Category Archives: Blog Publishing

6 steps to writing the perfect blog post outline

Do you first write an outline when writing a blog post or do you directly start writing the main piece?

Writing a blog post outline seems like an extra work, especially when you are not used to writing them.

Most content writers think that it is unnecessary to write an outline when you have got everything you need to write the blog post.

Do I write an outline before writing a blog post or web page?

Sometimes I do, sometimes I don’t.

It depends on how deep the blog post or the web page goes.

If there are just 400-600 words, then I skip writing the outline when the message is quite straightforward.

If the topic is complicated with lots of information, then I certainly first create an outline and submit it to the client.

Having gone through the outline the client gets a basic idea of what I’m covering and what is the flow of my narrative.

It saves both of us lots of time of editing and revising.

The benefits of writing a blog post outline

Have you ever read blog posts like “Write a blog post in just one hour”?

While such blog posts have some good tips on how to write faster, it is only in the body text that they reveal that you must have an outline to be able to write a blog post in just one hour.

Aside from writing a blog post faster, here are some benefits of writing a blog post outline before working on the complete thing:

Writing an outline saves you time and effort in the long run

In many cases you spend more time revising and editing a blog post than initially writing it.

You may completely misinterpret the instructions sent by the client.

Personally, I have experienced that the problem is not with interpretation.

Often the clients fail to send the right specifications and only when they read the complete blog post they realize that it isn’t what they were looking for.

Most of the clients don’t even pay you extra for all the work you need to do just because they didn’t give you the right information.

An outline can help you in this regard.

Write an outline in such a manner that the client completely understands what is being represented through the blog post.

Even after that if there is a confusion, since the client has already approved the outline, in case you need to rework, you can demand extra money.

Writing an outline helps you organize your thoughts better

You want to give your best when you are writing a blog post whether you are writing it for yourself or your client.

You don’t want to miss important information.

You want to cover all the important points.

You want to research and include the right data.

You may also have in mind what images you want to use.

When you are writing an outline you will have a complete map of how to formulate your blog post and you won’t miss the important point.

You will also know in which direction your information must flow to make the right impact.

In the hubbub of writing the main blog post, you may miss these points.

Steps needed to write the perfect blog post outline

1. Write the main headline and the description

Main headline screenshot

In this step you write the main headline, the HTML title, and the description of your blog post.

The main headline and the HTML title may be the same or different depending on your SEO and engagement needs.

The HTML title is what appears in search results as a hyperlink when your link appears for a search.

The main headline is the biggest font type text that appears at the top of your blog post.

Your main headline most probably appears with an H1 tag.

Again, I’m repeating that they can be same, or they can be different.

After that you write a small description of what your blog post stands for and what you’re going to deliver.

Additionally, you may also want to compile a list of keywords and longtail phrases that you would like to cover in the current blog post.

I’m interested in knowing the keywords not just for the purpose of improving rankings, but also to understand the language that people use when searching.

When using Google, people mostly use queries in their own language.

You may also like to read: How important are keywords when writing content?

These 4 pieces of information will give a solid direction to your entire outline.

2. Write down all possible subheadings

Subheadings screenshot

One under the other.

You write subheadings most probably with the H2 tag.

These are the subsections.

You can also call them subtopics.

These are the different subtopics that you would like to cover under the main headline.

Here comes the main information.

It is the subtopics or the subheadings that will tell you (and your client) what all you are going to cover in your blog post.

You may like to do some research on other websites and blogs to check what all subtopics they have covered.

The more subheadings you have, the longer will be your blog post.

Don’t cram your blog post needlessly.

But try to include as much useful information as possible.

Remember that your subheadings enable your readers to quickly skim through your content.

Your subheadings help your readers decide whether they want to read their remaining text or not.

Your subheadings should be able to tell almost 50% of the story.

3. Write information under the subheadings

Information under the subheadings screenshot

Now you can start adding information under the subheadings.

There is no need to write complete sentences.

Just write some introductory sentences on how you would like to describe individual subtopics.

You can even use simple bulleted lists to put in information under individual subheadings.

The more information you put, the more comprehensive will be your outline and the faster you will be able to complete your blog post, with greater accuracy.

