The Ultimate Guide To Start Blogging Career

Introduction

If you are searching for ultimate guide to start blogging then this blog post will guide you to blogging career. There are 600 million blogs in the world today and most of the blogs don’t get enough traffic and are not making enough money to be successful. Though most blog is not meant to be monetized the majority of blogger want to make money from their blogs.

In this blog post, I will blog about how you can create a nice blog, write engaging content, and get enough traffic through promotion. By following this ultimate guide to start blogging you can learn step-wise step how to create a successful blog, that earns you a good income.

Plan your blog

Planning is the first stage of starting your blog. In this stage, you strategize your blogging. 

The first step while planning is understanding your target audience. 

My target audience in this blog post is going to be people who are interested in blogging and want to know how to blog effectively. 

Build Authority in your niche by targeting audience?

If you are an e-commerce business like Amazon, eBay or Alibaba then your audience will be people who shop on your site. You want to drive traffic to your website through your blog by giving important information through the blog posts.

If you are a blogger who is writing about food then you need to write engaging content about your niche to build authority by knowing what your target audience really likes to eat. 

Similarly, if you are a fashion blogger then you should identify who are the people most likely to visit your site. 

Know their fashion taste and write engaging content with equally beautiful photos. 

In my case, I intend to target those people who really want to blog but don’t know how to start.  Even if they have already a website or blog they don’t know how to promote it to get enough traffic.

How to correctly identify the target audience?

The best way to find the target audience is through competitor analysis. 

If you are blogging about personal finance or travel then you should identify the top 5 blogs in your niche. 

• Identify what unique they are doing in their content.
• Identify what blog post they are getting the most social media sharing.
• Check their keyword 
• Know what blog post they are getting the most traffic.

By doing competitor analysis you will get ideas that will help you in planning your blog. One of the best ways to write a blog by analyzing competitors is by following the skyscraper technique. The skyscraper technique means you find the best blog in your niche and create a blog better than that blog.

Carefully choose topics to blog

After carefully examining 5 of the competitors you should choose the topics you are going to cover. 

When you choose the topics it should be broad enough so that you can write many articles and effectively target your audience. 

Since you did competitor analysis you know what topics are important you need to cover and what topics are not covered by your competitor which should give value to your audience. 

Also, ask yourself the following questions while finding your topics

• What is your goal?
• Are you passionate about the niche?
• Is this niche broad enough?
• Can you fulfill the gap you found with competitor analysis?

What is your value proposition?

When you are blogging you should know.

• Why are you blogging?
• What value you are giving to your audience?
• Will they come back again to your blog to learn more?

If you do not know what unique value you will provide then it’s time to do more research and find what you can offer.

Competitor analysis will give you an idea about what others are doing in your niche. 

Carefully understanding your own capabilities and resources will allow you to give value that you can consistently deliver.  

The next stage is to plan your schedule. 

This is the important part of the planning stage. 

If you are planning to post every week then plan for the day you are going to post. So that your readers are ready for your post on that day. 

The best time to post is between 9AM-11 AM when most people start their day. 

As per Buzzsumo Tuesday is the best day to post your blog for most social media shares.

Scheduling posts also gives you the right mindset that you need to do all planning before posting. 

The schedule gives you an idea about your goal of reaching a particular blog target you are going to reach. Like 100 blog posts before the end of the year. 

Scheduling also improves your content delivery since everything is preplanned. 

Scheduling your post on a fixed day allows you to better prepare for tasks like promotions, ads, and related work on other days. 

It de-clutters you and saves your time.

Set up your blog.

Naming your blog is a critical part of overall branding so it’s important, choosing the right name will help you promote your blog in your niche easily. 

A good name should attract your audience to your blog and help them easily differentiate from your competitors. 

It should portray what value proposition you are offering and the name should complement it.

Tips for a good domain name.

• You should choose a domain name to be .com
• Use keywords in the domain.
• The name should be short.
• Avoid hyphens and double letters.
• The domain name should be unique.

