There are literally millions of blogs out there on the Internet, and you may wonder if there’s room for another one. The good news is that you can be a successful blogger, but you need to know how to manage your blog and promote yourself if you want to build an audience.
Creating your blog site
There are plenty of tools available to get you started with a blog, and one of the most successful and well-known platforms is WordPress. Their sites are easy to set up even without much technical know-how, and there’s plenty of opportunities to add useful attributes to the site like plug-ins afterward.
While setting up the site is pretty straightforward, you do need to be conscious of the fact you need to maintain it and keep it secure. That means security checks, sorting out technical glitches, and backing it up regularly. If you don’t want to bother with the nuts and bolts side of having a blog, your best bet is to go for a managed WordPress hosting service that takes care of all those tasks for you, leaving you free to do all the fun stuff.
Adding content to your blog
If you want people to read your blog and engage with it, you need to be posting regularly. Most successful bloggers say daily is ideal, but as a minimum you should be aiming for three posts a week. Any less than that and you lose momentum, and people will forget about you.
The content you post needs to be interesting too, and appropriate for your audience. If you want to attract families and be child-friendly, keep everything light and avoid contentious issues and adult language. If you have a niche in mind that requires expertise in a subject – which most sites do to some degree – you need to have some level of authority on your topic.
It’s fine to start a beauty blog and say you’re learning along with your readers, or record your experiences when you take up a new sport for example, but it’s not a good idea to claim knowledge you don’t have. You’ll soon be exposed and dismissed, because there are plenty of better blogs for people to sign up to.
Advertising
It’s tempting to want to start monetizing your blog as soon as you can, but be careful with how you include advertising. There are some great services for finding advertisers for your blog, so getting advertisements isn’t too much of a challenge – although you’ll need to demonstrate that you have a solid following for most advertisers. What you shouldn’t do is turn your blog into a page full of adverts that takes over from the blog itself; subtle and appropriate advertising is ok, but don’t thrust it down your followers’ throats. That is why paid posts or sponsored posts are often more natural, just remember to be transparent.
It’s not enough to set up a blog, post the odd article, and wait for the visitors to start pouring in – because they won’t. You need a well-constructed, appealing site that has content people want to read, and that offers something unique to your followers.
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