Start your own blog on WordPress and become the blogger you’ve always wanted to be.
Search engine optimization has gained more importance in the last few years. It’s an essential part of every content marketing strategy. With results showing it is an efficient and reliable way of attracting new visitors and customers, it has become evident that companies should make a long-term investment in SEO. Having a solid content marketing strategy with a blog centered around it is a great way to convert many new visitors into paying customers. All businesses know they should have a blog instead of relying on other more unstable acquisition sources. But it can be a daunting task at first. Especially if you don’t know much about blogging.
Creating a blog is not as difficult as it may seem, and we’re here to help! We’ve created this guide to help you navigate the steps you need to take to launch your blog and make it successful.
Step-by-step guide to start your own blog
There are many ways you could go about creating your blog. You could even use a platform designed for blogging for free such as Tumblr.com or Medium.com, but you’re going to want to create your blog using a self-hosted WordPress website as it will generate better results and is the best way for you to start your own blog.
1. Define Your Blog’s Purpose and audience
The first question you should address is, who is your blog addressed to? Once you know who your audience will be, it will help you answer other questions, such as what your blog should be about and what questions it should answer. Of course, your blog has to be related to your brand. So, look at your audience and personas if you’ve defined them. If your business is not targeted toward a specific niche. What do your customers have in common? If you have e-commerce selling home appliances, there’s probably no point blogging about football. But maybe you can focus on themes such as taking care of home appliances and optimizing your home to help people discover new ways to benefit from your products.
2. Choose your domain name and hosting
Your blog’s success starts with two fundamental choices: your domain name and hosting provider. These decisions can significantly impact your brand’s visibility, credibility, and accessibility to your audience.
Finding the Right Domain Name: Selecting a domain name is akin to choosing your blog’s digital identity. It’s not merely an address but a representation of your brand and content.
Here are some tips to help you pick the best domain name for your blog on ComeUp:
- Reflect Your Brand: Your domain name should mirror your blog’s content and purpose. Ideally, it should be easy to remember, spell, and identify with your brand. It should also be as short as possible.
- Keywords Matter: While incorporating keywords into your domain can aid in search engine optimization (SEO), avoid compromising your brand’s identity solely for keywords.
- • Domain Extensions: While .com remains the most popular extension, consider other options (.net, .org, etc.) that might align better with your brand and niche. Consider your location and where your audience is.
Carefully choose your website host:
Once you have a domain name, the next step is finding a reliable hosting provider to bring your blog to life. Your website host is basically where your website is kept on servers located remotely. You have two main options when it comes to choosing a website host. These options depend on your needs and objectives. There’s a free and a paid option.
For a personal blog, you can use a free option by using Wordpress.com. Once you register your account, you can choose your blog name and start to publish articles. It’s a great option for you to begin with. Especially if you’re worried about losing money or not sure how much time you have to allocate to your blog.
Keep in mind that the free plan comes with some constraints. The main ones are that WordPress will display its advertising on your site, and your URL will display the brand’s name as follows youdomain.wordpress.com. You will also be limited in the number of themes, plugins, and storage space available. Another major drawback is that you cannot use your blog for commercial purposes.
If you’re planning to use your blog for commercial purposes. Doing marketing for your company or using advertising, then you have to find a web hosting solution compatible with WordPress. You’ll have tons of options, so we recommend making a comparison between a few solutions using a comparison site like this one. Major companies include HostGator, Bluehost, GoDaddy, and Hostinger. There are multiple advantages to using a third-party hosting provider. They will enable you to automatically install WordPress while also offering a free domain name for a year, more security, more storage, customer support, and backups.
Consider these aspects while selecting hosting for your ComeUp blog:
• Assess Your Needs: Determine your blog’s requirements based on expected traffic, website size, and scalability. Look for hosting plans on ComeUp that match these needs.
• Reliability and Support: Investigate hosting providers’ reputations for uptime, customer support, and security features. Reading reviews can offer valuable insights.
• Scalability: Choose a hosting plan that allows easy upgrades as your blog grows. Flexibility is essential to accommodate increasing traffic and content.
