Five Focus Areas for the First Three Months of Blogging
Getting Started
When you are just starting out with your blog or website, the first thing you need to settle on is what you are even going to be about. This is honing down on your niche, or your focus area. So, once you’ve decided to start a blog and have opened up a website using WordPress, Squarespace, or another host, what should you do?
Before you can go anywhere, you need to have decided exactly what your blog is going to be about. This is why keyword research can be helpful even before you have begun writing any content. Find something that a. You Enjoy b. You can create content for and c. Has a solid potential audience. for example, the video gaming niche is huge, but I just simply have no experience or interest in video games. I really love my Bernese mountain dog, but I don’t have enough content, expertise, or interest to be able to make an entire website about her breed. I could write endless journal entries and poetry, but there is not likely a large audience who specifically want to read my poetry. Find a niche that meets in the middle for you.
If you are deciding on a niche or an area of focus for your website, you can use keyword research to give yourself an idea of what the demand is. There are two things to consider – supply and demand.
- Demand – Is your topic in high demand? in other words, is it something that many people are looking for information about, is it a common topic for people to search, is there a large audience available?
- Supply – how many websites are there already available? Are there few experts creating substantial material about the topic, or are there endless established websites already about the topic that would drown you out and make it very hard to get noticed? Choose something with a good balance.
1. Keyword Research
After you’ve chosen your niche and have begun to work on your blog, it is helpful to do more keyword research for each of your posts. You can either write your post and then go in to edit it by inserting keywords where they fit in, or start out and writing them in as you go. I don’t believe that this is AS important as people try to make it out to be, because realistically, if you are just getting started and have little traffic and have no backlinks (other reputable websites posting links on their website to your website), you just simply aren’t going to rank on google even if you stuffed keywords to a glutinous degree. You can read more about why I am against filling your articles with tons of keywords HERE.
2. Create Content Consistently
Even if you are getting little or no traffic to your blog, you should still be building up content. You don’t want to rush and create a bunch of pages that are poor quality, so you need to use this time while you have low traffic to build up quality posts to receive your visitors when traffic begins to flow in later on. Spend this slower season building up strong, well written posts with engaging content and good keywords. I heard one successful blogger suggest trying to get 12 posts within 90 days, but I have now over 40 posts and have just passed the 90 day mark, and that doesn’t include the number of half finished posts i have saved in my drafts. This is beneficial because the more pages you have,
- the more potential pageviews you have, equaling more “traffic”, and
- the more pins you can pin on pinterest, creating more attention, impressions, and clicks.
Remember that you are providing a service to your audience. You would not open a coffee shop, set it up really nice, and then sell the cheapest, weakest coffee because it upset your customers and put you out of business. In the same way, you should not be feeding your audience cheap, weak content with useless information, faulty products, insincere reviews, or AI generated posts, just so you can make money off of them with ads and affiliate marketing. Successful bloggers and writers provide quality material for their audience.
3. Format Your Blog
Continuing with the coffee shop analogy – a nice, inviting coffee shop doesn’t just have good tasting coffee, it has ambience, warm lighting, cute decor, comfy seating, wall art, and so on. Work on your formatting. Whether you start with a theme or work from scratch, settle on a color combination, a consistent layout, and universal fonts. Work on your home page and about page to make them appealing and engaging. With each post include an attractive featured photo. Create a nice looking logo or header picture. Make it so that when people come to your website they feel comfortable and welcome and want to stay a while.
4. Organize Your Content
Your potential audience will be frustrated if you have great content but it is hard to find or your website is confusing to navigate. Create a header menu and categories that are intuitive and user friendly. When you start out, you may not have an absolutely clear vision on exactly where your website is going. However, start out with your general ideas, and create categories for them. This helps you keep your posts organized as you create more, it makes it easy for your audience to find posts about different topics, and it also can help inspire you to think of more post ideas in those categories. The categories and subcategories can be edited, added to, deleted, or organized further as you go on. I have rearranged mine multiple times depending on how much content I am developing about a certain topic (either more or less than I expected), and which posts and topics have the highest demand and traffic.
For example, I initially created many subcategories for Recipes, and I have many ideas for recipes to add, but I kept pushing my half finished recipe posts aside to work on art, books, and other topics that did better on Pinterest. The Recipes took a back seat, so I ended up deleting most of the subcategories because there were not enough posts to justify having that many subcategories.
As you develop content, include links within your posts to your other relevant posts.
5. Pinterest Pins
For each of your posts you should be making pins to pin on Pinterest, if that is where you are targeting your audience. i definitely recommend this because it directly gives the audience a link to your website, it’s like free advertising to bring traffic to your blog. I started out using Procreate but switched to Canva to create my pins because I could do them faster and they turned out nicer. I use Canva to make a lot of material for my website. (Read More: Clever Ways to Enrich Your Blog with Canva). They offer a free account or a paid Pro account with more fonts and elements.
Find a happy medium between making your pins unique and inviting while also not slaving away for hours on one pin. For whatever the algorithms reason, the number of impressions can be somewhat unpredictable, so you may spend hours on a beautiful pin and do the best keywords you can and it only gets twenty impressions after a week. I’ve had two different pins with identical keywords and one gets thousands of impressions and the other got about a hundred.
With these things getting your attention, you are on your way to building a successful website. You are working to build up a solid foundation that will be able to support your future traffic and workload.
Free Plugins I Recommend
Plugins can cost money and slow down your website, and they are usually a shortcut way of doing something that can be done in a more complicated way by hand. They can be useful, but I try to avoid using if I can find a way to do it myself. Also, some plugins are pushed by people on YouTube because they are receiving some kind of commission if you download the plugin. I don’t receive any compensation for this, but these are plugins that I use because either I am not skilled enough to do it by hand, or the ease of the plugin is so simple that it is worth it:
Brevo
Brevo was the best option for a small scale email list to start out with. They have a free version that includes up to 300 subscribers. This is better to start with than MailChimp or another that costs money.
Monster Insights
Monster Insights is free, but limited unless you pay for the Pro. However, it gives enough basic analytics to be useful, and it also has a way to create popups to subscribe to your email list, and keeps track of the analytics for that. There are enough features in the free version to make it worth it in the beginning, but I probably would upgrade later on.
AIOSEO
I prefer this to Yoast. Again, the free version is limited, but gives some good tips and corrections to help with SEO.
Pinterest Plug-in
This is probably the most worthwhile free plugin I have. It puts a Pinterest button on every image on your page so that other people can pin to their board from your posts’ images/pins.