Start a Blog in 8 Easy Steps

Here is everything you need to know to start a blog. It’s not all pajama pants and coffee, though that is the proper wardrobe (pants optional). There’s some work to do too.

Blogging is almost like a game on the internet called “Break the Internet.” Instead of building buildings in Minecraft with bricks, you are creating worlds with words. And you win when you go viral and get rich. In theory.

And it is important to realize that blogging isn’t just a revolution, it’s an evolution. Every reason you have to start a blog may change in the course of blogging, and you want to base some decisions now on that probability.

So let’s first…

Step 1: Establish Some Goals

I think the most important question at this point in the game is to ask yourself…

Why do you want to blog?

And why do you REALLY want to blog?

Because the possibilities in answering that question means a very different strategy between them.

Some other questions to ask…

1. Do you want to make money from a blog?
2. If so, how much? Passive Income or Career Income?
3. Do you want to blog to position yourself as an expert in a field?
4. Do you want to be a professional writer?
5. Do you just want to vent therapeutically and connect with people facing the same struggles?
6. Or maybe have fun doing the thing you love and connect with people who share the same interest?

Then from there you probably need to ask yourself these questions:

1. How much do I want to invest in this?
2. How much money am I willing to pay monthly for this?
3. How much time do I want to spend weekly on this?

For the record, there seems to be some kind of correlation with time and money because the bulk of the products for bloggers on the internet is based on “saving you time,” so you can get a lot done faster if you pay more money, or you can save money by investing some good old-fashioned time and hard work.

The other part you probably need to visit is if you are starting or running a business, you have more goals to consider.

Biz Goal Questions

1. What exactly are you trying to sell? Products? Services?
2. Who exactly are you trying to sell to? Think psychographics like interests and personality as well as demographics.
3. Are you primarily going to be making sales online or offline?
4. Where do you plan to sell products? Directly on your blog? Or through another online store? 
5. Where do you think your potential customers are online? Facebook? Instagram? Pinterest? Forums? 
6. Are your potential customers already searching for you or your industry? 

With these thoughts in mind, let’s move on to step 2:

Step 2: What Should I Blog About?

Choosing a good blog topic is kind of crucial because the internet really likes niche. You don’t have to go niche, but you still want to have a clear “What you’re about” to be quickly obvious when people hit your site.

People should know what your site is about without reading too hard in the first 5 seconds of visiting your site.

Think about that for a second. When you’re surfing the internets, if you run across a food blog about recipes and find a bunch of posts about blogging or creating a food blog, you start to kind of want to leave and find a blog that has recipes. If it’s too confusing, it kind of feels like you have to work to go through that site.

So choosing a good blog topic(s) helps you establish that connection at first sight / site.

Also ask “I want to start a blog for who?”

But also it’s important to ask, “Who are you blogging to?”

I’m learning the secret to the internet isn’t focusing on the what, but the who. People are still inevitably social creatures, and your primary way to reach them is a social act. Rarely do we make friends based on topics.

“I’m friends with Susan because she cooks.” Said Nobody.

Everyone cooks. Nobody follows recipes blogs just because they are recipe blogs.

“I’m friends with Susan because we have a lot in common.” Said Everybody when referring to their best friends and sometimes their spouse.

People follow cooks who provide recipes on their blogs because they like something about that person, whether the person is an epic smartass like Gordon Ramsay or they are the socialite like Martha Stewart.

It’s because it’s a social situation. And the first question in most social settings is,

“Hello, I am… Who are you?”

So in the beginning of starting a blog, you are kind of trying to decide who you are, and who you are trying to reach.

• Who do you want to be friends with?
• Who do you want to follow your blog?
• Who do you want to see sharing your links?
• Who do you want to buy your products?

And this goes from a very social place like, “I want to reach other women who are unapologetically themselves and loves the color pink,” to a less social more business place like, “I want to reach people who can afford to blow a couple grand on a life coach, so I’m thinking suburban housewives,” to also pricing and packaging, “I want to reach women who absolutely need help with life as a life coach, but if they need me, they probably can’t afford a couple grand at once, but they can afford $25 a month.”

But the social component is probably the most important.

Nine times out of ten, this is going to be a constant two way conversation. Your blog will evolve, you will grow in life, and your audience will kind of shapeshift as you shift, making the age old “Hi, I’m… Who are you?” a constant, evolving process.

So you don’t have to be “right” or careful what you choose here. You can change your mind later. To some extent.

But as someone who is socially aloof, I can assure you skipping this part takes a good chunk of that relateability out. If you just go through the process, it should be enough to help you get where you want with that. In theory.

Finding your Niche

When you start a blog, you almost have to have a niche. You can mix and match topics, but they should relate to the same one audience, and you should be able to state it clearly and concisely like

• Recipes and DIY Crafts
• Parenting and Wine
• Witchcraft and LGBTQ
• Art and Cross Stitching

If you don’t already have a clear idea of what you should blog about, you can consider attempting the following ideas:

1. Write a list of things you know a lot about
2. Add to that list the things you are Qualified to talk about and can verify it on the site (degree, certifications) because people like verification of credibility (no they really do, it’s just the validation they were looking for to take the time to read the thing they wanted to read, or to prove an idiot wrong with a link).
3. Add what your audience is asking for (especially if you’re not just trying to figure out what you’re planning to write about, but also what product you’re planning to sell)
4. What do you want to be known for? Because there’s a chance Google will eventually see you as an expert in whatever topic your blog is about, and they might put that stuff to the right of a search for your name.
5. Consider how you plan to drive traffic to your site and what’s trending, popular, and evergreen with that. For instance, if you plan on using Pinterest, check out their popular categories. 
6. Now try to find the Venns (like a Venn Diagram, find which ones fall under all the categories, and which ones fall under 2 categories, etc.)
7. Most importantly, which topic is something you would love to write about, you want to write about it, and you can stomach having to write about it even when you don’t want to write about it?

If you are trying to sell things, whether you sell something you make, or decide to do affiliate sales, you also want to go with a topic that your customers are searching for, wanting to read, and gets them excited to have your thing…

You can also flip that, like if you want to sell something but have no idea what you want to sell, pick a topic you love, an audience you relate to who also loves that topic, and then find things to sell in that niche. 

I have oodles of options listed in my Resources, most specifically, Make Money.

You can also check out my blog post on The Best Way to Make Money Blogging

Now let’s Word It in a way People Identify

Then you probably want to create what Rachel Miller calls a Bumper Sticker.