4. Prepare images

Although when I’m writing blog posts, I prepare images once I have completed the blog post, sometimes it is better to decide what images you are going to use during the outlining phase itself.

This way when you are writing and publishing the completed blog post, you will be able to work faster because you will already have the images with you.

Unless the client is paying for images, you will be getting them from your client.

This is a good way of getting the client involved in the blog writing process and increase his or her stakes.

5. Gather data when preparing the outline for your blog post

Data helps you build your authority.

In this section of creating outline for your blog post do research and find authoritative information that you can use in your blog.

People prefer numbers rather than estimates.

For example, instead of saying there are millions of blogs managed by WordPress, it is better to say that right now 43.2% of all websites on the Internet use WordPress as back-end (source).

Instead of saying that email is still widely used, you can say that 99% of email users check their email everyday (source).

When doing research, just make sure that you get the information from authoritative websites.

How much research you do depends on how much time you can afford to send on a particular blog post.

For example, if your client is paying per word, it doesn’t make sense to spend two hours on a 600-word blog post when the client is not going to pay you for the extra hours you spend researching.

On the other hand, if you are researching for your own blog, make sure you spend ample amount of time while creating the outline itself.

6. Consider, what, who, where, why, and how of your blog post in the outline

Every blog post must answer the following questions:

What is the purpose of writing your blog post?
Who is your target reader?
Where will your blog post be read the most – devices, regions, and platforms?
Why must people read your blog post?
How should your readers react after reading your blog post?

Whether you want to write a blog post outline before writing the actual blog post depends on your preference.

It is not written in stone.

It is just that, it helps if you plan and if you already have the information.

Personally, I have seen that writing an outline for a blog post or a web page sometimes works and sometimes it can be a needless distraction.

You need to develop your own system.

You can decide to write an outline before writing the actual blog post or you can straightaway write your blog post – whatever suits you.

The top-down approach to writing blog posts

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Top-down approach to writing blog posts

Optimizing your content for very broad topics can be difficult, especially when too many websites have already done the job.

Take for example “blogging tips”, or “how to blog”, or even “SEO content writing”.

When people are searching for Google, normally they are not looking for broad topics.

They are looking for specific information.

They don’t want to sift through pages and pages of information before they find precisely what they are looking for.

Hence, a person is more likely to search for “blogging tips for generating blog topic ideas”, or “blogging tips to improve SEO”, or “SEO content writing tips for an accounting website”.

Writing blog posts on broad topics doesn’t just fail to help your readers, it also poses problems for you when you need to come up with lots of blog writing ideas.

Hence, if you write a blog post on “blogging tips” then you have sealed the topic for ever and if you write on the same topic, you create duplicate content.

On the other hand, if you create a blog post on the title “12 blogging tips for an accounting app startup” you have more scope for similar blogging ideas, such as “7 blogging tips to improve engagement for a web design website”.

What is top-down approach to blog post writing?

When researching on the topic I came across this informative blog post that talks about the top-down approach to content planning.

This further brought to my mind the concept of creating topic clusters and pillar pages.

Topic clusters work on the same top-down approach.

Suppose you choose a broad topic “blog writing”

Then you choose a tool like Answerthepublic to generate a list of topics such as
Can writing blog posts make you money?
How to quickly start blog writing without wasting time in learning the ropes?
How can you use blog writing in business communications?
How to calculate the ROI of blog writing?
Which is the easiest blogging platform for writing blog posts?
How to make it easy to write a blog post every day?

Answerthepublic screenshot

Frankly, the list goes on and on.

This top-down approach to writing blog posts can give you practically unlimited blog topic ideas.

These are also called creating content clusters.

You choose the main topic, write an introduction for the main topic in a dedicated blog post, and from that blog post, you start linking to all the subtopics that you create.

Why not create a big, humongous blog post covering all the possible topics instead of creating content clusters?

Most of your readers don’t want to read 5000 words just to find out how to start a blog for business communications.

People use precise queries on Google.

For example, people searching for “how to calculate the ROI of blog writing” may not be looking for blogging platforms which you will include in a 5000-word blog post.

Instead, you create highly targeted blog posts addressing individual topics so that it’s easier for people to not just find the topics on Google but also go through them without having to sift through a ton of information they don’t need right now.

