{"id":29555,"date":"2016-08-23T06:11:48","date_gmt":"2016-08-23T05:11:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.web-systems.pl\/how-to-write-a-blog\/"},"modified":"2016-08-23T06:11:48","modified_gmt":"2016-08-23T05:11:48","slug":"how-to-write-a-blog","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.web-systems.pl\/en\/how-to-write-a-blog\/","title":{"rendered":"How to write a blog?"},"content":{"rendered":"\t\t
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Are you already writing, or are you only planning to start your first blog? If you want to take it on, you should seriously study the rules of running a blog so that you do not repeat the usual mistakes. Like every blogger starting out with writing on the web, I made a few mistakes myself. I had my share of frustration, I lost time and money. And like every blogger who ended up succeeding, I kept at it. It could have been easier, it could have gone faster. Now that I have the experience, I want to help others and share a few tips.<\/p>

Here is what you should know before you start building a blog<\/h3>

First you have to create the blog, focus on valuable content, make the blog interesting and, above all, have the right approach to building it. What matters when you set up a blog is using the right tools for the job. Once the blog grows, you will not want to depend on a rented online platform and you will want all the content on your own domain hosted on your own server. That way you reduce the risk of losing the blog through some turn of events, such as the collapse of the company offering free blogs.<\/p>

1.<\/strong> If your blog is only a hobby and you do not intend to earn money from it or to support a business with it, you can use the WordPress<\/a> platform, Blogger <\/a>or another one of your choice. If, however, you intend to make money from the blog, you should use your own server with content management software, that is a CMS (WordPress<\/a> is very popular here). That means buying a domain and paying a hosting company for space. At the start it may feel a little intimidating, but it is a far better solution than running a commercial blog on a free blogging platform.<\/p>

2.<\/strong> If you have already started writing your blog on a free platform, published a few posts, then came across this guide and changed your mind, the easiest way to switch to your own blog is to copy the material you have into your own CMS on your own domain and delete it from the public platform. Leaving the content on the public blogging platform will get you penalized for ‘content theft’, so it is definitely better to clean everything up on the old free blog once you have moved to your own domain.<\/p>

3.<\/strong> Do not pick an online platform because a friend of yours uses it or because you have a discount code. Look for the best solution for you, take your time, be rational about it. Some bloggers run into trouble once their blog becomes popular, so choose a good blog for your own use. If you are not happy with your online platform, switching may be less painful than you think. Most companies offering WordPress also offer migration services for published content – ask whether that option is open to you.<\/p>

4.<\/strong> Make backups. Always! Backups are extremely important. If material disappears from the site, you replace it from a backup and you come out ahead. Do not make the mistake that thousands of other bloggers made when they failed to plan for a data failure. Backups should be created on an ongoing basis and stored in a safe place.<\/p>

5.<\/strong> Pay attention to security. If you have only just started, few people know about you. Even hackers do not know about you yet. Sometimes, though, attacks are random and your website can become the victim of exactly that kind of attack. If you do not know your way around server and data security, look at the offers of companies that provide such services. Among the popular companies that make free security scanners available, Sucuri<\/a> is worth mentioning.<\/p>

6.<\/strong> Build your own mailing list. It is important to create incentives, reasons for someone to subscribe to your messages. Convince your readers to give you their email addresses and to give the blog a bit of their attention. It is worth considering a guide or an e-book that you send out for free in exchange for a sign-up. Interesting audio and video content will draw readers in. On top of that, a short online course will teach the visitors of your blog something new. You can also offer other incentives that will bring readers back to your blog.<\/p>

Welcome your readers, give them valuable content, add a contact form… and collect email addresses to use later on as you build your brand.<\/p>

7.<\/strong> Focus on creating interesting texts. Do not write about random topics. Building a stronger relationship with the reader requires meaningful content. Create clear categories and tags. That brings order and encourages the reader to explore a given blog in depth. Categories work like a table of contents for the blog. A personal development blog can have categories such as “Managing your time” or “Taking care of your health”. Every post you publish should have a category, keeping in mind that posts can be published in two or more categories. There is no need to create the entire list of categories on your first day of blogging. Three or four categories are enough to start with.<\/p>

