How To Start Blogging And Choose The Best Platform in 2024
Blogging culture has been hyped, and many people are looking for answers to how to start blogging. Well, here’s everything you need to know about how to start blogging and what are the best platforms for blogging. The first thought or question that comes to mind before you began is… How to start blogging? There are many tutorials available online on how to set up a blogging account. Various blogging platforms let you make your account for free and have access to several services and features.
How To Start Blogging
Step 1: What is your Idea and Niche to Start Blogging?
You will surely have a lot of ideas in your mind but a blog should be focused on a specific topic or niche. No niche is unique, but your presentation, knowledge, and personality are.
When you are thinking about how to start blogging, probably you already know what are you going to write about. A blog-specific niche is all about the kind of content you are going to create or write for your blog. The advantage of having a niche is that it gives you expertise and will be easy to decide content for your blog.
Make sure you choose your niche carefully, it should be something of your great interest so that you can also enjoy writing and working. Furthermore, your selected niche is in demand and has more search volume so that your audience increases.
Research about your selected niche
Once you have an idea of what are you going to write you need to do a lot of research on it. You won’t be able to grab attention only with the idea you have. If you are a beginner then you should start with a more specific, to avoid high competition.
How to research your selected niche
Follow these steps to search related keywords for your blog. After this process, you will be confident about the niche of your blog and get an estimate of its competition and audience.
- Open Google search and enter the word that is most relevant to your niche to find out the keywords and competition.
- On the searched results page, you will get links to different websites that are ranking currently.
- At the bottom of the page, you will see related search phrases and words, they might be different keywords for your niche.
- These related searches will help you find the most trending keywords and decide the keywords for the niche for your blog.
- You can use different tools like Google Keyword Generator, Ubersuggest, keywordsheeter.com, and scout various keywords that are relevant to your blog.
- Make a list of at least 15 to 20 keywords
- Use tools and extensions like SearchVolume.io or Word Tracker to find the volume search of all the keywords.
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Step 2: Research on your Competition and Audience before you start blogging
When you see that your selected niche has great competition, it could be a good sign. It means that there is a great amount of audience interested to read or view your content, which is related to your (already popular) niche. You can elevate their interest furthermore by giving good quality content.
There will be competition in your chosen niche. However, you can also work with your competitors and collaborate, which will generate more audience for both of you. For example, be a guest blogger at each other’s platforms.
Benefits of guest blogging
- It assists you to improve your online authority.
- It will aid in raising your brand awareness.
- It will help to improve your marketing skills.
- It lets you have instant exposure to the targeted audience
- It will expand your network.
- It will strengthen your backlink profile.
- It will expand your social media following.
- It generates leads and website traffic.
How can you check the competition?
Follow these given steps to find and recognize your competition, as well as whether it has a good audience or not.
- Search your blog niche on Google, at the same time in another tab or window, search for the best of your blog’s niche.
- Search your chosen niche on Facebook to find out the interest of people from Facebook.
- Search your niche on Twitter to check out if the top personalities on Twitter are providing any content related to your chosen niche.
- Search about your niche on online leading magazines that write about your niche, to find out if people’s interest.
- Search your niche on Instagram and see how many people are interested in it.
- Search on Google Trends to know how your niche has been doing and how many people are looking for your niche-related content and in which area.
Step 3: Select a Name and Domain for your new Blog
Your blog name will create your brand for you. This is what is going to define your work and people will remember you.
Think of something that goes with your niche and personality. Start with a little brainstorming, and note down all the potential names, phrases, and combinations of words that come to your mind.
Settle on what stands out to you and check if a domain is available at your preferred domain name checkers like GoDaddy.com or Bluehost.
Always try to get a .com domain if possible and keep it simple, short, and easily memorable. Avoid using complicated or miss-spelled words, using numbers and homophones.
Once your web domain name (blog’s address) is available to buy, check for the hosting if you can get a free domain name along with your site hosting.
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Step 4: Get a Web Hosting
Get useful web hosting for your blog, check out different web hosting platforms that offer the best web hosting services in your area.
Your web hosting company will take care of all the technical aspects for you and make sure that your site will appear when someone types your domain URL.
Siteground.com
- It is the of the best-reviewed web hosting
- One of the best customer support service
- Offers free CMS install services
- Allows data transfer
- You get unlimited access to Sub and Parked Domains
- It offers vast web-space
- It offers a free email account offer.
