As most of you blogging babes may know, starting a blog is no joke. There are countless hours that go into making it a reality. There are periods of stress, and sometimes even the feeling of giving up (can you relate)? The market seems so saturated with information, and people promising you how they can make your blog a money making machine, but sometimes, it can all be so overwhelming. Today I am going to share 7 useful tips on how to start a successful blog.
How To Start A Successful Blog
From Pinterest to hosting, to SEO, to content, there are days when my head spins when I look at my list of things to do. I have been at this blogging thing for about 3 months now, and I am still finding my way, but I want to share some of what I have learned over the course of the past several months.
When I decided that I wanted to start a blog, I created a list of questions based on the hours of research that I did. I hope that the information found in this post can cut down the time you spend searching at least by a little bit.
The information found in this post is not sponsored, and I am not incentivized for writing it. These are my true opinions based on my experience with launching my website.
Self Host Your Site
Self-hosting and hosting are two different things. I explain more about hosting later in this post. Self-hosting entails choosing a domain for your site and purchasing it. The benefits of self-hosting instead of using a free site is that when you buy your domain, you own it. Self-hosting makes your site look more professional, for example, I self-host, and my website is www.jzpthomas.com, if you choose one of the free platforms, your site would be something like jzpthomas.worpress.org. Another thing to keep in mind when using free platforms is that your content that you spent hours and hours creating could one day disappear if you violate the terms of the free hosting site. In my opinion, this is a big enough reason to self-host.
Hosting
Web hosting is an essential part of getting your site up and running. Think of web hosting as the house, and your website as the furniture inside of the house but in the form of computer files, images, and documents. Hosting companies rent out their servers to you so that you have a place to store your website, and they provide internet connectivity so that users can access the files and information on your site. Luckily, website hosting is pretty inexpensive, and there are tons of companies that you can choose from. For my blog, I decided to use a company called Host Gator. What I liked most about this site, is that once you get signed up for hosting, you can connect to WordPress with the click of one button.
WordPress hosting is one of the best options out there. You use WordPress for your blog, so why not use them as your host.
Use my code to get 20% off your monthly plan!
What platform should you use?
I highly recommend WordPress. I honestly cannot say enough good things about this platform. The plugins make the site easy to use and update for those of us who may not be super technically savvy. I also like the support that comes with using WordPress when you sign up for premium support. There are many users guides out there, and you can find help for practically every topic related to WordPress on YouTube for free. I am including a couple of links to pages I found super helpful as I begin to set up my blog.
Keep Expenses Low In the Beginning
A key thing I have learned is that you want to keep your startup costs low when you start blogging. We all want to monetize our blogs and get to the point where it is an excellent source of income, but until that point make sure you are keeping your costs low. There are necessities such as a premium subscription on WordPress, website hosting, an SSL certificate, Site Security Monitoring, and of course, there are some blogging courses that appear to be worth the investment as well. I have my eyes on the Billionaire Blog Club, but I have been a bit hesitant to invest before I am profitable. But the free 12-day blogging boot camp that he offers has me completely sold.
Content
Content is queen. It is the reason people come to our blogs. They want to hear our point of view, and they want to be provided with information that is useful to them. For the most part, people do not want to read about what you ate, or what you did last weekend. They want substantive content that is useful to them and hopefully solves a problem. For example, if you blog about food, you could include a roundup of recipes that don’t take much time to cook for the busy adults in your demographic.
SEO
Search Engine Optimization. I am sure that you have heard this term countless times by now. SEO is an important aspect to all of our websites; it helps us to get recognized and ranked within Google. Every piece of content you create for your blog should be SEO optimized. If you took my recommendation and signed up for WordPress, you can download a handy plugin called Yoast SEO. I love this plugin because it is so easy to use, and it ranks your SEO before you hit publish on your posts. Yoast SEO will give you suggestions on ways to improve, and as you make updates your rating changes. We want to always strive to have a green light for our SEO.
Here are some ways to get that green light.
- Make sure every post has meta titles and descriptions
- Be sure to update your URL to make it SEO friendly using keywords that are most relevant to your post topic
- Try to link back to other posts on your blog with every new piece of content you create
- Add alt text to every image on your site alt text enables Google to read your images even if there are not words on it thus making you more searchable
What mail service should I use?
We all hear over and over again about the importance of creating and maintaining an email list because if Instagram or Facebook were to go down, we would lose all of our followers. With an email list, you own your list. For this reason, I recommend starting out with MailChimp because it is free up to 2,000 users. You can also use this tutorial to help you with setting up beautiful opt-in forms so that when you create your freebie, you can capture your user’s information. I highly recommend you start building your list sooner rather than later.
Use this list as a guide to the key things you need to know about how to start a successful blog, and if you’re experiencing writer’s block use these tips to get those fingers typing.
Also, go here to download your free checklist.
