Important things you must know before starting a blog

Things you must know before starting a blog

If you have plans on starting a blog then this post is for you. Quiet often, many persons would love to go into blogging for whichever reason they may have but this desire fade away in no time as they will find the process to be a complex one (which I don’t think it is). Blogging has to do with consistence and patience. Let me tell you something, I ventured into blogging February 2016 but could only say I understood a little bit of how the blogosphere works in august of the same year, before this, I was busy searching for information online and doing trial and error practice. This was because; I never had someone to put me through. But you have me, you are getting all the information you would ever need right on my blog and through my facebook and twitter handle by simply following me. In this article I will be telling you exactly what you need to start a blog as a beginner with five months experience (my awkward blogging moments).

Now, let’s get started with the things you need to put in place before you launch your first blog;

1.       Decide before you start:

Before you put up a blog, there are certain decisions you must make and keep them in check in your blogging journey; you wouldn’t love to have a heedless blog as a blog. So it is very important that you take the following decisions:

·         Decide to start: this is not just it because I know that everyone reading this post is 100% ready to start but blogging is more than just starting (you shouldn’t stop along the line), this is why you must decide when to start with great focus on your environment (start at your convenience).

·         Decide on a niche to blog in: this is the most important decision in blogging so you have to be very careful here. If possible, go through a deep introspection before you chose a particular niche. For those of us who don’t know what a niche is; a blogging niche is simply the topic of your blog (I.e. what you are going to be talking about on your blog). It is advisable that you a niche you are very good at for example; a person who is very good at sports analysis should blog about sport while a person good at cooking and fashion should start a blog in the respective niche. Here are some niches you can pickup from: sports, fashion, food, science, tech, travel, storytelling, news and many more. Note that blogging is majorly about teaching and sharing information so you need a little bit of writing/communication skills but if you are not good at teaching I suggest you go into the news or entertainment niche where you can just copy from another site and put it on your own or look for latest music and upload them for people to download.

·         Domain name: this is the name with which visitors will identify/find your blog it can be a sub-domain (which is normally free) e.g example.blogspot.com or a full domain (which is bought) e.g example.com. a good domain name should be simple and short, memorable (easy to remember), related to the niche of your blog (or use your name instead if you can’t get a good domain name that’s related to your niche).

·         Why you want to blog: you have to recognize the reason behind your blogging dreams, it helps you to know whether to be serious with it or not. Some persons blog because they just want to own a website, some create a blog for their business, while others like myself create it as a business; it all depend on what you want to create your site for.

·         Your working plan: to be a successful blogger, you need to draft your working plan and stick to it if at all you want to build authority as a blogger. Let your audience get used to your time, this could help you get more returning visitors and drive moderate and increasing traffic to your blog. By doing so, your audience can never decrease; they rather increase or remain steady. This could be hard but it could be made simple by scheduling your posts to meet up with the time your update time. For example; if your drafted time for updates is 4a.m daily, you know you may not be able to meet up at some point in time but, if you have scheduled today’s post yesterday nobody will detect your absence because  your post was publish. With post scheduling, you can schedule as many posts as you wish for different time period. I mean, you can schedule 30 posts to publish one on daily basis; which means you will be free for 30days.              

2.       Create a rough sketch of your would be blog: when planning a to start a blog, make a rough sketch of your would be blog on a paper before taking it online. This could help you save time on the designing of the blog.

3.       Chose a platform to host your blog: this is very important, your blog has to be on a platform; there are many platforms which you can use but the common and reputable ones are wordpress, blogger, joomla and some others, but it all depends on what you want. Every blogging platform has its advantages and disadvantages. I advise that you should use blogger if you if you are looking to start a free blog, though a more superior platform, I don’t support using  a free wordpress blog if you have monetization in mind.

4.       Your blogs appearance: you ought to know that the first thing your readers fall in love with is the appearance of your blog. Blogs with ugly designs tend to drive away your audience. Therefore, before you put up that blog, why not spend a little to make the design more appealing. If you think a beautiful appearance is not necessary then ask yourself why books with beautiful covers sell better that other better books despite the saying that a book should not be judged by its cover. From my observation; ‘people read color before text’. Hope you understand what I meant by that? The bottom line is that you should at least spend 30minutes in drafting ot a unique color for your blog, but if you have a nice acumen on color it shouldn’t take you 10minutes. am not good in color so it takes me roughly half an hour of trial and error before I normally get  a satisfactory appearance for my blog.

5.       Start making posts: this is the essence of owning a blog, write quality articles. In order to build authority, your contents have to be unique.

6.       Work on your traffic: a blog is nothing if it has no reader so you have to start getting people to know about your new blog. The simplest way to build traffic is to create social accounts for your blog and share your posts to the social the social networks. Like myself, I solely depend on facebook and Google plus  for my blog traffic, the rest come from search engines.

Having read the above guidelines, it is my belief that the above steps are mandatory before when drafting the blue print for your blog. Note that this article is written based on my blogging experience; men, it was hell trying to get my blog running.

Down to the big question, are you ready to start a blog today? I think you should read my step by step tutorials on how to start a free blogspot blog or how to start a worpress blog.