This post is a guide in starting a blog. If you are passionate about writing and want to start a blog of your own, you have come to the right place. Maybe you are already a blogger and have been blogging on other people’s websites so far. This is the time for you to put out your writing skills on your own platform.
The best thing about learning how to start a blog is that it does not require any form of investment. There is so much free-of-cost content available on the internet these days about teaching stuff like this. In fact, sometimes, you get access to so much information that it becomes a burden to filter through it. That’s why we have sorted through all the information and built an easy-to-follow seven-step process for you. We will guide you on starting a blog by illustrating the process on a rising website building platform called Strikingly.
7 Steps for Starting a Blog
Here is our step-by-step process of starting a blog.
1. Pick a Niche for Your Blog
The first thing you need to do to start a blog is deciding what subject area you will write on. Based on that, you have to think about which specific niche will be your target audience. You cannot write blog posts for everyone to read. They have to be targeted to a particular group of people with certain kinds of characteristics. This is important to get the right type of traction for your blog.
Image taken from Strikingly user’s website
People who start writing and posting on the internet without researching how to start a blog often skip this step. They do not know the importance of picking a niche. When people visit their blog, they end up confused. If you want people to visit your blog regularly, you need to give them a concrete reason. You need to produce content targeted to people who are going through a specific phase or situation in life.
Image taken from Strikingly user’s website
For example, you may choose to target your posts to women struggling with post-pregnancy depression. How to start a blog that targets this niche? Your blog posts will need to be on topics such as the following.
- Time-saving ways to prepare baby food
- Easy to do morning yoga to keep yourself going throughout the day
- Maintaining a balance between raising a child and building a career
When women from this niche visit your blog once, they will find a lot of content on it to keep them visiting again and again. But if the topics you write on are entirely random, people won’t decide if they really want to subscribe to your blog. That’s why when you are starting a blog, be clear on the subject, topics, and niche you will be catering to.
2. Sign Up for an Account on Strikingly
Once you have decided on the niche you’ll be targeting, it is time to officially create a blog. Learning how to start a blog is more like studying how to create a blog website. Let’s walk through creating a website on a web-building platform.
Image taken from Strikingly
Go to Strikingly and sign up for your free account. You just have to fill in your name and email address and verify your email. Then when you log in, you will get access to your Strikingly dashboard. This is a platform where you don’t have to worry about coding, programming, or dealing with any other technical issues.
If you choose to begin with our free plan, your domain will include the platform’s name. This means if your blog name is ‘Tourism Adventures’, your domain will be ‘tourismadventures.mystrikingly.com’. You can later choose to upgrade to one of our paid plans and get a custom domain for your blog. But for a start, this is good because it will rid you of the hassle and cost of purchasing and registering a personal domain to start a blog.
3. Select a Template for Your Blog
After you register on Strikingly, you will be taken to our template selection page. Here you can choose what you want your blog to look like. This is how to start a blog most easily. Our templates serve as ready-to-use website designs for you. They are like the theme that will give the overall appearance to your blog. You can still choose to change the color palette and layout of your blog posts, but the foundation of your blog design will be laid out by the template that you prefer.
The most suitable will be to choose from among our blog templates. These are designed especially for bloggers or companies that want to have a separate blog to publish their content.
Many people fear researching how to start a blog because they think they will have to learn web designing and programming. But when you use a website builder that provides you with ready-made templates, you are free from all that headache.
Image taken from Strikingly user’s website
4. Add the Basic Information on Your Blog
When you reach this step, you have already dealt with the technical part of learning how to start a blog. Your blog design is now ready. But before you start creating blog posts, you must add some basic information to the website. You can do this by simply clicking on the area you want to add content on and starting typing.
Give a basic introduction to yourself by describing your passion and background in writing. Explain what your blog posts are about and how they benefit your audience. Don’t forget to add your contact details. You can also build a contact form by clicking ‘Add New Section’ from the left panel of the Strikingly editor and selecting ‘Contact Form’.
5. Write and Publish Your First Blog Post
It’s now time to start writing! Create your first blog post by following these steps and mastering how to start a blog.
- Click the green button ‘Add New Section’.
- Select ‘Simple Blog’.
Image taken from Strikingly
- Depending on your chosen template, you will see a ‘Manage Blog Posts’ button somewhere. Click on it.
- Then click the green button ‘Write New Post’.
- First, type in your post title on the open screen, and then start writing your article.
- When you are done, hit ‘Publish’ on the left bar.
- Repeat the last three steps for writing and publishing more blog posts.
6. Integrate Your Blog With Social Media
Maybe you have been writing articles for a long time already, but only now you are studying how to start a blog. If that’s the case, you must have some social media presence with links to several articles you wrote and got published somewhere. Now that you are starting a blog, you can promote it to your social media followers.
There are two main ways to integrate your blog built on Strikingly with your social media pages.
- You can add social media icons to your site’s footer and link them to the corresponding social media pages.
- You can use the Strikingly social feed feature to insert part of your Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter feed on your blog’s home page.
Image taken from Strikingly user’s website
7. Promote Your Blog
Even though your blog will be ready when you complete the last step described above, it is still worth mentioning in our guide in starting a blog that you need to promote your blog website to drive traffic. Having traffic is critical for your blog to grow its audience and subscribers. Tell your friends and peers about your blog and give them the website URL. Ask them to share it further with their friends and family.
Keep making posts on social media and linking them to your blog. If you have many followers on Facebook, Youtube, Twitter, or other social media sites, you can leverage that to grow some traction for your blog.
Don’t forget to publish new blog posts regularly. Good and successful bloggers create a new blog post every single day. We can assume that you are good at writing blog posts since you consider it worth your time to learn how to start a blog of your own. Remember the more frequently you update your blog content, the more Google bots will crawl your website. This will help in enhancing your blog’s search rankings and increase its visibility in search engines. When your blog is optimized for search engines, it makes your job of promoting it and growing traffic to it easier.
Concluding Remarks
Now that you know how to start a successful blog, you shouldn’t delay acting upon it. There are many good writers and bloggers in the world who are not able to turn their writing skills into a successful profession or business, just because they are not willing to take this first step. If you want to be among those who make a living blogging, this is the time for you to start a blog of your own.