Word your topic in a way people want to proudly put it on their car. 

The reason I say this is because the bulk of your traffic will come from people sharing your posts. You don’t want to write about things people are too embarrassed, ashamed, or just trying to pretend to be the opposite to share it. You want to write about their flag. The thing they wave proudly in front of other people. The thing that they want people to think they are like…

To me, Identities are things people want others to see them as. Identities like…

• The intellectual
• The beauty queen
• The Liberal / Conservative
• The rebel
• The athlete who will run that extra mile push yourself harder!
• The Type A Personality I can do it better and faster
• The Creative
• The Religious Person / AntiReligion Person / Spiritual Person 
• The wealthy guy who can’t eat dinner at a place who uses paper napkins
• The Southern Belle who loves being pretty and sweet

These are not things people want to be, per say. These are things people want others to see them as.

“If you stand for nothing, you’ll fall for anything,” is just another way of saying, “Better to be someone you’re not than to be nobody at all.”

Now nobody flat out says they are these things, but it’s very implied in the things they say, share…

• In the car they choose to drive,
• the way they decorate their house,
• the people they choose to hang out with
• the clubs they join
• their fashion statement

It’s really just like a grown-up version of high school.

So whatever your topic is, you want to feed that Identity and make it a cause that people would proudly endorse to make themselves more popular in their minds.

You really just need a one-liner for purposes of here, but it becomes a basis for many parts of your blog. You might choose to use it as a blog name or slogan, or maybe just part of your About Me, the point is to get an idea of the…

personality of your topic

Starting a Blog with Difficult Topics

And some topics are difficult topics, especially on Facebook, like religion and diagnoses. You want to word things in a way that appeals to people’s privacy and puts a positive spin on things.

When it comes to Facebook (i.e. the Facebook page that’s a blogger’s must-have), they actually want you to avoid using words like Christian or Islam or Cancer or PTSD. Instead of “Living with Cancer,” you might want to go more “Surviving and Thriving.” So it’s like you have to portray what it’s about without using the words.

In addition, Pinterest and Google are both taking a very ethical turn and they have stopped promoting (or making it easy for people to promote) unqualified articles regarding health. If you are trying to “heal people” with your herbs, there’s a chance you’re going to struggle with Google and Pinterest unless you’re a doctor and/or all the doctor and government health sites validate your claims.

Try this experiment…

1. Google Top __________ Bloggers and choose a niche you’re interested in like Top Recipe Bloggers.
2. Pick any of the articles in the search results that have a similar title, “Top 10 Food Bloggers.”
3. Read through the people they list. Take note at what they chose to talk about that person.
4. Decide which blog you want to check out based on what you read.
5. Why did you want to check out that blogger? What stood out to you to make you think, “This person sounds amazing?”

Now none of those people in that experiment completely conspired this when they started their blogs. They really have no idea what about them would make them click in your head. But you get a good feel for the identities, the thing about them that socially attracts people to them, and how they stand out from others in their niche.

Step 3: How to Come Up with a Blog Name

You want to do this before getting a website because you will most likely want your blog’s name in your domain address.

It’s almost impossible to have a simple name anymore when you start a blog, like Blog.com because all those domains are taken. So as you compile a list of ideas, you want to…

1. Google Search
2. Domain Search

Google… Searching your name on Google lets you see what else is out there. If there’s high competition or another company with that name, you might want to avoid it to avoid confusion. Plus you don’t want to compete with other people for Google rankings. If you find a name that isn’t being used much yet, it’s pretty easy to rank number 1 when people search your exact name. 

It’s like if you are thinking of naming yourself Walmark, you may find out that Walmart’s close name is too close for you to really distinguish yourself.

Similarly, your actual name might be a name shared by someone famous and/or dead. In trying to come up with a pen name for myself once, I found that 10 out of 10 names I searched for had someone famous with that name. I was trying to find a Henry AnyLastNameThat’sNotFamous and I gave up.

Domain… Searching your domain with a domain registration basically tells you if it’s available. Some companies will also tell you other ideas with the name and extension. I recommend Lyrical Host.

But you might find out that BravoName dot com is taken, but not dot net or dot org. But you don’t want to go BravoName dot net if BravoName is pretty big in Google’s Search for the dot com site.

Options to Consider to name your blog when you start a blog…

Do You Want to Blog As Your Real Name? 

If you plan to write or position yourself as an expert, you probably want to really think about branding yourself as your birth name or a nickname. Other people who should probably consider this are creatives, artists, photographers, even cake decorators… 

I mean like name your blog after yourself. 

YourName.com 

I read somewhere that the best fiction author name is Two Syllable First Name and One Syllable Last Name like Stephen King, but I’m not sure how accurate that is. It does rather seem easy to remember when it’s like that. Like if your name is Elizabeth Porter, you might discover Lizzie P. is easier to remember. 

Which then makes you consider writing under a pen name, and I don’t recommend it unless there’s a good reason to stay anonymous like writing about your own mental illness.

I used to think if I could get a boy’s name, or gender neutral name, people would be more apt to take me seriously, but I’ve discovered nobody really cares or pays attention. Offline, they notice that stuff. Online, you are lucky to get them to read your article beyond the headline let alone the author name and bio. For real, a good 55% to 95% of the people who share your post will probably never read it. And about 10% of the comments seem to come from people who didn’t read it. It’s kind of disturbing at times, but you get over it. 

Name Your Blog The Identity People Want to Be

But if you decide to name your blog something other than your name, and there are many good reasons to do that, you probably want to aim for words that accurately describe what your blog is about and the Identity people want to be.

My favorite blog name for this reason, a name that tells you exactly what you’re about to read and an identity many women enjoyed boasting being a part of is Moms Who Drink and Swear. It’s the perfect name. People who didn’t even read her blog liked her Facebook page just because the name was something that resonated deep within their soul they wanted to be part of that and then tell everyone about it. They wanted the t-shirt. 

Insane in the Mom-Brain is another great and, as she would say, “fantastical” name. 

A blog on your own poetry might be Wine and Rhyme, Cuddling with Books, Poetic Ramblings of a Broken Heart (that’s more Adele)…. 

Naming your blog a name that people would want the bumper sticker on their car with just your blog’s name makes the “get more traffic” and “grow my social media” part so much easier. Remember, they put things out there that they want people to identify them as, not things that they think they truly are. 

Pick a Topic Relateable Noun 

The idea here is to think imagery. A little metaphor. Mainly Vibe.

