What is a blog || How to start a blog?

As the name suggests, blogging is one of the easiest and most rewarding ways to share your thoughts and experiences. It's also a powerful way to establish your authority as an expert in your field. If you've ever thought about starting a blog but haven't gotten around to it, this guide will help you make that next step. We'll show you how to start a blog and get it up and running on your own hosting service. This post will walk you through all the steps needed to create content, design, format, optimize, and monetize it for success.

1. Choosing a topic for your blog

Choosing a topic for your blog is the first thing you need to do when you start a blog. It will also be the most difficult decision to make because there are so many things to write about.

The best question you can ask yourself is, “What will I be writing about?” You can’t cover everything, but you can at least start writing about the interests and concerns you have. If you’ve been writing online for a while but find your article topic continually changing, it’s probably because you don’t know what your audience will find interesting.

Blogging is incredibly customizable, which makes the start more fun than ever. In this guide, we’ll show you how to:

The metrics you’ll use to measure success will depend on your own needs. These will vary based on your audience size, niche, and interests. To find these metrics before you start:

These metrics aren’t set in stone — you can always ask a friend what they think—but each is a starting point for you to determine how valuable your blog will be. While most of these metrics will vary based on sites’ needs (the more traffic or opt-ins you get, the higher the metrics will be), here are a few of the main ones worth talking about:

Ranking: Topics can be ranked based on a variety of factors including time spent on the topic, revenue generated, and the number of times a subject or keyword appears in Google search results. To rank better for a keyword or different topic areas, you can optimize your content for SEO with tools like Ahrefs or SEOquake.

Earning Traffic: Though your blog can use links to external sites, it’s not necessary to establish links with every new post you create or re-publish. Instead of linking out to every single post from your author page or each new blog post you write, consider the first 100 interactions your audience has with your blog.

2. Creating a domain name and web hosting account

When you’re ready to start your blog, the first thing you’ll need to do is set up your domain name. You’ll need to find an available domain name, register it, and transfer it to the web hosting service you’ve chosen. This is going to take some time. Take breaks — sometimes your concentration needs a break, and a few hours here and there are well-needed to help you accomplish your goals. And here are some helpful hints to help you speed through the process of choosing the right hosting platform.

If choosing a hosting service, host with hosting companies that offer both free and paid plans. Free plans will give you less functionality, but you won’t need to think about billing and payment, and you’re going to get the best performance from your hosting. Plan too low, and you won’t be able to pay off your hosting debt. Plan too high, and your blog won’t scale as well as it could and your end-users won’t be able to utilize your content. Keeping your hosting prices low and consistent also helps with search engine optimization.

Now that we’ve chosen the hosting platform that we want to use, are there any other considerations we should make? For example, when selecting the blogging platform, don’t use Namecheap or Squarespace. Use one of those someplace else with a quality URL. That’s it! From there, it’s just a matter of getting the blog up and running and working.

When choosing a hosting provider, the first few questions you should ask them will be:

The setup and operation of your blog will vary based on the features you want and what tools you use. The most important things are as follows:

How you choose to use your blog will also depend on the specifics of your business. If you’re selling real estate, marketing, and related products, you may use your blog to share information about how these products are working for your prospective clients.

3. Selecting a blogging platform

If you want to start a blog, choose a platform that’s easy to use and a platform that you’re comfortable with. There are plenty of different platforms to choose from including WordPress, Blogger, Tumblr, Medium, and many more.

Once you choose the platform, you still need to choose an editorial strategy. More importantly, figure out what your blogging style will be. You should develop structured content that clearly documents your message. This includes any images you use, your formatting, and your cohesion with your other content. You should also clearly define your timeline and milestones. For example, if you’re creating a blog post for publication the second week of every month, your content strategy should reflect this. A social media or blog video strategy will work best for some blogs. Others can thrive on an editorial calendar.

Depending on your chosen platform, analytics will be important for ensuring that your content is connected with your target audience. For most platforms, it’s helpful to use tools such as Good spot, Ubersuggest, and Mr. Page.

Initially, your blog will require you to create some content. Once this is complete, you can start the post process by downloading a template or create your own. This often includes scheduling time to write a post, organizing the post across various platforms, creating a title tag, creating a post’s image, creating both the body copy and voice-over, creating a table of contents, and scheduling time for SEO (more on that later).

The following sections show you where to get all the components you need to create, host, and share your blog. Because I assume you’ve already tackled these steps, we won’t go over those here.

Your hosting provider will provide a free or paid-for hosting plan based on whether you’re creating a simple blog or if you want to scale up to a commercial website. On WordPress.com and Blogger.com, this is the standard option.

4. Designing your blog's layout and appearance

You need to think about how people are going to interact with your blog and how you can make that experience as easy and seamless as possible. When you design a blog, it’s important to think about your blog’s purpose. Are you going to share your tips and recommendations for success? Show your personality and personality styles through the stories you share? A blog’s purpose can help dictate the types of posts you choose to write and the length of your posts. Because all blogs have different purposes, it’s helpful to think of them in terms of themes.

Whether you write your own content or rely on other people’s writing, the key to blogging successfully lies in productivity and avoiding filler. Creating and publishing excellent content can take away the pressure of getting your work out there and consuming it.

One of the main tasks of a blog will be to collect and store as much useful and relevant content as possible for future reference. Bloggers will also need to make efforts to track their blog’s stats and apply various KPIs to the blog posts they write to evaluate their performance.

A high-level overview of a blog is this: You design a blog username and password. Then you create a blog and author profile by filling out the profile information and providing any information about yourself that you think might be relevant. Then, you can add other users to your blog. Another part of the blogging journey involves creating an RSS feed of your blog posts, using Feedly or another RSS feed reader. The RSS feed enables you to build your author profile, get contact information for your blog, organize your blog posts automatically, and more.

When implementing these steps, you must be intentional about how you structure your blog. You don’t want to post the same content repeatedly, nor do you want your audience to get overwhelmed by the sheer amount of posts that you’ll publish.

5. Writing, editing, and publishing posts

1. Write your draft. This is the most important part of your post. If you don’t have a complete draft, then you can’t edit it. If you don’t have an editable draft, you can’t publish it. On the day you embark on this adventure, you better have completed your draft.

2. Figure out what exactly you want to say. What exactly do you want to say about your industry? What prompted this particular thought? How do you want to communicate that to your audience? What specific subjects are you interested in covering? Once you answer these questions, make a list of at least five to ten topics that you want to write about. This should be a list of potential blog posts. Don’t get ahead of yourself, but don’t make too many articles at once either. Use your list here only as a jumping-off point.

3. Combine your thoughts and write them together in one place. First, let’s look at a basic blog post:

Now that you’ve created the first draft, it's time to bring your thoughts together and combine them in one place. This can be as simple as taking a split-screen and opening your blog post on one side and your draft on the other.
Take your draft, then open your blog post on the other side. Have a look at what you’ve written so far and why those words are important to you. Often, you can summarize each of the blog post’s key points by saying “This is how I want people to know [topic]…”
Most blog posts achieve their goals when they set out to solve problems and provide solutions. That’s their goal in itself. The goal isn’t to expose their expertise — the goal is to put their expertise into a convenient place they can easily find and read.