A first-time blog start can be a nerve-racking experience. It is both exciting and frightening at the same time. Make sure to follow the right steps and avoid any major pitfalls so that your blog is successful. Since we started blogging 12 years ago, we have made many mistakes and have learned from them.
More than one billion page views have been displayed on our blogs over the past decade. Our article today will help you learn the “expert tips” that we wish we knew before starting your very first blog.
In 2021, there are six things you must know before starting a blog. Through this write-up, I want to give some personal insights to all budding bloggers who wish to start a blog in 2021.
- Be Specific with Your niche
What happens with a lot of new bloggers as they get confused when it comes to choosing a niche of their interest? Mistakenly they get to choose a niche that is often too competitive or too broad in scope. The more you narrow it down, the more you will be better off as Google considers your blog relevant, reliable and as an authority site.
- Find The Perfect Domain Name
Domain names are crucial, especially for the success of your website. Over 2.3 million people subscribe to our blog and I’ve had more than 500 million video views. I should have used a subdomain instead of a number since that restricted the number of items we could have in the list.
Check out these quick tips on how to choose the right domain name for your website.
- Make your domain name easy to spell, pronounce, and remember.
- The domain name should contain your brand name or keywords.
- Once you are done with selecting and hosting the domain name, then consult with a professional SEO consultant or a SEO Agency Dubai to do the keywords research for your preferred niche?
- Setup Google Analytics
The only way to grow your website is to understand how people find and use your site. Just like many beginners, I, too, began learning about the importance of website analytics only when I asked for the help of the people who had done it before me.
Google Analytics is the best analytics software available today, being used by millions of websites worldwide. With it, you’ll see where your users are coming from, what your best content is, and much more.
It helps you track visitor engagement across your website so you can improve your business based on real numbers instead of guesswork. Using Google Analytics if you run an online shop will allow you to track website traffic and boost conversions.
- On-Page SEO Optimization is Important for Growth
If you’re serious about creating a successful blog, then you have to focus on on-page SEO from the very beginning. SEO short for search engine optimization helps optimize your website so that people from search engines can see it. SEO Software can help to prepare the compete seo audit of your website, There are two main types of SEO strategies:
- Off-site SEO
- On-site SEO
By making small adjustments in various areas, onsite SEO helps you increase the SEO value of your blog. There are several tools available to help you complete this process, so even if this sounds progressively more complex, there is something for you.
Creating internal links has to become a habit. Links within your content are ones that link to other areas of your website, blog posts, or other pages of your website. Internal links make your content visible to search engines and allow them to better understand the context of your page.
- Keyword Research
A lot of people write good posts, but they’re not discoverable because they don’t use the right keywords. The majority of beginners come up with blog post ideas based on what they see on their blogs. If you’re looking for what your users want, then there are tools that can help you find them. By using these keywords you can get more traffic with your blog posts.
AnswerThePublic is a useful free tool that you can use to find the questions your users are looking for. Then you can incorporate these answers into your blog posts to increase your search traffic.
Do you want to know which keywords your competitors are using? You can use SEMRush to steal your competitor’s keywords. In addition, it shows you which keywords are being advertised by your competitors with paid advertising.
- Brand Awareness Through Guest Blogging
Guest blogging is a great way to create brand awareness, and effective search engine optimization practices help bring in traffic to your website. Check out other blogs and social media accounts for people who write in the same niche as you. After you message them, you can ask them if they’d be interested in writing a post on their blog. In essence, you are stealing their traffic by directing people to your blog from theirs, which helps you gain a larger audience.
Additionally, their content can also become useful for you to rank more highly on Google, and also more people will see your content if your website is ranking high in Google.
- Quality over Quantity
I cannot stress enough how important it is for you to write high-quality content rather than wasting your viewers’ time with rushed posts. Many bloggers think they need lots of posts to be uploaded every month and make a schedule to adhere to, but this is just not as important as having one really good post.
I would recommend doing a little planning before writing the post. It is important to write the format of the post and start the plan for the post beforehand as that will allow you to define the purpose of the post, the style in which you wish to write it, and have a better idea of what you want to achieve.
Final Thoughts
The advice that I provided should help you avoid some of the mistakes that I made during my blogging journey. For anyone reading this who is thinking of starting a blog in 2021, you must. It will be a pleasure working on it. You have to select a specific niche that is too narrowed and take advantage of keywords research techniques to bring in more traffic to your blog.
Jenny Amaya is a full-time blogger and digital marketing officer. She shares tips and tricks to improve your website’s SEO and get more traffic to your blog, affiliate marketing and web designing.
She helps newbie bloggers, how to build a better blog & turn their passion into profit. As a Marketer, Jenny has also helped many businesses to improve their digital presence through SEO, social media and branding.