14 Things To Know And Do Before Starting A Blog

What things to know before starting a blog?

These days anyone can start a blog and write articles. You can start a blog about anything you want, such as for expressing your thoughts about things or for spreading your knowledge that you gain from your experiences.

No matter what is the reason for starting a blog, and also no matter it will going to be a personal blog or a niche based blog. So if you want to start a blog, and succeed with it, then you should do some groundwork first.

You know that the base is the most important part of achieving and maintaining the highest height of a building.

In this article, I am going to show you 14 things to know and do before starting a blog. So let us begin: –

14 Things To Know And Do Before Starting A Blog

1. Decide What You Will Blog About

Choosing a blogging niche is a very crucial and important part because it identifies the purpose of your blog. It describes what your blog is about and what kind of content you will put in it.
It also helps you to stand out from the crowd and get a more targeted audience for your blog.

So you have to decide what you will blog about, be sure it’s enough motivational for you. So if at some point you will feel down and collapsed, it will help you to push up, and encourage you to go ahead rather than giving up.

You can transform your passion or experience as your blogging niche. A topic on which you can write it freely and confidently without getting bored. Because if you’re not passionate about your blog niche, then it is too difficult to maintain the consistency and the quality of content.

Related – Top 10 Most Popular And Profitable Blogging Niches

2. Look At Some Blogs In The Same Niche

After you decided your blog’s niche, then it is time to look at some blogs in the same niche.

It is important to know what other bloggers are doing in your niche, how they write, what topics they are covered, what resources they use, etc.

This kind of research gives you an idea of content planning and content production. Now you know how other bloggers write their articles, which means that you can measure how engaged content they were produced and how they interact with their readers. So you can use similar tactics for creating engaging articles for yourself.

When you know what topics those bloggers are covered and what isn’t, then you have an opportunity to write articles on those missing topics and serve unique content on your blog. You can also write articles on existing topics by adding extra and updated information on it.

So how do you find those blogs that have the same niche?

It just pretty simple suppose your niche is cooking, then you can search like Cooking blogs or Top cooking blogs on Google. If you are looking for blogs in a specific region, then you can do that too and search for like Cooking blogs in the US or Top cooking blogs in the UK.

3. Write Down Blog Posts Ideas

Once you have looked at some blogs in the same niche, then it’s time to write down blog posts ideas for your blog.

Planning content in advance is one of the essential strategies of content marketing. It will make your job easier and prevent you from thinking about the next blog post idea after writing an article.

So sit back and take a pen and paper or open a new document on your computer and note down all blog posts ideas. Try to write at least 50 blog posts ideas for your blog. If you have planned several categories under your blog niche, try planning 10 blog post ideas for each category.

Maybe you don’t have that much of ideas in your mind right now. So what can you do in that situation?

In that situation, you can use social media and online forums for finding relevant blog posts ideas.

4. Consistency Is Required

Consistency is a must for every blogger. It is one of the major factors that help you to become successful.

If you are not consistent as a blogger, then there is a decent chance you lose your blog’s traffic, because no one likes to read an article again and again. People always like to explore new things.

Being a blogger, delivering content consistently is quite difficult, as we all know that blogging is not a short term business. It will take time to deliver the results you want. And till then, we have to create quality content consistently. But here’s one thing, as blogging is a long term business, there are times in our blogging path when we feel demotivated and no longer want to write.

So how we deal with that situation?

Here are some tips to produce content consistently:

• Make a schedule for your blog posts and stick to it.
• Give a dedicated time to write a blog post and avoid all kinds of distractions while you are writing your article.
• Split your blog post content into blocks and tasks, then set the goal of breaking down those blocks and start writing.
  It is not necessary to deliver content daily, but it’s important to have a schedule.

Read Also – 7 Things To Do After Publishing A Blog Post

5. You Need To Be Social

When you have a bunch of posts on your blog, then one of the missing pieces of the puzzle is traffic. You won’t get any traffic from the search engines if your blog is new, and it took months and years to get traffic from the search engines. So what you do now for instant traffic?

The answer is pretty simple Social media!

You need to be social because social media is a great way to get instant traffic on your blog. My favorite social media are Pinterest and Twitter that helps me to drive traffic on my blog.

It also helps you to connect with other bloggers and build a network for mutual benefits.

Related – How To Use Pinterest For Driving Traffic To Your Blog

6. You Need To Be Authentic

Starting and running a blog hold lots of hard work behind it. But on the other hand, it is a pretty fun game too, because you can write whatever you want and how you want.
Make sure you need to be authentic, be yourself, be genuine, and write the article in your own style. It will help you to gain your readers’ trust, and that will help you to make your connection stronger, with your audience.

