If you have not been away on another planet other than Earth, you must have heard about Blogging. Blogging has been around now for quite some time but the trend does not seem to be ready to die anytime soon. So if you really have been away, well welcome to planet earth, now let me tell you about blogging.
What is Blogging?
Blogging is just typing or writing on any topic. Earlier people used to write in journals or diaries. Now as everything has turned into electronically maintained technology based products so that journal writing gave rise to blogging.
Blogging first began for people to write their personal thoughts into a computer blog. But now it has been developed into something much more huge and big. Now you can find blogs in every niche and in every style and manner. Blogs are now proper webpages, where everyone can write on whichever topic they would choose. They are not just personal thoughts but information rich sources that are adding a huge repository of knowledge to the internet all the time.
read more Top Mistakes Bloggers are making everyday
Besides being informational, blogging if done properly will earn you a good amount of money also. Earlier it was termed as a source of passive income now a number of people have left their jobs and gone to full time blogging.
How to start with blogging?
There are seven basic steps involved in creating a blog. We will discuss each of them in detail.
- Deciding your blog niche
- Choose a blogging platform
- Choose a hosting service
- Choose a domain name
- Install blogging platform
- Post on your blog
- Promote your blog post
Now let us look at them one by one separately in detail.
Deciding your blog niche
Deciding a blog niche depends upon whether you are writing a blog just for fun for yourself only or you intend to make money out of blogging. If you want to write a private blog just for yourself then it is ok. Write on anything that you want. But if you want other people to read your blog too and you want to earn money from your blog too, then you must do some research and find poplar niches.
A popular niche means there are many searches on the web regarding the niche. When a blog niche is popular it means that a huge number of people are asking Google about it. You might think that it is good to write on a niche that is popular but that is not true. Among the popular niche the competition is very tough and it is extremely difficult to establish your authority in the popular niche because there are already a hundred blogs on them.
So after reading this you might think you should think that okay, then I should go for a topic that has very low searches but even that is not really good idea. Because then it will be very difficult to develop a fanbase when no one is interested in the topic. Usually you should choose a popular topic but do a lot of hard work in SEO and generation of excellent content. Only then can you do well in any niche.
Use SEO and keyword research before writing a good post an then you can publish it.
Once you have decided a niche gather a lot of information about it. Make a rough draft of around 20 posts in the niche for your blog. Now you can move to the next step.
Choose a Blogging platform
There are a number of blogging platforms available on the internet. You can start your blog with any of them. These are free blogging services and are available to anyone. You just need to have an email account and then you can create an account. Once the account is created you can start writing and posting.
WordPress
It is the most renowned and established blogging service. Although it came after blogger but gained more popularity because of its features and ability to handle bigger blogs in an efficient way.
It is free to use and you only have to pay for the hosting fee and the domain name fee. There are two types of sites on wordpress.
Hosted and self-hosted
In hosted WordPress the site is referred to as wordpress.com. It has limited features but they are free to use. If you want more features, you need to pay a fee.
In Self hosted you have to pay a little amount, otherwise all the other services of WordPress are free for bloggers. The self-hosted sites are usually referred to as wordpress.org. It is an extremely feature rich platform and great for people who have a little technical background. here is how you can start with wordpress.
Blogger
Once blogger was the most popular blogging platform in the blogosphere. However now there are many blog platforms and they gave blogger a tough time. One most appealing feature of blogger is that it is completely free. There are no additional charges like those of buying WordPress themes. Everything you want is available for free on blogger. Start With Blogger.
Typepad
It is a feature rich blogging platform that has a great many users. It is usually not preferred by newbies because it requires the users to pay a monthly fee.
Tumblr
Tumblr is also a very popular name on the blogosphere and social media. It is a very popular blogging platform because it is very simple to understand. It has a simple interface and allows users to write blogs, add images, videos, audio and text.
Movable Type
This is very popular among the blogging networks. Provides a great platform to bloggers working together. It is also a paid service but the rates are not very high.
These are some of the most popular blogging platforms. These are among the top blogging platforms available and are widely used.