If you were writing about Britain, you might name your blog The Red Telephone Booth. 

If Harry Potter were writing about his adventures, he might name his blog Platform 9 3/4. 

Even the name of the school in Harry Potter embodies witchcraft and wizardry, like the name just helps you fall into the fantasy by name alone via the imagery. Hogwarts. Like we all know witches use eye of newt, and hog’s warts are a perfect ingredient for a brew or school name.

Robert Frost were to start a blog, he might name his blog featuring his poems something like Two Roads, Yellow Wood, Divergence, The Road Less Traveled, Underneath the Undergrowth.

Pick a Topic Relateable Verb that your readers are trying to do

A great example of this, excuse the language, is Unfuck Your Habitat: a blog and book on cleaning your house. Clean Your House must have already been taken. 

The idea here is to aim for motivation and encouragement. Instead of describing what you are, you are focusing on what you do and the action of doing. With that, you can really hit on aspirations and pain points of your readers.

A recipe blog on eating healthier might go with Heal your Diet. 

When I first decided to start a blog, this blog, I named it Blogging As I Learn It, but I shortened it in recent years to Blogging Learn because I wanted to emphasize the doing. The Learn.

It really kind of helps to use a thesaurus or come up with your own list of creative synonyms and metaphors. 

Once you’ve come up with a name, then it’s onto WHERE?

Step 4: Where to Start a Blog?

Now this is where life gets a little complicated.

Some things to keep in mind here…

• Your investment you are willing to make.
• Do you plan to blog and sell things on your site?
• What functions beyond blogging would you like?

and also…

While it’s possible to move an entire blog from one platform and one hosting to another, you are way better off if you can pick a place that you plan on living for a long time at the time you start a blog. …unless you like doing things more than once.

With that said, there’s 3 things to consider for WHERE to blog.

• The Blog Platform 
• The Hosting
• The Domain

The platform is the place that makes your blog posts. It’s where you type the words, and it automatically takes those words and puts it into a blog post and usually creates a thumbnail of that post on your home page. A better buzz word for it might be CMS (Content Management System) but I like Platform.

The Hosting is the actual computer hardware, the servers, who is going to store your files (your posts, your photos, etc.) and share it with the world on the internet. Popular hosting providers include Bluehost, Go Daddy, Host Gator, SiteGround –> none of who I recommend, but they are popular enough to help you categorize this concept as that thing. My favorite hosting is Lyrical Host for reasons I mention later.

The Domain is your address such as www.myhouse.com VS www.mybluehouse.com

In some cases, the platform and hosting are the same place. In other places, it’s not. Anywhere that offers hosting usually offers domain registration (that’s where you claim your domain so you can have permission to use the address, and so nobody else takes it).

Some options to consider that I recommend… Let’s first get through the ones that are easy to explain.

Blogger: Free

Blogger / Blogspot is completely free to use. They provide the platform (blogger) and the hosting (google). Your domain will be something like yourname.blogspot.com but then you can purchase a domain like yourname.com and attach it to your blog for free.

The upside is because it’s totally free, even if you stop blogging, you still have your stuff.

The downside is that, I can’t say they are limited in design because they really offer the most flexibility if you can code your own site, but if you don’t know how to code, there’s a lot of limitations to design. They have some free templates. One of them I would actually use. And then there are 3rd party templates for free and some for sale. Most of the 3rd party templates do require some coding, but there are many tutorials to help walk you through the basic things, and enough tutorials for you to learn even more.

The other downside is that you don’t actually own your site. Google can shut you down at any given time. I’ve not known them to do that with Blogger blogs, but some of their features have been known to disappear / change.

This blog was powered by Google’s Blogger, but I’ve recently switched to WordPress. You can probably see my old blog here.

A lot of people start a blog in Blogger just to see how it goes before delving into paid services.

Wix, Weebly, or Squarespace

All 3 of these places offer a very easy, drag and click, web design. They have various monthly plans. But they are often very limited in things like with Wix, I’ve read that once you choose your template, you can’t change it. I’ve also read that Weebly is difficult to export or integrate with 3rd party apps.

Now things get complicated when I talk about …

WordPress

There are 2 versions of wordpress. They are totally different things. It’s so confusing. And anytime someone says, “WordPress,” they could be referring to either one of these though usually they mean self-hosted. When I say WordPress, I mean self-hosted. When I say Free WordPress, I mean the free one.

And it’s because WordPress is a platform. It manages your content. It can be used anywhere.

If you have 10 wordpress sites with 10 different hosting companies, you can access all of them from wordpress.com as well as create a free blog.

Quick story on history… If I remember correctly, WordPress was new to me when they had the free blog at wordpress dot com, and a free download for the wordpress system at wordpress dot org. I swear you once had to download it and upload it to a server. For years, bloggers made the distinction by the address (dot com vs dot org). It became huge popular, and so many hosting companies offered hosting with free wordpress installation so that way you don’t have to download it yourself anymore. Before you knew it, many offered one click installs (hit this button, answer these questions, and voila, wordpress), and then in time, they offered hosting specifically for wordpress with some tweaks in the hosting package better suited for wordpress. Meanwhile, wordpress dot com found ways to incorporate with all wordpress sites and offered more paid products to give additional features similar to self-hosted.

Free WordPress

The free wordpress is on wordpress.com. It’s hosted by Automattic. They have a free option that gives you the domain yoursite.wordpress.com and then you can pay for extra things. I recommend this route if you plan on blogging just to write. If you want control over the design, sell things, or have additional function (i.e. plugins), or even your own domain, then you are better off going with a different option.

Some bloggers start a blog here similarly to how many do in Blogger, and I have to admit, it’s easier to move content over from WordPress Free to a Paid version because of the way they name pages and posts.

Self-Hosted WordPress

This is the popular one among bloggers. Basically you go to any wordpress hosting provider and sign up for one of their wordpress plans. For the most part, you end up paying less a month going this route than paying for the paid features in the free wordpress.

The upside is when you pay for your own hosting, you own your site. Not WordPress.

The other upside is you have a lot more control in the design and function.The upside and downside is that while it’s more user friendly than trying to code a blog from scratch, it is still complicated enough that it takes time to learn it. It can be pretty frustrating at times trying to get your site to do the thing you want it to do.

The other downside is it can get pretty expensive because while there are free themes and free plugins, the paid ones actually do the thing you think the free ones are going to do, so it’s really easy to find yourself buying things for your wordpress site. It’s almost like a hidden fee, but it’s not a hidden fee. It’s a hidden shopping.

