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Blogging has become one of the most used and popular communication outlets of our time. It allows users all over the web to share ideas, information, and spread knowledge to a large number of people with a single post.
A blog can be customized in a way that suits you and your business to gain an audience of customers and supporters. You can use your blog in many different ways; not only for communication purposes, but as an effective selling outlet for your products or services.
If you are wondering how to start a blog, just follow along for some helpful tips and pointers.
First Step: choose your preferred niche
A blog requires patience, time, and commitment, as it will not bring you success overnight. It is important to select a niche or overall topic about which you are passionate and knowledgeable.
Consider what you can blog about that will separate your product and services from those in the same market. What makes your business unique? Aspects such as unique content and valuable insight will increase traffic to your blog, with users sharing your content on social media outlets such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest and Instagram.
Social Media presence is an extremely important outlet for all online businesses, as posts on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, and Instagram are some of the most read sites by potential customers.
Links and likes on these sites will drive traffic to your blog, growing your audience and customer base.
Here’s some advice: just ask yourself what inspires you the most and what about your business really drives your passion. Once you have answered this question, you have your niche topic. Readers will always respond to content that is thoughtful, provocative, and that comes from a place of passion.
There are however some niches that bring more money than others. Do your research before, and do not waste your time on something that doesn’t bring any money. At the end of the day, your online business is there to generate you an income, right? We are preparing an article about evergreen niches, so you can start on the right path.
Next Step: hosting and domain name
Having a unique and recognizable domain name, as well as a unique business name, is very important because it is the first point of contact for your audience.
Your audience will need to know the subject matter and tone from your domain name; therefore, it is important to choose one that accurately reflects your business and your intentions for your blog. You can get a domain name and hosting at Siteground (this is their website), which offers affordable solutions for small and medium sized businesses.
Choosing your Blogging Platform
A blogging platform will help you in the management of content, design, and images. WordPress is a great platform for beginning bloggers because it is simple, flexible, and reliable, as well as very popular. You can use WordPress to build a blog and customize it with different designs, features, plugins, and layout, and if you have a basic knowledge of HTML, you can fully adapt it to your needs.
What is WordPress?
WordPress is the current most popular tool for creating websites and blogs. You can create any style of website with WordPress, from a simple blog to a full-featured business website with an online store.
You do not need to have previously built a website to use WordPress. There is no need to have any coding or design skills to create a professional, fully functional website with their easy-to-use tools. There are a lot of WordPress themes from which you can choose: some are free, some others are available for a fee. Explore the themes that might best suit your product and vision.
How To Get WordPress
You can choose to run your WordPress in a hosted environment, or you can decide to host it in your own server. Once you have access to the administration dashboard, your website can be updated from any location in the world as long as you have internet connection. You can also update your WordPress site from your smartphone, as WordPress is fully compatible with Android and iPhones (iOs).
If you want to learn how to install and create your own site via WordPress, you can download our FREE ebook.
Advantages of WordPress
The best part about WordPress is that it is free to use and free to update as you see fit. While it is simplified for web beginners to use, individuals who love coding can explore more and use their talents to modify WordPress to their tastes.
There are other website creation tools like Wix, Squarespace, or Weebly, which don’t give you full access to their property service for free. With WordPress, you can also host your website on any hosting platform or move your site to another hosting platform with ease.
Create posts & pages with ease
WordPress was originally developed for blogging, and while it has grown to offer many more services, blogging is still the core of this platform. You can create a continuous stream of posts that can be updated easily using a commenting and social media integration system. Also, you can create web pages with permanent linked content for easy access.
Manage all of your media in one place
WordPress also has an inbuilt media library that allow users to integrate different types of files to their site, including MP4 and MP3 files, as well as PDF files.
Plugins
This is the best part of WordPress: plugins can be used to unlock the power to do anything you can imagine. You can find and download any of the thousands of free plugins offered by the WordPress community in the plugin directory.
Themes
A WordPress theme is how your website looks to the reading audience, and provides the framework that combines widgets, elements, and plugins used on your WordPress site. Themes can be found easily in the WordPress community by visiting the WordPress Themes Directory. Remember to make sure the theme you choose makes sense for your blog or website content.
If you would prefer to enlist a professional, there are many web designers who are willing to design a custom WordPress theme for a fee.
Widgets
Widgets are the building blocks behind a WordPress site. Each theme has widget-ready areas, usually placed in sidebars or footers of a website. These widgets take users to additional information and data to enhance their experience on your page. They also offer design elements, structure, and functionalities to your pages.
Next Step: focus on quality content
Once your blog is up and running, content is possible the most important part of your client acquisition strategy. You will need to spend significant time and energy making your web content reflect your product or services, as well as be unique and reflect the company “voice”.
You should ensure that your blog articles are interesting and relatable, so that your audience will like and share it. Delivering quality content on a regular basis will ensure that your blog is getting adequate attention.
Final Step: Building Traffic
The more quality content your website has, the more visitors will have an interest to repeatedly visit it. Once your blog is established with quality content, it’s time to focus on driving traffic to your site.
Once your blog starts pulling traffic, you should then consider converting this traffic into business leads.
One of the possible methods is to encourage your visitors to subscribe to an email list, which will inform them about your services and discounts. This will help boost continuous traffic, but remember: you’ll need to keep posting regular, interesting content so your visitors and customers don’t lose interest!
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