Nowadays, blogging isn’t just for the professional writers or journalists. It’s so easy that pretty much anyone could blog these days. Some blog to merely share their thoughts and reflections while others do it to showcase a lifestyle and market a product. Regardless of the reason, blogging could be a very powerful tool to bring your message across to your audience. And with the right platform, content and tone, your blog could soon become very successful.
If you’re looking for ways to start on that personal or business blog, here are a few steps to help you get set up.
1. Decide on your blog concept
With so many blogs and websites out there, it’s important that you truly understand what you want to write about. This is easy for business blogs since one would already have the business and its environment to talk about. Not so much when it comes to personal blogs.
Because you intend to write regularly and keep your audience updated with fresh content, choose topics that reflect your passion in life. If you like fashion, books, fitness, recipes and the like, go for it. While there is no limit to what you could write, most readers prefer to read and follow specialized or blogs with a theme (e.g. monthly trends, video games, restaurant reviews) than one that comes up with very random topics.
2. Choose your blog name
For some people, this is the hardest part of the set-up. You should try coming up with a name that is quirky enough but easy to remember and also not very long that most people would forget it. While you could opt to use your name as the blog title (again, there are no rules), another suggestion is to also come up with a name that touches on your blog theme and what you intend to write about. For example, your blog is about a housewife turned fitness guru, you could try naming it “The Fit Mom,” etc.
3. Decide what blogging platform to use
There are a wide variety of blogging platforms available and ultimately, what you choose would depend on your preference. But the two most common are WordPress and Blogger.
Blogger is free and manages your content in the Google servers while WordPress has two options, a free account and a paid premium account. For the free domain name, it would include “.wordpress” in the link address while the paid premium allows you to set up your custom domain name. Of course, the paid accounts have more features and specifications than the free one so it would really depend on your need and budget.
4. Register your domain name
Each website offer instructions on how to register a domain name. Once you’ve signed up and the site acknowledges your registration, it would send you an email to teach you how to set up the blog.
5. Write content
Of course, a blog isn’t really a blog unless you put content on it. Most blogging platforms have very user-friendly interface that makes everything self-explanatory to a beginner.
To make your posts more attractive and informative, it’s recommended that you add photos related to your topic or even a video and come up with a regular writing and posting schedule so that your audience would know when to tune in for new content and would also have something to always look forward to.
6. Promote your blog
There are different ways to highlight the content you wrote:
• Social media
some blog hosting sites offer the function to automatically publish and share a link and excerpt of your blog to Facebook, Twitter or Tumblr. If you don’t want it to be automatic, you could change settings anytime you like.
• Follow other bloggers
follow other blogs that ignite your passion and interest and actively comment on their posts
• Include blog address in email signature
this is one of the most subtle ways you could promote your blog. Just be sure to hyperlink the address so that potential visitors could easily be directed to your blog.
• Write regularly and grammar mistake-free content
blogs that are incomplete or with numerous errors are not attractive to writers. Come up with a schedule and topics to write ahead of time.