The top-down approach in blog writing prevents you from solely focusing on very broad topics and then wondering why you are not faring well on search engines.

Even big websites that have published thousands of blog posts find it difficult to rank for broad topics because there is too much competition.

Even if they rank well for broad topics (how to SEO your blog, for example) it is simply because for years they have been following the top-down approach for blogging and content writing which has enabled them to publish hundreds of content clusters and pillar pages for highly targeted topics.

What are the benefits of the top-down approach to blog writing?

One of the biggest benefits is that you can go deeper and deeper.

Content cluster screenshot

There is practically an unlimited supply of topics that you can cover when you follow the top-down approach to blog writing.

One of the biggest problems in content marketing in general and writing and publishing content in particular is a lack of ideas.

People start with great fanfare and then very soon they run out of blogging ideas.

When you follow the top-down approach to blog writing, how many blogging ideas you get simply depends on your ingenuity and creativity.

Content clusters also give a reason to your readers/visitors to stay on your blog for a long time.

While they are not forced to go through a very long blog post, they are free to explore as many links as they want that you put on your main topic blog post.

This reduces your bounce rate and this in turn improves your search engine rankings.

It is also easy for people to find the relevant topics when they are visiting your blog.

What about search engine rankings?

When you write blog posts on specific topics it’s easier to rank them compared to the broad topic.

You can write and publish blog content faster with the top-down approach because writing on a single idea is much easier than writing a magnum opus.

It is also easier for you to organize your content.

You can create a list of topics and subtopics using either a dedicated content management software or something like Google Sheets.

You can even use a Google Docs document.

For that matter, you can simply create a folder using your File Explorer and then go on adding sub-folders and then store the relevant documents in these sub-folders.

You will need to keep track of the hierarchy so that in future if you need to make some changes, you can easily reach the right document and make the changes.

Can you immediately start blogging?

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Can you start blogging immediately

Yes, and it depends.

The starting part is not difficult.

Whether you want to host your own blog under your own domain or you want to use one of the existing blogging platforms, and depending on your Internet speed of course, you can start blogging within the next 10 minutes.

You can start both business blogs or personal blog based on your preference.

You can start blogging immediately in two ways:

Install a blogging platform such as WordPress under your own domain name.
Use a third-party blogging platform by simply opening an account with them.

Immediately starting a blog with WordPress

Installing the WordPress blogging platform may seem like a daunting task because it involves “installing”.

WordPress is a set of PHP files that you need to first download from WordPress.org, and then using an FTP program, uploaded to your web hosting server.

But it doesn’t have to be this complicated.

Most of the web hosting companies allow you to install WordPress on your server with a single click.

Well, single click is just a way of putting it; it takes a few clicks.

But the interface is quite friendly and even if you have never installed WordPress on your server, you can install it and start blogging immediately.

Web hosting companies like GoDaddy also offer dedicated WordPress hosting services.

If you opt for a WordPress hosting package, WordPress comes pre-installed.

Once you have made the payment, you are given a WordPress username and password.

You can immediately log into the dashboard and start blogging.

You don’t even have to install anything.

You don’t need to deal with FTP servers.

You don’t need an FTP program on your computer.

You will simply need to go to the URL recommended by the web hosting company and once you are on that URL, you will be able to log into the dashboard and start blogging immediately.

Don’t you need a custom WordPress theme to run a blog?

Not necessarily.

Yes, a theme matching your main website does look good, but the focus of my blog post is telling you how to start blogging immediately and for that, I’m going to skip the part of installing a WordPress theme.

The default installation comes with standard themes that you can use to display your blog.

After logging into the dashboard, you can use one of the default themes.

After that, there is a very neat WYSIWYG editor that you can use to write and publish blog posts.

There are many tweaks that you can make to your WordPress installation, but right now that doesn’t matter.

What matters is, how fast you can start blogging.

Even if you want to start a business blog and you don’t want to waste time getting a custom theme designed, the default theme is sufficient enough.

The important part is creating content.

It may take two or three months to get a nice theme but in the meantime, you should start writing and publishing blog posts as soon as possible, and this is the quickest way.

Don’t worry about the theme yet.

The content is the important thing.

Just set the ball rolling.

Immediately starting a blog with third-party blogging platforms

I’m not going to discuss multiple blogging platforms because that becomes confusing.

