Key Tips For Starting Your Blog In 2020

Key Strategies To Starting Your Blog In 2020

Blogging has evolved over the years when it first started around 1993, a blog is a short term for weblog and this became a source of the blogger sharing their story and personal journey’s.

I don’t know about you but I absolutely love the Food Network Cooking Show “The Pioneer Woman”

Before Ree Drummond had her cooking show she was a blogger and photographer back in 2006 and her blog was titled “The Pioneer Woman”

On her blog, Ree blogged about her ranch life and homeschooling, her blog was featured in the New York Times, you can read more about Ree’s journey here.

My reason for sharing her story is to show, how she started out just sharing her life and her interests and it grew from there.

What Story Are You Telling

The questions to ask yourself is what story do I want to tell? Do I want to bring others along on my journey of entrepreneurship, travel, fashion or a healthy lifestyle. The reason this is important because blogging about things that are important to you will give you more topics to write about.

I hear aspiring writers and bloggers say “I don’t know what to write about or I have writer’s block” although that can be the case at times. In my case there is so much for me to blog about, the problem is getting those thoughts from being jumbled in my head and down on paper where I can organize them.

For this particular reason I use a tool called Simple Mind which helps me to get my ideas down on paper so my content has a flow instead of my thoughts being all over the place. Here is an

example of me brain-storming this topic.

This tool helps you to get everything out of your mind so you can structure your content as you begin the writing process, you may not use every idea or thought, however it’s a good tool to give your content some structure.

What Is The Purpose Of Your Blog

When you know the purpose of why you want to blog, then you have a foundation to build on. My purpose is to equip entrepreneurs who need relevant information to grow their business and they need help connecting the dots.

I am taking my struggles and experiences as I grow my business to provide content for others on the same journey.

Once you know what your purpose is when starting your blog , then it won’t be such an overwhelming task.

A key tip before going public and feeling like you may get stuck in writer’s block is to begin brain-storming topics you will blog about, and begin creating a library of content.

What this does is help you to have some content for those who visit your blog to consume, it would be a disservice to your visitors to have only one blog post and then be missing in action until you come up with the next topic to post.

You can write a least 4-6 topics and then schedule them a week at a time, now you have a over a month’s worth of content already to go, so that gives you time to work on more content.

If you are new and just starting out you may not get that many visitors unless you blog on platforms like Medium which already has a built in audience.

There are many sites where you can blog on for free, here are a few of them to get you started.

Two Types Of Bloggers

Although there may be more than two types of bloggers, I want to focus on that number so you can see how you may want your blogging journey to begin.

Will your blog be about your personal journey that you are sharing with others.
Will your blog be a resource that teaches others some type of skill or knowledge.

The reasons these questions are important because what you share via your blog will become your brand “What You Are Known For” so make sure to stick to that same theme, because you don’t want to confuse your audience.

I absolutely love Wendy Nguyen, a fashion blogger who started on Youtube. I love her style it is so effortless, she just seems to pull together outfits without even trying.

Wendy now has over 1 million followers on Instagram page, the key takeaway is she started out with a Youtube channel blogging about her passion. Checkout her Youtube Channel where she first began. You can read more about Wendy’s story here.

When I look at a fashion and lifestyle blogger, I look at their intent is to share their love for fashion, travel, food and how they love to express themselves, so the lesson takeaway is that they are not trying to conform to someone’s version of what fashion is they have their own sense of style and it draws in those who have that same love for fashion.

This is why fashion and beauty brands have been reaching out to fashion and lifestyle bloggers they have caught on that celebrities are not the only ones with huge followings, and the don’t have to lay out an enormous budgets to have them endorse their products.

Brands are now reaching out to bloggers who have built a steady following and a strong brand sense, and this why it is important to know your vision as a blogger.

The next type of blogger who wants to share their skill set or expertise, their main goal is to grow their audience, so they can offer more premium services this type of blogger can begin researching what type of people are looking to learn more about that particular skill-set or knowledge.

This can be done with Neil Patel’s Ubersugget keyword research tool, with this tool it helps you:

Find the keywords your target audience is searching for
Find how much competition is around those specific keywords
Find out how much the cost per click is
Find the age group that is searching for those keywords
Find out if the keywords are getting any clicks or just a huge search volume

View my last blog post here that shows an example.

Everything Starts With A Plan

So now that I have given you some examples, now the planning begins. When you are a business blogger helping other entrepreneurs on their journey a good tip to know is finding out where their struggle is at.

Create polls
Create Surveys
Ask questions

This is so key because you are not a mind reader so you have to ask your visitors what content do they want to receive from you, this takes the guesswork out of what you should be creating. Once your blog begins to receive more traffic and comments, they will tell you what their struggle is or ask you for advice, so now you have content to blog about.

I was asked in one of my blog post comments, how do you keep people from stealing or copying your content, my answer to them was “it happens”.

However, if you want to protect your work you can register it with https://www.copyright.gov/registration/ your work is considered copyrighted the day you created it, however, if you wanted to go after someone legally you would need to prove that you are the creator of the work this can be costly so here is another way you can check too if your content has to be plagiarized.

Go to https://www.copyscape.com/ and perform a search on the URL of your site where your content or blog post is located to see if someone has copied your content, simply tell them to remove it or link back to you as the source.

If someone is using parts of your content and linking back to you as the original source that’s okay, because this is how your content gets found.

Take notes from this post as you see I have links to relevant information to give my readers access to further assist them along their journey, this is a key component in blogging is to have links in your content, here are a list of things you need to have in place when creating your blog posts.

Great Title
Main topic that draws attention
Images
Links
Proper spelling (although I do botch that up at times 😅 ) use grammarly to help with this
CTA (call to action) if you are building your email list this is a must, create a resource that gives value, it can be a checklist or some type of download that gives your audience valuable information or tools that they can utilize.

Hosting Your Blog

This is of the utmost importance because now that you have the tools to create a great blog, you want to make sure that your visitors are not leaving before they had a chance to consume your content because your site is taking forever to load up. I’ve tried the cheap ones and let me tell the saying is true “You Get What You Pay For”.

My hosting company for the last 3yrs have been with WPX Hosting, and all I can say is they do a phenomenal job, they are a bit more expensive than Bluehost & GoDaddy, but I have never had an issue with them.

What I love about their service is, If your site gets hacked they have a backup of your site, they create backups everyday, and your site loads super fast, how awesome is that! Okay enough about them but go and check them out when you are in the market for a good hosting company.

Bonus Tip

When you create your article submit it directly by using Google’s Search Console.

Enter the page’s URL into the inspection tool at the top of the Search Console, and it will attempt to search if the page is already indexed, however the first box on the right you will see Request Indexing and this will put your page in Google’s crawl priority que. You can check after 24 hrs to see if the page has been indexed.