5 Blogging Tips To Know Before You Start A Blog

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Starting a blog is a very exciting time but to be successful use these blogging tips.

With over 600 million blogs worldwide, there’s a lot of competition out there. Competition from people who have been blogging for years and are more experienced.

This is why you need to know exactly what to do before you start.

After all, you don’t know what you don’t know. So get everything you need to know right here and start making money with your words.

5 Blogging Tips To Know Before You Start A Blog

Finding Your Niche

Choosing what topic to write your first blog about can be tricky to decide.

Do you go with that list of the most profitable blogs?

Spoiler alert – it’s the personal finance niche. Check sites such as Nerd Wallet and Money Supermarket.

They are very profitable blogs that are making money with affiliate marketing and display advertisements.

But what if you’ve got no interest in personal finance?

Simple you don’t go into that niche unless you’ve got the money to pay writers to create blogs on those topics.

This is where following your passion comes in.

How Do I Find My Blog Niche?

To find your blogging niche, start with a ‘brain dump’ of blog topic ideas that you’re interested in and have passion for.

Following your passion and you can create blog posts that are easy to write. Just needing to work on your blog 2-3 hours a day creating content your audience will love.

Speaking about your passion for the topic will naturally come through.

However, if you’re anything like me, you’ve got a few passions. So how do you decide what passion you should go with for your first blog?

Choosing Your Niche

Before I started Freelancer Lifestyle, I had a few other potential passions, these included

  • Living with Multiple Sclerosis
  • Life after coercive control
  • Regaining a happy life through exercise

To help narrow down which I should be blogging about, I used keyword research tactics.

Doing keyword research on Google, Quora, and Answer the Public I finally realized that there was a gap in the entrepreneurship and freelancing space.

6 Blog Profitable Niche Ideas

If you’re still struggling for ideas these profitable niche ideas shall inspire you.

  • Digital Marketing
  • Making Money Online
  • Health And Fitness
  • Personal Finance
  • Personal Development
  • Food And Recipes

A profitable blogging niche has a high cost per click (CPC) and search volume. To gather this information, you need to use keyword research tools.

As a rule of thumb, to find a profitable blogging niche, it needs to be a niche that advertisers are paying a lot of money for and has a high search volume.

Finding Your Unique Selling Point (USP)

Find your USP and you’ll find where you fit in the blogosphere.

A USP is how you’re going to be different from other blogs out there on the web.

With Freelancer Lifestyle, it’s a blog not just about starting a freelance business and getting freelance jobs. But it’s also a blog teaching you about the tools out there.

Tools you can use to market your business and build sustainable passive income streams.

A lot of blogs and YouTube channels I see are either one or the other. With Freelancer Lifestyle, I’m teaching my readers how the two things are interlinked and can help you in your online business journey.

Deciding What Blogs To Write For Your Audience

You’ve got your niche and know what your USP is, now it’s time to actually creating the content.

You can’t just start creating content, you need to do your research first.

Do your research by using the keyword research tools, checking out Google trends, and looking at what other content creators are talking about.

Just generally know what people are talking about and searching for that’s relevant to your niche.

Writing Blog Posts

Writing blog posts, you don’t need to be the best writer. You just need to have a passion to do blogging and a love for your niche.

Before you start writing blog posts, you need to understand search engine optimization (SEO). SEO is what will shape your blog post and rank your content.

Here’s a template to write your blogs for SEO.

Always remember to write your blog posts for humans first and then for search engines. This is how you’ll rank and build an audience.

Build An Audience

Without an audience, no one will read your blog. With an audience, you can get influence and make money with your blog.

You know who your audience is, you’ve got your niche nailed, and the USP down to a tee. It’s time to start getting your audience.

This is when the curse of perfectionism can rear its ugly head. Don’t get stuck with perfectionism when getting your blog audience.

How To Build Your Blog Audience And Get Traffic

A blog audience are the people who are searching for information on your topic, stumble on your blog, and then become loyal readers if they love what you’re doing.

There are many different ways in which you can build your blog audience and get traffic. Here are my top 3 ways I get traffic for Freelancer Lifestyle.

Social Media

Social media is a beast. There are tons of different platforms. Some seem to be dying, others are brand new, and some seem to be loved continuously.

From my experience, the best social media platforms for bloggers are

  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • LinkedIn

Reason why is that you can leave a direct link to your blog posts.

Others like Instagram and TikTok, you’re only allowed to have the one link which you place in your bio. This can be great if you want to use these platforms to build brand awareness.

Quora

Quora is a fantastic place to get traffic. It must be my number one source of traffic and search engines at number 2.

If you’re not aware of Quora, it’s a forum where people ask questions or answer them. I use Quora to answer questions that are in my niche.

If your niche is cooking, fashion, beauty, fitness, celebrity news, or anything else, there will be questions on there for you to answer.

If you are interested in Quora, check out this guide to getting started with Quora so you make the most out of this platform.

Pinterest

Pinterest is a great platform to use if you’re dedicated to creating pins consistently. Consistency is really key for making the most out of Pinterest.