I still recommend WordPress if ever you plan on doing any of the following:

• Sell physical or digital products 
• Want a newspaper or magazine style home page
• Create a collaborative site with multiple writers
• Provide recipes that you want an easy to print recipe card
• Want to enable rich pins
• Provide downloads like PDF’s, fonts, zip files… 
• To sign up for ads and control where the ads are going

Now another thing, and I hope it doesn’t add to the confusion, but if you start looking at hosting companies to compare for WordPress, you’ll find some of them have Regular Websites where you can install wordpress on it for free, and WordPress websites at like $2 more a month. They look the same, but they aren’t the same thing, not just by price, but also by performance which then gets you wondering, is the cheaper version enough to get by?

And I am here to tell you I tried that, and no it’s not enough to get by. The cheaper product where you pay for a regular cloud based website and then install wordpress –> That has a lot of limitations as to how many people  can visit your website, your memory, and then a bunch of tech stuff that even the best geek would struggle to troubleshoot, such as the site isn’t working because you have too much javascript running at once. It’s not worth the headache. Trust me, with a blog, there are a billion other headaches you need to tend to you don’t need to volunteer extra headaches.

Which is why I recommend the transparency in a company like…

Lyrical Host

If you opt self-hosted wordpress, I recommend going through Lyrical Host. I am an affiliate, BUT I’m not recommending them because I’m an affiliate. I’m an affiliate because I recommend them. I do use them for all of my self-hosted websites.

Quick run down as to why I recommend them over the other options:

• Transparent Pricing
• Actual Free Tech Support
• Free goodies
• Customer Oriented
• Great Facebook Group
• They plant trees
• You don’t need an FTP thingy like Filezilla to access your files

But the main one is the actual free tech support.

 Best Headache Prevention: Actual Free Tech Support 

Most hosting companies offer free tech support when the problem is on their end. If you have problems with WordPress, they want more money. If the problem is from any external source that isn’t their hosting, they want more money. Go Daddy wanted to charge me $300 to help me find the malware in my site.

With Lyrical Host, you can put in a ticket for any tech related issues like if you can’t get your fonts to load properly. If you don’t know how to code a wordpress site to sell your own themes, you almost need a place that is willing to help you resolve wordpress tech issues beyond wordpress’s forum.

If you start a blog for the first time, I highly suggest Lyrical Host because they will help you with the tech more than anyone else.

I finally stopped wasting 40 to 60 hours of my life to get my website to load properly.

Save 10% with Coupon Code:  BeHappy 

Once you decide where to start a blog, it’s time to play.

Step 5, 6 & 7: Setting Up Your Blog

So you got the name, the domain, and you decided your platform, the next thing to start a blog is to CREATE!

You have 3 main areas of emphasis at this point in the game:

• Function
• Content
• Visual Design

If you’re using Wix, you probably need to do this backwards if you can’t change your template. But if you are with something where you can change your template / theme, just pick one for now and let’s get this other stuff out of the way…

I personally find it easiest to get some content up there before messing too much with design so I can see how the design is going to look with content. These themes, especially in WordPress and Blogger, look very different when there’s no content than when you get content, especially since you have to customize the look before you have any idea if it’s going to give you the look you want.

If you were thinking it’s just that easy to be all, “I want a pink website with flowers, and a black line here, and you can search for photos here, and I think I want to throw in a free course,” and find one theme that will let you do all of that, for free, well. It’s not that easy.

Hell, half of the time, I can’t get a free theme to look and do exactly like the picture says. It’s because THEY LIE! Or I’m an idiot. Maybe both.

Look. It should not take me 4 years of college to figure out how to get Sam’s theme to go from purple to yellow.

I have legit once spent 3 days figuring out how to make a menu sticky.

Step 5: Function

We are just hitting the basic gist of this at the Start A Blog Phase… Eventually, you might want to learn more on this subject and tweak your blog.

The professionals call this UX, short for User Experience, and UI, short for User Interface. I think there’s also other words involved like site structure, but for the most part, let’s cover UX and UI for right nows.

UX / UI

First off, it’s important to understand that while many places differentiate between a website and an app, they are in essence the same thing. Your website is basically another piece of software. And the idea of a “user” using your website / app / software is something you should think about when designing it.

The user experience is what it sounds like… the experience someone has using the thing. Part of that is thinking about why someone might come to your website (what are they trying to accomplish?), and part of that is making sure they had such a fun time, or make sure they got exactly what they needed, or a little of both, to enhance their “experience” of you.

The user interface is the part of the design process that covers how the app works, or how your website functions. The internet defines it as, ” the means by which the user and a computer system interact, in particular the use of input devices and software.” But this means from a design perspective that the user interface is “intuitive,” that the person using your thing can figure out how to use it without getting a college degree for it.

The user experience is about the human’s relationship with you.
The user interface is about the human’s relationship with the computer.

So let’s say you’re trying to design a video game, you might list out the things people like most about playing video games, such as they want to have fun, be entertained, become part of a game, escape into a story, etc. So then the design of the game might entail all that, like maybe you create a plot within the game to make it more interesting than Mario just saving a princess we know not why. I mean were they even dating?

Now the user interface part comes into play when you’re deciding particulars, such as how is the player going to choose their weapon? Can they change the colors of it? If so, what colors? Do they press the A button or the B button to do it? How are they going to know which button to push?

It also varies per audience.

For instance, when video games came out that were like an Escape Room situation, where you are in essence in this room and you have no idea who you are, why you are there, what you are trying to accomplish, until you scope out the place, explore, find clues and figure it out. Maybe you need to get a key, to open the locked box, to find out the story or the thing to do next or maybe you just find a wrench in the box and now you have more questions… My kids love that crap. I, on the other hand, hate it.

If I can’t find out how to play the game within the first 3 minutes, I won’t play the game.

My kids, Generation Z, are the opposite. Games they figure out quickly they grow bored of quickly.

So these are all things to think about when designing your site. Most companies offer a special position specifically for UX / UI. Some have a team for it. Nobody expects you to become a master of this as if it were your career because a blogger has to do almost everything, but remember, you’ll be competing with places who have hired people who mastered this as a career.

Site Structure

You want to kind of map out how your website is going to work. I usually think about all the ways people find my site, and then envision a tour guide deciding where they should go next. You guide them like a tour guide based on the Call to Action(s), like in some places, you  might do a “Go Here or Go There” and in other places, you might do a “Get a free thing” and then to a page for “Subscribe”

Most people will probably find your blog via each individual post. For instance, you write a post, you post the post, and then you share it on Facebook and pin it to Pinterest, people will find you on Facebook and Pinterest, and their first sight of your site is that blog post, not your home page.

