Making a Blog is not the hardest thing that you will ever do but to a rank newbie it can be overwhelming, just like anything. Here I will try to distill some wisdom for someone who might be new at it. Take it easy, take it slow, and read what I have to say. Digest it, and get started. Blogging is fun, satisfying, and can also be a kind of stress reduction therapy if you do it regularly. Once you get over the “what to blog about” and technical questions, making a blog will go pretty quickly and before you know it you’ll be blogging with the best of them.
I want to leave these videos because they have some good info, but my product recommendations needed to change, so PLEASE watch the very short third video and then read the rest of the article for how to get them.
Some Important Steps to Making a Blog
Making a blog is actually pretty easy. Before you do ANYTHING technical, decide on what you want to blog about. All a blog is, in it’s simplest format, is an online diary. The name “blog” comes from the combined shortened for of Web Log or Weblog – shortened to “blog”.
Making a blog requires you to decide what you want to blog about.
Will it be a general mish mosh of subjects or on a specific subject, or niche? Will it be mainly for recreation or for making money with a blog? Will it be a personal blog or one that serves another purpose? For example, blogs can be for anything. They can range from random thoughts and musings of individuals, be based on niche products or services catering to a specific group of interested parties or potential customers, for a specific company as a public relations tool, or as may other reasons as the imagination can come up with.
Blogs have replaced the traditional website in many areas, simply because the blog software takes care of most things and the user merely has to create content and publish it.
Blogs have plugin capability, many are free, and they do everything from helping with search engine optimization, security, visual aspects, tracking, sales, advertising, and just about anything that you can imagine.
Making a blog requires you to choose your blogging platform
Choosing a blogging platform is a topic that can use up an entire post, but I can go into that briefly here.
Or maybe I’ll just spill my guts…
There are several choices here. There are blogs that are hosted by someone else, usually a corporation of some sort, and self hosted, which means that you get your own web hosting area and own internet domain name. There are nuances here. For example, you can go with a blog that is hosted by a company and buy your own domain name and have it mapped to the blog, so that people go to your own domain name rather than something like yourblogname.wordpress.com, yourblogname.blogger.com etc. The benefits to branding are usually commercial or if you plan to turn it into some sort of commercial venture, whether through selling directly on the blog or using it for promotional purposes. You can do all that without your own name, but the more “professional way” is to use your own domain. Many blog services will require you to use their domain registration service of choice rather than your own.
The cons to using a hosted blog while making a blog are that you aren’t as free to customize as if you were using your own installation. They usually don’t allow plugin support, but some services like Google’s Blogger do have many widgets that you can use to place affiliate ads and other things around your blog to make it more interactive and show off more bells and whistles.
Empower Network offers a hosted for pay blogging platform that hooks into a great affiliate system that has totally replaced many people’s regular incomes. What’s even better is they have a new blogging system called Kalatu, that is WordPress based and can map to your own domain that you buy at a domain registrar like Namecheap. They host and secure it, you just log in and blog. You don’t have all the fancy plugin freedom of a raw WordPress blog, but you don’t have the administration nightmare either. Making a blog that is profitable couldn’t be easier.
Making a blog requires some technical considerations
Making your own blog, then hosting your own blog usually consists of you getting a domain name from a registrar like Namecheap, linked above, and also web hosting space from a service that supplies it. There are many web hosting services out there, all coming with some sort of customized CPANEL or similar back office app for you to manage your hosting account. Whether you need a single domain account or a larger reseller account (to host multiple domains/sites) is up to you and your needs. I recommend Bluehost, which is a premier WordPress partnered web hosting service. I also recommend Hostgator, which is another huge name in web hosting. If you have deeper pockets and want rocket fast hosting… not that Bluehost or Hostgator aren’t rocket fast, but if you have a larger budget and want something uber tuned for WordPress, at least check out another premium “tuned for WordPress hosting service”, WPEngine hosting.
You can find some more information about making a blog with a WordPress installation here.
You also have to get visitors to your blog. Aside from advertising, which can get expensive, you need internet searchers to find you when they search for you. In order for that to happen your blog needs to come up in the search results. Your location in those search results determines how many people will come to your blog. Your location in the SERPS, or Search Engine Result PageS, is cooked up by the search engine’s algorithm. Google, being the largest and most commonly used search engine, is the one that you are advised to optimize for. Microsoft-Yahoo BING is the second largest search engine, and the rest of the search engines make up the rest. Searchers use keywords to find what they are looking for. In internet SEO parlance, a keyword can be a single word (broad) or several words making up a phrase. The longer the keyword phrase the more targeted but less searches it usually consists of. While the longer keywords, or long tail keywords, consist of less searchers, they are usually people who are looking for a specific thing and in eCommerce circles can contain a higher percentage of buyers. You then need backlinks to your articles so that they get authority signals.
You need a tool to look for these words in order to write your posts around them. Google offers the free Adwords keyword planner. I used to use Micro Niche Finder, which I loved (mentioned in the video above) but it is now defunct and not updated so I had to find a worthy replacement, which thankfully I have. This would be Market Samurai which is easy to use and should be in any serious blogger’s arsenal. It’s cross platform too, as it runs through Adobe Air and can run on a PC or a MAC.
So, those are the basic things that you have to consider when making a blog. After that, it’s up to you to choose which niche of people you want to target. In other words, you have to decide which group of web searchers who your message will serve. Considerations might range from anyone who will listen for personal blogs to specific market segments for commercial ventures. the bottom line is this, you have to provide decent to great content or no one will come back and the search engines will eventually know about that. There are also other rules like you should have lots of internal linking between pages of your site and also outside popular sites should link to your site to raise your “street cred” with the search engine algorithms. More considerations are social shares and also blog comments.
Making a blog requires passion about what you are blogging about
You have to be interested in your subject and that has to get through to your visitors. You have to write in a way that people understand. If it’s instructional then it has to make sense and be easy to follow and duplicate. Blogging is fun and once your blog is set up you can post to it from anywhere you have a computer or a blogging mobile app for your particular blogging platform. If it’s a monetized blog, it can make you money 24/7/365 even while you are sleeping. If it ranks well in the search engines and gets plenty of visitors, it can provide you with an income for life.
When making a blog, why stop with one?
Once you are finished making a blog and getting it populated with posts, you can post anytime at your leisure to keep it going. Once it is going, you can then start another blog on a completely different subject and build it up just like the first one that you created. It’s truly a rinse and repeat process. Once you have an army of these blogs out there and healthy, they are incredibly easy to maintain on a part time basis with minimal work.
So, I hope that this article served you well. There is a lot to blogging and creating websites, but it comes with practice and it’s not rocket science, so don’t sweat it. Making a blog can be one of the most rewarding experiences you can ever embark upon.
Whatever you do, don’t stop there.
Don’t move on until you’ve made it sexy.
If you are interested in making a blog and then getting paid for blogging, partner with me and let’s get going.