If you’re wondering why I’ve not put Pinterest as a social media, that’s because it’s a search engine first.

You need to treat it as a search engine but just uses images in the search results.

As I’m not that dedicated right now at the time of writing this blog to creating content for Pinterest, I don’t get that much traffic.

But I do get traffic.

This makes Pinterest the third place I get the most traffic, even with only creating on average 1 pin per day. Right now, I’m planning to make more effort with Pinterest, as I see that it is worth my time to do.

If you’re unable to dediated much time to Pinterest, it is worth your time just to make at least 1 pin a day.

Make Money From Blogging

Blogging is a marathon and not a sprint. This is what you need to remember when starting your blogging business. Blogs are not a get-rich scheme, it’s a business.

If you want to make a full-time income from blogging then you need to be working on it full time. Yes, that means working on it 5 days a week and doing at least 5 hours a day.

Just don’t be a perfectionist because this is holding you back from getting starting and making money blogging.

7 Fastest Ways To Make Money Blogging

Blogging is a great way to make money online. There are many different ways in which you can make money including:

  • Display Ads
  • Affiliate Links
  • Sponsored Posts
  • Offering Services
  • Selling Physical Or Digital Products
  • Coaching
  • Speaking Gigs

As a blogger I do 4 of these different methods in which this blog makes money.

There are many different ways in which you can also make money with your blog. You just have to think about what your audience needs and what opportunities there are out there for you to make money.

When you start making money with your blog, you can go from just blogging in your spare time to doing it full time.

What To Do When You Start Blogging Full Time

When you’re starting out as a full time blogger, you need to be posting out new blogs 3-4 times a week. Writing blog posts is not your only job.

What you should also be doing is growing your audience.

Grow your audience effectively and quickly for your blog using social media platforms and forums. But only use a couple of platforms. More importantly, platforms with your audience on.

The other thing that you should be growing is your email list. When you build an email list, give people who are already subscribed to you, updates on when you publish new blog posts.

You can build an email list quickly and easily. Read my blog post on how you can build an email list without using ads.

Building your audience, you’re building the know, like, and trust factor. This is essential when you add affiliate links, digital products, coaching to your blog. Because when your audience knows, likes, and trusts you, they are more likely to buy from you.

Without building the know, like, and trust factor, you can start to think your blog is failing. Don’t think that your blog is failing if you don’t see it making money straight away.

It takes time to do and I’ve never heard of an overnight success.

People who are successful work hard, work smart, and never give up.

Check Your Analytics Without Analysis Paralysis

Analytics is a great tool to understand your audience better. But it comes with a big problem. You start checking your analytics all the time, get stressed over every little thing, and end up in analysis paralysis.

Beat analysis paralysis and use analytics the correct way.

To know what is working for your blogging business and what blogs are really taking off and what’s not, you need to look at your analytics.

There are many different tools from Google to help with this along with your website host.

But only check your analytics once a week or month for example. Different analytics tools to use are:

  • Website analytics (Google Search Console or Google Analytics)
  • Twitter analytics
  • Pinterest analytics

Then set up a routine for when you’re going to check your analytics. This in the end gives you a clearer understanding of what’s going on with your audience and blog.

What You Should Invest Into Your Blog

There are 3 things that you should be investing in. With these 4 things then you can grow your blog faster and look more professional. But don’t worry, none of these things cost the earth.

Hosting

The majority of the world’s blog posts are done on WordPress. To get a professional-looking WordPress site, you need a host.

A WordPress host is essentially your site’s landlord that you pay rent to. Then with the property you’re renting from the landlord (host) you get all the fixtures and fittings but you can design it however you like.

There are a lot of hosts offering varying prices.

Read how you can build a WordPress site here.

Graphic Design App

If you’re not a graphic designer by any stretch of the imagination then there are tools out there to help you.

A tool that we use at Freelancer Lifestyle is Canva.

With Canva I can create beautiful graphics for my blog posts, social media marketing, eBooks, and PDF’s to use as lead magnets.

Upgrade to the Pro version of Canva and you’ll get access to a branding kit and access to more graphics in their library.

Canva Pro is a real bargain at $10.99 as it’s something we use lots.

Email Marketing Software

For every $1 spent on email marketing $42 according to Litmus. Meaning that when you invest in email marketing software, you’re going to get a good return on investment (ROI).

At Freelancer Lifestyle, we love the email marketing software GetResponse. With GetResponse we can

  • Build unlimited email lists
  • Send autoresponders
  • Newsletter blasts
  • Build sales funnels
  • Store files of digital products we want to sell

You can read our review of GetResponse right here.

There are other things you can invest in before you start your blog. But these are the top 3 things you should be looking at first.

In A Nutshell,

Those are my top 5 blogging tips you should know before you start a blog. When blogging you need to know exactly what you should be writing about, build your audience, and setup methods to make money from your content.

About Post Author

Alison Wolf

Helping you to build an online business so you have an extra stream of income or quit the day job. Don't forget to follow me on social media using the handle @heyalisonwolf