Getting Started with a Blog

Blogging. Believe me or not, it is nowadays considered as a job, or sometimes you can say a way to earn some additional bucks. To me its a kind of hobby that I enjoy doing. As you’re reading this post, I can speculate that you’re willing to have a blog of yourself. Cool then, you’re at the correct place. I’ll help you out with this issue. Starting from the creation of the blog, to it’s heavy monetization — you’ll get everything here. There are some mistakes that I made while creating this blog. I shall try to make your path smooth by keep you away from those blunders. Initially you ain’t gonna need any programming language. But after few days of serious blogging those will play a major role. So you better learn them early. Before starting the tutorial, there are some terms that I think, should be made apparent to you.

• Niche: Niche is the particular category that your blog is all about. For example, technology, celebrities etc.

• S.E.O: Search Engine Optimization or in short SEO is about optimizing your blog for improved ranking on search results in search engines like Google, Bing etc. When someone find for something in google or yahoo, a list of links appears. The much you rank upward, the more traffic you drive to your blog and the wealthier you become. This is one of the most important tasks of blogging.

• Templates: Template is a pre-built file that contains html instruction about the look of your site. You can select a template and apply it to your blog and your blog will look the way, the template is written.

Now let’s get started with our step by step beginner’s guide. Study all of them deeply to avoid any minor or major mistakes.

1. Choose a platform:

There are hundreds, if not thousands sites that offer you free blogging platform. But you should select what’s perfect for you. I’ve hand-picked a few of them. Here’s the list:

Blogger:

Blogger is the best platform for a beginner to kick off! It’s damn easy for anyone and it comes with several stunning features. This is one of the most reliable blogging sites since 1999. Now this company is owned by Google, Inc. So obviously this is major benefit in search rankings as your site is optimized by the crawling king Google itself.

Blogger or Blogspot.com is packed with the basic features that you might need to post something. You can also use several in-built & external widgets or gadgets o make your blog look good. If this is your first time, then I’d recommend you to go with blogger.

WordPress:

If you ask a professional blogger about his favorite blogging platform, the reply would always be WordPress. Unlike Blogger, wordpress is a feature-packed site with awesome customization options. That’s the reason you’d notice that most of the huge blogs run on wordpress. WordPress lets you beautify your site from hair to toe. You can even host your site out of your own, which is one of the biggest lacks of other platforms. I won’t recommend it for starters.

Tumblr:

Tumblr isn’t really the best stage to create a blog. But for few niches like photography it comes as a very good alternative. You may try this out, but I doubt whether you can keep up a long time with this. Besides, it’s server crashes down often which isn’t quite good for your site’s health.

2. Pick your niche:

After you’re done choosing your platform, it is time to select your niche. First of all think about what you are interested in, what you know the most, what drives you crazy. This may be about anything, like Sports, Technology, Photography, Fashion & Lifestyle, Health, TV & Music, Movies, Celebrity buzz etc. Whatever that is, pick up a certain niche, and start writing about that. Remember that 90% of your posts should be related to that niche. Well you can select multiple niches, but that would be a little tough for you to control at one time. So my advice will be to go on with something specific.

3. Name your blog:

After choosing the niche, it’s time to give a name to your baby blog. Try to name it in accordance with the category your selected. It should be short & meaningful enough to be memorized easily. Then choose a domain name for your blog. You can skip this if you don’t want to invest bucks on your blog so early. You can buy domain names from sites like GoDaddy or Namecheap. Or else leave the default domain provided by the platform. If you choose Blogger you’ll be given a URL like <sitename>.blogspot.com. There’s no problem with the default URL. It’s just a little harder to remember (try mine). Anyway let’s jump to the next step.

4. Beautify you site:

It’s time to make your blog look better. At first select an awesome template for your blog. There are many sources on the web, where you can download or buy templates as per as your choice. Some templates come for free, some don’t. If you wish to spend some money on your blog, you may buy it. Blogger gives you some default templates. But I’d suggest you to grab them from different sites. Just search on google with the keywords “Free Blogger Templates”. Simply pick it, download it and install it to your blog.

Widgets are another way to make your site user friendly and look great. You’d get some default gadgets on blogger itself, or look for them on the web. Add them as per as your needs.  But don’t flood your site with non-essential clutters.

Beautification goes on as you keep blogging. Stay tuned to my site for awesome widgets and other cool stuffs.

5. Start Posting:

No matter how great your blog looks like, it’s useless without good contents. People won’t come to your blog without something to read, and whoever comes will bounce back. Hence, start posting from today. You may start with a welcome message to all readers. In the post tell them in detail what your site is about. Right after that, begin sharing your knowledge about the certain niche. Try to make your post as lengthy as 250-500 words and make an effort to post often. By often I meant to say, at least twice a week or more. This will be both wealthy and healthy for your blog.

6. Submit it to Webmaster Tools:

Next step is to submit the site along with it’s sitemap to Google and Bing’s Webmaster Tools.