The difference between a self-hosted blogging platform and a third-party blogging platform is that when you use a self-hosted blogging platform like WordPress, it is under your own domain.

A self-hosted blogging platform like WordPress is good for your search engine rankings.

With a self-hosted blogging platform, when the traffic begins to build up, it comes to your own domain name rather than another website.

The only problem is that it may take you many months to build decent traffic.

This brings me to the topic of third-party blogging platforms.

One of my favorite third-party blogging platforms is Medium.com.

You can immediately open an account with Medium using your Twitter account or Google account.

In fact, it may take less than five minutes to start writing a post on Medium.

One of the biggest benefits of publishing your blog posts on Medium is that you can get exposure faster, unlike a self-hosted blog.

The Medium platform is ready-made.

People can follow you and receive notifications whenever you publish new blog posts using Medium.

You can build traffic faster on your Medium blog, but the only problem is that most of the traffic comes to your Medium blog instead of your own website.

For building faster visibility, Medium is a great platform.

If by chance your blog post is picked by their editorial team and featured on the homepage, your blog can get massive exposure in terms of hundreds of thousands of views, in a single day.

It also makes it easier to immediately start blogging.

What about other third-party blogging platforms?

LinkedIn allows you to publish articles using its platform.

Publishing LinkedIn articles or blog posts is a good way to build your leadership over the professional networking platform.

It is said that LinkedIn promotes blog posts and articles published on its own platform more than the usual smaller updates.

Aside from Medium and LinkedIn, there is also a WordPress.com, but somehow, I have never liked it.

It doesn’t look professional.

If right now you don’t want to immediately start blogging under your own domain the best options for third-party blogging platforms are LinkedIn and Medium.

You can use LinkedIn for professional blogging.

You can share your thought leadership blog posts using LinkedIn.

LinkedIn these days also allows you to run a newsletter.

This way, whenever you publish a post over LinkedIn, your newsletter subscribers immediately receive an email with the contents of your blog post.

Medium too has such a facility.

What do I recommend if you immediately want to start blogging?

If you ask me, I would highly recommend the self-hosted WordPress blogging platform.

It may seem difficult in the beginning, but it will be worth the effort.

Your search engine rankings will improve if you publish regularly.

All the traffic that your blog generates will come to your own website.

You will own the content – all the blog posts are stored in a MySQL database and anytime you can take backup of this database and store it locally on your computer.

Even for self-hosted blogging platform, you don’t face many hurdles.

As mentioned above, WordPress hosting is available with every hosting service these days.

All you need is access to the admin/dashboard, and you can immediately start blogging.

Third-party platforms definitely have their benefits, but I would recommend that you first publish your latest blog posts on your own, self-hosted blog and then share them or syndicate them on the third-party blogging platforms.

5 best blogging platforms I would recommend

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5 best blogging platforms

Blogging isn’t as easy as it was in 2010, or even in 2015. Primarily because everybody wants to use blogging to draw traffic and improve search engine rankings.

Since it is increasingly becoming difficult to gain visibility for one’s blog, people are constantly predicting the end or demise of blogging.

Still, depending on who is presenting the figure, roughly 6 million blog posts are published each day worldwide. This naturally makes it difficult for most of the blog posts to get visibility.

Hence, blogging isn’t ending – more people are blogging, and hence, it is difficult to succeed at blogging compared to the early days.

Does it mean there is no use publishing a blog? It depends.

Despite stiff competition, people are able to carve out a space for themselves through ingenuity, hard work, originality, and perseverance. You can still find many successful new blogs.

How you gauge the success of your blog also depends on what you want to derive out of it. Advertising revenue is always difficult. Most of the entrepreneurs start a business blog because they want to develop a platform from where they can communicate their thoughts and also draw quality search engine traffic.

I regularly publish my content writing and copywriting blog because it generates constant business for me. It also helps me maintain decent search engine rankings for my main website.

The blogging platform that you choose for your blog depends on what you want to achieve. Are you seeking visibility? Do you want to improve your search engine rankings? Do you have a preference when it comes to interface and features?

Based on these factors I’m listing here 5 blogging platforms that I would recommend you use for your purpose.

How to choose the best blogging platform for yourself?

