Starting a blog can be a daunting task, at first, as there is a lot to learn to get up to speed, especially if you’ve never worked with blogs or websites before.

In our post on how to start a blog, we highlighted the following steps…

1. Choosing a niche

Before you get into naming your blog and building your site, you’ll want to decide what you’re going to write about.

This will be your niche.

As a blogger, the niche you choose will help to make or break your success as a blogger.

Your niche will give your blog a focus, help guide the design of your blog, and illuminate the unique value you’re giving to your visitors.

A niche is more than just a topic or segment of a market.

It’s about how you’re going to address this topic, your unique background, and the audience you’re speaking to.

Whatever niche you choose, it’s important that you care about the topic, and there’s actually an audience of people who will read what you’re writing.

2. Choosing a free or custom domain

The beauty of the internet is, that there are a number of free services to get started with blogging.

Inasmuch as these come with their limitations and are not necessarily designed for brands and bloggers gunning for a professional blog outlook, they still serve the function of getting new bloggers started with blogging and publishing content to their readers.

To set up a blog for free, you can check out web development services including WordPress.com, Wix, Blogger, Facebook, Medium, etc.

To communicate professionalism and own your platform, however, you need to set up your blog under your custom domain (e.g. www.renixconsulting.com).

This gives you complete ownership of the platform and enforces your niche authority with your readers.

This is the best path if you aim to effectively monetize your blog.

We recommend you build your blog with the WordPress application.

In this post, from here on, we will be discussing blogging with a custom domain.

If you desire a free platform, you can continue with the post about blogging for free.

3. Blog and domain name

The name of your blog should be influenced by your niche.

It should be descriptive and memorable, so your readers will immediately know what your blog is about.

You should take some time to jot down keywords related to your niche, as well as any random related words that come to mind.

You needn’t use your niche words in your blog name, you can explore their synonyms.

To keep things consistent you’ll want your blog’s name and your domain name to be the same.

This makes your blog congruent.

That means you’ll have to choose a domain name that matches the premise of your blog from the very beginning.

Once you have some ideas it’s time to make sure that the domain is actually available.

4. Web hosting

To have a blog on the internet, you need web hosting.

This will be the online repository of your blog content, where your readers will retrieve your posts with their devices.

When you sign up for a hosting plan you’re renting the server space of a hosting provider for a period of time, which will give you a place to store your site’s files online.

Without a hosting subscription, usually billed annually, you’ll have a domain name without a website.

When building out your first blog, you should know there are a few types of web hosting to explore.

The type of hosting well-suited for most blogs will be shared hosting.

This type allows you to keep your hosting costs low, while still giving you the necessary server resources to grow your blog.

5. Writing or editorial calendar

Start out by deciding the main topics you want to write about and narrow down your focus to the most important topics.

Focus on a small set of topics you’re really knowledgeable about or topics you are really interested in, this will help you identify the blog post to write.

Such a well-thought-out blog structure and organization will help your readers quickly understand your blog theme, making them come back for similar content.

An editorial calendar is a publishing schedule, a planning tool that helps you publish content on a regular basis, especially considering timely events and seasons.

List your main topics and begin “brainstorming” articles for each topic.

Keep writing down blog article ideas until you run out of ideas.

You can schedule these topics on a calendar.

Keep your editorial calendar in a place where you can easily reference it.

Irrespective of your experience with blogging, your editorial calendar should help keep you organized so you can create timely posts.

6. Blogging platform – WordPress

There are several software and platform options you can choose for your new blog.

The commonest platform is WordPress.

This is the option we recommend.

WordPress is a content management system that allows you to build your blog and manage your content.

It powers about a third of the publicly accessible websites on the internet.

It’s easy to get started blogging with WordPress, and rather easy to set up and manage.

You can contact a web design agency to help you set it up.

WordPress has a number of themes to create any type of blog you want to set up.

Its flexibility and community of developers around the world is its unique feature, added to its being free to use!

You can manage it without any coding experience.

Hence, you needn’t learn coding or programming to get started.

7. Get started with writing

You are here, exactly where you want to be – penning down your ideas.

Go ahead and come up with a number of posts, we recommend about 20 posts to get your blog started.

Writing a perfect blog post is not an easy task, there are a number of characteristics it should have including a catchy title, relevant images, useful charts and diagrams, a call to action, etc.

8. Publishing your posts

It is best to publish a number of posts before inviting your readers to go through them, having a few posts or just one is not enough to convince your readers about the value you provide.

Publish several blog posts before you start promoting your blog.

You can always publish your current version of your posts and go back to edit them later on, insert some internal links, add an image, explain your points better, etc. as time goes on.

If you have a bunch of interesting posts already published on your site, visitors are more likely to read, enjoy your articles, and decide to come back later for more so, we recommend you publish about 20 articles before “launch”.

9. Optimizing posts for SEO

As earlier mentioned, the essence of blogging is to create a community of readers around a topic/niche hence, upon publishing your posts, you need to make them available to the public, especially on search engines.

Most of your readers would come through search engines, commonly Google, you need to customize your blog posts to rank for your niche on Google.

This is what is meant by search engine optimization (SEO).

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