Some people will manually type your home page to find you, but most people will click on your home page to learn more about you.

So while the home page is often what most people think is the first impression, it usually is a second or third impression.

The Blog Post is like Your Porch. Home is your Living Room. Your first impression is your Porch.

From your blog post, you have 3 primary places to try to get that second click to manage the flow of your traffic…

• The Top Navigation / Menu Bar
• The Side Bar (if you opt to have one or two of those)
• Within the post

Secondary places include:

• Bottom of the blog post (like related posts)
• The Footer

So you kind of want to decide where these people are going to go at the time you start a blog. What do you want them to do?

• Buy products
• Subscribe to your email
• Read more posts
• Follow you on Social Media
• Join your Group
• Comment
• Donate

So, basically you want to have a call to action of some sort on each page. Possibly several. And they don’t need to be next to each other. Think back to user interface, you kind of want the calls to action to be intuitive.

Calls to Action

Each CTA (Call to Action), thing you want them to do, has its own hacks and finesse about them in the nature of the flow and strategy of that flow. Again, this is a gist for the start a blog moment, and in time, you may want to learn more about these subjects…

For instance, if you want people to buy products or shop, you want more than just an ad in your sidebar. You want to write about the things that get people who would want to buy your product reading and then write in a way that invokes the emotion that gets them excited to have your product. And then you want to embed links within your post (as well as your side bar). Example, you might do a review or a comparison of product A with a competitive product B.

Some products of your own you may want a landing page that does the explaining and selling of the product, and you’re just trying to get people to learn more.

Also, Pinterest is a great place to pin a rich pin to your product pages. Things sell well on Pinterest. And people are actively searching for products without much “it has to be name brand” influence on Pinterest. So you might want your product pages where you can add it to the cart to be amazing SEO, with amazing photos that are Pinterest friendly, and Pin It options.

Email Subscriptions usually sucker people in with what the internet calls a free optin, or a lead magnet, so that would entail coming up with a free download people are dying to have they can’t resist, making a landing page for that download that shows pictures of it, content about it, and has the sign up form, and then linking in posts/sidebar/menu via a graphic, button, or text trying to sell the free thing. This approach also seems to have a lot of success with paid / boosted Facebook Page Posts. Once you get the email, then you try to sell things via emails. There’s more to it than this, but this a gist of what most people do.

Read more posts… WordPress has various plugins to get a Related Post feature at the bottom of posts. Blogger has some options too like that. You gotta be careful they aren’t putting spam posts in there. They both offer widgets / gadgets to feature popular posts… But the best thing to do is to write about something, and then put your own related post (picture and link or text and link) handpicked that you think would go well. You can mix it up within the text, anchored to one word in a paragraph, maybe linking at the end of a paragraph, or place it at the end of the post (like what do you want to read next?).

Some SEO plugins offer a way to boost internal linking (because it’s good for SEO to link to your own pages and posts within pages and posts) by taking a keyword, such Hosting, and linking it all to one page / post such as “The Best Internet Hosting Company” or maybe “10 Reasons to Choose My Hosting Company.” But the plugin will automagically link that every where your site has the word “hosting” in it.

And each location has its own personality. For instance, a link to read more about Related Posts might go well for this page at the bottom of this paragraph (or highlight and link Related Posts). You might be perusing and that stood out to you because the link changed the color, and you click it because that’s one thing at the forefront of your mind you were already thinking about before coming here and you want to see if it’s a good link or if its stuff you already know. But either way it’s a great place to link to a post on Related Posts because that’s what I’m talking about specifically right here.

But at the bottom of this page? That means you read the whole post. You already invested quite a bit of time with me, and you are probably more interested in overall ME HELPING YOU do the thing you’re trying to do than you are a specific topic that was already covered here, so there, on this page, I could do an increase traffic post, a Graphic Design 101 Post, and maybe a post where I try to showcase free courses.

Nothing that auto generates these things are thinking along these lines. Computers are not social creatures. The input is going to be if I mention the word Pinterest enough, it might recommend Pinterest posts. You can decide those things better than an automated plugin, and you have more control in how it looks.

And if you’re already making Pinterest pins for posts for Pinterest, you have a good image for linkage already made.

That might of been a bit much for a quick overview, but I do that. You’re here to learn. Right?

In addition, you want link to your own posts within posts as relevant for SEO reasons. They call it horizontal sitemapping as opposed to vertical, and I can personally get a vague sensation (vague) of that structure like vertical is categories and a list of posts that belong in there whereas horizontal is a post with a list of posts that belong there, that also has a list of posts that belong in there. So instead of a tree trunk, you get a whole tree. Google robots like the tree, not a dead stump of a trunk.

One great way to do that is to create a topic cluster where you have a super long pillar page (like this one here), and then you write 10 – 30 blog posts about the same topic and link them within the pillar page and link to the pillar page within them (I’ll get there with 10 to 30 links someday sometime whenever).

When we get to the content step to start a blog, I start you off with a pillar page concept.

You definitely want social media follow buttons somewhere on your blog (usually the sidebar, but sometimes the footer), and the most common place to ask for social media follows is to highlight one or two social media places and have that as a call to action on your Thank You for Signing Up page to your email subscription.

People whose Facebook group is thriving and almost a pillar to their business tend to advertise that as a content block on their home page. I’ve seen many blogs ask people to join their group via a hero image in their footer or a good graphic (like join my group with a square around it) in the sidebar in addition to it being a call to action in free courses they offer and somewhere in the series of pages you see as you sign up for their email.

The thing about comments is people are most apt to comment once comments are already there. To get comments going, most people just ask a question people can answer in the comments, but in my experience, the best way to get comments is to join a blog hop and ask a question people would want to answer at the end of a post just to make their commenting obligation easier on them. The questions can get a crickets noise, and that’s worse than not having comments when there’s a question just flapping in the wind on the bottom of the post. I personally am kind of against comments sometimes for that reason, but I then see how well comments are working out for The Bloggess. I guess it depends on your purpose, audience and method.