• Additional Features: Consider essential features like SSL certificates, backups, and ease of installing content management systems (CMS) like WordPress.
• Between all the hosts and plans, there are so many options to choose from. Choose the option that matches your needs the most and compare all the different services until you find the one you want.
3. Create your WordPress blog and get started
Once you’ve chosen your host, start building your blog. Create your account and your site. After it is created, you can log in to WordPress, install it, and create your WordPress account. This will allow you to download and install the WordPress content management system to manage and edit your blog using the user-friendly and accessible WordPress interface.
4. Designing for Exceptional User Experience and attractive blog
Creating an aesthetically pleasing blog is crucial, but equally important is ensuring an enjoyable and accessible experience for your audience. User Experience (UX): A well-designed blog enhances user experience by focusing on a responsive design across devices, intuitive navigation, quick page load times, and readability. Make sure it’s easy for your users to navigate your site and find what they are looking for. Keep things simple at all times. If you overcomplicate things, your users will want to leave your blog quickly instead of sticking around to read more content. There are many factors to consider for your blog’s theme, so take your time and examine each part individually to build a cohesive and attractive blog.
We do have some advice when it comes to your design choices:
- Your branding needs to align with your business: If you’re creating a blog for your business, people need to recognize it’s your business’s blog right away. If your blog looks too different from your website, people may have difficulties associating it with your brand and could even think it’s not your brand’s blog.
- Design a responsive blog: Nowadays, so many people are browsing articles on their phones that you want to consider your mobile design before considering the laptop one.
- Make it simple to navigate your blog: It’s essential to make it easy for users to browse your website. All categories should be easy to find, and you should also incorporate a search bar so readers can find specific content more easily.
- Design your blog so people want to spend time there: It’s so easy to leave a website, so make one where people want to stay. Add lots of white space so readers can focus and are not overwhelmed with information. Establish good spacing in your texts. You also need to make your content skimmable, as many readers are just looking for one piece of information instead of reading the full article. If your article answers questions, answer them early instead of just typing up a long article for SEO purposes.
Choosing the perfect design for your blog can be difficult. Especially if you have no design experience. If you want a more attractive blog while saving time, you can buy services from a professional design freelancer. There are many different options available on ComeUp that will enable you to unlock the expertise of a highly skilled freelancer. It can also be of great help to answer all the questions you may have about your blog.
5. Generate delightful and helpful content
Think quality over quantity. You can have articles answering every question your users may have. Your readers won’t use your blog if the articles are not well-written and straightforward. If they have pressing answers, you want to answer those questions early on. The content needs to be pertinent to your audience, and it needs to give them added value. If it’s not informative they won’t come back to your blog. Your content should be the reason why you start your own blog in the first place.
Make sure the article is skimmable and answers readers’s questions in a few seconds. If you want your articles to be as optimized for SEO as possible, research keywords and write a longer piece with lots of helpful information. The more specialized and specific you can get, the better. You want to surprise your readers with new information they don’t know. Do that with your knowledge of the business and industry.
You also want your content to be actionable. Readers should know what they need to do after reading your articles. It is alright to use repetition in important places, such as your conclusion, as you want them to take action based on the new information they learned.
Your blog’s content should follow guidelines so it is clean and consistent. You should not change the formatting drastically from one article to the next. Create regulations and templates. These will also be useful if you have guest writers or outsource work to content writers.
It may seem like a lot of work to craft the perfect content for your audience, but the rewards you will reap are tremendous. It will help you grow your business in countless ways.
Benefits you could take advantage of with a successful blog.
Create a new audience of readers and a community loyal to your brand:
Once you develop a stable readership, your reputation will spread, and your readers will grow. The more you can engage with your readers and get them to engage with each other, the more your community will grow and solidify. A strong community can be great for growing your audience, as these are users who actively endorse your brand and talk about it. The most essential point is that you establish your voice as the authoritative voice in your industry, it will do wonders for your business. People are more likely to buy products from the brand known to have the most expertise in its field. Your customers will trust you above all other brands.