- Allows a good number of multiple visits.
- Friendly site tools
- Also gives 30 days money-back guarantee
Bluehost.com
- It gives you 99.9% uptime.
- Create and manage unlimited emails
- Store a large amount of data
- It’s easy to create a website
- Get free basic SSL
- High server speed
- Affordable rates
- Get a money-back guarantee within 30 days.
Step 5: Install WordPress
WordPress is one of the most popular options when it comes to building a website. Because it gives you full control of your website and is profoundly flexible.
Once you are done with buying a domain name and web hosting, now set up a WordPress account. WordPress won’t cost you anything and works well with almost every web hosting, including Bluehost or Siteground.
It just takes one click to get your WordPress for your site and start running. It offers you a wide variety of themes and plugins (in abundance) to make blogging accessible and gives you more control over your website.
At first, it looks daunting but all you need is a little patience and practice.
Step 6: Choose a Theme for your Blog
Now starts the fun part of setting up your website, select your theme that goes well with your niche, and customize it. Your theme is the foundation of your design and will determine what your blog is going to look like.
It offers a wide range of free themes, that can be customized with no limit, though if you don’t mind investing a little, paid themes are available at an affordable cost.
All you need to make sure is that it looks appealing and is responsive, this part is crucial for your blog’s aesthetic, that the theme can adjust the way it appears on different devices, like mobile, laptop, or tablets.
All the themes on WordPress come with unlimited support. Add pages to it, like About Us, Portfolio, Contact us, etc. as per your requirement and your website is ready.
Step 7: Install Plugins
You can install plugins so you don’t have to deal with a lot of technical stuff and focus on things that are more important to you. They extend the functionality of your blogs, like apps and tools to help you with a variety of things. Such as add contact forms, sliders, or forums.
You can choose them according to your requirement and interest but these are just a few recommended ones:
Yoast SEO
Yoast SEO is one of the best and must-have plugins for blogs when it comes to SEO. It can analyze the readability of your blog and optimize your keywords.
Mail chimp
It’s a user-friendly email marketing plugin, which will help you manage your subscribers, send emails in bulk and track their results. It can easily be integrated with all other major plugins.
Akismet
This is an anti-spam plugin, which will examine your comments and contact forms to find any spammers or harmful content.
Everest forms
This is helpful to make a contact form so your readers can be in contact with you. It’s easy to use with drag and drop fields and gives you the freedom to add an unlimited number of forms with multiple column support.
Easy Social Sharing
It is a social media plugin to share the contents of your website up to 18 different social media networks. It can be beneficial to grow the reach of your audience.
Step 8: Start writing your blog and publish
How to start blogging…. just start blogging.
Now that your website is ready and live and all the technical aspects are being taken care of, what’s left for you is to create your blog and publish it.
It’s recommended to create an editorial calendar for blogging. You don’t need to go too fancy, just decide when are you going to post and make a note of it somewhere, whether digitally or in a diary.
Keep a track of your ideas and plan your blogs so you can be organized and don’t get overwhelmed. Keep your blogs clean and readable. Use bullet points, sub-heading wherever possible to format them properly.
You can also add CC zero images to make it visually more attractive.
How To Start Blogging And Make Money
You had asked how to start blogging? Now you would be wondering if you can monetize your blog. Because everyone is interested in generating some revenue from their blog. It is a great way to do something you like and get paid for it.
Though not everyone is looking forward to making money out of their blog, they are blogging just because they like to. Some people blog to polish their writing skills and upgrade their talent.
Blogging can help you generate a side income, however, some people solely depend on blogging for full-time work and income.
Tips to help you monetize your blog
- Check the products, services, or information that are being sold by other bloggers in your niche.
- Sell physical products
- Give advertising space on your page to various brands, products, and services.
- Contact with big brands and businesses for collaborations. This works two ways;
- Barter: Other brands or businesses barter their products with you for your content, to help them promote their product or service.
- Paid promotions: Brands and Businesses will pay you to promote and advertise their product or services.
- Through Affiliate marketing you can get a commission on every purchase made by the audience through the link you will provide.
- It will be your ethical responsibility to inform your audience that you are getting paid for promotions. It will build trust with your audience.
- Moreover, it helps to raise your reputation.
- You don’t need to invest, they are budget-friendly.
- They help to expand your website traffic.
- Helps you extend your audience.
