How To Start A Blog

Starting your own blog has never been easier thanks to numerous blogging tools which are available for free. Anyone can start a blog without any technical knowledge; and by following the steps below, you could be the next problogger in no time.

Start a Blog 

Find the right keywords to target with your blog

Once you choose your niche, it’s crucial to find just the right keywords to target. This is a delicate balance between finding keywords that get enough search traffic and keywords that don’t have too much competition.

Decide on a design. Look at other blogs and pick out some designs that you like. It’s kind of a pain in the butt to change to a different template after you’ve picked one, so make sure that you at least like the format. Colors can be changed but it’s harder to switch to a three-column format from a two, or what have you. One thing that I changed over time was the amount of stuff I put in the sidebar. At first I wanted the site to be fairly clean, and not have a lot of stuff over there. But over time I realized that the actual length of the sidebar didn’t matter, because the length of the main site increased as I wrote more and longer entries.

Determine a theme. Most bloggers take one of three approaches. Some write on whatever happens to interest them at the moment. In this sense, their blog is truly a “web journal.” Others, select a single theme and stick to it. Frankly, this takes a lot of discipline. Still others, like me, focus on a primary theme but occasionally deviate from it. If you want to develop a following of loyal readers, I think the latter two approaches are best. People who have similar interests will keep coming back for more.

Pages. Having multiple pages isn’t extremely important at setup. But at least include an About page. (Skelliewag has a great article on How to Write the Perfect ‘About’ Page.) Also, include your contact information somewhere. I prefer to have a separate page for Contact, but you can include it in the About page or even on the sidebar. I provide my e-mail address and a comments section. You can set up a separate e-mail account for your blog if you prefer not to make your main e-mail address public.

Choose your tools

Select the tools that will help your blogging easier and faster. You can use the built-in blog editing feature or install a desktop or offline blogging client. Web browser integrated blog tools are also available. Use what’s convenient for you.

If you often create screenshots, you may want to choose one of the screen capturing programs to make the process easier.

You can always update and install more tools later. For now, just get what’s necessary to jumpstart your blog.