How To Start A Blog- A Simplified Guide For Beginners (1)

Calm down and see these stats before you dive into the ocean:

– The average blog post takes 3 hours 16 minutes to write

– There are over 2 million blog posts published daily

– 69.4% of bloggers have never made money from their blogs

– Writing amazing contents is what 80% of bloggers think is responsible for building an amazing blogging career.

– The average word count of top-ranking content (in Google) is between 1,140-1,285 words.

Do you still want to be a blogger?

Now I’m not trying to make things scary or uninteresting. As a matter of fact, blogging has to be one of the most fulfilling things that has ever happened to a lot of happy people, Including me!

Before Launching

From this point till the end of this post, I’d want you to liken your intention to opening a blog to  opening a shop where you intend selling stuffs to people on your street.

Soliloquy (think twice to know if you really want this shop)

This moment is really critical because there’s a need for you to think through this decision. Don’t just think, talk audibly to your self and ask why you really want to do this. Once you get an answer and it’s a positive one, then you can proceed.

You have a high chance of failing as a blogger if your reason for blogging isn’t strong enough to withstand the trials and tribulations of this game. Think about how you will be able to measure your impact viz-a-viz the mission you’ve marked for yourself. This will help guide and further motivate you to push even harder.

Study (you need to know enough so you don’t die)

Yes, read about blogging from every website or blog you can find on google. You can as well bounce on youtube, watch as many videos as possible on blogging. This is necessary because it saves you a great deal of avoidable mistakes. For instance, prior to launching my blog, I figured (in one of my findings) that wordpress was a better content management system compared to Blogspot.

Pick a Niche

No that you know which problem you want to solve and have also studied well about blogging from other bloggers, you need to pick a niche. This is an area where you want to be focused on and would want people (especially your audience) to identify you with. There are numerous number of niches available depending on your interest. a few of them are: Travel, food, technology, Health etc.

The name

Choosing a blogs name is one of the most delicate procedures of owning a blog, but a lot of bloggers miss it totally. Why? They choose names based on what they like as a person, rather than what actually suits the blog’s purpose. Don’t get me wrong, it isn’t a bad thing to create a blog after your name (at least this is one of the strongest ways to brand one’s self). But here are a couple of questions needed to be asked:

Let’s take Obahiagbon as an example

• How easy is the pronunciation of this name?… imagine Obahiagbon.com
• How easy is the spelling of this name?
• How related is this name to the niche of this blog? Imagine he wants to run a travel blog.

If unsure about a befitting name, you can try out namelix –  a simple website which helps generate amazing business names.

The logo

I have changed my logo from what I started with. Why? It wasn’t well thought out when I launched.

You see, your logo should be very simple, yet sophisticated. Try as much as you can to allow an experienced designer do the job for you. But as a starter, you can temporarily make do with logo joy  – one of the easiest means of getting a logo idea.

The CMS (Content Management System)

This simply is a platform which manages digital content, since your blog falls into this space, it’s necessary you pick the best out of the numerous ones available out there. For the sake of getting it right from the get-go, I’d advise you opt for WordPress  even though there are others like blogger, Drupal and Joomla! Of course I wouldn’t just advise you go for WordPress without solid reasons, some of them include:

• User-friendliness —Even for Beginners.
• WordPress Themes Offer Multiple Options.
• WordPress Sites Rank High on search engines.
• WordPress Sites Are Mobile Responsive.

Follow Who Know Road

The Host

This is where all your contents are stored so that whenever anyone needs any part of it, it quickly gets served.

The host platforms just like the CMS are also very many, with the most popular being the likes of Godaddy, Bluehost, ipage etc. while the upside of all these platforms is unflinching service and professionalism, the high cost of service is what might be a pain in the ass for a newbie. I started with ipage and paid approximately N70,000 every year to renew both hosting and domain name. I got tired after the second year and came back home to Akolag Tech a very affordable and competent local host platform that has been responsible for hosting my blog and it’s domain since I divorced ipage. In fact, they made it possible for you to be reading this.

The Domain name and URL

While your url (Uniform Resource Locator) is what points to different pages in a website or blog, your domain name is what is used in identifying your blog. I know it’s not yet clear, so look at the samples below:

My blogs domain name is: nomadicnegro.com

My blog’s url in this instance is: https://nomadicnegro.com/about-my-job-life-and-travel-blogging/

Things to consider before choosing a domain name:

• The future of your blog: e.g don’t choose naijadventures.com if you know you have a dream of going global.
• Ease of spelling: if someone can’t correctly get the spelling of your blog from your pronunciation, don’t use it. take a cue from top websites like facebook, google and amazon
• Syllable: the longer the syllables, the less interested people will get in wanting to visit your blog. Yeah, people are that lazy.

Continue Here.

This post is dedicated to Olanrewaju Odunowo. He hired me as an undergraduate to work as a reporter and blogger when I had little to no idea about how blogging works.