5 Things to Consider Before Starting Your Blog
I think you are getting excited and eager to jump into the blogging world. Do not jumpstart just yet. There are many factors that you will need to consider before starting a blog. I’ve concluded the 5 most important factors that require careful consideration.
Traffic
You will need to consider whether your traffic matters. If you are only planning to create a personal blog ranting about your day-to-day life and thoughts, traffic is not essential. However, I assume you are planning to monetize your blog, that’s why you’re here, you will then require traffic. Your blog’s traffic gains you popularity and popularity earns you money. A successful blog depends a lot on its traffic, thus, you will not only need a lot of traffic, you will need quality and targeted traffic too. How do we bring in more traffic? The topic of your blog, is the core fundamental of successful traffic building, thus, you will need to spend some time on deciding your blog topic. (Well, there are hundreds of ways to bring in traffic, but we’re not going to talk about it in this post today, I will share you the in-depth tips to attract traffic in later posts.)
Topic
What are you going to blog about? Starting a blog is way too easy, but finding appropriate topics to blog about takes a little more thought and effort. Many people seem to blog about something that they’re not familiar with, for the sake of reaping money from it, that is wrong. After a while, or after a couple of posts, you will get bored with it, trust me, I made the mistake, so I don’t want you to repeat that. Try to blog about a narrow topic with informative write-up that helps people, that way you will have a better chance of bringing in traffic, ‘cause the reason why most people go to the internet is because they’re seeking information, tips, advices or even opinions. Two new blogs are created every second, you will need to stand out from the crowd in order to gain a larger portion of the traffic, thus, try to find out others in your same niche and see why they are different from others. If you are planning to monetize your blog, you will need to focus on a niche topic or demographic. Well, there’s no specific subject that you’re required to blog about, in fact, you can blog about anything that you like, any topics of your interests, or anything that you’re good at. For example, if you enjoy cooking and making your own recipes, you can blog about cooking and your personal recipes. Or if you are good at computers, why not blog about computer tips or even programming? Therefore, always go with what you’re good at and the traffic will follow.
Blog name
Naming your blog is as crucial as naming your baby, so name it wisely. You can only do this well after settling on a niche topic for your blog. A blog name is its first impression to your readers, thus, it should easily come to your readers’ minds. Your blog name should be easy to type and spell without too many letters. A good blog name should also say something about the topic, so that when your readers see your blog name, they already know what your blog is about. Take the recipe blog as an example again, if you see “Chris’s Secret Recipe”, I’m sure you can tell it is a blog about Chris’s personal recipes. In simpler words, choose a unique, suitable, readable, spellable and memorable name. Again, if you’re only planning to have a personal blog, your blog name isn’t that important ‘cause you can always choose the topic after naming your blog.
Blogging platform
There are many blogging platforms available on the internet, big names like Blogger(Blogspot), Wordpress, Movable Type, TypePad, Live Journal and many other competing blogging platforms, not forgetting recently emerged MySpace. However, different blogging platforms offer different levels of service. Personally I only tried Blogger and Wordpress, so I can only comment on these two blogging platforms. Both Blogger and Wordpress offer the blogging platform, the subdomain name and free hosting, but there are some restrictions and limitations on customization if you host your blog with them despite both of them are by far the most easy-to-use platforms.
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Blogger. Also known as Blogspot, is owned by Google. Everyone loves Google, ‘cause Google constantly improves and upgrades its products and services, which makes Blogger stand out from the competition. With its promising drag-and-drop feature and recently released new Blogger application, creating a blog using Blogger is a breeze, it is one of the fastest ways to start blogging. It would be so much easier for newbies to learn and practise blogging on a simple and user-friendly platform like Blogger. Blogger provides hosting and you provide the content, without costing you a dime.
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Wordpress. I came across a lot of clean, beautiful and successful blogs using Wordpress platform, so I finally made the decision to move all my Blogger blogs to Wordpress recently, and it’s worthwhile taking time to learn and understand Wordpress. WiseBlogging.com is proudly using Wordpress platform. I really enjoy the outstanding features and powerful tools of Wordpress, its user interface is remarkably simple to use and undeniably it is one of the most versatile blogging platforms, which is why most top bloggers are using Wordpress exclusively. However, if you are just starting out as a beginner, I’ll suggest you to start with Blogger. Why? Because Wordpress requires perhaps the most sophisticated level of technical knowledge for implementation despite it is open source software. Therefore, it can be a little time consuming for a non-technical beginning blogger to figure out Wordpress.
You can always switch over to Wordpress when you see fit, it only requires a few clicks to switch and export your content to Wordpress.
Free hosting or paid hosting
Before starting your blog, you will also need to decide on whether or not you want a free hosting blog or a paid hosting blog. Free hosting blog simply means that Blogger or Wordpress hosts your blog, and your blog’s domain name will be a subdomain like “yourblogname.blogspot.com” or “yourblogname.wordpress.com”. However, if you are willing to fork out a little money for a paid hosting, you can host your blog using your own domain name, for example, “www.yourblogname.com” . So which one should you choose? Here is some advice to you:
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For those of you who don’t mind the subdomain concept, go get a free hosting blog account with Blogger, and host it with them. Get yourself familiarised with blogging and its techniques, then only switch to Wordpress and a paid hosting account which give you full control over your blog.
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For those who insist on getting your own domain, but can’t afford the domain and hosting, I can show you how you get a FREE hosting blog account with Blogger while using your own domain costing you ONLY $0.74 a month!!! Yes, there’s a way, I’m not joking. This is going to be covered in later posts, meanwhile, you can start deciding on the other four factors while waiting for this one.
Last but not least, do go through this post over and over again if you haven’t gotten the answers to these 5 factors. If you have carefully considered all these 5 factors, Congratulations, it is already half of the battle.
Next post, “How to Create a Free Blog“.
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2 Responses to “5 Things to Consider Before Starting Your Blog”
very interesting, but I don’t agree with you
Idetrorce
I esteemed yours blog,
thanks the author a lot of useful to myself have found..