Since there are many blogging platforms available you need to know precisely what you are looking for before you pick the right blogging platform for your need. Just because many people you know might be using a particular blogging platform it doesn’t mean it is the right fit for your requirement.

Here are a few things to consider

Content creation and management

You will most likely be writing and publishing blog posts. You may use a few images. You may also sometimes like to embed videos.

The success of every blogging venture depends on your ability to create and publish content on an ongoing basis and hence, you will be interacting with the content editor almost daily.

The content editor of the blogging platform must allow you drag-and-drop features if you are comfortable with them. You should also be able to enter plain vanilla text with all standard HTML markup. You should be easily able to embed images and videos.

The content editor must be light, visually appealing, and offer you only the features you need.

Search engine optimization features

A big part of your blogging effort involves improving your search engine rankings. Your blogging platform must have all the standard features to allow you to optimize your blog posts for easier and faster crawling, indexing, and ranking.

Aside from the standard features such as ability to enter custom titles, descriptions and tags, your blogging platform must allow you to use standard SEO extensions that will enable you to analyze your text in real-time and make changes for better SEO.

Layouts, themes, and designs

Every major blogging platform allows you to use themes and layouts, but individual platform has its own capabilities. Do you already have a website and your blog must look like your website? Then you should be able to tweak the blog theme as per your website layout.

Some blogging platforms allow you to write themes at the code level, some allow you drag-and-drop features to easily create the layout, and some offer you a mix. You can choose your blogging platform accordingly.

Plugins and extensions

Since no blogging platform comes with every possible feature you may need, you can increase the capabilities of your chosen blogging platform through plugins and extensions.

As mentioned above, there are some SEO plugins and extensions that can analyze your text in real-time to let you know whether you are appropriately optimizing, under-optimizing, or over-optimizing for your keywords.

Similarly, you can find plugins and extensions for contact forms that also handle spam comments. There are some plugins that allow you to run complete shopping cart and e-commerce features from within your blogging platform.

You can make a list of extensions, integration needs, and other features that you may need in your blogging platform before deciding the best blogging platform for your blogging needs.

5 blogging platforms I would recommend

WordPress.org

WordPress blogging platform

This is one of the oldest blogging platforms. Ever since it was launched in 2003 it has become one of the most widely used content management systems. As of 2022 almost 43% of all the websites on the Internet are managed on WordPress. It holds 65% market share for content management systems worldwide.

Most of the web hosts these days offer WordPress.org as a pre-installed hosting package so you don’t need to physically install it on your server. Even if you go for conventional hosting packages, WordPress.org can be installed in a single click.

Once the WordPress blogging platform is installed it is ready to work out of the box. You can straightaway start publishing blog posts although you would want to customize it in certain ways. It comes with standard themes and layouts that can help you publish blog posts immediately.

Why do I recommend WordPress.org as a blogging platform of my preference?

The best part is that all your content remains with you. The blog posts that you publish, the images that you use, they all belong to you.

All the blog posts are stored in a MySQL database. You can always take backup.

In case you want to move to another web host, you are not stuck. All you need to do is take the backup of your MySQL database and then restore the backup on the new web host.

It is also a very lean CMS. Unless you install lots of plugins and extensions it has a very straightforward source code. This is very important for your search engine rankings. The less source code you have, the easier it is for search engine crawlers to access your main content.

Aside from the fact that you can fully customize it as per your needs – make it look exactly the way your existing website looks – it is harder for your content to be found by your target audience. You are publishing everything under your domain. Unless your content begins to be crawled or unless you have a good social media presence, nobody knows about what you are publishing. You have to start everything from scratch.

Also, in some cases, you may require knowledge of PHP, JavaScript and HTML to tweak your layout just the way you want. For that, WordPress developers are easily available.

LinkedIn blogging platform

LinkedIn is a social networking platform for professionals, but it is also fast emerging as a viable blogging platform. The content that you publish through the blogging platform of LinkedIn is also called article publishing.

Why use LinkedIn as a preferred blogging platform?

It already has a ready-made audience. It enjoys better search engine presence compared to a new blog that you kickstart under your domain name. It is automatically search engine optimized. You can get visibility faster because good content is promoted among the Lincoln audience.

