Do you feel you have the inspiration and enthusiasm coupled with the eagerness to work required to start your own online blog, be it purely personal or for your small business but are at loss as to how you should go about it? Are you also not sure if this could be lucrative and worth your while and what sort of costs are involved in setting up such a venture? To address all your questions and concerns we’ve conjured up a simple guide overviewing the basic steps to be followed when attempting to create a successful blog online, so read on to find out more.
Although starting a blog is simpler than starting an entire business or building a website, there are still numerous questions to ask yourself and decide upon before making your first steps, chief among them being the need to know why you want to start a blog in the first place. If you want to reach results, then you need to have a clear aim from the very beginning. You also need to identify your theme and match it to the most suited platform in which to launch your blog, while you also need to map out your action plan and road towards blogging success. Our mini-guide aspires to help you come up with all the relevant and correct answers that will propel your venture and help achieve your aims.
Why do you want to be a blogger?
The first question to ask yourself and give a convincing reply to, is knowing exactly what it is that makes you want to become a blogger. Besides having a clear thematic unit for your aspiring blog you also need to identify what your aim is that spurs you wanting to create it. Moreover, you need to know what it is that would like to showcase, if it is a particular talent that you feel you have and you want to share with your audience, what is the message or purpose you want to convey to the rest of the world through the blog. In order to have solid chances to succeed your blog should add value not only to you as a person, or even a business owner, but to your target audience as well. In short, it should be a win-win situation. After you identify your theme, you also need to decide on the type of content you will be offering, whether it will simply be written items, or photos or videos, or even any combination of all mediums. What you need to ensure is that your content will be representative of you and the messages you want to convey, allowing your passion and eagerness for blogging to blossom and appeal to others who will be choosing to visit it and see what you have to say and show. Effectively projecting your aims through your content and presenting something that has a point, an essence, a raison d’être, will surely go down well and help you attract and win over your target audience.
You can start for free!
If you are not willing or cannot afford to pay in order to start your own blog, especially if it us purely personal and not tied to any kind of business activity, the good news is that you can still do it in a very affordable manner, since there are many platforms around, such as Blogger or WordPress that allow you to create a blog for free. Once you have your aims and needs clear in your head, do some research on available cost-free platforms and decide which is the most appropriate and better suited for your own blog to use.
What’s in a name?
The name of your blog and consequently the domain name that will host it are very important factors and need to converge and match nicely with your blog’s content, its philosophy, its visual presence and its overall identity. Search for a name that is relevant to you and the content you are offering, representative of your aims, and most importantly something that is not too long and complicated, but rather short and catchy. If the domain name is appealing and easy to remember this will help users to pass it on and become ambassadors of your message, through word of mouth, ensuring your traffic increases. To purchase your domain name you will need to pay some money, but don’t worry as there are plenty of economical solutions around that you can easily identify through some basic research.
How about some profit?
Even your blog is entirely personal and making a profit out of it is not in your initial set of aims, it is entirely possible to turn it into a profit making venture, provided that you structure it well from the beginning, you build and develop it with care and feed it with content that is interesting, unique, useful and has an impact on your users and target audience. In deciding whether to purchase advertising space in your blog, interested companies will look for the quality and quantity of your content, as well as how often you update it, while also focusing on the impact it has on their potential customers. If for example you create a successful culinary blog, supermarkets or kitchen utensils retailers would love to advertise on your blog as they will view it as relevant to their own offering a superb way to reach out to the market segment they are interested in. All platforms that allow the creation of a blog also contain information and statistics in reference to how many clicks a blog gets and generally info about your user and their background/demographics and this type of reports are very important if you want to monetize your blog’s presence. In short, your blog can surely become a provider of significant income if you sell advertising space effectively, attract sponsorships and collaborations from interested and relevant companies and also offer other smart ways to interact with your audience, such as contests and prizes.
Gaining prominence
Gaining prominence for your blog and establishing it as an authoritative source of information and content in your field, entails building for your offering an overall recognizable brand. To achieve this you need to ensure that your blog and all its content has a uniform, compatible identity, including logos and trademarks that need to produced in a creative and tasteful manner. Also ensure that when uploading content, it has cohesion and consistency in terms of fonts, colours, sizes and their overall presentation as this will do wonders for embedding your unique identity in the eyes of users and visitors.
In a nutshell, creating a blog isn’t too complicated and it could well mean the start of a very pleasant, rewarding and potentially highly lucrative endeavour. What will make or break your chances for blogging success is purely your own personal drive, passion, eagerness and authenticity. If you have something to say and want to share it with the world through a blog, then start blogging today. And if you still feel unsure how to proceed, contact us here at Netresort and we will be happy to guide you through it all.