After finding a suitable domain name register it with your domain registrar. 

Some of the domain registrars include Domain.com, Godaddy.com, and Namecheap.com.

Host your blog. 

Bluehost and GoDaddy are preferred hosting providers. 

After finding the best hosting solution provider you are ready to set up your WordPress blog.

Installing WordPress

• Login to your hosting account Cpanel.
• Find the Install WordPress section.
• Click on the install button.
• Choose your domain name.
• Enter your Email, user name, and password for the admin panel of WordPress.
• Click Install Now to finish the installation. 

Congrats 🙂 you have Installed your WordPress blog and are ready to post. 

The Next step is choosing your theme.

What theme to choose?

• Choose a simple theme  
• The theme should be responsive so that your blog can be easily readable on any screen size.
• The theme should allow you to add easily plugins. 
• Consider buying premium themes if the budget allows.

What plugins to install in your WordPress blogs?

Yoast SEO. Yoast SEO is a plugging that helps you in getting more traffic to your website by optimizing your post for readability, managing sitemap, title, meta, and robots.txt

Shortpixel image optimizer. Image optimization helps you reduce the image size which increases page load speed. This plugin compresses images and boosts user experience.

WPRocket. It is a very good plugin that caches by creating a static copy of your blog and makes your blog fast loading. 

Elementor Pro. It helps you build a great theme. 

Create content

Congratulations you have all the blogging tools ready. Now is the time to write a great blog post. 

Choose a topic as planned before and write a blog by doing extensive research. 

The title of the blog should be compelling to the target audience and use the researched keyword in the title too to boost traffic.

Before writing the post do the keyword research. 

Keyword research will help you find what your audience is searching on google. It will help you identify keywords and their competitiveness so that you can target them to get traffic. 

By doing keyword research you can understand what is trending in your niche. That will help you write effective content. 

Google keyword planner is a free keyword research tool that is useful to identify search terms that your target audience is searching on google.

Other tools include ahrefs and ubersuggest by Neil Patel.

How to do keyword research and apply it in a blog:

• Make a list of topics for your niche.
• Analyze competitors to identify the keyword they are targeting
• Find the search terms that fit your criteria for targeting based on competition and crafting your content marketing strategy.
• Find the top 10 terms and use them in your blog as keywords. 
• Insert the keyword up to 7-10 times in the introduction, conclusion, and the main article naturally.
• Insert keyword in Meta, title, too.

Writing your blog post

• Organize an outline of your blog post before starting to write
• Outlining helps you organize the content so that you can write great content. 
• Write a compelling introduction that explains what you are going to write about.
• Create different sections by thoroughly researching the topic.
• Add subsections within sections to generate new ideas.
• While writing your content be authentic. Provide unique information that your audience will love to read.
• Create attention-grabbing headlines and subheadings. This helps you attract your potential audience. 
• Keep your sentences short and simple. Provide your audience with information they seek fast and make it thought-provoking. Most people skim read so make your paragraph 3-4 sentences with a maximum of 5-6 lines.

• Before writing your content do extensive research so that you provide up-to-date information. 
• Use infographics to make the topic enjoyable since our minds process visual data efficiently. Some of the tools include Canva and Piktochart. 
• Add enough images which complement your post. This will make your blog more appealing and help your content to be shared on social media. 
• Use unique images from Unsplash, Pexels, and Pixabay.

Use tools to create engaging content.

Some tools for content creation include. 

Grammarly. Grammarly helps you write like a professional writer with spelling and grammar checks. 

Copyscape. Copyscape will find if your content is 100% original. Never publish content that is copied or not original.

Canva. Canva helps you create engaging visual content.

Google keyword planner. Helps you find the keyword you can target to get more traffic.

Meme generator. A meme generator is a good tool to get nice and funny memes in your content to make it interesting. 

Google docs. Google docs are one of the best tools for writing because you can not only collaborate and share but also work from anywhere, work offline too. 