Since it is a third-party hosted blogging platform in terms of customization and extensibility, you can’t do much. The only benefit is that, provided your blog posts are good and informative, you get traction faster.

Also, LinkedIn prefers blog posts published within its platform when it promotes content compared to links existing somewhere else.

Medium

Medium blogging platform

Medium is a full-fledged third-party blogging platform. The entire content exists on Medium. Then why am I recommending it?

Medium is a very large blogging community. It has its own audience, its own readership. It gives you live stats on how many people look at your stories and how many read them till the end. It has a unique algorithm to present appropriate content to particular readers.

In the beginning I have written that many people discount blogging as a trend that is waning, but Medium created a space for itself when bigger blogging platforms such as WordPress.com, Tumblr and Blogger.com already had thriving ecosystems. It shows that if you offer something unique, if you can stand out, you can still carve out a niche for yourself.

The Wix blogging platform

Wix

Wix is for designing and hosting websites but since most websites also prefer to have a blog, it has its own blogging platform. It has a free version but then on every blog post the Wix branding appears.

The primary strength of Wix is its WYSIWYG editor for creating layouts. You can literally drag-and-drop various components of the design that you want to create. It also has a drag-and-drop editor.

The free version allows you to create your blog as the wix.com subdomain but if you upgrade to a premium version you can host your blog under your own domain. There is nothing to install. You just need to connect your domain with the Wix web hosting server and all the features immediately become available to you.

It has blogging templates for every business need. Its biggest draw is minimalistic layouts and ease of use.

The only problem is that once a template is created, you cannot change it.

Squarespace

Squarespace blogging platform

Just like the Wix blogging platform, Squarespace is a web hosting and web design platform that can also be used to host a blog.

Squarespace is known for its sleek designs with a touch of minimalism. It is preferred by artists and designers as it focuses more on presenting portfolios without obstructions. It has beautiful templates that you can easily tweak. It is said that individual templates are handcrafted by an in-house Squarespace team of designers.

The entire interface at Squarespace works on the philosophy of drag-and-drop and no-code. You don’t have to meddle with a back-end editor to get the layout that you desire. When you are building a page, it looks exactly as it is being designed.

Unlike WordPress.org it does not have thousands of plugins and extensions, but you can have a shopping cart integrated within your Squarespace blogging platform setup. You can also integrate email marketing. There is a members-only area for paid subscriptions. You can also host podcasts.

Conclusion

As someone who prefers better control over design, layout, and content, my most preferred blogging platform remains WordPress.org. Yes, I am biased because, although I’m not a professional WordPress designer, I have a fair idea of how to handle the basic theme-altering functions to get the desired layout for my websites and blogs.

After that it is Medium. Very robust. Easy to publish. Real-time stats. Greater chance of your content being found by the right audience.

10 tips for starting a successful blog

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10 tips for starting a successful blog

A successful blog can be defined in multiple ways. You may have a successful blog in terms of traffic and advertising revenue. You may have a successful blog in terms of building your brand. Success can also be gauged by the amount of business your blog generates.

Every individual, every business has a different definition of success. The moot point is, does your blog help you achieve your goals, and if it does, it is a successful blog for you.

Blogging brings you many benefits but just like any venture, it also comes with its own set of challenges. For example, 70 million blog posts are published each month just by WordPress users. You can easily imagine how much competition an average blog faces and how difficult it must be for Google algorithms to crawl, index, and rank blog posts based on their relevance and quality.

If it is so difficult to generate visibility of your blog, why am I advising to start a new blog? Isn’t blogging already saturated?

Blogging is saturated for people who want to make a quick buck, or people who don’t have enough patience or a desire to work hard.

Yes, in the beginning years it was easier to get enough visibility for your newly started blog and now it may take a few months before some decent traffic begins to trickle down, but it all depends on your niche, how much competition you face, and what is the quality of your content.

Besides, many people think that starting a successful blog means getting millions of visitors and generating lots of advertising revenue. Even a small blog with 200-300 visitors per day can be successful if it generates business for you. A successful blog can help you

Improve search engine rankings of your main website.
Generate leads for you.
Enhance your brand presence.
Establish yourself as a thought leader.
Increase your social media visibility.
Keep your audience engaged and informed.
Build you a platform where you can tell your side of the story in case of a controversy.