Tags work like an index for your blog. It is worth having several tags for a single post and using them to build thematic connections between pieces of content. As you write your blog, make sure you are not spamming, because it looks bad and readers do not accept that kind of behavior even when it is accidental.<\/p>

8. <\/strong>Get friendly with Google Analytics<\/a>. It is a way of analyzing the behavior of the readers browsing your blog. It is a simple tool as far as the most common uses go, but even so it is not used very often by new bloggers. Try to write interesting posts, because those will be attractive to readers, and what interests them is exactly what you will learn from the Analytics data.<\/p>

9.<\/strong> Try to earn links to your site from other sites. It is a perfectly sensible activity. Take care to use keywords in link anchors. You can use the keywords other people use, checking them with the Google Keyword Planner<\/a>, but keep in mind that the links you build should be natural, so they must not be artificially stuffed with keywords!<\/p>

10.<\/strong> Use internal linking. When you publish new content, add links to older posts. Meta tags are also recommended as part of optimization: META TITLE and META DESCRIPTION should be unique and contain the keywords the article is optimized for.<\/p>

11.<\/strong> Publishing posts by other bloggers often gives you access to publishing on their blogs. Many new bloggers need a lot of time before they agree to publish other people’s posts. In reality, even large and well known bloggers are open to publishing posts by new bloggers: they want to help newcomers in the industry that way and, at the same time, get valuable content that attracts readers in return. A well known blog lets you get noticed and win a lot of readers.<\/p>

12.<\/strong> Keep the site running smoothly. It must not be overloaded and it should load fast at any hour. It is worth checking the speed of your blog with PageSpeed Insights<\/a> and, if needed, optimizing it to improve how fast the site works. The most popular method is enabling cache, which limits the number of database queries and can sometimes cut the page load time several times over. If our blog is already large and gets a lot of traffic, moving to a faster server may turn out to be necessary.<\/p>

13.<\/strong> Optimize the photos on your site. Add images and make your blog interesting. Photo dimensions should be appropriate, with no empty space around them; color photographs in JPG format and high resolution are usually a good fit. If you need to optimize photos for the blog, you can easily do it with, for example, the WP Smush plugin<\/a>.<\/p>

14.<\/strong> A favicon matters, because it shows up in the browser tab list as a mini logo of your site. A favicon makes your site look professional. Favicons are most often created using the colors of the website and the first letter of the site name.<\/p>

15.<\/strong> You need to stay optimistic and not expect success that arrives overnight. There will be bloggers you envy. Success often comes only after several months or even years of blogging. Sometimes earlier blogs are the road to success for new ones. If you want to achieve success quickly, it is important to see your blog as a business. You need to plan the growth of that business, invest in the site and plan how to expand it.<\/p>

16.<\/strong> Good time management matters. Obviously you have plenty of everyday responsibilities. You may work full time or study. You may have a family, which means there is never enough time. Even if you work on the blog full time, you will need good time management and good skills. Work on the blog in a rational way, take breaks, get some rest. Moderate comments, answer emails, put energy and passion into creating valuable blog content<\/a>.<\/p>

17.<\/strong> New bloggers worry about how they will cope with negative reviews. Rude comments on their blogs, aggressive tweets and malicious emails are not what they need at the start of their blogging adventure. You cannot please everyone. Some people have irrational expectations that cannot be met in any way. Watch what the negative opinions are about, monitor trends, collect comments: all of it will translate into knowledge and experience, and it is exactly the combination of knowledge and experience that will make you a good blogger!<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":20295,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[832],"tags":[91,92,95,96,94,93],"class_list":["post-29555","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-guides","tag-blogger","tag-blogs","tag-business-growth","tag-contents","tag-planning","tag-writing"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.web-systems.pl\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29555","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.web-systems.pl\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.web-systems.pl\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.web-systems.pl\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.web-systems.pl\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=29555"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.web-systems.pl\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29555\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.web-systems.pl\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/20295"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.web-systems.pl\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=29555"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.web-systems.pl\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=29555"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.web-systems.pl\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=29555"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}