Donate… I’ve not seen any blog attempt this beyond setting up a Zazzle store and donating the money they earn in sales. I’ve also seen some do that FB donations button that Facebook is doing. Now the petition sites and politician sites do have a donate process, and the best thing for that is to look at their function with their donate requests and try to mimic that on your blog. Most of the time, they sell their cause, the fight, as opposed to themselves or the nonprofit. There’s usually a “Sign up to help” and then a popup or page in the sequence requesting a donation to be made. Most of them thrive most by email marketing. So in this case, free optin, get that email, and send emails with titles on HELP US FIGHT THE BAD GUY and then link to donate requesting just $3.

But you can kind of see how the web function flows in all these scenarios. You kind of want to at least envision a map of this in your brain. You can also consider writing it out somewhere like Flowmap (which is free for one active project).

If the moon, a giant rock, can design the ocean tide, then you can design the flow on your website.

What Pages Should You Have?

When you start a blog, you want to plan your pages. What pages do you want to have? Which ones will be in your menu?

This includes

• Landing Pages
• About Me
• Contact Me
• Services
• Blog (if you have a static home page)
• Shop
• Resources
• Portfolio
• Reviews
• Start Here Page
• Product Pages (some plugins like Woo Commerce will create these for you)
• Privacy Policy
• Affiliate Disclosure

Then you also want to think about what links you want (or calls to action)

• In your sidebar
• Highlighted on your Home Page
• In your footer
• Things you’d like to place within posts

You can read more 50 Ideas for Web Pages on my “studio” site Michelle & Cat.

Be User Intuitive

A lot of it is about timing and placement. You want to be INTUITIVE about where you put this stuff. 

It’s about placing the right link at the right time in the right place. 

Jane clicks on your blog post from Pinterest because she wants the bookshelf you have in your picture on how to decorate your living room, and she reads about where you found that bookshelf or how you made it, and at that moment she wants to….

• Buy the things to make her own bookshelf from Amazon?
• Buy the bookshelf itself from Ikea?
• Make the DIY Flower vase that’s on the bookshelf?
• Buy the perfect books that are must-reads and pretty enough for the book shelf?

She might not see those things in the sidebar if you put it at the top of the sidebar because she doesn’t want those things until she’s read about the bookshelf halfway down the post.

If Jane gets bored of the bookshelf and decides she likes your talk about the living room at the beginning of the post, that’s when Jane is ready to read more about living rooms or shop for her living room or maybe sign up somewhere or follow so she can read it later. 

• So you put links to purchase the bookshelf (if available) really close to the content about the bookshelf. Or the link to DIY Build Your Own Bookshelf.
• You put the link to the DIY flower vase near the photo or related info that would make someone want to know that.
• You put the links to other Living Room Decor posts wherever you see the post being excited about decorating the living room.
• You put the link to the Living Room Category in the sidebar with other major categories you write about, and knowing where that is on the sidebar, that’s where you plan your blog post to get exciting about Living Room Decor. So if you have categories at the top of your sidebar, then the anticipation of the perfect living room style and design better than any other socialite out there is in your first 3 paragraphs. If you got your About Blurb at the top, then your first paragraph might be a short personal story.

Nobody does this perfectly, but the UX / UI design wizards and ninjas do consider it on this level, to this degree, with scientific studies. And you might bank to follow some to learn more about this industry and the standards.

The magic of the internet is that it’s intuitive.

Most of the popular sites are popular because they made the function intuitive to its users. FB people can figure out how to use FB’s  features because they put the button in the first place most people are going to look for that button. 

Plugins and Function

WordPress users may also want to decide what plugins they want to use. Generally, you have plugins for things like…

• SEO
• Graphics for Social Media (open graph)
• Sharing Posts
• Related Posts
• Image Optimization
• Comments
• Page Builders
• Cookie Consent

But you kind of want to decide what functions you want and plan the method for making that function function. Bigger ones might be more like

• Create a social media or forum
• Offer online courses
• Have lots of galleries (portfolio maybe?)

Read more about Plugins I recommend: Blog Design Tools
Plugins that are Must-Haves: The Bare Necessities of a Functional Blog

I think you will see that this blog is fully operational.

After you got a mindmap of how the users will flow through your website and a sitemap of the pages and where they will be…

Step 6: Content

We already decided the niche you are about earlier in this post. So now you kind of need to decide what you are going to write about in regards to that specifically.

When you start a blog, you can kind of wing it and write about whatever you want to write about, but if you want to optimize yourself for growth, traffic, and longer times on your site, you probably want to create an overall content plan.

Write for SEO

SEO (search engine optimization) is a buzzword for basically making your site visible to the robots so they can match you in search results to people who are looking for you. If you blog about automotive, readers searching automotive words may not find your site in Google if Google’s robots can’t figure out that your site is actually about automotive.

SEO is the art of making sure Computer Robots know you are there and what you are about.

With that said, SEO robots don’t have eyes like you and I. They figure out what you’re about based on many things like the

• words you use, everywhere, not just the blog post but the menu, the sidebar, and they have to be words where you can highlight the text (not words in pictures, though Pinterest can read words in pictures), and they kind of label the words as important to less important based on heading tags, size of font, bold, etc. 
• pictures’ file names, the descriptions, the alt text, etc. 
• sites you link to
• the people who visit your site
• places that link to you

So you want to write for the robots in ways they can understand you because they are the user interface that helps people find what they are searching for, and you want to be found by people who are searching for you. You do not want to be found by people who are searching for someone else.

Write for Your Audience

Inevitably, humans are social creatures who do not think like robots. Robots are only reflective of our intellect: our ability to math, and organize information, and carry out commands… We can’t figure out how to make them think and feel like us, and for reasons like The Terminator and Matrix, I don’t think we want to. Although Furby comes close, and some day Furby might destroy the world because its owner’s parent decided it was funny to call it profanities.

But you want to write to your audience for your audience.

And the way you do that is to interact with them. Ask them what they want. Listen to their problems, their pain points, their struggles, their celebrations, their conquers, their happiness… If you don’t already have an audience for your blog, ask people who fit the target market: people who resemble the audience you are trying to reach.

This is probably the most important thing you can do when you start a blog. Define your audience, but also really get to know them.

Do more listening than talking.

Do more understanding than judging.

Do more empathy than sympathy.

Do more solidarity than lone wolf.

Start a Blog Content Strategy

You want a content strategy that enhances what you are about.

So the first step is to pick ONE keyword for your blog. Like this blog is Blog/blogging.

