At the beginning of every year, most people set goals to start a blog. However, very few actually do and the majority of them drop along the way. Here is how you can set your objectives and accomplish your blogging goals in 2023.
A blog, short for weblog, is a frequently updated web page used for personal commentary or business content. Blogs are often interactive and include sections at the bottom of individual blog posts where readers can leave comments.
To understand blogging, it is important to first understand the concept of web development. Web development is the process of building and maintaining a website; it is the work that happens behind the scene to make a website looks attractive, work fast, and perform well with a seamless user experience.
Today’s blogs are more likely to be personal online journals or commentary related to a business that’s frequently updated and intended for general public consumption.
Bloggers control their content and don’t have to rely on other outlets to publish their views and connect with an audience. Monetization strategies let bloggers make money from their writing and sometimes build entire careers.
Uses of Blogs
Share views and connect with the audience
Blogging is an effective way to raise awareness about a subject or product and to build an online community around it
Build a business and sell products
Blogging is a popular practice for businesses trying to gain credibility in their industries, build high search engine rankings, connect with a target audience, and identify sales leads.
Raise awareness
Blogs are an effective way to raise awareness about issues and causes and to influence public and government opinion.
How to Start Making Money Online With A blog
Building your Readership
That means that you need to make sure first-time readers of your blog will come back. Only by having returning readers will you build a sizable audience from which you can profit.
Monetizing your blog
Once you have built a decent readership base, you can turn your attention to making money from your blog. There are various ways to do this, but one of the most lucrative ways bloggers make money also happens to be the easiest- advertising. Having a large number of visitors to your blog means that advertisers will pay to have their ads shown to your readers. The easiest way to blog for money is to get paid for displaying advertisements on your blog by joining Google’s AdSense program.
How to Write and Publish Your First Blog Post
Generate Ideas
Coming up with winning ideas is often the most challenging part of blogging, so it’s crucial to carve out time for creative thinking. To get started, consider your goals, niche, your target audience, and what you want to offer readers and customers. Begin by jotting down the types of stories your readers might be interested in.
Create an Outline
Now that you’ve got a million great ideas to write about, it’s time to choose one and create an outline.
For your first post, we recommend choosing a topic that you’re passionate about, one that provides you with enough material — and is interesting enough to you — to write conclusively and authoritatively about.
Write Your Post
Once you’ve developed your ideas, start writing. Write freely, ignoring the impulse to self-edit as you go along. Polishing your draft takes place later, so for now, just get the words out. Use your own unique voice, all while keeping your audience in mind.
Edit grammar and Content
Take the time to edit your work. Concern yourself with both grammar and content. Eliminate needless information and wordiness
Craft Your headline
The title of your blog post is more than just a catchy turn-of-the-phrase to grab readers’ attention; it’s a critical part of getting your content seen by search engines. Plus, your headline is essentially a virtual guide map, setting readers’ expectations for what they’ll get within your post.
Add Graphics
Images often attract readers to your post in the first place, giving them an idea of what you’re going to offer in your post.
Optimize for SEO
An important step in creating content is optimizing it for discovery in search engines, which involves strategic use of keywords, URLs, titles, and templates, and meeting readability standards. Educate yourself about SEO best practices and utilize available plugins to ensure that your content appears at the top of search engine results.
Hit Publish
Before you hit that publish button, remember: that whether you’re going to post once a day or once a week, it’s crucial to commit to a regular, consistent publishing schedule.
Make goals to stay organized and disciplined, as readers need to know what to expect from your site. Set deadlines for the creation of your content so that you stay on track.
Share
With your polished prose and attractive graphics, it’s time to share your work and invite consumers to engage. There are so many ways to optimize your content for social media. Here are some ideas to get you started:
- Share your post on social media, tailoring the content to each platform.
- Tag influencers and use hashtags to get your content in front of possible readers.
- Encourage user-generated content from your followers.
- Capitalize on timeliness.
- Utilize analytics to track your success.
- Read up on simple techniques that improve your social media presence.
- Once you’ve built a list of email followers through your site, you can connect them to your content through email marketing.
Repeat
Creating content consistently will attract more readers to your site and establish your authority within your field, so in keeping with your schedule, build a routine and repeat these steps. Then sit back and watch your readership grow.
Process of Creating a blog
1. Choose Easy-to-use CMS (Content Management System)
CMS (Content Management System) is a set of functions used to make life easier for website creators. One of the best-known, easier-to-use and most-used frameworks (the basic structures) around the world is WordPress.WordPress is developed in the PHP (Hypertext Preprocessor) programming language, which allows any user with basic knowledge of computing to create complete and very easy-to-maintain websites with interactive content.
2. Choose a domain name
Your domain name is your unique Internet address. Getting a domain name is relatively easy, even if you’re starting a blog with no experience. But you better purchase your domain name with the same service you’ll use to host your WordPress blog, so you won’t need to transfer it.
3. Choose a web hosting service
Choosing a good web hosting service to host your WordPress website is one of the most important steps you will take to start a blog with no experience. That’s because the hosting web service will handle much of the technology for you. You’ll have even less to worry about if you get your domain name and domain email address along with WordPress hosting.
You check the top web hosting companies in Kenya
4. Choose WP security measures
Be SSL secure
Install a reliable WordPress Security Plugin
Install a reliable backup plugin
You DO need a VPN—NordVPN—to keep your privacy safe as a blogger, whether you blog anonymously or not. Try using NordVPN, which, by the way, allows you to connect up to 6 devices at once!
5. Choose Plugins
A plugin is nothing more than additional software (sometimes called an “add-on”) that informs the platform (WordPress, in this case) of several actions and changes that must be carried out on the system, improving the capabilities of your platform.
Summary
9 Simple steps on how to start blogging
- Choose your niche
- Choose a name for your blog
- Get Hosting and a domain name
- Choose your blogging platform
- Create your blogging with WordPress
- Create Content
- Run a pre-launch campaign
- Publish content and grow your blog
- Monetize your blog
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