Have you been searching for the right guide that gives useful advice on how to start a successful blog? Look no further as we have prepared the only blogging for beginners guide you’ll ever need. But first, let’s start with the basics of blogging.
The word blog (originates from the word “weblog”) is used to describe a website that shows a narrative of events or information, even different kinds of media like videos and images. A blog consists of and displays information logs in chronological order, meaning that the latest information appears first and the older information follows Blog posts usually have a diary-type description of comments and links to articles or media.
As a beginner blogger, remember that your focus can vary from one narrow topic or a range of different topics depending on your preference. Starting a blog is similar to a business startup in the sense that you need to handle your investment resources - time, capital, content creation, website, Search Engine Organization (SEO) optimization, and more.
How Do You Start a Blog?
So, how do you start a blog? This section will thoroughly explain a step-by-step guide on blogging for beginners.
Step 1: Begin Preparations for Your New Blog
Before you begin this blogging for beginners guide, you must ask yourself a few questions before beginning your journey. You must know what you want to achieve as a beginner blogger and to ensure that you are headed in the right direction, you need to keep the following points in mind. So, what’s your purpose?
- To Share Information and Knowledge. Do you want to start a blog because you want to help other individuals with your existing skills? Then, hobby blogging is for you.
- To Earn Exposure as A Professional or Business Individual. Did you want to talk about your business ideas and values? You can make your business website more interesting with regular blogging. With increasing blog posts, you improve your website’s SEO.
- To Make Money Through Blog Monetization. Some individuals have their blogs as their main source of income.
- To Strategically Market Your Content. Blogs are great to consider as a part of your marketing strategy. Writing relevant blog posts can attract the attention of your target audience.
- To Promote Your Product or Service. Did you know that blogs are a great way to promote your services or products? You can write in-depth posts about your services or products on your site, or set up a blog alongside your e-commerce website.
Here’s a Strikingly user whose website fulfills a lot of the points above.
Image taken from Strikingly user’s website
As you can see, Ashmith is a professional individual who has a page dedicated to his blog posts as well as a page dedicated to the services he offers.
Step 2: Choose a Blog Platform and Create a Blog Site
When it comes to blogging for beginners, another important decision you need to make as a beginner blogger is which platform to use. It is not easy to maintain and frequently update a blog so you should find a platform that is easy to use. Strikingly’s blog has many posts that can help you decide on a blogging platform.
Step 3: Designing and Customizing Your Blog
Yes, having good-quality content is important for your blog. However, having good-quality content with a poor website design is going to get you nowhere. So, the third step to blogging for beginners is to ensure that your blog has a design that is visually appealing to your readers. Once again, Strikingly’s blog has many posts that assist you in terms of blog design and customization.
Don’t forget the following points either as they are extremely important on how to start a blog:
- Choose a web domain name.
- Choose a web host. You can self-host your own with a hosting service if you prefer.
- Choose a web design template for your blog. Most blogging platforms have a wide library of pre-designed templates. For example, here’s the website template library offered by Strikingly.
Image taken from Strikingly product
- Choose useful plugins and blog tools. This is optional as they only enhance the utilities of your blog.
Step 4: Enhance the Readability of Your Blog
Now that we’ve gone through 3 steps already, it is clear that blogging for beginners can be challenging as there are a lot of things to consider. For example, regardless of being a beginner blogger or not, you are required to regularly write and publish blog posts, manage blog promotion and ensure that readers enjoy your blog content.
Regardless of which blogging platform you select, there are bound to be optional tools and programs to add more features to your blog. These functions make your blog more appealing to readers and enhance it. Some suggested tool functions for a beginner blogger to search for include tools that:
- Add features that monetize your overall blog and its contents.
- Assist optimization of media like images.
- Check the SEO of your blog posts.
- Check the grammar and spelling of your blog posts.
- Improve your blog content’s readability.
- Improve the overall readability of your blog website.