That’s your primary keyword, and to start, you probably want to center content around that. In time, you can venture into other keywords like for this blog, I might do Pinterest, Facebook, Writing and Writers, Indie Book Publishing…

So you want

• one page of content to include that word in your menu 
• that word in the text somewhere in your sidebar
• blog posts centered around that word

Then you should create 3 blog posts that center around that keyword. Blog posts are doing best at this point that answer a question. Swing on down to Quora and find 3 questions about your keyword, and just simply answer them in 3 blog posts. Grab some photo that kind of envisions the look you want from Pixabay or Unsplash and make those your featured image. It doesn’t matter too much what you go with you can change them later. Publish those blog posts.

You also want to go ahead and create your pages. You don’t have to tweak them to perfection just yet, but get a rough draft of what you want your pages to be. But publish them so your pages are visible options to link to. The main thing to get here is the words and information. Maybe even an outline.

Remember when I talked about a pillar page? You don’t have to do this the moment you start a blog, but I recommend creating a page for your topic’s keyword, with a title that sounds catchy, and a plan for it to be an “everything you need to know about Blah.” Eventually, you will want to link to all the blog posts somewhere in that page that you have written on the subject of blah, but you want to go ahead and get that page up with a link to each of the blog posts you just wrote.

You can also kind of create a content plan and/or schedule, or you can wait until you tweak your blog to do that. But at some point, you’ll want a list of blog post ideas to write, with headlines that are click-worthy, that support your keyword, and choose how often you plan to publish posts (once a day? once a week? once a month?). But you might go ahead and start writing a list here and come back to it as you go. Plan on also linking those posts to your pillar page once they are posted.

Remember, people say “Content is King,” and by that, they mean that what people want is your words and ideas. This is probably the most important part of a blog.

Step 7: Visual Design

So now that you got some posts and pages, you can get a better idea of what design to go with. When messing with Blogger and WordPress especially, it’s difficult to see how a theme is going to look until you use it like you plan on committing to it.

Now for me, I like to choose my brand stuff now. This is when I choose

• a color scheme
• a logo
• a visual vibe (cartoons or photos? Soft or Edgy? Feminine or Neutral?)
• fonts (one for my headlines, and one for copy)
• mood board…

And I base that on things like

• How I’m trying to make people feel (bright colors for encouraging motivation reasons here)
• How I want to be perceived (a little professional because y’all are learning, so CMYK is the most professional bright colors out there)
• I want my brand to be pretty, but not too pretty (I’m a libra, but also target market is women)
• Speed and Time Management (Illustrations were probably not the way to go over stock photos)
• Affiliates — I rebranded removing all profanities to add affiliate advertising because I don’t want to charge for courses.

But if you are trying to make a FREE theme or template work without having to do much code, you might want to play with that first and let that choose your colors and look (most free ones don’t let you customize colors that much). It’s up to you.

So you kind of flip flop between trying out themes and getting an idea of visual branding options. 

But generally, when you start a blog, you already have some visual branding concepts in mind from your idea because humans are visual people, so you may want to revisit the feelings you had when you first started thinking about a blog for ideas and direction. Usually our first instincts are more correct, and while that’s more for test purposes, I think it’s relevant here too.

Themes

For WordPress (and most blog platforms), you have to choose a theme or template or skin for it. This can take a minute. There are oodles of themes out there in just about every style imaginable.

There are free ones, and paid ones. Most free ones are “freemium” meaning you only get partial features for free.

Generally speaking, the free ones are not that robust. Depending on your needs, most of the time, you’re going to want to buy a theme, and those can run about $50 to $120. Even if you hire a professional designer, they most likely will want you to buy a theme and hopefully deduct it from the 3 grand they charge you. Even more exciting, many people buy themes almost every 2 to 3 years as technology updates and some theme places don’t.

I don’t mean to sound like YOU HAVE TO PAY FOR A THEME OR DIE with this. I have found a couple awesome free themes. I am using one of them right now on this site.

Keep in mind the theme is not a plugin. You can always add plugins for things like web page builder, forums, online courses, shopping cart / Point of Sale, etc. And if you have something like that in particular in mind, you may want to Google Themes for ______________ Plugin.

Sometimes, there’s a 3rd party company that offers a variety of apps and themes together that work together to achieve something like online learning. Examples include Buddy Boss, Thrive Themes Membership, Divi…

I already have a page devoted to themes and plugins. But my current favorite cocktail includes the following:

• Astra (theme)
• Elementor (page builder)
• Rank Math
• Easy Social Shares

Other cocktails I like if you want to devote more money to it…

Genesis + Hello You Designs

17th Avenue

Bluchic Themes + Elementor

Keep in mind this is a process. There’s a chance you’re going to want to change your mind later on the theme, less likely if you bought a theme, but very likely if attempt a free theme. Most people attempt a free theme to start a blog, and they find themselves kind of bouncing back and forth between design, theme options, content, design, theme, design, theme….

Website Visual Strategy

So you want match and coordinate the following on a visual level for aesthetic reasons and consistency…

• logo/header
• Call to Action Buttons
• social media icons
• and anywhere else you can match things.

You also want to decide a visual strategy for pictures.

Do you want photographs? Illustrations? Dark colors? White colors?  Bright Colors? Do you want glam looking quotes (signature font and a sans serif)? Or maybe book nerd looking quotes (typewriter font)? Fantasy? Artsy watercolor look? Do you want people? Faces? Faceless people like just the hands with half the head cut off? Objects? Nature? Travel shots? What kind of filter do you want on most of them?

You don’t have to answer all those questions, but you want to find the thing that makes your photos and pictures you’ll be picking and choosing for blog posts and pages to be coherent, consistent, and your style.

You can also decide your visual strategy for social media. In fact, when you start a blog, you want to consider creating social media accounts specifically for your blog. I suggest to aim for only one or two as you will have to visit these daily in addition to your personal accounts. Some people use personal accounts for their blog, and that’s ok, but if you really want to up your social media game specifically to promote your blog, you want to have content that feeds the same niche and audience as your blog, and NOT too much content that does not feed the niche and audience.

You almost want to create a template (by the time it’s all said and done) for the types of pictures you’ll be using like:

• Your featured image (it will be a thumbnail on the home page)
• Your horizontal images (for Facebook and Linked In)
• Your vertical images (Pinterest, Insta-stories)
• Your square images (Instagram, twitter, FB, thumbnails, even Pinterest, it’s really the most versatile size)

You also want to decide where you’ll be making these images. I use Photoshop, but if you don’t want to pay monthly, Canva or Spark is really the best free option. PicMonkey is a great in-between with more robust options for image editing.

Remember, the simplest designs anymore do so well because minimalism is in. Just make it appealing and emotionally in tune with the content.

