Blogging has been the rage for many years now and continues to grow in force, everyone is starting up their own blogs to talk about a wide range of different issues and problems. A lot of mums are starting their own to post about bringing up their children and even the older generation are getting in one to showcase recipes, holidays, sewing and DIY. Starting a blog is the new way to reach out to people that feel the same as you and have the same views, many blogs have their own following and dedicated readership.
Things To Do And Think About Before Starting The Blog
The most important thing here is the planning of the blog, what will you talk about? What will you name your blog? Once you have this figured out the rest of it will come easily, here is a little checklist before you even think about creating your blog.
- Will you use your own domain name or blogspot or something similar? – Having your own unique domain name and hosting is much better than using blogspot services, using services such as blogspot, you do not truly own the blog and there is only so much customization you can do to it.
- What will you call your blog? – Thinking of a catchy name that fits in with your niche you are going to write and talk about is a must, though some blogs come up with quite strange names which is a growing trend, there is actually a blog post covered by Stacey Corrin right on this blog for choosing a name, you can see that here.
- Choose a theme for your blog – There are literally millions of themes to choose from online, some of them are premium and some of them are completely free of charge. The premium ones have a lot more options for you to choose from but the free ones are also completely customizable, you can Google this and search for some WordPress themes to get your creative mind flowing.
Those are just some of the essential things required to start your blog and they are some of the most important, especially since the name will stick forever and you won’t really want to change it later on down the line, so it is an important step! Another major step is the marketing of your blog, what is the point in starting a blog, thinking of a catchy name, getting a niche theme and there is nobody around to see it? It would be kind of like opening a shop on the high street and not telling nobody about it, there will just be no visitors at all, this brings me onto the next and probably most important step!
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Marketing Your Blog To The World
This is where many people go wrong and blogs flop, marketing is a huge part of running a blog and will determine whether it is a success or not. You will want to have your blog up in the Google listings, preferably on page one for your target keywords so your audience can find you. So let’s say for example you are in the cake decorating niche, your target keywords will be:
- Cake decorating seattle
- Seattle cake decorating
- Cake decorating in Seattle
So we want to show up in Google for these three keywords. The first thing we will do is something called guest posting. This means we will reach out to bloggers in the same niche as ourselves and ask them if they would like some content created via you, for their readership.
Guest Posting
Guest posting is one of the oldest forms of marketing on the Internet, it is simply creating publications for other bloggers, within the article or the biography (check the bottom of this article to see my biography) we will place a link back to our blog, Google will crawl the publication and see the link, the more links you have on other peoples blogs the more you will go up the listings for your chosen keywords.
I do have a rule of thumb when it comes to placing keywords and this is my own private rule I am about to share, Google does not like 100% keywords use on all backlinks, so we must use keyword density:
- 20% use for exact keyword match, ie, Cake decorating Seattle
- 20% use for partial keyword match, ie click here for cake decorating Seattle
- 20% use for generic keyword match, ie, Click here
- 20% use for brand name keyword, ie, Your blogs actual name
- 20% use for naked URL, ie,
Each guest publication you send out, just mix them up with any of the above, I have gone ahead and created a spreadsheet you can download here to keep track of them all. You can add as many keywords as you want and keep track of how many anchor texts there are in your campaigns.
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