5 checklist to start a successful blog

There are tons of contents on the internet teaching various techniques on starting a blog. Most of them are on point while a while lot of them are mere fantasies and just there to boost your morale.

So today I am going to give you some bullet list or you can call them checkpoints that would lead you to starting a successful blog without wasting time and money.

Before we get started we have to know what a blog actually is. A blog is a type of website that deals with producing contents to answer or solve the problem of a particular niche.

Take in mind the word niche, the major reason why most blogs fail is because they don’t have a precise niche.

So before you start your blog, make sure you know who exactly your potential readers would be. This would also help you monetize your blog better.

So without wasting any more time, let’s us dive into the steps (in the right order) involved in building a successful blog.

Pick a niche.

A niche is kind of like an area of specialization. For instance, you can choose to blog about a particular football club, a particular car, a particular food or a particular business. Whatever it is, just make sure it is as precise as possible.

What I see is most bloggers making the mistake of blogging about how to make money blogging when they have never made money blogging. 

This approach certainly doesn’t work. You won’t make money lying to people, neither would you make money selling a force image. In fact, google will detect it and drop your authority on the search result page.

Do you know that you can monetize, almost every niche? So don’t worry, just pick one and get started.

Write Ten (10) articles on your niche

This was the mistake I made earlier on, I would buy a domain name and hosting plan only for me to find out that I find it difficult to write articles in that niche.

So you don’t want to waste money and most of all your time, so try writing at least 10 articles on your chosen niche before establishing your blog. I you find it difficult, I would advise you quit and find another niche you are familiar with. 

Purchase a domain name and web hosting plan

A domain name and web hosting plan is the basis of all websites on the web. Just in case you have no idea what they are, a domain name is simply the name of the site (like google.com, Facebook.com and huffpost.com), while a hosting plan is simply a rented space on a web server where your files are stored. 

There are a lot of stores where you can purchase these stuff online, some of which are bluehost, Namecheap, hostinger, whogohost e.t.c

Setup WordPress

WordPress is one of the most powerful and by far the most popular content management software (CMS) in the world. So once you get your web hosting plan and domain name in place, all you need to do is login to your cpanel and install WordPress. Most web hosting companies like bluehost offer a one click WordPress installation.

Now you have your blog ready, but you still need to twerk it to your taste. This is where themes come to play. A theme is WordPress is what defines how your blog will look like. There are a tons of free themes on WordPress, however, if you can’t find your choice there, you can go check out themeforest, which is one of the most theme marketplace on the web.

Design your featured picture using Canva

Canva is a software (also has an application for mobile phones) that helps you design custom graphics effortlessly. So you can get a nice featured image for your articles. This is enable you to escape any copyright claim from third parties. Also, if you apply for Google AdSense later on your blog, the approval process would be faster when you have custom images.

However, if you want life graphics, you can consider checking for stock photos in website like Shutterstock and the rest.

Publish your already written articles

I usually recommend you do this immediately Google search crawlers discover your blog. Also do ensure that those articles are properly linked to one another as this would play a great deal I’m ranking well on google serp.

Now you got your blog ready, there are some other things you can do to make a mark like sharing your blog links on social media and online forums in order to get your first set of readers. 

It’s not usually encouraging at first but believe me, very soon you will be doing little to no work and still get people coming to your blog.