Once you have a good theme and visual design happening, it’s time to go back into your content and tweak them with better photos and some calls to actions, get the SEO game going and social media stuff up. Update.

Now that’s a way to start a blog, a swell blog, and you’re ready to commence your regularly scheduled programming.

Step 8: Now that you got your Blog as a Noun, it’s time to Blog as a Verb

At first, when you start a blog, it may feel like you are talking into a void. It will feel that way too with a new social media. But keep talking so that the content is there.

Decide how often you’re going to post.

Try to stick to that schedule because everyone loves consistency. In fact, consistency is more important than volume / quantity. So the timing is really up to you on your schedule and comfort zone.

A lot of people ask how often they should post, and a lot of people have answers. And arguments. And really the best answer is for it…

Post However Often As You Want

But for the most part, industry standard is once a week. Some do monthly, some do bi-weekly, some do twice a week, and some will create 75 blog posts in 3 days and then move on to their next site.

Keep in mind too that you will probably want to tap into a social media platform or two. Those you will need to visit daily, and those you will need to create your own content for as well.

Decide a post marketing plan.

After every post, what do you do with it? Kind of decide where you want to post your post regularly, like Facebook profile, page, group? Pinterest? Linked In?

The important thing is to share what is popular and working on each social media platform. Like instagram isn’t really the best place to share a link to a specific post unless you are gramming as a business. But Insta-users love a photograph of the work in progress with a link to your home page in your bio.

You might find yourself repurposing content, which is another way of saying making new content from old content specifically for certain social media. For instance, video does well on Facebook and is vital for YouTube, so you may want to make videos to promote blog posts. You might want to take your own photos related to the story in the blog post for Instagram. You might want to make quote graphics for that post. You definitely want to create a Pinterest Graphic with the title overlay on the graphic (or 5).

Create an Email List

You want to find a company to handle bulk emails and collect email addresses. I suggest this the moment you start a blog because an email list is an asset. No really, it’s worth money. It’s like owning land. And it’s so easy to build. The most popular among the bloggers seem to be Mailer Lite or ConvertKit.

Most bloggers provide a freebie in exchange for an email address. Lead Magnet is a good word for this.

Then you have to create content for your emails, and design the email look. Many “experts” say the best emails are like you are emailing a friend. Just a note. No need to get heavily infatuated with design and photographs as those easily get marked as spam.

But I personally love the emails I get from Shay Cochrane. She makes it as easy as looking at a magazine cover in check out at the grocery store except you don’t have to search for a page you just click to see the words.

Michelle needs to link to a post about Shay’s Email Strategy here.

But you want to decide a consistent schedule to send emails out highlighting blog posts, things you’re selling, things you’re doing, or just simply to say hi I’m still here how are you?

You might also consider learning about drip emails and automated systems. People who specialize in email marketing have ways to get to know what your audience wants based on the emails. There’s just a unique science and strategy with them.

Verify Your Site with Pinterest

Many bloggers get a lot of traffic from 3 primary places: Google, Facebook and Pinterest. So if you see everyone talking about Pinterest all the time, that’s why. They love it because it brings so much traffic for free.

When you start a blog that’s a popular topic on in Pinterest, you can get an audience quicker by creating a matching Pinterest Profile for your blog that shares articles of similar topics and categories. For instance, my profile for this blog has boards like blogging tips, career tips, social media + Pinterest, lots of design related boards… Similar blogs may have boards like email marketing, influencing, creating a course, SEO, girl boss, side hustles, make money from home…

When you start a blog that reaches a popular audience on Pinterest, you can get an audience quicker by matching with shared interests. So say you blog about an unpopular topic (which blogging is not that popular), you can find popular topics that people who blog might also be interested in. In my case, I noticed a lot of people love sharing amazing photos and illustrations, so I have several graphic design inspiration boards, and mood boards… Writing prompts have become a popular category with Pinterest if I wanted to take advantage of that.

If you plan on linking your blog to your pinterest account, you probably should go and verify your site so you can easily track your pins from your site. The best tutorial on Verifying Your Site with Pinterest is on Tailwind. 

I have to take a minute to tell you that Tailwind is awesome. I am an affiliate there too because I personally use them and like them. Signing up with them is a great step toward increasing your traffic via Pinterest, and they have a great free plan.

Get Your Sitemap going with Google and Bing

The process is a little drawn out, and I explain it in this blog post: The Bare Necessities to a KickAss Blog. 

But the main thing is to familiarize yourself with these two places and make sure they have your sitemap. Your SEO plugin may do it for you, but it’s important to really maximize on people searching for you in Google and Bing. But if you don’t do this step, they can still find you. It’s not creepy at all.

Affiliate Stuff

If you were planning to do affiliate marketing (where you make a little commission from sales your blog brings people), now is a good time to decide what you want to promote, and apply to be an affiliate. Many places will take you on blind (like when you start a blog, but don’t quite have the blog finished), but many places also like to know where you are blogging. So now that you have a beginnings of a blog, you may want to go ahead and apply. You can also wait until you have more regular posts and traffic. It’s up to you.

But you do eventually, if you go this route, want to create a list of affiliate places, and keep it handy as to where you can find codes.

You also want to plan some content for this.

Read more about Affiliate Marketing.

Blog As You Learn

Take some classes and read up on things like

• SEO
• Increasing Traffic
• Affiliate Marketing
• Pinterest
• Facebook
• Instagram
• Graphic Design
• Writing Sales Copy
• Writing good headlines
• Writing better
• Guest Writing
• Getting Published in Other Places
• Content Calendars and Scheduling

I have a pretty good list of Free and Paid courses I recommend.

Find some good blogs to follow (like this one and the ones on this list). Find them on the internet and sign up for the emails, but most of us don’t email every blog post, so you want to also find us on Pinterest and other social media.

You might also keep a scrapbook when you see ideas because the best way to learn isn’t from what people tell you to do, but by watching what they are doing. It’s really easy to see a writing style you want to try your own way, or a design concept you may attempt with your colors… Some people use Pinterest Secret Boards for this, or you could consider some kind of notebook app like Evernote.

Also I recommend two amazing blogging courses that are Free! And they are about how to start a blog.

TAKE THIS FREE COURSE on How To Start a Money Making Blog
AND

TAKE THIS FREE COURSE on How to Start a Blog and Make Money Online

So after reading all this, what is your next step?

Lyrical Host 🙂 Coupon Code: BeHappy

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

•