Welcome to Blogger Hangout with one more awesome blogging guide. If you want to excel in blogging knowledge and start your first dream blog that generates you regular passive income, you’re just at the right place.
NOTE: This guide isn’t about making some quick money online.
If you are having a fear of getting started with a blog, this post is for you.
We’ll be breaking down this blogging guide into 7 easy steps just to make it a go-through guide for starting a blog. So, without further ado, let’s jump into the topic:
#1. Choosing Your Niche for Blogging
If you are just a beginner and really don’t know much about niche blogging, then here is the short meaning of niche blogging: “Niche blogging is the act of initiating a blog to use it to market to a particular niche.”
How to choose a perfect niche for your blog?
As a beginner, this question gets stuck in everyone’s mind once you see successful bloggers from almost every niche. Cooking, Lifestyle, Interiors, Marketing, and Parenting – you name it, and there are already lots of leading blogs making a huge sum of money.
First, brainstorm the ideas and think of topics you are passionate about. If you read top blogging tips from pro bloggers: Someone can’t blog sustainably about a random subject they are not interested in. For instance, if you aren’t much into something like parenting and you simply start over this, you can’t maintain that blog in the long run. A hard fact!
Instead, if you love pets, then start blogging about pet care, but wait…
You can’t blog everything about Dogs because it is a huge niche. Instead, come up with sub-niche topics like Dog food, Dog vaccination, Dog training, etc.
#2. Choosing Your Domain Name
Once you finalize your blogging niche, the next step is to register a perfect domain name for your blog.
You can get your Domain name from some of the top domain providers like Godaddy, Namecheap, HostGator, etc.
Here are some tips on how to pick your domain name:
1. First, you need to tap on your top-level domain extension .com or .info or any other country-specific top domain like .us,.co.uk,.ca. Until and unless you plan to market a specific country and audience, your best option would be on .com because it is the most commonly used top-level domain name globally.
2. Use relevant words in your Domain Name. For instance, if you are following the pet care niche, then existing brand blogs have their names like:
- Zoetis Petcare
- Fetch! Pet Care
- Walkin’ Pets
- Pet Life Today
3. This will add some extra miles to your Blog name’s memorability and branding.
4. Try to make it super easy for people to type and pronounce.
5. Try to avoid digits and hyphens in domain names – it will be really hard for the visitors to remember your domain if it is something like this healthypets80 or healthy-pets.
6. Once again, it should be short, sweet, and memorable. According to a study, more than 85 percent of leading blogs have 6-14 characters in their domain name.
#3. Choosing Your Hosting Provider
Once you have registered your ideal domain name, it’s time to go and find your Hosting Provider. Some of the best hosting providers are Hostinger, SiteGroup, HostGator, and BlueHost.
My recommendation would be any one of them because they provide you great uptime and quick 24/7 customer service compared to other hosting networks.
Some hosting providers also offer a Free Domain and limited ad credits, and extra perks with their hosting plan, so carefully compare them to find your best hosting plan.
#4. Setting up Your Blog
Once you have gone through booking your domain name and hosting space, now it’s high time to get your blog up. This new blog should have a decent user interface and an admin-friendly CONTENT MANAGEMENT SYSTEM (CMS).
As you probably know, the most popular and global open-source CMS platforms are WordPress, Drupal, and Joomla. For blogging specifically, WordPress has been the industry leader for years because of its user-friendly blog management tools, plugins, and a plethora of themes.
You’re good to go with WordPress CMS (wordpress.org), and after its installation, you need to set up a perfect theme for your blog. You can explore and select a free theme (if it suits your design needs), but you can always purchase a premium theme for this blog from theme giants like Elegant Themes, Theme Forest, or Elementor.
Set up your WP theme and create all the necessary pages a blog requires:
- About page
- Contact page
- Privacy policy page
- Sitemap page
Once you have all these pages ready, make it easy for your visitors to navigate all the pages on your blog. Include a menu bar; add footer links; and sidebar widgets.
That’s it! Now, you would be good to go with publishing blog content and showing it to the world.
#5. Setting Social Profiles for Your Blog
Don’t miss social media. Show your presence on different social media platforms and interact with your audience. Here is the list of popular social media networks you should concentrate on:
- YouTube
- Tumblr
- Quora
- Flickr, etc.
After signing up and filling your social media pages/profiles, add social media icons, link to them, and enable “share functionality” on your blog.
Though I agree that it would consume some of your daily time to share your new content on all these social networks, you can actually automate the entire process with free plugins or social media management tools like HootSuite, Social Pilot, or even Buffer.
#6. Creating Content for Your Website
Now, we are coming to the most important section of this guide: creating content for your blog.
Writing and publishing is the most crucial thing in your blogging journey.
You may get an excellent domain name, great blog design, really fast loading time, and powerful plugins to get your work easier, but all this stuff is a waste if you don’t have remarkable content on your blog.