Promote your blog post

Make your blog search engine ready.

Making your blog search engine friendly is extremely important. Since most of the people looking for content often use search engines like google or bing. 

If your blog post appears on the first page of google then your blog will get more traffic which brings more revenue for you. 

Organic traffic is the best traffic that will guarantee the success of your blog.  

Google uses complex algorithms to rank the blog posts. 

Some of the ways you can make your blog post google friendly are:

1. How fast does your blog load? Use google PageSpeed Insights to check and remove bottlenecks. If your blog loads faster it gives a signal to Google to give a better ranking. You have a better user experience and better conversion. 
2. Mobile is the preferred device for most internet users so your blog should have a responsive design. 
3. Conduct extensive keyword research so that you know what terms your target audience is searching on google. Then provide relevant content based on the keyword research. 
4. Use visuals to your advantage since google likes images and videos. You need to have original videos and photos and provide descriptive alt text. 
5.  You should provide the audience a good experience. Though good SEO is equally important you are writing for people, not search engines. Ultimately what is good for people is good for search engines. Most people are searching for key information in the blog so doing effective research is a must. Then write such that it’s easier to grasp. 
6. Provide enough complementary images and infographics so that audience can easily digest the information. 

In order to promote your blog, one of the best tools is link building.

Why link building?

Inbound links are an important factor for your blog because it gives search engine like google signal that you have good content. If a lot of good websites are giving backlinks to you then it signal’s google that you have authority in the subject or niche. That brings more organic traffic to your blog. Having a well-researched blog post with a good backlink from a higher Domain Authority website is a sure way to promote your website. 

How to get good backlinks?

Guest blog to a high DA(Domain Authority) website is a sure way to increase your own Domain Authority. So finding ways to write on a high DA website is a good way to get a quality backlink. back link from high DA

 Your main goal while guest blogging should be to provide quality content to the readers. By providing quality content while guest blogging helps you can improve your own engagement. 

Do proper research to find a high DA blog, and read other blog posts in it. Then find the topic which is not covered in it so that you can write about it.

Connect to the blog owner by following on social media and engaging with comments or sharing their content.

Write a great pitch outlining your idea for the guest post and wait for the response. Then write amazing blog posts by following their guidelines. 

Other link building strategies include

• Comment and testimonials.
• Find broken link
• List site on directories.
• Do competitor analysis.
• Publish skyscraper blog posts to get links.

Promote your blog with email marketing.

E-mail marketing allows you to build relationships with your audience. Since you have complete control over what you are going to deliver and is impactful. Most subscribers can be easier to convert to customers since as per a study by McKinsey & Company email marketing is 40 times more effective than social media.

Social media marketing.

Social media is a great way to connect with like-minded people, friends, and family. Social media is important for your blog since people share ideas, learn and interact on social media platforms. 

Ways to promote blogs on social media include:

Share your blog post on most of your social media profiles. You can integrate social media on your blog so that when you post your blog. Readers can share it.

Using #hashtag helps your content be discoverable on social media. Use it often with social media like Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Pinterest, and TikTok.

Social media likes to have more visual content. Create original image that is visually appealing that improves engagement and increases social media sharing.

Build a relationship with your audience. Share other people’s content on your social media.   Go beyond liking and leave an encouraging message on your follower’s posts. Actively engage through social media by using the platform to give great experience and personalization.

Use Analytics in your favor.

Google Analytics is a great tool for your blog. It gives you a host of information that is important to analyze the performance of your blog.

• How your blog is performing?
• You can analyze who is viewing your blog post?
• How much traffic each blog post is getting?
• Why some blog posts are doing poorly to improve?
• It gives insight into what viewers searching on your website?
• You can understand from where you are receiving your traffic.

Since Google Analytics is a free tool it is one of the most useful tools you need to be well versed in so that you can further plan your blog.

I hope ultimate guide to start blogging will help you reach your goal of successfully launching your blog.