The Bear Necessities of a Kick Ass Blog

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This is a great formula of things to include on your blog that are professional, useful, and at times, necessary. Most of this is for self-hosted wordpress blogs; however, any blogger can get use of some of these ideas for their blog. I mean the biggest difference is the plugins.

Keep in mind this is entirely opinion. Mine also changes all the time, which is why I keep updating this article. But it’s also not infallible, and it’s not the only way to do things. This is more of a guide for people who aren’t sure what to do, and a list of ideas for people who do have a good idea of what they want to do or have already done to use as relevant. 

First Step: The Idea 

What is your idea for a site? That’s where everything begins, an idea. Though I’m not sure all of life began from an idea or the idea of life showed up after life was created, that’s like one of those chicken egg questions except we all know the egg came before the chicken on account fish lay eggs, and turtles, and both existed before chickens in evolution and Genesis/Torah. 

The way I generally do this is I get an idea for a site. With that comes some ball park idea of the branding. I often spend months kind of thinking of the branding as I think of the idea.

Like to me, it’s not a complete idea until I can visualize…

• Visualize it as a Brand
• Visualize the Audience
• Visualize how the brand and audience interacts 

This is very important. This is how you can tell if you have a good business idea or not. If you cannot visualize people interacting with you as a business, then it’s probably a bad idea. But if you can see clearly that you’re going to find your people on Instagram and have an awesome time talking about your product and all the things related to it, and you are kind of excited about getting up close and personal with people about what you’re selling, then it’s a good idea. It doesn’t have to be on Instagram. It’s just an example. 

So to me an incomplete idea would be, “I want to do a recipe site.” 

A complete idea is more like, “I want to do a recipe site. I plan on monetizing it with advertising revenue (once I get the traffic) and sales of printables of meal planners. I want to niche it down to Recipes for Families with an emphasis on feeding a family of 4, meals that have leftovers for a while, budget friendly, healthy enough… my target market is mothers, but I don’t want to exclude fathers. I’m going to call it ____. I already kind of experimented with different color schemes and looks by photographing dinner with these, and I decided to aim for a primarily white or light wood background and pops of color via vegetables, fruits, and tea towels, though I’m open to a teal, dark red, and dark blue concept. I want to be shinier than “farmhouse living,” but duller and more subtle than a site giving printables to teachers. I plan on finding my audience primarily through Pinterest plus my own following who are mainly moms. I can continue to guest write mom-based stories and publish as a mom writer to help market the recipe site. Wouldn’t it be cool if I could supplement with homeschooling worksheets some day on Amazon? I got a feeling moms my own age are just as seasoned as I am, so there’s a good chance I’m going to be reaching out to a younger generation, so tiktok.”

It doesn’t have to be that complete of an idea, but the more complete your idea is, the easier the rest of this is going to roll. 

Step 3: Content Strategy + 3 Blog Posts

Step 4: UX / UI / Pages / Mapping

What is your site going to do? 

Then the Pages

• Home
• Blog
• About 
• Contact
• Legal Pages

Now the rest depends on what you’re doing.

If you’re selling something, you need the pages to ease through purchase. 

If you have a log in for customers, you need pages for that. 

If you want to build an email list, more pages. 

Here’s a list of 50+ Page Ideas for Websites written by yours truly on my “studio” site. I also list out the usual required legal pages. 

Then the User Interface and Mapping

This is where you kind of “quickly” draw out a map of how the site will flow between pages. By quickly, I mean it’s almost always going to take a considerably lot more time than you anticipate. Everything in blogging is that way though, so you know, that might not reject the null. 

There’s 2 ways to do this. 

1. Map out the site in a way that it makes sense to you.
2. Map out the site in a way that it makes sense to the person using your site. 

Most people do a little both. But the moral of this story is generally, those are actually 2 different things. 

Most major corporations will pay for a team of people to create various ideas for a site’s page structure, and then test those theories with some market research. I don’t know, if you got a hundred people following you willing to answer questions in a survey, go for it. If you’re like me and can’t get people to answer survey questions at all, then you might just decide to stick to some industry standards. 

This step can entail some research like… 

• Google UX and UI and read articles about those subjects
• Visit sites in your niche that do similar things and take notes to what pages they have and how they link to those pages
• Visit sites that are not your niche but appeal to the same audience and see what pages they have and how they link those pages. 

• List of pages to make (and make them)
• The main menu 
• The side bar material
• Calls to Action for each page
• Envision the different ways people find you and navigate your site

• Where people are coming from and how do they find you. Pinterest Pins? Facebook Ads? Google Search?
• What does that click to? 
• Where do you want them to go from there? What call to action are you having on that page / post? 

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