These are just a few ways to monetize your blog, however, be sure to upload good quality and related content.
How to start blogging by choosing the best platform for you
You can have two choices when it comes to creating your blog, you can;
- Create and design your website using an easy website builder and start blogging. This needs a lot of work but you get the ownership and control over your content.
- Set up an account in one of the blogging platforms available online like Medium, Instagram, Blogger, Facebook, LinkedIn.
Most Popular Blogging Platforms to Start your Blog
You have many options when it comes to choosing the platform that works for you. Though some platforms are technically not blogging platforms, still you can get success from them with the right content.
Setting up an account is a lot easier on blogging websites and millions of people already visit these websites multiple times a day. However, you need to follow their terms and algorithms.
1. Medium – Traditional Blogging Site
You don’t need to wonder how to start blogging on Medium. Medium is a popular website for traditional blogging and already has more than 60 million users. The main focus of bloggers is niche-related content for readers.
Medium is a platform that can provide some of the most subversive, thought-provoking kinds of content online. You can find blogs on almost every possible niche, as they have a wide range of topics and is the home of several communities of dedicated readers.
They also give you a heads up with the estimated time you will take to read the article, with the title before you open the link. It’s remarkably simple to post a blog on Medium. While typing you can see how your blog will look after publishing, the bottom line is “what you see is what you get”.
Pro tips for Blogging on Medium
- Medium also helps you with some tips and tricks for your blog that are hidden in plain sight.
- Medium also offers you to add other writers and editors to your blog by creating their Medium Publication. Additionally, you get a lot of options to control your blog homepage.
- You can display quotes in two ways- block-quote by clicking the quote icon once and pull quote by clicking the quote icon twice.
- Type an asterisk or a dash to start a bullet list.
- There are no words with TK in English, Medium advises using TK to leave notes for yourself or something that requires your attention before publishing. You will be alerted if you hit publish with any word with TK.
- The first letter of your paragraph can be made larger with Drop caps to give it an editorial touch.
- You can post a blog on your website and re-post the same blog on Medium to get the advantage of its benefits for SEO. Follow their ‘how to..’ to use the Import your posts feature accurately and set the canonical tag to make sure that you don’t get penalized by Google for plagiarism.
Medium is the best traditional blogging platform where readers are looking to read classic blog-style posts. It’s best for beginners or for those who like classic blogging and long-form posts. A preferable choice for those who have a lot of good content and Medium has a built-in audience with a seamless interface.
However, the disadvantage is that you don’t have any control over the traffic and have to follow their terms and regulations.
2. Facebook – Largest Audience Blog Platform
Everyone knows Facebook, it is noteworthy that it has the largest audience, it has approx 1.49 billion daily active users.
The question is not the same as how to start blogging here, instead… How many of those active users will make a way to your page or will reach your post?
To get organic reach one needs to invest a lot of time, patience, and effort. You can either create a group or a business page or a page for your brand and post on Facebook.
Facebook is a huge, powerful, and overwhelming platform. Just create a page, build your blog and post it. You need to pull on building your audience, though comments and interactions will be better than any traditional blog platform.
Pro tips for Blogging on Facebook
- If you are using Facebook as a classic blog platform, create Notes. You will have a header image, a title, and space for text in the middle. You can create any form of posts with it like post videos, polls, gifs, or go live. It can also help you to schedule, save and backdate posts.
- You can use Facebook Creator Studio, which is an all-in-one dashboard to publish and analyze your content. It can make it easy to post and handle all your interactions in one spot.
The downside is that you are building your blog page on someone else’s website and need to follow their algorithm for your business. Audiences are available but you do not get the entire control as it is not your site. If your plans include making money through blogging, build your website and start a blog there.
Furthermore, recently media has been raising he concerns over the privacy issues, frequently changing process and set of rules.
It is a fabulous place for making a community page element to your blog. Though organic reach on Facebook is not what it used to be, it is still an enormous platform.
3. Instagram – Visually Creative Platform
Instagram is originally a visual platform, the feeds are all images and videos. Still, you can use the caption area for your text which can be approx 300 words and people like to read long captions.
If your niche is something visual like art, dance, small videos, or short how-to-videos, Instagram is the perfect platform for you. In reality, Instagram has hit lifestyle blogging in a lot of ways.