Traffic to your website will also grow as you optimize your content for SEO.
Your content, if crafted correctly will attract thousands of visitors to your blog and your site. Make sure to help them and give them a great experience, and they will become good customers. The more your domain authority ranks highly, the more you will appear ahead in user’s searches. As your audience mentions your blog more, they will post links leading back to you everywhere online. These are known as backlinks and can help generate more traffic for your blog.
Reach a new audience, reach new buyers.
As more people come to your articles for answers, more people will find your content helpful. If they do, they can become leads or customers. Start engaging with them early on to get them to buy more. Find clever ways for them to subscribe to your blog and give you their email address.
These are the main advantages you will benefit from once you have your blog. Build your blog today and start growing your business. To get better results rapidly, you can buy ComeUp services to generate a delightful blog faster. If you need content for your blog, you can purchase services from professional blog copywriters with tons of experience. Give them an article topic and the information you want to share with your audience, and they will generate your article.
6. Optimize your blog for SEO
To bring lots of traffic to your website, you need to focus on Search Engine Optimization. This will enable search engines like Google to find your content and decide to whom it should be shown. SEO can be tedious and technical, but it’s surprisingly not as difficult as it may seem and essential to your blog’s success.
Here are the key things to consider to optimize for SEO:
- Do plenty of keyword research. Use tools like SEMRush and Ahrefs to find the keywords that match your topics. Instead of just choosing keywords that have large volumes of traffic, you need to find the ones that have a good balance of volume and low competition so that you can rank for them. If you choose the ones with the biggest volume, you won’t attract any traffic because many other articles have been written by experts on the topic and have established themselves as the best for that topic.
- Add Keywords to all your content: You’re going to use headers in your articles. (h1, H2, and H3 headers) Make sure they all contain keywords. Without overstuffing them with keywords. Add more keywords to your article’s body and alternative-image text. You also want your meta descriptions to have the right keywords.
- Craft your content to help people first and foremost. Some people will tell you to stuff your articles with lots of keywords. But that can hurt your ranking if overdone. Instead, focus on the purpose of your article and how you can help your readers best.
These are the key things to consider to boost your SEO. Nonetheless, some technical backend optimizations can be applied to improve your traffic even more. You can buy services from a technical SEO expert to generate great results. They will be able to give you lots of advice and implement solutions to grow your blog.
7. Publish your blog and promote it everywhere
When you’re ready, you can publish your blog. But it won’t be easy at first. Promote your blog to get it going and get your first visitors. SEO will help attract traffic, but you need to take other actions to grow your visitors and audience of active readers.
Some examples of how you can promote your blog:
- Promote your blog in areas where your niche is. Answer popular questions your audience has online and redirect them to your blog. You can engage them on Reddit, Quora, or other forums.
- Promote your blog to your existing database. Let your clients know you have a blog now and ask them to share your blog with their audience.
- Work with other bloggers to get them to promote your blog and engage in guest blogging.
- Answer comments your reader may have and engage with them.
- Ask people to share your blog everywhere and be persistent. Many people will promote your blog but they may need a small push.
- Promote your blog everywhere on Social Media. The more your blog appears, the more people can find it.
Conclusion: Start your own blog today!
Now that you have all the information you need to create and launch your blog successfully, we encourage you to take it one step at a time. It can be challenging at first, but it’s also exciting.
It can take some time to create your blog and do everything you need to do, but you’re not alone. If you ever need help, you can buy ComeUp services from experienced freelancers who are experts in their fields. This will not only improve the quality of your blog, but it will also help you go faster while enabling you to learn valuable lessons from seasoned professionals.
Once your blog has been launched and is generating traffic, analyze what return you are getting for your efforts. How many people are visiting your business from your blog? How many are buying products or becoming customers? You need to track all the data related to your blog as much as possible. Even your most popular articles, so you can find what themes and topics you should emphasize in your blog.
We wish you good luck and lots of success in creating your blog. And remember, if you ever need help, you can use ComeUp freelancers to fast-track your project.
