To be able to be a successful blogger, first of all, you need to identify your strongest skill sets. Maybe you’re a great photographer or a graphics designer, or maybe you just love to code. Maybe your writing skills are unique enough to encapsulate a reader. Whatever the choice or reason to start a blog, you should use your skills! Don’t blog in a certain style because you’ve heard it’s effective or in a way that makes your strength the centre, be-all and end-all value people can take from looking at your content.
Blogging is one of the only businesses that will allow complete flexibility over your life, many bloggers choose to blog about travelling which is an industry that continues to grow.
Here are some basic tips to get you blogging in no time
Choose a Host and Create An Account
The first step to starting a blog is to pick a host. A ‘hosting’ company is a company that houses your website or blog online and allows it to be seen by your readers.
There are free options available and others which you pay for. Depending on how avid you are with the industry, you may want to use the freebies or a professional service such as refreshtech.com.
Choose and Rent a Domain Name
A domain name is the web address people will type into their browser get to the website or blog. The general cost to rent a domain is (relative to its spec name features) to be about $10 to $15 for the year. This is a big part of the creation of your blog. That could seem a little daunting. However, it is not hard to change your domain name down the road if needed, so don’t stress over it too much.
Install WordPress or another Content Management System
WordPress is a popular mainstream blogging software that many bloggers use today, once it is installed into your domain control panel, will be able to produce your content. After installation, you’ll then be asked to choose a login name and password for the WordPress account. There are plenty of different content management systems available just like WordPress, give them all a try and find which one suits you best.
An important note…at this point, you’ll be asked to pick a theme. Choosing from the vast amount of free content readily available for a quick MVP startup can be fast and simple.
Congratulations! You just started a blog!
Choose a Theme
Depending on your knowledge or expertise within web-development, you may wish to use the free templates, purchase a spec layout or code your very own. For the most part, though, there are many free themes available that will suit the majority of bloggers needs. Otherwise, be sure to take advantage of all the code snippets and open source material available to use.
Choose a Topic, Create Somewhat Expectations And Then Fulfill Them
This means consistency in what you want to publish. Whether it be when you publish, the style of how you write, what you post and share, etc. Before you hit publish though, do some keyword research with retrospect to your content. A bit of planning for outreach and a little promotion after you publish will help traffic get directed to your site.
Chances are if you’ve been thinking about blogging, you already have in mind the topic you’d like to write about. However, with so many blogs out there, is there room for yet another one about your chosen topic?
These are just a few handy tips that can help the complete beginner come to terms with the idea of starting a blog. Do you have any other tips you would like to share? Let us all know in the comments below!
