Enough has been read, enough has been said. Do you now finally want to know how to start a blog and make money online? It doesn’t matter what is your reason for starting it, be it influencing people by your words, be it promoting your company or business or be it making money.
If you’re determined to start a blog but don’t know how to get started, you’re at the right place. After reading the article one thing’s for sure, all your doubts and all your questions will vanish. Haven’t even decided what your blog’s niche will be? No problem, you’ll end up deciding one for sure after reading this article. Don’t know how to set up a blog and other basic stuff? Not a problem, we’re here to teach you.
Ideate
- Find Your Niche
Deciding your blog’s niche is one of the most important parts when you start a blog. Your blog will hardly succeed if you choose a niche that you don’t like or is uninteresting to you. If the niche interests you, you’ll never be bored, will be in a flow, and will never consider your blog as a burden. There’s no rocket science in finding what’s the perfect niche for you. Just know what you’re passionate about, what’s that one thing that never bores you and you often do it in your free time. For example, your passion is dancing, make it your niche and blog about it as you’ll for sure have knowledge related to it. Blogging becomes way easy if you blog about what you already have a piece of knowledge of. Selecting your blog’s niche ain’t a difficult job, just ask yourself what niche you’ll be comfortable within the long term and you’ll have your answer.
Stay Laser Focused
Your blog’s readers need to have a clear idea of why are they visiting your blog and what should they expect when they visit your blog. Gain excellence in the niche which you blog about and provide your readers with the best content you can so they end up having no second choice except your blog while searching for something in that niche.
Be original
You might wonder what’s the sense of writing original content and wasting time in it when you have an array of content on the internet to copy and repost it in your blog. But, there are plenty of reasons why writing original content makes sense. Reposting someone else’s work can make your blog look unprofessional, lower its rankings, negatively affect the SEO and lower your and your blog’s credibility. If your work is original, people will love to read it, and most importantly, google too encourages blogs that have original content.
- Discover Your Voice
Be Genuine
Your readers aren’t fooled to believe in everything that you post. People can easily spot out the fake ones. A lot of bloggers nowadays post fake screenshots of their blog’s earning, publish fake reviews, and make fake promises for their products. But all this will lead to a temporary growth of your blog, but in the long term? Will affect your credibility and the blog in a negative way. Posting genuine earning reports (even if the earnings aren’t much) is way better than posting fake ones, that’ll lead you nowhere in the long term.
Be Light-Hearted and Be Yourself
Don’t every time be formal and serious in your blog posts, that sometimes makes your posts a bit dull. Even if the topic is a serious one, try to be a bit informal and humorous in your posts. This engages your audience and creates a good relationship between your blog and the readers. Also, it is very important to be your own self. Knowingly or unknowingly we all at first start writing in the way and the style in which our favorite writers do. Learning from other writers is an excellent habit, but cultivating their exact style in ours isn’t. It is very important to create a style and an identity of our own. So, “learn from everyone, follow no one.”
Choose Your Tactics
- Select A Blog and A Domain Name
Simplify
Simple domain names and simple designs are mostly preferred than the oversaturated ones. Having a domain name that’s easy to remember and a design that’s easy to scroll in affects the blog’s traffic and SEO positively. So, just pick up a simple domain name for your blog and not the one that’s oversaturated.
Make It Your Own
Do not opt for a domain name that’s similar to someone else’s. Dong this will make your blog look unoriginal and create a mess in the SEO. Having an original domain name helps in creating a unique identity of your blog and increases professionalism. Also, it is important for ranking it in search engines.
- Pick Up A CMS (Content Management System)
People usually get confused while selecting a CMS before starting the blog. There are tons of CMS options you can select from. Every CMS provides you with different facilities that make blogging a bit easier and efficient. Among these thousands of CMS, WordPress and Blogger followed by Tumblr, Squarespace and Typepad are some widely used and the best ones that people prefer. Among these, WordPress is the most preferred one with 59.4% of the market share.
Before selecting the CMS, know what are the needs and requirements of your blog. Knowing that will make it easier for you to select a CMS. Also, different CMS’s provide different facilities like hosting, content management, etc. So decide which CMS will be best for your blog and choose wisely. At last, choose a design template of your choice and the one that suits your blog type.
Grow Your Presence
- Create A Schedule and Stick To It
It doesn’t matter whether you make 5-10 posts a day or just 1-2, the thing that matters is the consistency. If you’d made 5-10 posts in a single day but there isn’t a consistency in your posts the rest of the days, it’ll not make much sense. But, if you make a single post daily but have consistency in your posts, people will have a clear idea of what your schedule is and when to visit your blog for fresh content. So, making a single post a day with consistency is better than making 5 per day with no consistency. So, it’s an excellent habit to schedule your posts and stick on to it.
- Engage Your Readers
Make It Easy
Engaging with your audience is a very powerful tool in blogging. It has tons of benefits and advantages. One of the best ways to engage with your readers can be the “comments”. If it's easy for the readers to comment, there will be a good number of comments, but if there are any crap criteria before commenting like signing up or logging in, people will find it difficult to comment and give it a second thought.
Respond To Comments and Emails
Responding to comments and emails is a way by which your readers get to know how much you value their feedback and their opinions. It is a powerful way of creating some strong connections and networks. Also, you’ll make a lot of good friends through this.
- Use Visual Aids
Images, Videos, and Infographics
Using these visual aids creates a sense of professionalism and attracts more audience. A blog post without these aids sometimes is boring to read and is a bit dull. Using images and infographics can be a good way to cover up your whole article in short and so before reading the article, the readers will have a clear idea of what they’re going to read in this article. Videos add to the glory, you can create videos on how-to-angle in whatever area you’re expert at.
- Be Kind
Along with some good feedback and comments, you’ll for sure also receive some negative feedback too. You may get many negative feedbacks but don’t get disappointed or reply to them harshly, instead take them positively and reply politely. The best thing you can do is respond to negative feedback with a clear head.
Connect
- Claim Your Handles, Build Your Community and Amplify
Social media plays an important part in the success of a blog. It helps your blog to reach a wider and unique group of audience. If someone likes your post and wants to share it with their circles in social media, don’t make the sharing difficult for them i.e. just include the social media buttons after every post of yours, these buttons make it easy for your readers to share the posts with their circles. Just a click, and done. Also, try to make groups and build a community on these social media websites which will help your blog in a lot of ways. Be it FB, be it twitter, be it Instagram or just any social media website, allow your readers to follow your blog anywhere and everywhere easily.
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