So, you want to start a blog?
Awesome, you’ve made a fantastic choice! You may have heard that blogging is dead. That it’s over saturated, there’s no money, newbies can’t build an audience and so on but, all that’s false. Blogging is full of potential to earn you lots of money and build an incredible audience. But, it isn’t a walk in the park. There’s definitely work to be done and some of the most vital steps happen before you actually start your blog. Those crucial steps are the real secret sauce to success and I can’t wait to share them with you.
Keep reading to learn 6 things to do before you start a blog.
Most new bloggers completely pass over these 6 steps until they’ve already started their blogs. Not that that’s a bad thing but, I will say if you want a step ahead it’s important to accomplish these beforehand for a true advantage.
The last thing you want is to be playing catch up or trying to figure things out after you’ve started. Following these 6 steps before you start a blog will save you time and effort.
Please note, these aren’t in any particular order.
1. Clarify and Set Your Blogging Goals
Blogging isn’t easy and if you don’t have a plan than you better plan to fail. It’s that simple. Before you start your blog you need to get clear on what you want out of it and set goals to achieve it. Everybody has different ambitions when they start a blog. Some people desperately want to quit their jobs and earn money from home. Other simply want an outlet to share their creative spirit and meet like-minded people. It’s entirely your business what you’re blogging goal is.
One you’ve established your goal write them down. That could be how much you’d like to earn in a certain period of time or subscribers to your mailing list you’d like. It could also be how much content you’d like to push out within a certain amount of time. You can even set out to achieve having regularly sponsored posts or be featured on a bigger blog. The choice is yours.
2.Choose a niche
Deciding on a niche is the another super important step to take beforehand. Absolutely do not pass go if you haven’t decided on one yet.
A niche most simply defined is a topic. It’s what you’ll be focusing on in your blog. There are tons of blogging niches like motherhood (mom-blogs), personal finance, cooking and recipes, fashion and so on. There are also super focused niches within niches, so for motherhood you may find a blog about parenting adopted children or one that’s just for #boymoms.
You don’t have to be super focused in your niche, just starting with a broad idea of your niche is enough for now. Knowing your niche first is important because you’ll be using it to guide through the rest of the steps you need to take before blogging.
Thinking of a niche? Learn about the TOP MONEY MAKING NICHES
3. Define Your Target Audience
Let’s pretend for a moment your blog is up and running. You’ve built a killer website and have out of this world content. Good job! The next thing you do is share a link to your latest post on your Facebook page but, no one’s clicking. You might think “Damn my friends and family never support me!”. The problem isn’t your friends and family, the problem is they aren’t your target audience.
When you start a blog you need to know who it’s for (that’s where the niche comes in). If you’ve decided your niche is fashion and beauty it wouldn’t make sense to share your links with your teenage nephew or elderly Aunt Anne. You need to know who to share your links with so they’ll have a greater chance of being viewed, shared and possibly purchased from.
It isn’t enough to have a nice website and great posts.
When defining your target audience (which can vary depending on your niche) think about these things: what problem are you solving for your readers? What’s their age, income, location and interests? Where can you find them online? Imagine your perfect reader and center everything you do around them. You’ve probably seen other bloggers suggest an avatar and I’m suggesting it too.
Pick a domain name – Bonus Suggestion Before You Start a Blog
Creating your domain name is the next important step. This is where your readers will find your website. Some tips to remember are that your domain name should be easy to remember, easy to spell and as relevant to your blog as possible.
When I was in 8th grade my best friend came over and wanted to create an email address. She wasn’t computer savvy and also not a very good speller (which is what lead to this horrific moment in our young lives). I told her to type www.hotmail.com. I didn’t spell it out for her or stand over her shoulder so instead she ended up typing www . hotmale . com (I purposely broke up the link for your own eyes and mine because its porn). The website that loaded was not for emails. Anyways in a state of panic we went with Yahoo.
That story leads to my biggest piece of blogging domain name picking advice make sure your domain name leads to you even if someone makes a spelling mistake.
