Learn How To Start A Blog? Step by Step With Pictures
In this article, we are going to learn what is a blog, its purpose, and finally how to start a blog.
What is a blog?
A blog is a web page which is generally updated on a regular basis. It is a sort of an online journal or a descriptive website which displays the content of varied nature. The type of content that gets published on a blog depends on who the owner is and what was his objective to start a blog.
What is the purpose to start a blog?
You can start a blog for many reasons.
You can start a blog to document your experiences.
Are you someone who loves travelling and has been to many places? Do you want to share your experiences with the whole world? Sure!
You can create neat and well-crafted documentation of your travel history in the form of pictures, videos and those captivating stories behind it and post it on your blog.
Do you consider yourself a health freak and want to share your secrets with the world? Or do you simply want to stay accountable to people to reach your fitness goals?
An account of your fitness transformation, recommended exercises, diet, books to read to achieve different types of fitness goals and presenting them in a visually appealing manner is another great motivation to start a blog.
Do you love to cook and want to share your mouth-watering recipes with the whole world? Sure!
You can develop a beautiful journal on how to cook different recipes with a detailed account of the ingredients required. Posting original pictures and video tutorials, by all means, is a plus point.
How about maintaining an online journal of your school/university life?
An amazing idea, right? Regularly updating the blog with creative documentation of your student life including the daily hectic schedule to the dynamics an unsettling social life, excursions and everything in between is yet another idea if you want to start a blog.
In a nutshell, you can start blogging about any life experience you are comfortable enough to share with the world. Unless and until your content does not harm or hurt people’s feelings, you can free to choose any subject you want to write about.
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You can start a blog for a specific section of the internet users
You can start blogging about information aimed at people of a professional niche. It can be anything ranging from applied sciences, engineering, humanities, commerce. This will also help to build your credibility in a particular field.
You should start a blog if you want to grow your business
More than 50% of the world population is online today. Our whole planet has essentially turned into a digital global village. No space is a better marketplace than the present-day digital arena. If you start a blog and publish effective optimized content about your products and services with a great presentation, the webpage will have greater visibility on search engine result pages. This way, more people who want to want to buy your saleable stuff will visit the blog with the assistance of search engines.
Making money out of your blog
Making money out of blogging is a very straight forward process- to optimize your webpage to acquire a higher rank in a search engine result. This practice of web publishing is called search engine optimization. Crafting content by keeping in mind the effective techniques of search engine optimization is as important as developing a high-quality write-up with a great presentation and value.
Keywords and Keyphrases are the words that most people use to search for a particular topic in search engines. Strategic usage and placement of such words throughout the write-up is an effective technique to gain higher ranks on a search engine result page. The keyword density of a blog post should be maintained between 1% to 3%. Using bold and italics font for the keywords and key phrases, including relevant hyperlinks and properly structuring a blog post under headings, subheadings and bullet points are some very important key aspects you should keep in mind if you want to attract more traffic to your blog.
You also need to understand that blogging is a practice that requires patience, persistence and dedication. For obvious reasons, it is important that you gain a higher rank in a search engine result page but if your content does not add value to the lives of your readers, the blog will eventually lose traffic over a short span of time.
You can earn money out of blogging in the following ways:
- Posting adds
You can place ads to your site with the help of Google AdSense. You don’t have to be in direct touch with the advertisers here. Google, instead of senses your content and places relevant ad banners on your blogging page. Another way is to sell private ads where you get in touch with the advertiser but this only happens when you have a good amount of traffic on the webpage.
- Selling products
You can also earn money if you sell product hits like ebooks, online courses, apps, plugins, page designs, original images, videos and music. Study your audience before you start developing these products. An insight into the needs and desires of your readers will help you in making products that add value in their values. This, in turn, will help you generate a good amount of money.
- Sell memberships
You can develop exclusive content and products for a specific lot of your audience who can only have access to it if they pay for special membership. You should make sure that this content is more valuable than the one that is available for free.
- Tool for content marketing
You can market your products and services by developing content related to your business and attract potential readers and convert them to consumers by winning their trust and establishing a feeling of familiarity by empowering them to make a well-rounded and educated purchase.
How to start a blog?
- Outline the purpose of your blog.
What do you want your blog to be about?
Do you want to document your travel or fitness or university experience or do you want to share your culinary skills with the world?
Or are you a historian who wants to post amazing write-ups about medieval times?
Or are you looking to grow a business?
Whatever is your purpose, precisely outline it.
There are many platforms on which you can start a blog.
WordPress is one of the most famous blogging platforms out there. It powers 33% of the internet.
So, how to start a blog on WordPress?
Open WordPress in a computer’s web browser.
This is the homepage of WordPress.
Click on “Get Started” option. On clicking it, a new page will open which will look something like this.
Fill out the form displayed.
Mention your email ID in the first blank. Carefully choose a unique username and password. Fill in both the blanks and click on “Create your account”.
For your convenience, here is an example.
On clicking “Create your account” a new page will open which will look something like this:
You can build your site by choosing any of the above options depending on your objective. Here, I choose the “Blog” option. When you click on the “Blog” option, a new page will open which looks something like this.
You can choose any of the above options; Travel, Fashion, Education, Food, Music, Photography, Sports or even simply type any other keyword of your interest.
I have chosen “Photography” here.
On clicking the arrow, you will be directed to choose a name for your blog. The page will look something like this.
Think of a unique and interesting name for the blog.
I have assigned the name “Olivine” for my Photography blog.
On clicking the arrow, you will be directed to choose a domain name for your blog site. The page will look something like this.
After typing “Olivine” in the blank, the following options appear on the page.
For starters, select the free domain name.
Here, I have selected the free “olivine.home.blog” which further directs me this page.
I click on “Start for free” option on the top of the page.
You will be finally directed to your blog which will be of a similar nature as the one mentioned below.
You will have to confirm your email address by clicking on resending the email.
Before you start writing, customize your blog by picking up themes. For this choice, the “Customize” option under the ”Personalize” section on the left toolbar. You should choose your theme that complements your content.
Click on the “Write” option on the right section of the page and craft your first post and publish it.
- Check out what your competitors are up to.
Visit the blog of people who publish content of the category the same as yours. Understand their strategy and study their work. Learn the tactics that help attract more traffic. Closely observe their audience and deduce what the readers want to read. Learn to differentiate between taking inspiration and entirely copying someone.
- Post frequently
If you want to attract more traffic to your blog, you need to keep posting content according to SEO guidelines as frequently as possible. Also, updating your old content time to time also helps to increase the visibility of your page.
- Promote
To attract more traffic to your blog, you should share your blog posts on social media handles. This increases the popularity and visibility of your webpage in front of a large audience.
Final Words
Starting up a blog without an understanding of Content Writing becomes life without any aim. There are plenty of ways you can monetize your blog if you put your content right. It is advisable to Learn Content Writing for a successful career as a blogger.
