Blogging is many things for many people. For us, starting a blog was a way to record our travels. Never for a second did we think 7 years on we would be paid to travel to some amazing places, get to review luxury hotels, eat mouthwatering food, meet some great like-minded people and win a few awards along the way. Our blog is still very much a hobby, an extremely fulfilling and often lucrative one, but a hobby nonetheless. Many of our peers have made the leap into full-time blogging. It’s important to note that that can come with a lot of risks. However, if you put in the hard work and dedication, it certainly can pay off. They are now their own bosses.
This means they can choose the work they take on and the hours that they work. Having started eatsleeplovetravel.com back in November 2014, there are a lot of things we wish we had known then. Therefore, if you want to become a blogger, whether as a hobby or if being a full-time influencer is your goal, here are some of the basics you will need to know when starting a blog.
Decide On A Niche
The first thing you need to do is decide what you would like to write about. Your niche needs to be something you are passionate about, because the second you lose interest is the second your blog will suffer. Therefore, if like us you love travel and travelling become a travel blogger. If you are raising small humans and want to write about that then become a parenting blogger. Enjoy cooking and eating food, become a food blogger etc. If deciding on your niche is too tricky then become a lifestyle blogger. Lifestyle bloggers write about almost anything and everything including the things already mentioned together with fashion, money saving and personal posts about mental and physical health. Once you have decided, on to the next step.
Choose A Blogging Platform
So the next decision you will need to make is which platform you are going to choose to run your blog on. In the 7 years we have had eatsleeplovetravel.com we have always used WordPress. It is a straightforward and pretty simple platform to use – basically if we can use it, so can you. Back when we started there was really only two choices – WordPress and Blogger, with most of the bloggers we know using Blogger back then, moving to WordPress since. There are now a number of new and emerging platforms which you may prefer depending on your technical competency level and the things they offer but as we’ve never been given a reason to look at them further, we cannot provide further insight.
Buy A Domain Name and Go Self Hosted
The next thing is to choose and buy when starting a blog is your domain name. Your domain name is the name of your blog i.e. eatsleeplovetravel.com. Your blog domain should really reflect your niche. This will allow readers to know straight off the bat what your blog is all about. If unsure check out some other blogs in your niche to get a better idea. If you decide to start a lifestyle blog, many lifestyle bloggers use their names (often first and middle name) which is a great idea if you cannot think of something catchy yourself. And if you’re long term goal is to earn money from your blog, go self hosted from the outset. This will allow you to add advertisements to your blog. We use Lyrical Host who we cannot recommend enough.
Find a Theme and Design Your Blog
Your self hosted blog is now up and good to go but looks terrible. If you have chosen WordPress, it is likely you will have a basic theme. Therefore, you need to start shopping around for the perfect theme for your blog. If you don’t want to shell out anymore money after paying for your domain name and hosting, WordPress do offer a number of free themes. You can peruse them from your WordPress dashboard. It is important to remember they are free, therefore unlikely to be exactly what you have in mind. If you do have some more cash to splash then you can buy a theme. There are hundreds for sale from different developers all over the world, so you are more then likely to find something fitting your blog from a simple Google search.
Learn About SEO and Add Content
As the saying goes ‘content is king’. Therefore you need to ensure the posts you publish to your blog are interesting, informative, funny etc, whatever you are going for to attract readers and keep them coming back for more. Something we wished we research more when we were starting a blog was SEO. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a great way to drive visitors to your site. It basically means the process of improving your site to increase its visibility when people search for products or services related to your business via search engine. The more you are visible the higher you will feature in the search result, which in turn should mean more people read your posts/look at your blog and if you are running advertisements, should mean more money.
Promote and Market Your Blog
If you have put a lot of time, effort and often money into setting up and establishing your blog, you need to work to ensure that people actually see it and read what you have written. Therefore, you need to ensure that you create a killer influencer marketing strategy. You need to build trust and add a personal authentic element to your promotion and marketing. Therefore, you should set up supporting social media channels (Instagram, Facebook, Twitter etc) and share your posts across them to make your blog visible to a wider audience. It’s also important to monitor engagement analytics to ensure what you are doing is generating visits, leads, sales etc. There are a number of influencer management tools you could use. This will allow you to tweak/change your strategy based on the information.
So still thinking of starting a blog? We hope this information helps and your blogging journey is a smooth one.
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