Being authentic, you have to focus on quality rather than quantity of content.

7. Know How You’ll Make Money With Your Blog

When you start a blog, possibly your ultimate goal is to make money with it. If it is not, head over to the next point.

There are several ways to monetize a blog, such as running ads, doing affiliate marketing, writing sponsored posts, selling digital products, membership, etc.

Keep in mind blogging isn’t the fastest way to make money. So don’t expect instant results from whatever methods you have implemented to monetize your blog, because it took a while to roll money for you.

Related – 9 Ways To Monetize A Blog

8. Knowing And Selecting Best Blogging Platforms

You have lots of options for blogging platforms. You can create your blog for free with platforms like Blogger.com and WordPress.com, or you can use WordPress.org, for creating your blog on your self-hosted website.

When you start a blog with a free platform, you don’t have much control of your blog, and at the same time, you have limited options to design and customize your blog.

So that’s why I personally recommend a self-hosted blog with WordPress installed. It gives you full control of your blog and tons of options to design your blog. There are lots of plugins available for WordPress, that helps you to add more features on your blog and run smoothly.

A self-hosted blog costs you a few bucks a month. I use Bluehost as my hosting provider and WordPress as my blogging platform. Here is the step-by-step guide for starting a blog with Bluehost and WordPress.

9. Learn Basic HTML

These days there are visual editors on every blogging platform. So there is no need to type any kind of code to change anything on your blog. You can easily customize your theme appearance by tweaking some options.

Even some blogging platforms have drag and drop functionality, which simplifies your blog design work.

Now a days, you don’t need to know HTML and CSS to run a blog, but if you have basic knowledge of these things, you can control your blog professionally. It helps you identify and tackle small bugs on your blog.

So having a basic knowledge of HTML makes a huge difference. You can learn basic HTML on sites like Udemy.

10. Learn Basics About SEO

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is the most important thing if you want to rank your blog posts on search engines. Implementing some SEO strategy makes a big difference, and it helps your articles gain more traction from search engines.
So I highly recommend you learn basics about search engine optimization.

11. Learn Content Copyright Issues

You need to know about content copyright, and you have to prevent yourself from using copyrighted material on your blog. You can’t use any written and visual contents (Image, Videos, Graphics, etc.) if it falls under copyright protected license unless you have permission to use it.

So keep in mind that you’ll not use any copyrighted material on your blog. For images, you can use royalty-free stock images from sites like Unsplash, Pixabay, Pexels, etc.

Before using images from these kinds of sites, make sure you read their usage policy for those images. Some sites require credit for using it, and some don’t.

Meanwhile, you have to protect your content from the content thieves, here is an article from WordPress.com that helps you to prevent your content.

12. Select A Domain Name

Now it’s time to select a domain name for your blog. A domain name is your blog name, it helps visitors to find and access your blog through the internet.

The name of your blog represents the purpose of your blog, so try to select a name that reflects your blog’s niche. Keep it simple, keep it easy to read and pronounce, and keep it memorable so your visitors can remember it for further visits.

You can use a domain name generator like Domain Wheel for searching domain names for your blog. And you can use Bluehost for registering your selected domain name.

13. Check The Availability Of That Name On Social Media

Before you register your domain name, make sure to check the availability of that name on social media platforms. So you can create pages and accounts on those platforms with your specific username.
It helps your audience to easily find you, on those social media platforms.

Keeping the exact username on those social media helps you look like a brand, and adds a little professional touch to your blog.

14. Go For Elegant And Clean Blog Design

It is quite important that how do you present your blog to your visitors, what is their first experience when they come to your blog?

If you believe the first impression is the last impression, then you definitely understand the gravity of that question.

If the design of your blog is too complicated to understand and difficult to navigate, you will probably lose the retention time of your visitor. They just land on your blog and walk away immediately.

So if you don’t want this, keep your blog’s design simple and clean and make sure it’s easy to navigate on it. Ask your friends to give reviews about your blog’s design.

There are lots of beautiful themes available for WordPress, here are some of them:

• Divi
• Astra
• OceanWP
• Hestia
  So select any of these and start customizing it for getting an elegant and clean design for your blog.

What Next?

Now it is your turn to take steps and apply these things before starting a blog. I know you are already familiar with some of these things, or maybe you know all of them. So share your experience in the comment section about those things to know before starting a blog.

Above featured 14 Things To Know And Do Before Starting A Blog, Shows you things to know before starting a blog. Hopefully, this article provides you better insights about the things to know before starting a blog. Please let me know in the comment section what you think about this article.

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