How to start a blog

In 2011 when I started my first blog (in Italian, on how to write a good CV in English) I did so because I felt I had something to say, something valuable to share that someone else may find useful. It is also the same reason I started this blog your are reading. This is one of the most common reason people start a blog.

Some others want to share their knowledge to increase their personal brand or to support an existing business through SEO-friendly content articles.

And a growing number of people blog and successfully monetise their efforts in order to create an alternative income – or even make it their first!

How to start a blog (or website)

Your domain & hosting

A domain is simply the web address where your blog will be found. It can be anything, but it pays to pick a good one.

Some people chose a fictitious name (e.g. if it is a personal blog) or their name & surname (e.g. if the blogger wants to enhance their professional profile). If you want to blog on a specific topic I suggest using a domain that includes somewhere one or more of your important keywords. This is SEO friendly, i.e. Google will give you kudos for it and you are more likely to rank and be shown higher on the search engine.

Example: this blog’s domain is moneyforthemoderngirl.org – it is a personal finance blog and the domain includes “money”.

I normally buy my domains and hosting from Bluehost because they are reliable (you don’t want your blog or site to go offline for random reasons) and their platform is user-friendly. If you have any questions, their customer service is also very good and quick. This is what their home page looks like

Check here to see if your ideal domain is available:

When you have found a good domain, follow the steps on Bluehost to buy it, and then buy the hosting too. Hosting is simply where all your website (text, images, etc.) is stored. You don’t need to know much about this except that you need it.

As a rule of thumb a good domain is usually around $20 (approx. £15), sometimes less. If it is more expensive you may want to consider to pick a different one.

Hosting at Bluehost starts at  $2.95 (approx. £2.24). They will ask you to select a plan. If you have a personal blog, just go for the basic one, there is no need to spend a penny more.

Both domain and hosting are a recurring yearly expense, but definitely not high expenses.

WordPress – the best Content Management System around

I’ve used WordPress since launching my first blog in 2011 and have seen it evolve and improve beyond what I thought was possible. I think it is the best CMS around and has some powerful plugins to help even non-technical folks build amazing blogs. According to WordPress themselves, Google praised highly their SEO friendliness. I agree with them.

Through Bluehost you can install WordPress yourself in one click. I’ve done it, it’s really that simple:

Choose a theme

Once you’ve installed your domain on WordPress, you need to tick a them, which is the layout and structure of your blog.

WordPress will automatically install a default one for you, so you can choose a different one or keep the one installed.

Create content

Now to the fun part! When you first start off, you have an idea about what you want to write about. If you have a personal blog you will also have a topic you’d like to focus on, be it your inner thoughts or a specific niche you’re passionate about. If you are a company you want to answer any possible question your clients may have and also show off your authority in the field.

Your content calendar

In order to publish interesting content regularly (and this is a best practice), the best habit you can develop is to start a content calendar where you plan what to publish and when, and job down content ideas whenever they pop into your mind.

I use a Google Doc with four simple columns:

• Month
• Title / topic / idea to blog about
• Published?
• Notes and comments

I also use colours to mark out alternate months, so I can quickly see if the number of my content ideas is uniform over the months.

If I get an idea for a set of posts, I can easily add them to the calendar and plan one each month.

Try to get into the habit of “seeing” content ideas wherever you go – are you waiting for the bus and watching people? Think of what could make their life interesting and that you could blog about. Or if you see an ad on the bus driving by, what is the ad message and what could you learn about it for your blog?

You can also read other blogs in your chosen field or in any other area and learn from them. It takes time, but it pays off to develop a content idea mind.

Every blogger starting out has to learn, well, how to write. None of us is a natural, you will develop your style and tone of voice over time and you will get to a point where the words will just follow out of your pen keyboard.

You will also produce posts that are great, and others that are not quite as good. Don’t lose your sleep over these, just keep on blogging.

Some bloggers publish short posts, others exceptionally long ones! The point is to publish useful and unique content that will interest your readers.

The very useful  Yaost SEO plugin (more on it later) gives us kind of a benchmark: they recommend a blog post to be a minimum of 300 words, or minimum 900 words if the post is a cornerstone article, i.e. one of those those posts that are most important to you, the ones you really want to be found for on Google and make people come back to your site or buy your stuff.

Should I care about Google when creating content?

Yes! SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is only one way you can drive traffic to your blog (more on this later), but in any case it’s worth using a mix of traffic building techniques, so don’t ignore SEO.

Allow me to remind you of Google’s vision statement. They want:

“to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful”

What does this mean for you? It means that you should focus on producing useful and unique content. If you create dummy content or use quick-win strategies that go against Google’s ethos, you and your traffic may get hit and penalised by Google at some point.

Images

We are all busy, we don’t always have time to read endless articles and posts and news. Sometimes we all skim through an article, and where do our eye instinctively pause? On images.

Yes, they are important. Not only do they help us convey a message, they also help break up a long, long post and, last but certainly not least, they are our little SEO helpers.

What does this mean? It means you can and should use your focus keywords as much as possible (don’t push it though!) in the image’s file name, title and alt text.

A word of warning: images (and gifs and videos) can have a large file size and make your website load slower, which people don’t like and may cause them to go away too quickly. Luckily there are plugins to help you solve this issue (more on this later).

Permalinks

Do this before you start publishing posts and pages, it only take one moment. Permalinks are simply the URL structure of your blog’s pages and posts. Blogs should always use a structure that highlights the keywords that important for them.

In your WordPress dashboard on the left, go to Settings, then Permalinks. Blogs should alway tick the option Post name. Example of what the URL will then be looking like:

https://www.example.com/sample-post

The part in red is what permalinks are about. They add useful keywords to your URL, which Google likes. You set it up once and never have to worry about again. But if you like, you can still edit the individual permalink of each post or page, right under the title when you write or edit them.

Internal links and backlinks

The reason why links, both internal and backlinks, are important is because they give authority to a website or blog. This stems back to the very beginnings of Google, as explained by Steven Levy in his book In The Plex:

“Page [Larry Page, Google co-founder], a child of academia, understood that web links were like citations in a scholarly article. It was widely recognized that you could identify which papers were really important without reading them – simply tally up how many other papers cited them in notes and bibliographies. Page believed that this principle could also work with web pages.”

If, for example, The New York Times links to your blog, that gives it authority. This would be a backlink.

And if you link to other pages of your own blog, you give authority to those pages through an internal link. And you steer people to reading other parts of your blog too.

I will write more about blogging in future posts giving tips and suggestions that I use everyday. Keep coming back!