Every week, we answer a common question about marketing or an aspect of business. This week, our question comes from a fan who entered our giveaway for an Amazon Fire Stick and Echo Dot bundle. Today, we answer: “how do I start a blog?”
Blogging is a great way to build a platform to reach your audience. Done well, blogs are a fantastic way to educate others and build your credibility within your chosen field. Better still, starting a blog is not too difficult to do!
How to Start Your Blog: Simple Steps You Can Take Today
Before you start your blog, think about what you’re going to blog about. Having a clear direction will make it much easier to create great content that you want to share. Really research your audience’s needs, and tailor your blog to help them meet their goals. Remember: it may be your blog, but it’s all about your audience!
Step 1: Find Your Niche
Just like companies need niches, so do blogs. Decide if you want your blog to be educational, casually informative, or professional. Think about how you wish to create content as well: essays, interviews, podcasts, and videos can all be part of your blog. You shouldn’t feel the need to do all of these, unless you think your audience will like that!
Step 2: Choose a Platform
The next step is to choose your blogging platform. While there are platforms that require you to pay, we’ll focus on the free stuff for simplicty’s sake going to focus on the free platforms and services available. WordPress, Wix, Weebly, and Tumblr are all great platforms with countless possibilities in terms of configuration and customization.
Step 3: Choose a Web Host
After you’ve chosen your blogging platform, you need to choose your web hosting service. Without getting too technical, the basic concept is that web hosting services allow you to run blog software on their servers so that your customers can view it online. Some web hosting is even free, particularly if you use platforms like Tumblr.
Using WordPress as an example, they allow you to have hosted and self-hosted sites. Hosted sites are run on WordPress’s servers. Self-hosted sites are run on someone else’s servers.
If that’s tough to wrap your head around, here’s how it works for Marketing is the Product. We use the platform WordPress. Our whole website is hosted by Dreamhost. The total cost of ownership for us is around $15/month.
Final Thoughts
Starting a blog is a great way to create content that others want to read. When used as part of a bigger strategy, content marketing through a blog can really work wonders to grow your business!
Remember to keep your blog relevant to your readers, but always full of fresh, nice-to-read content. Starting is the hardest part, so once you power through the initial hurdle, your blog will be up and running in no time!
