4 Things You Must Know Before Starting Your Blog

We all know that blogging is not a get-rich-quick scheme. For your blog to be successful, you need to put in a lot of hard work.

You also need to approach it with the discipline of a business. That includes learning all the steps in starting a business right.

You don’t just want to create a blog; you want an insanely successful blog. And you don’t have all the time in the world. You need your blog to rise fast so that you can soon start earning and getting returns on your investment.

Start Fast

Never start anything without a plan. Take your time and do thorough research on your niche. Get a list of top blogs that you would want to emulate. Get it all down to a science, where you even have some realistic income projections.
Plan properly, but don’t spend all your time planning. Get started fast.

The first steps in creating a blog are really simple. They can be done by literally anyone who can operate a computer. It should take you less than an hour to do them. You’ll first need to register your domain name and then host your Website. You can use the same company for both functions or use different companies.

Take advantage of any offers that will enable you to save some money. At any one time, there are lots of offers running that will enable you to get these services at up to half price or even cheaper.

Once the site is up, install WordPress, which is a great content-management system and blogging platform. This is where you’ll be doing most of your work. Make sure you have all the necessary plugins. You can research the best current plugins and install them.

Write Incredible Content

Your blog cannot go far without great content. People want to get value when they visit your blog. They come to your blog with deep challenges. If you are able to sort out a percentage of their issues, you will start getting ardent fans. Here’s how to ensure your content always wows your fans:

  • Keep it fresh: If something in your industry happens, you want to be among the first people to blog about it. Any strategies that you recommend in your blog should be useful today. Nobody wants outdated copy with tips that don’t work.
  • Stay relevant: Many bloggers struggle with the urge to digress a bit on their content. Maybe there’s an interesting thing going on in your life, but it just isn’t in your niche – but you really want to post it. Don’t fall into such temptations. Only blog about what’s useful to your audience.
  • Go deep: Gone are the days when people would just post shallow, short content and still rank and earn from their blogs. Nowadays people want real, in-depth information. This gives you authority and helps your audience derive even more value from your content.
  • Make it interesting: You don’t want your reader’s mind to wander off to other things. There’s no room for that. Make sure your content is so interesting that your readers want to keep savoring it and yearn for more.
  • Be consistent: Now that your readers are yearning for your content, give it to them constantly. Have a regular blogging schedule and be very consistent. Don’t keep performing disappearing acts on them.

Do SEO Early

As soon as your blog is up and you have published a few great posts, start practicing the latest SEO techniques.
Despite the explosion of social media, most people still search for information on search engines, especially Google. The sooner you rank on page one of Google, the faster you can get a blast of targeted and relevant search-engine traffic.

It is true that optimization methods change at lightning speeds. However, there are some age-old methods that have proven to work regardless of the frequent changes of search engine algorithms. These include:

  • Link building: This is where you get links that point back to your site from other credible Websites. You can do this through guest posting, blog commenting and use of infographics, among other methods.
  • Proper keyword usage: Keywords are simply search phrases that are typed into search engines when people are looking for information. You need to make sure you use them properly in your content so that search engines can better understand what you’re writing about. Don’t stuff them in your article. Just make sure you use them naturally in your title, URL, article body and image ALT tags.
  • Linking out to authority sites: In your content, link out to great sites where your users can get more information. Don’t worry about getting traffic out of your site. Here you want to rank well so that you get even more traffic to your site.

This doesn’t end here. Let SEO be a continuous process where you’re always researching on better methods and implementing them.

Be Social

The world is quickly going social. You don’t want to be left behind. Leverage social media. Strive to be a darling to your audience. Make sure your content is likeable and shareable. Whenever you go viral on social media, you get droves of quality traffic to your site.

There are many other methods of making sure your blog rises fast. However, the ones mentioned above are the most important. If your high-quality blog can dominate search engines and social media, you’re definitely in for the big bucks.