s the company that puts your website up on the Internet. Some of the prominent hosting companies include HostGator,
Bluehost, iPage, DreamHost, FatCow, etc.

You can refer to my post, “12 Best Web Hosting Providers” to get further information on Web Hosting Companies.

You then need to install WordPress on your website. If you need some help for installing WordPress, you can read this post, “Start WordPress Blog Step by Step Guide.”

You need to access your WP-Admin page to start blogging.

Design Your Blog

You need to design your blog so that your blog has a professional look and feel, and stands out from rest of the blogs.

By using a good theme, you can design your blog exactly the way you want. You can either use a free theme or can go for a premium theme. You should pick a theme which looks professional and is
easy to customize.

WordPress makes it easy for you to switch from one theme to another without losing any of your content or images. You should remember that your blog should be easy to navigate, as well.

You do not need to spend a lot of money designing your blog, but you must search for good looking design, or you can look for readymade themes which do not cost much. You can get WordPress themes from – Premium WordPress Themes Provider

WordPress SEO and Plugins

There are certain distinct advantages of using WordPress for running and managing blogs over the internet.

One of them is that WordPress comes with Plugins option. There is plenty of third-party SEO Plugins available.

Using the SEO Plugins, you can make your WordPress blog SEO friendly. Plus, Plugins which can increase your blog productivity, visitor’s interaction, search engine ranking and provide a lot of other benefits. You can also avoid SEO errors like a broken link, duplicate content, interlinking posts, etc.

Search Engine Optimization is necessary if you want to improve your website rankings in the search engine results and thereby increase visitor traffic, as well. Making your blog SEO friendly from very first day will help you to get long term Search traffic.

Using WordPress SEO plugins, you can remove duplicate pages which result due to similar posts appearing in more than one category. You can make the Author Pages, Tag page, etc. to NoIndex (for avoiding the duplicate content issue), include Meta tags, descriptions, title (for better on-page SEO) and much more.

You can refer to my post, “10 Best WordPress SEO Plugins”. You will find very useful SEO Plugins for your WordPress site.

On-Page SEO

From the very beginning when you launch your blog, each and every of your blog post should go through On-Page SEO efforts.

Not only the quality of your content is important, but the way it is presented to the audience also counts a lot.

Doing On-Page SEO tasks you can greatly enhance the ranking of your blog in the search engine results. Appearing on the top of the search results means lot’s of free traffic to your website.

Some of the popular and widely used On-Page SEO techniques involve the use of keywords in the heading, title of the post, in the description, in multiple places in your content as well in the Meta Description.

So you have to optimize the use of keywords in your post so as to make your blog post SEO friendly. To learn more about On-Page SEO refer to this post, “On Page SEO: How to do it right!”

Come up with Good Content on your Blog

As you may have heard lot of time content is King. It will always be true that content is King.

Why will people come to your blog?

To find interesting and useful information.

What if I present you a music DVD filled with some crap music you never want to listen. What will you do to that DVD; you may put it in a corner, or you want to break that DVD.

Same applies for bad content your content will be of no use to others. Search for what people want to read and create quality content of their interest.

Build Social Profile for your Blog

As soon as you start your blog, simultaneously you need to build the social profile for your blog. Social media channels such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, etc. are a strong medium for
driving huge visitors’ traffic to your site.

Secondly, if you delay in building the social profile, probably your preferred social ID or URL might be taken by someone else. Through Social Profile you can spread your blog to a large number of
targeted visitors. You can develop a huge following for your blog.

List Building

Another important thing is the email list building. You should make every effort that facilitates you email list building. Doing this, you can develop regular and repeat visitors for your site.

You might feel that list building will not prosper in the initial days, but don’t forget that this small list can certainly grow to give you a large number of loyal visitors and subscribers.

If you are not planning to go for email list building in the initial days of starting your blog, then you can promote your blog through the use of RSS Feeds. It helps to gain repeat visitors as well as
helps to sustain visitors for a longer time.

Blog Promotion

Now you have a self-hosted blog, good blog design, right plugins, and very good content is this of any use without visitors.

Blog popularity is measured by how many visitors come to that site. Bringing visitors to your site is a difficult task, but there are plenty of ways you can bring visitors to your site.

Submit your site to all major search engines you can get a lot of visitors from search engines. Submit your blog post to the top social bookmarking sites. Make comments on other blogs, create your
profile on social networking site and make friends.

Advertising: Advertising is one of the most powerful mediums for blog promotion. It is very popular among bloggers. You can do paid advertising on social sites such as Facebook, Twitter. You can also advertise on search engines including Google. It is a good technique for gaining quality visitors for your site or blog.

Website Analytics Tools

Performance tracking for your blog or website traffic analysis is one of the cornerstones for success in the blogging world. By doing website analytics, you get an in-depth report about the performance of your blog.

With website analytics at your hands, you can go ahead and plan your blogging strategy. You will know from which sources your site visitors are coming from, which blog posts are popular on your site, how much time visitors spend on your blog, etc.

There are various Website Analytics Tools which can help you to get detailed reports about your website traffic and much more.

For further information, you can refer to one of my earlier posts, “10 Best Web Analytics Tools”.

Some more tips for starting a blog

• You must have article topic list which can fulfill your blog writing requirements for at least next three months.
• Regularly promote your blog on social networking and social sharing sites.
• Must have a plan of link building for your blog and blog post.
• Make your website fast for better SEO.
• Build relationship with other bloggers in your niche even you have not started your blog.

So these were some of the Essential Things to Do before Starting a Blog. Following the above points diligently, you can prolong your blogging career and moreover make it a grand success. Implementing the above techniques you can carve out a successful blogging career for you.

Starting a blog is easy, but it is essential to sustaining and build a successful and thriving blogging career. Doing these Essential Things will certainly help you to become a successful blogger.

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