It is so popular among influencers that it’s hard to go elsewhere. The best part is various apps are available to create the feed for Instagram. You do not need to know a lot about a technicality, hire a developer or build an audience all the way from scratch.
On the other side, you are obligated to the changing algorithm and feed of Instagram. You can be the best judge and weigh the pros and cons of your blog.
You can host live vlogs on Instagram by tapping the camera icon at the top left of the screen and tap Life at the bottom. Once you are ready, simply tap Go Live. You will be able to see the number of viewers at the top and comments at the bottom of the screen. When you are done, tap End, it is recommended to tap Save. It will save it to your camera roll. By tapping Share you can add it to your story, for 24 hours, so others can see who could not around when your feed was Live.
Pro tips for Blogging on Instagram
- First of all, pick a good profile name, which is catchy and makes your niche clear.
- Make sure you stick to a specific niche, for instance, if you are a food blogger avoid posting about pet parenting, or if you are blogging about gadgets and electronics avoid posting your dress shopping.
- Visually appealing
- Post regularly and engage with your audience.
- You can have one line in your profile bio, with the help of tools like Linktree, you can add more links.
- You can also get your Instagram followers to subscribe to your newsletter, though do not expect them to go and read your blogs.
If you want them to follow your blog on some other platform, first start creating a relationship with your audience. Once you have a strong relationship and can build trust they will go wherever you take them.
Instagram is an amazing platform for your creative side, especially visually creative. Your visual work will be the highlight and the caption will be your mini-blog. The catch is that you have to follow the set format.
There are already so many users and it won’t be very difficult for people to find you through hashtags, comments, and other people you and others are following.
4. LinkedIn – Business & Professional blogging platform
If you are wondering about how to start blogging for the management, business, and professional world… the answer is LinkedIn.
LinkedIn is home to more than 590 million users, and around 45% of users are monthly active users. It was a resume hosting platform and worked as a job searching app, for people who are looking for a job and for people who are hiring for a job.
However, it changed drastically in the past few years to another level. 45% of the LinkedIn article readers are usually positioned in higher-level positions like CEOs, Directors, Vice Presidents or managers, etc. This makes it the best choice if you are trying to build a business blog.
Ryan Holmes said “Hardcore LinkedIn users know that there’s certain warm professionalism that underlies many exchanges on the platform. In short, LinkedIn offers a kind of stability, civility and real value that’s sorely needed on some social platforms.” in an article “Is LinkedIn Poised To Be The Next Big Social Network… For Brands?” for Forbes.
LinkedIn is a social network for working professionals from various industries. If writing formally and for professionals is your forte then this platform can fulfill your expectations with its ready-made culture. Your influences will grow according to the size of your network, the more good quality post you publish the more connection requests and followers you will acquire.
Pro tips for Blogging on LinkedIn
- Post regularly, if possible create a calendar on when are planning to post. That way even your followers will know when to look for a new article from you.
- Always stick to the topic, don’t wander around, or gets distracted. Be clear on what you are writing about.
- Whenever possible use researches and statistics related to your blog.
- Get a helping hand from your friends and colleagues by sharing a draft for feedback before you post.
- LinkedIn offers its course “Writing to be Heard on LinkedIn” if you want to get better at blogging and improve on their platform. So you can deliver successful content that people would like to read.
Any article you will publish will be visible in the Article section of your profile, your audience can follow you and be alerted when you post your next article.
If you are looking for ways on how to start blogging about management, business, or professionally related topics, make your profile and start publishing your articles on LinkedIn.
The disadvantage is that publishing on LinkedIn will not make you an influencer. As well as you are beholden to the algorithm of the platform and don’t have any control over the site or traffic.
However, you will be able to build a network and have more business opportunities. The pre-existing community (including 45% of higher-level positions holder) are already reading and discussing those topics and will be able to read yours too.
Wrap up
Whichever platform you choose it’s easy to start a blog. However, it will take a lot of dedication, time, and hard work to make it successful and earn money through it.
Keep an eye on the rewards to motivate you to outweigh the risks. Blogs are affordable and are loved in one form or the other. You can start them at a nominal investment (yes, consider it an investment and not cost).
Choose the platform that suits your selected niche and form of content. At the end of the day, you are the best judge and can weigh the pros and cons before choosing.
Continue to create and publish great content. As you embark on your blogging journey, remember to be honest, transparent, and yourself.
What’s holding you back?
Enough of reading, let’s get blogging…
