How to Start a Personal Blog
Despite what many people think, blogging is still a great way to monetize your knowledge and passions. While others may turn to Instagram, TikTok, or Facebook, learning how to start a personal blog is still viable if building your own website and writing long-form copy is more appealing to you. Read on to learn the best way to begin writing a personal blog.
Why You Should Create a Personal Blog
Starting a personal blog allows you to gain ownership of your content and express yourself with a larger audience than what can be achieved through just friends or family. You can take an everyday thought, opinion, or life experience and write about it for the entire world to see. A personal blog creates a space where readers sharing your views can connect with your discussion without geographical limitations.
Not only does this provide an opportunity to develop relationships, but it supports growth in cognitive development by exercising writing and critical thinking skills, as well as providing new challenges depending on the topics you decide to cover, such as photography, coding, cooking, or craft skills. A personal blog is a great way to keep track of all your thoughts while also being able to look back at past experiences to trace personal progress and development.
Decide on the Right Platform for Your Blog
If you want your blog to be successful, your blogging platform needs to provide the right tools for your skill level and the needs of your target audience. We’ve compiled some of the most popular blogging platforms below.
WordPress
If you’re looking to start your own personal blog, WordPress is easily the most popular blog platform for doing so. The setup takes a little longer than some other platforms, but it pays off in the long run, as it offers a lot of flexibility and plugin options.
When you start a new WordPress website, you’ll need to choose a domain name that reflects the blog content you’ll be writing about.
Blogger
Blogger is a free blogging platform owned by Google, so you can use your Gmail account to set up your blog. It’s also a great choice for those who are just starting as new bloggers and don’t want to spend money on web hosting services yet.
The best part about Blogger is its user-friendly interface. It’s easy to navigate, and new personal bloggers will find it simple.
Wix
Wix is a great option if you want to start an ecommerce store. Starting a store to sell physical or digital products allows an extra option to monetize your blog without brand sponsorship. If you already have a store, Wix allows you to attach a personal blog to your store.
Wix is notably easier to start using than WordPress, making it more appealing for beginners. That being said, Wix offers less flexibility in the long term. It all comes down to your time and how much of a learning curve you need or want. Additionally, if you want premium themes from Wix, you must sign up for a paid plan.
Weebly
If you want a simple, clean design, then Weebly is for you. However, it’s not as popular an option due to some limitations. Although the drag-and-drop editor is simple to use, making it a great option for beginners, it can feel quite restrictive when it comes down to writing content. So, even though you have a lot of control over the building aspect, Weebly can feel frustrating and overwhelming for some who use it.
Picking the Right Theme
Choosing the right template or theme for your site is vital. Firstly, make sure that your site navigation is intuitive and simple. A well-structured navigation menu will help readers navigate the website quickly and easily. Similarly, choose post layouts that are easy to read and understand. Ensure they’re not too cluttered or confusing; if your visitors can’t navigate through your posts easily, it might negatively affect their experience on your blog.
Installing an appropriate theme is the best way to ensure all these criteria are met. With the abundance of available themes out there, you can find one that perfectly suits the purpose of your blog: be it minimalistic as a lifestyle blog, creative for a portfolio page, or newsworthy for a journalist’s platform. Whichever theme you decide on, make sure its design and layout provide an enjoyable experience for your users while making the content easy to access and digestible.
Build Your Personal Brand
Creating a memorable brand is essential for your blog. This includes customizing your personal web space, from the style and layout of your blog to the look and feel of the content you use. Not only will this give you an edge over other blogs, but it will also help create an identity that reflects who you are as well as the message of your content.
Some elements to consider when developing your brand include your logo or website header, fonts, font size, colors, overall design layout, images (including featured images), social media accounts (such as Instagram or Twitter), and SEO-friendly settings.
These elements should all be chosen to convey a consistent brand image while providing readers with a visually pleasing experience. However, consistency should be maintained by setting certain rules, such as selecting one theme standard across all platforms for fonts and colors used in both website images and social media profile banners. Furthermore, when creating a logo or website header, make sure it reflects words or phrases that can summarize what your blog is about.