Step 5: Beginning the Monetization of Your Blog
You’re getting close to the end of this blogging for beginners guide but keep paying attention! It takes not only time to create and maintain a blog site, but also investment and patience. When your blog shows growth in popularity, you might want to consider ways to monetize it. Why? Because getting some sort of reward from all the efforts you put in to sustain your page is nice.
Regardless of whether you’re a beginner blogger or not, here are some tips that can help maintain the sustenance of your blog as well as its usability for your readers:
- Avoid black hat techniques to speed up the process of monetization.
- Be patient and persistent as earning passive income through blogs take time.
- Build your brand and promote your blog from the start.
- Develop long-term plans for your blog’s monetization.
- Do not overdo advertising because it could overshadow your content and as a result, annoy readers.
- Ensure that the content on your blog is of the best quality.
- Select a website template that has the flexibility to allow blog monetization.
- Select a website design that allows you to display ads on the sidebars of your site.
Of course, monetization does not have to be your main goal, but it is something to consider in the future.
Step 6: Promotion and Maintenance of Your Blog
The final step to this blogging for beginners guide is to remember that the consistency of your efforts should not falter as you need to continuously promote your blog and grasp the attention of readers. Aside from promotion, you should also maintain the SEO of your blog because it is incredibly beneficial to your blog’s success.
Here are some more blogging tips for beginners (or veterans) relevant to SEO:
- Consider using third-party tools and editors that can enhance your blog site’s readability.
- Ensure that the headings and body text of your blog are optimized.
- Pay attention to the basics of SEO such as titles, keywords, optimized images, and more.
- Select a web design template that is SEO-friendly (and preferably with SEO optimization code).
- Use SEO plugins to ensure that the entirety of your content is optimized well.
- Use images that are optimized with appropriate alt tags.
Blogging Tips for Beginners
Now that you read through the blogging for beginners guide on how to start a blog, here are more tips for you.
- Cite individuals who influenced your ideas.
- Don’t be extremely formal, write just like how you would talk.
- Focus on how organic traffic (SEO) can benefit your blog in the long run.
- Have a specific post type with an outline and headers.
- If you make claims in your blog posts, make sure to support them with data and research.
- Keep an editorial calendar so you can blog consistently.
- Make your point over and over again.
- Publish drafts that begin to collect dust.
- Use examples to support the importance of your points.
Blogging Mistakes to Avoid
It wouldn’t be a complete guide to blogging for beginners if we didn’t tell you what to avoid doing when blogging. So, we’ve compiled a list of blogging mistakes to remember.
- You only think of ideas that are interesting to you, not your readers.
You can solve this by ensuring that the blog posts you create will contribute to your goals. Ideas come at random times but just because it’s a good idea overall, it might not be a good idea for your blog.
- You forget about your readers’ persona.
You can solve this by understanding your readers’ persona to create blog posts that can resonate with them. As a result, your blog performs well and you create content that resonates with your readers.
- Your blog posts are written in a manner that’s too stiff.
You can solve this by writing blog posts that sound personal, so ditch the jargon and instead, loosen up your writing tone.
- Your blog posts have broad topics.
You can solve this by beginning with a clear, concise idea. If you want to get the benefits of blogging, you need to be more specific.
Now that you’ve gone through the entire blogging for beginners guide, are you ready to begin your journey? Especially with the knowledge of basics of blogging you’ve acquired? If so, you can create your first blog with Strikingly and become a beginner blogger.
Image taken from Strikingly
Strikingly is a website builder that allows you to create a blog website or page with ease. You do not need any pre-existing skills in web design or development to begin. Why? Because there are many website templates and blog layouts available for you to choose from.
Image taken from Strikingly product
There are also options to buy a domain name for your blog so you can personalize your blog. Aside from SEO optimization features, it provides monetization features such as online store integration for your blog and many more. Can you believe that Strikingly offers so many features to its users?
Simply just sign up for an account to access the many features Strikingly has to offer for both free and paid plans. The three kinds of plans you can choose from including the basic plan, the limited plan, and the pro plan - all of which allow access to various features.
So what are you waiting for? Use the knowledge you learned from this blogging for beginners guide and sign up for an account today!
