Having a high-quality blog is crucial.

If you have ever considered creating a blog before, you know that it can be a great way to grow your business, connect with your audience, and express your ideas in a written format. Your existing customers and prospective customers will see your blog and will be able to connect with you differently than before. This is why we need to put extra care into our blogs, rather than quickly putting them together. In this blog post and the video below, we are going to walk you through the following:

1. What to do before starting your blog
2. Staying consistent with publishing
3. Making your blog an effective marketing tool
4. How to get more people reading your content

You may feel totally lost when it comes to buying your own domain, writing content, and getting people to read it. We have put together seven steps for you to follow to help you reach success with your blog.

How to Start a Blog in 7 Steps

If you are creating a blog, you don’t want to talk about anything and everything. You want to pick one topic that will connect with your target audience. Talking about every topic under the sun will not encourage your audience to connect with it and they won’t be as interested in it. So, when you are first starting your blog, consider your business, what you do, and some topics you can discuss frequently. You want to make sure your topic is capable of being expanded on, this way you don’t get stuck after writing just five blog posts on the topic.

Next, you want to write down some of your ideas for your blog posts. Blogging can seem very easy, after all, you just type a few words and publish it for the internet, right? Wrong! Each blog can take up to five hours and it can be really difficult to write engaging content. Many people will sit down to write their first blog post, and are shocked at how difficult it truly is. So before you do anything else, sit down with your computer and a nice cup of coffee, and write a couple of blog posts. If words are flowing and you feel you are coming up with great content, then you are likely meant for blogging!

Once you have established that you are ready to become a blogger, you must figure out your platform. A common mistake amongst new bloggers is that they use platforms like Wix or Squarespace for their blogs. These platforms aren’t great for blogging for a few reasons. Squarespace and Wix are website builders, whereas WordPress is an open-source software. This means you can do just about anything you want with a WordPress website through plugins. With Wix and Squarespace, they can limit you on what features you have on your website. Additionally, WordPress is much easier for practicing SEO. You don’t want your rankings in search engines to be lacking because you chose a website building platform like Wix or Squarespace. So, be careful about which platform you use when starting your blog. We highly recommend WordPress because it will most likely be the best website platform for you if you are wanting to start blogging.

On another note with website platforms, when you are creating a blog, you want your blog to be connected to your business website. Some will create their business website on WordPress, and then have their blog on Wix, and the websites aren’t connected. This is not a good solution, especially for marketing. The goal is to get someone to connect with your blog posts, and then move to the rest of your website out of interest. So, if you have your blog and website on two different platforms, your content won’t be as effective. This is why you need to make sure your blog and website are connected and easy to get to each other.

If you don’t have a domain name yet, you will need to get one. For example, our domain name is “www.DisruptOrdinary.com”. Domain names aren’t very inexpensive, as some are as little as $12 per year. Try to get your domain name sooner rather than later, because you don’t want someone to take the domain name you were wanting. We use GoDaddy.com in many cases when purchasing domain names for our clients, so you may want to check with them first.

You will also want to get your hosting set up. Your website needs to be hosted and put on a server before people can find it. We also use GoDaddy.com to get our client’s hosting set up, and we highly recommend that you look at their hosting plans. When you get your hosting and domain name set up, you also need to get them set up with your website platform. This is usually relatively easy to do, especially with WordPress.

Next, you want to get familiar with your platform and start creating your blog templates. If you have never done any website coding or anything on the back end of a website, it can be a little bit tricky at first. But, you will get the hang of it once you go in and start getting it set up to how you want your website to look.

Think about the colors, fonts, and images you want on your website, and try to get it to match your brand. Go in and get all of this figured out before you continue on with the rest of the steps and before you start getting website visitors.

Now that you have an idea of how your platform works, you want to write out your first post, edit it, publish it, and make sure everything looks exactly the way you want it to.

After this, you need to get on a posting schedule. You don’t want to publish a blog post whenever you feel like it, and leave your blog untouched for months. You need to start building consistency with your audience and have them expect your blog posts on a certain day of the week.

Aside from building consistency with your audience, a schedule also helps you to stay on track and committed to keeping up with your content.

Now that you have done all of this work and created all of this content, you want people to see it! The first thing you should do is make sure all of your blog posts are SEO optimized. To do this, one of the easiest ways, if you are using WordPress, is to download the plug-in, “YoastSEO”. This plug-in walks you through SEO step by step on each blog post.

Other than SEO, you want to be promoting your blog posts on social media. This is obviously important, because this is where your audience already is. You want to post about your blog several times and also announce each blog post to your email list. Let your audience know where to find your blog posts and remind them consistently when you post.

When you follow these seven steps, you are sure to have an effective blog that connects with your target audience. If you are ready to get started, we wish you the absolute best of luck with your new blog! If you decide that you need some help getting your blog posts optimized, we offer a great tool called “The Google Ranking Tool” with our Finally Visible Academy membership that will be very useful for you.

Links Mentioned In This Video:

• Wix
• Squarespace
• WordPress
• GoDaddy
• Finally Visible Academy