Disclosure: This is a collaborative post.
Photo by Pixabay: https://www.pexels.com/photo/author-blog-create-creative-267569/
Have you ever considered starting up your own blog? Running a blog is great fun. It gives you the opportunity to express yourself, share your opinion online and meet like-minded people who enjoy reading your content. You can literally run a blog on anything you feel passionate about – sports, accounting, lifestyle, food, marketing, business, kids – you name it, you can do it.
Starting a blog isn’t as difficult as you may think either. With modern-day technology, you could argue that it has never been easier to start one – which we tend to agree with. With online website builders, you can quickly have your blog set up within minutes using their pre-designed templates. If you are a little bit creative, you can upload their templates and then edit them to your own custom design. All you need then is your emails created – just be mindful of spam emails and think of a domain name relevant to your blog.
To help you with starting up your own blog, below are our top tips.
Creating a website
We just touched on it above, creating your own website. In order to run a blog, you will need to have a website created where you can share your content online. This is easily done now due to online website builders doing it for you. If you don’t want to give it a go yourself, you could hire a freelancer to do it for you. Alternatively, if your budget stretches far enough an agency although their prices are a lot higher than the other two options.
Social media channels
In order to bring in additional traffic to your blog you are going to require social media channels. Social media channels allow you to share your content on them as and when you post it as well as engage with your followers. There are so many different social media channels out there that you can sign up for. The ones you choose very much depend on the type of content you are producing. If you create videos, YouTube and TikTok could be the way forward. If you capture images and want to publish lots of stories, Facebook and Instagram are worth looking at. Other channels which blogs use include Twitter, Discord, Snapchat, Reddit, Linked in and more.
Write about what you are passionate about
Blogs don’t become a success overnight. They take many months of dedication, publishing interesting articles regularly that your readers will enjoy. For this reason alone, it’s important that you write about what you are passionate about. This way you feel motivated to keep on writing articles about that topic and have a genuine interest in what you are writing about. If you don’t write about what you enjoy, then you will find that you aren’t consistent enough at posting, leading to your viewers reading other blogs instead of your own.
Be original
One tip that a lot of businesses should follow when starting up, not just a blog is to be original with what you do. Whenever posting anything online, try to keep the content as new as possible, as this way readers will be likely to return to you for up-to-date content. If you are doing something that others are doing, always strive to do it better. If your content is based on something that is happening live, aim to be the first to publish it. This way, your content is more likely to appear top of Google as well as be shared online more.
Be honest with what you write
Another rule of life which should be applied in everything you publish online is honesty. Make sure that the content you publish is factful and true. Don’t make up facts and don’t lie when posting online. If you get caught out, this can build up an unwanted reputation online that you aren’t to be relied on with what you are writing.
Create a content calendar
Content calendars are great! They help you think of different topics for your blog and keep you organized. You’ll also benefit from being able to post regular content online, keeping you consistent. By thinking of your content in advance, you are essentially putting a plan together that you can aim to stick to. When planning a content calendar, you can easily move your topics around as well as change them if when coming to write them you don’t think they are right for you.
Create an email list
When possible, get readers added to an email list and send out a newsletter once or twice a month. Email list sign-ups can be added to the homepage of your website as well as content pages. Some companies advertise email list sign-ups on their social media channels as well. The more people you build up on this list, the more people you can get in touch with when you have important content to share. When creating a newsletter to send out, try to make sure the newsletter includes all the most popular articles that you have written that month as well and paid content that you need to push out.
Overall, there are many tips that can be given to help you start up your own blog. Our biggest tip would be to just go for it and to not put any pressure on yourself. Write content as and when you can and see it as a hobby instead of something you are going to make money from – after a while some blogs can make a big income. Once your blog starts to grow, this is when you can start to bring in some money and reach out to potential advertisers. Make sure you write about things that you love, whether that’s lifestyle, beauty, motherhood, parenting, anything really.
What tips do you have for starting up your own blog? Which of the above tips did you most agree with? Is there anything you would like to share that will benefit our readers? Let us know in the comment box below.