Pick a Catchy Blog Name
If you want people to visit and engage with your blog, you need to make a good first impression. That means having a unique and catchy name. Here are some examples of catchy blog names that already exist:
- Dad or Alive
- The Book Smugglers
- Cordelia Calls it Quits
- Pinch of Yum
These personal blog names are eye-catching and make you want to read them. So, it’s very important that you think hard about your blog and brainstorm some relevant, memorable names.
Decide on Your Niche or Blog Topic
There are many types of niches within the personal blog realm. You can’t just target everyone on the internet because not everyone has the same interests. Think about what you’re passionate about, and share it with interested people. These are some of the most common and popular types of personal content genres:
- Health and Wellness
- Gardening
- Food blogs
- Travel blogs
- Lifestyle
- Fitness
- Gaming
- Parenting
- Personal Growth
- Fashion blog
Many of these niches are incredibly competitive, so think about what makes you and your blog special, and market the heck out of it!
Create a Content Calendar
Building an effective content calendar is essential for driving engagement and success in your personal blog. Content calendars help you stay organized and plan ahead by keeping track of blog topics, deadlines, and post-performance, all in one easily accessible place. An excellent content calendar should also provide insight into the timetable of posts when to publish them, the frequency that yields the best results, and how to measure their success.
An editorial calendar can help manage expectations around your blogging schedule so you can effectively time content releases with holidays, special events, and other promotional activities. Keeping up with an editorial calendar also encourages you to be consistent with blog post creation, ensuring that readers will have something new to read at regular intervals. This helps maintain reader engagement since it builds anticipation toward future blog posts in a much more organic way than constantly marketing new articles.
Calendar-based posting regularly also has search engine optimization (SEO) advantages since this allows search engine crawlers to be able to better predict when new content might appear on the site, which could have a positive effect on SEO rankings over time.
Implement SEO Strategies
To be successful as a personal blogger, you must not only write excellent content but understand how to optimize your content for SEO. SEO is a strategy designed to generate more traffic to your blog by increasing its visibility in Google and other search engines. When potential readers type in certain keywords relating to what they are looking for, the higher ranking of your website means more clicks and leads that could potentially convert.
There are several ways to optimize your site for SEO. An essential step is conducting keyword research: a process of discovering which words or phrases people are using when searching online related to the topics you write about. This will help you create content that focuses on these terms and allows you to rank higher in searches. You can optimize your blog content by using a keyword research tool like Semrush or Ahrefs.
Other good SEO practices include writing comprehensive titles and descriptions with strategically chosen keywords; making sure all tags are properly associated with posts; adding header tag elements; creating interlinking between content topics and various other pieces of related text throughout your pages; engaging in social media outreach; and targeting longer tail keywords as they tend to have less competition than shorter ones.
Taking the time to optimize your site can drastically improve its ranking on search engine result pages, giving it greater exposure and increasing blog traffic over time.
Maintaining Your Personal Blog
Maintaining a blog can be challenging, so it is important to commit to blogging every day. To make this commitment easier, consider creating special-themed days for your posts. This will give your blog structure and help you stay focused on topics. Additionally, try to plan each post ahead of time in order to make posting more manageable.
This doesn’t mean that the content of each post has to be lacking; instead, focus on highlighting only the most essential ideas and allowing them to shine through concisely. Dedication and structure are key components to a successful blog, so if you have great organizational skills, then apply them when maintaining your blog.
Personal Blog Examples
If you want to learn how to run a successful personal blog, why not look to the pros? These personal blog sites offer some great inspiration for you to take with you on your journey to becoming a successful blogger.
The Skinny Confidential
The Skinny Confidential is a women-centric personal blog site offering health tips and advice. This blog is run by Lauryn Evarts Bosstick, who is a pro at lifestyle blogging. She offers tips for self-acceptance, meditation advice, and even tips for your first trip to get Botox injections!
Tea Cup Bee
Illustrator Melissa Pagluica started up her blog and website content, Tea Cup Bee, in the footsteps of her graphic novels. She keeps her loyal readers updated on her personal life and projects with each post.
Cup of Jo
Cup of Jo was founded in 2007 as a daily women’s lifestyle site covering a wide range of topics from style, food, parenting, and culture. They offer many tips on subjects like pregnancy, traveling, and vacationing with your family!
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