Choose a Hosting Service
Let me first explain what a hosting service. When you publish a blog it would not merely reside on a your computer. To be a part of the big bad world of the internet, the files of your blog must go to a web server. Web servers are powerful computers that are connected to the world wide web. When a client sends the request for a page the requests are sent to the appropriate web servers on which the required pages are residing.
Thus you can see that a hosting service is very important because if it is efficient then the site’s response cycle will be higher which Google likes and will give a high rank to. Bluehost, HostGator and iPage are some of the best hosting sites. Another great hosting site is the cloudways that is based on cloud hosting service. You can read more about it on our site.
Choose a domain name
Domain name is the web address. For example www.facebook.com is the domain name of Facebook and our domain name is www.thenextrex.com. As you know there are thousands of web sites on the World Wide Web and each has a unique domain name. So there has to be international firms that manage the allotment of domain name to different users.
Godaddy is a very popular domain name registrar. Namecheap is another great one. You can chose any domain name registrar and get a cool new name for your website. While choosing a name for your website here are some things you must take care of.
- Make sure it is not very difficult to write. In fact it should be easy enough so that people can remember it for their use.
- It should be meaningful. Meaningful domain names are not only good for SEO and they make users return to your site too.
- Choose a domain name that represents your business. A name that goes with your business is of course a big challenge but it must be adhered too.
If your site is in a popular niche the domain name will be expensive, otherwise it will be cheap.
Install a blogging platform
Now that you have a hosting service and a domain name both available, it is time to install the blogging platform on your system. You can do it before the previous step too, but logically even if the platform is install you will not go live on the net without a domain name and a hosting service.
Here is a step by step guide telling you how to set up a wordpress platform.
Use SEO and then Post on your blog
As I mentioned before, you must have draft of around twenty posts before coming to this step. Once your site is up on the net. Copy your blog posts to the post editor. You must make posts that have good SEO compatibility. The SEO will make your posts to rank higher on the Google search engine results page. Here are some great SEO tools.
Top 10 SEO tools to make your site rank among the top
Once SEO is done your post is ready to go live. Publish it and wait for the audience response. Here is a great way to get comments for your blog. Here is how you can do excellent SEO for your blog.
Promote your blog post
When you are new to blogging do not worry of you do not have a great response from the audience. It takes time to build a strong base of followers. Here are the social media platforms you can promote your blog with.
The popular microblogging site is great for the promotion of your blog posts. You can use your personal Twitter handle as well as make a new one for the website exclusively. In the beginning there will be very little followers but do not despair soon you will grow both in rank and numbers. You can Get More followers on Twitter by reading this Increase Twitter Followers With These Simple Tricks
Facebook has been evolved into something much more than just a social network. It is a great place to market your blog to. Create a page named after your blog or a group where you can discuss your blog if it is based on some thought provoking topics. You can promote your blog through a successful Facebook as campaign the secret to which you can learn from here. you can learn to create a successful Facebook group from here.
Pinterest is a great place for regular stuff that has a lot of images and picture. If you have a blog that has a lot of pictures then pinterest is a great place for you. There are thousands of daily active users of Pinterest. You can add the images on your blog as pins on pinterest so that traffic can be diverted to your blog.
StumbleUpon
It is a popular bookmarking website. It is a journey to discovery. If you are getting bored on the web you can take ideas for great websites from StumbleUpon. There are so many websites on the internet available that it gets difficult to learn about them, so stumbleUpon is a great way to find them.
LinkdIn
It is a social networking website that is exclusively for business people and professionals. It will make your blog popular among the professionals and business minded people. You can choose the businesses that are related to your niche to publish your blog among them for better response and popularity of your post.
Digg
This is site that has an extremely high traffic and is good for the publicity of your website. Many websites and blogs use this platform for the publicity of their webpage.
You can make efficient use of the social media to effectively promote and update your blog. However remember that you will eventually start getting traffic but not right away. Persistence and perseverance is the key. Just keep on trying and writing one great post after the other to get the best results.
When you are starting up a blog remember all you have to do is to set up a platform and start writing. Even of writing is not your string point still you can do well. There are many ways in which the blog can be beneficial for you in the long run.
Also Read “On-page SEO practice that should be adapted“
Do you plan to start up a blog? Which topic would you love to write on? Let us know by commenting below.