It’s also important for your domain name to be relevant to your niche. If you’ve decided you want to blog about recipes you could use something like “Recipes with Reina.com” oppose to something like “Reina in the Wild.com” which kind of sounds like a travel blog.
Play around with a few ideas and check to make sure that the domain address is available. You can use the domain search feature from godaddy here. There are plenty of places you can purchase a domain online but, if you sign up for hosting with Bluehost you can get your domain for free.
4.Learn SEO basics
If you want organic leads to your content you need to learn the basics of SEO.
SEO which stands for Search Engine Optimization is a way of designing your website and posts that make search engines love you so much they’ll rank your website higher in search results for certain keywords and phrases. The higher your website ranks the more traffic you’ll get.
Here’s a great post from Leanne Wong packed with information to help.
5.Make a plan to monetize
If you want to make money from your blog you should probably know a few ways to do it. Having a blog is just a step to making money not a guarantee.
There are plenty of ways you can grow an income from your blog but, not everyone uses them all and you don’t have to either. You should decided before you even write your first post what way(s) you’ll implement. As time passes you might find some work well for you while others don’t and you can readjust your approach to making money. Here are the most common ways bloggers earn:
Affiliate Marketing: This is one of the easiest methods to make money from your blog especially if you’ll be suggesting products. Basically, you join an affiliate program and start promoting products on your blog. You’ll have your very own affiliate link that’ll track any purchases made from that link. When people purchase you gain a commission. One of the most popular affiliate programs is through Amazon.
Digital Products: Lots of bloggers create their own digital products like ebooks, courses, masterclasses, templates and guides to sell on their website.
Ads: Allowing advertisements to be shown on your blog is an easy way to earn money. Of course, with this route you’ll need a good amount of traffic first.
Sponsored Posts: Sponsored posts (or collaborations) are popular in niches like beauty, fashion and parenting. You work with different brands and create blog posts focused on their product. Some bloggers will do this service in exchange of goods or for payment. If you won’t be blogging about beauty, fashion or parenting don’t worry there are a lot of opportunities in other niches.
Choose a color palette & logo – Bonus Tip Before Starting A Blog
Guess what? A color palette and logo are essential but, no one else is going to tell you that. Your blog is your brand aka your business and you want people to be able to easily identify you in as many ways as possible.
Think about it, the last time you saw a target commercial were you able to identify it without seeing or hearing the word “Target”? If so, how? Was it the strategically placed red and white bullseye logo? Most likely –ahem ABSOLUTELY.
Don’t you want that for you blog? Create a logo and choose colors that represent your blog. One that people will immediately recognize when they see it.
6. Create a Blogging Schedule/Calendar/Task List
One of the biggest challenges of blogging is the time it takes to come up with ideas, research them, write articles on them and share. It’s time-consuming and a lot of new bloggers aren’t prepared for this. Some get discouraged with the fact they aren’t producing as many articles as they’d like. The problem is there isn’t a schedule or calendar in place to help you out.
Before you launch you should have several articles on your blog ready to go. From there you should have a calendar prepared for upcoming content that you’ve already decided you want to write. Plus you should also have resources and a simple outline.
Along with having a calendar you need a schedule. Having a schedule is truly essential. I block out a certain amount of time each week and certain tasks are appointed for those slots. So sometimes I’m simply writing articles, while other times I’m researching for upcoming content. That includes resources, affiliate oppurtunities. And there are times when I simply share my blog and read and comment on other peoples blogs.
The most important thing that I do is have a task list. I know that as soon as I write my articles I’m supposed to have Canva open and ready to create my images and Pin images. Then once my article is posted I immediately go to Pinterest and post it. I have several other steps that I do but, I won’t bore you with the details. This is a super generalized idea of how I complete my blogging tasks that I think may help you.
PIN THIS!
It’s time to blog!
Now that you know the 6 things you need to do before starting a blog you can feel even more confident and start your blog. Here is a great post that shows you from step 1 to finish how to get started.
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