NOTE: Writing takes time, especially if you’re a beginner or doing it along with a full-time job. You can get the help of outsiders and skilled writers from amazing platforms like Upwork, iWriter, or Fiverr.
So how are you going to plan to write content for your Blog?
Many new bloggers get stuck with the same question, and those have many questions like “How to write my first blog post?” & “How to use keywords in my article?” and lots more.
Below are the top five blogging tips on drafting content posts for your blog:
- Target the audience looking specifically for something relevant in your niche and answer their questions. Don’t be in a rush, but logically put your affiliate link giving good value to them.
- Find and research the keywords you want to rank and analyze your competitors with SEMRUSH.
- Make your article captivating and readable. Engage the audience and thus write the content in You and I format.
- Use illustrative images with good captions and put at least one picture for every 5-6 sentences.
- Write your posts in a structured way and fully utilize CTA buttons that your visitors turn into customers/clients.
#7. SEO for Your Blog
So far, so good. You’ll produce great content as per the audience persona. But wait…
Your Blog won’t reach great heights if you don’t have a Proper SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION (SEO) process in place. Blog SEO helps you get ranked on the top spots of Google, Bing, or other search engines.
So, the next question arises:
How to get ranked your blog or website at the top in SERP results
First of all, there are primarily two forms of Search engine optimizations.
- White Hat SEO
- Black Hat SEO
And Bang! You guessed it right.
White hat SEO is the legal and ethical way to perform SEO whereas the Blackhat SEO is an unethical way to rank your website or blog by using some manipulative tricks as opposed to search engine guidelines. Black hat tricks don’t help you in the long run, and you should be at serious peril if Google organic traffic is your primary source of getting leads.
So white hat SEO is the way to go. Moving on.
Two Parts of SEO
- ON-PAGE SEO (and Technical SEO)
- OFF-PAGE SEO
On-Page SEO
I will break down On-page SEO into 7 simple steps for your better understanding:
Usage of Keywords in Content
Using Keywords at the right time and right place without stuffing them throughout your post is the key to success in driving organic rankings traffic.
Always use your primary keywords in the title tag, meta tag, and heading tags but don’t overuse them. A high keyword density and repetitive terms will make your blog look spammy.
Whenever you are going to write a specific blog post, properly research the keywords that you can rank for.
Below are some of the crucial things you need to consider while looking for keyword ideas:
- Make sure the keyword has a high monthly search volume (consistently). Don’t go crazy with lots of seasonal search terms.
- Pick the keywords which have less competition and low keyword difficulty.
- Make sure you can rank for the keyword. Analyze the Google SERP.
- Never pick the keywords that are not relevant to your topic/niche.
Keep these 4 rules in your mind while doing keyword research.
Don’t worry; there are many tools bloggers try to do keyword research, but none of them works as perfectly as SEMRUSH.
If you don’t know what SEMRush is; it’s an SEO toolkit that helps you to research keywords, find competitors’ links, analyze content gaps, and do lots of other marketing things.
They also offer a 14-day (FREE) trial in which you can try all their features at SEMRUSH.
Keeping SEO Friendly URLs
Always include your keywords in your post/page URL. As an example, don’t make it look like this:
https://www.domain.com/blog/post_117/
Instead, make it look like this
https://www.domain.com/blog/keyword
Using Outbound Links
Blogging is all about giving the best value and advice to people. Don’t be self-obsessed. Be helpful. Link out to high authority blogs and research so the audience can find more about the subject.
Using Internal Links
Link to the other (and older) posts on your blog from your recent posts to pass the link juice, lessen your bounce rate and get indexed maximum content out of your blog’s archives.
Optimize Your Pictures
Make sure all your images contain Alt attributes with keywords in them.
Make Your Blog Load Faster
According to a study, if your blog takes more than 4 seconds to load, 70% of people will quit your website. You can check your website speed at GTMETRIX or Google Page Insight Speed Tool.
Also, you can set up GOOGLE AMP (ACCELERATED MOBILE PAGES)on your blog for faster mobile loading.
Go In-Depth
Make your blog posts as long as possible. Writing long articles with a minimum of 2000 words boosts your blog’s SEO.
Off-Page SEO
Link Building. Backlinking is just getting an HTML link from some other websites. You can get them easily by commenting on other blogs but wait and pause if you get links from dumb blogs or websites that are completely non-sense.
You should get backlinks from the domains within your niche which have good domain authority, quality, and high organic traffic. That’s why link building isn’t a walk in the park.
Here are some of the simple tips to get easy link building opportunities:
- Build networking with other industry bloggers.
- Comment on their blogs. Provide value through your words.
- Do guest blogging.
- Participate in interviews and roundup posts.
- Design infographics and distribute them to your network.
A Blogging Journey Begins…
I hope this guide will help you understand the basic steps of starting a blog. Blogging is very fascinating, especially for Gen Z. Starting a blog is always easy but nothing happens unless you take charge and start working hard. Go ahead, get motivated, and motivate others for years to come.