Listed below are 10 tips for starting a successful blog

1. Clearly define your niche

The narrower it is, the better it is. Remember that you are not looking for millions of visitors. You are looking for visitors who will do business with you. 200 people coming to your blog and 10 among them submitting your contact form is much better than 5000 people coming to your blog and just 5 among them submitting your contact form.

It is also easier to start a successful blog if your audience is selective. It means there is less competition.

I’m publishing a blog on content writing and copywriting. This is not a narrow niche because in the field of content writing and copywriting there are multiple fields, but when I started it was a niche because there were very few content writers.

Suppose you start a blog on digital marketing. Again, it is a broad topic and many people might be covering many things in the field of digital marketing. How about just creating a blog on podcasting for digital marketing, or digital marketing writers? Or even graphic designers for a select few graphic design tools?

2. Blog about something you love (or hire a blog writer)

I know, this is a clichéd advice. You love different ice cream varieties, and you would like to start a blog on ice cream recipes, but you are into finance and your business requires a successful blog in the field of finance.

Since you are into finance, you must be passionate about your topic (unless fate has entrapped you).

Love for the topic will enable you to work on your blog every day even when you don’t encounter success in the beginning. The ongoing effort can be daunting especially when you don’t see any improvement in your blog traffic.

Most of the people who started a successful blog are passionate about the topic. Every day I write on content writing copywriting, and blogging, because I am interested in these topics. I have learned a lot. I like to share. Also, my website is my bread-and-butter and this keeps me motivated enough to stay put and work on successive blog.

Even if you’re not passionate about the topic but still you want to start a successful blog on your chosen topic, and if you have the budget, the next best option is to hire a blog writer or a professional content writer.

Since he or she is a trained writer, and since he or she will be paid, which is a good incentive, you will get a regular supply of high-quality blog posts.

3. Choose the right blogging platform

Currently my favorites are WordPress and Medium. WordPress gives you independence (I’m talking about WordPress.org). You can install it under your domain name either as a subdomain or a directory. Your design, your layout, your images, and all your blogging content belong to you.

A good thing about WordPress is that it gives you complete customization. You can have custom themes. You can search engine optimize your blog. You can install plugins to achieve various tasks and get different features.

If you want to move to another host all you need to do is take backup of your entire content (images, themes and blog posts) and take it to the new host.

I have been using WordPress for more than 15 years and I believe it has been an excellent choice.

There are many more content management system but WordPress is the best, both for managing website as well as blog.

Medium is a third-party blogging platform. Which means, all the blog posts that you publish belong to Medium. It is basically a content publishing platform that can generate lots of traffic for you. It already has a great following. You don’t have to build everything from scratch. There is a standard template and people are accustomed to the template. Medium allows you to take backup. There is also provision for publishing Medium blog posts appearing under a custom domain but you will need to figure out how to do that.

Both WordPress and Medium have their individual advantages and you will need to weigh your pros and cons. The only problem with Medium is that a third party owns your content and the traffic that comes to Medium may remain on medium and not come to your website. It is good for branding though.

You should also keep an open mind towards LinkedIn blogs. Just like Medium you can use the LinkedIn platform to publish blogs. Again, the content that you publish will remain on LinkedIn and the traffic that you generate will be secondary, but just like Medium, you can increase your visibility faster.

My personal take: Install the blog on your own website through WordPress and keep Medium and LinkedIn secondary options for additional visibility.

4. Publish blog post with greater frequency in the beginning

This will help you get your content crawled and indexed faster by Google. How fast Google crawler crawls your content depends on how often you publish. If your publishing frequency is quite low, the crawling frequency too is quite low.

For example, if you publish just one blog post every week it may take you anywhere between 5 to 6 months to get some traffic and visibility. On the other hand, if you publish a blog post every day, at least for the next two months, your content will get indexed faster and your search engine rankings will improve quicker.

Even if every day is not possible, keep your target 2-3 blog posts every week.

5. Pay close attention to the search intent of your visitors

Why you want people to come and read your particular blog post? What should they get out of it? This can be gauged by knowing their search intent.

Although search intent is SEO specific it can also help you write and publish targeted blog posts to help you start a successful blog without wasting much time.

Are your visitors looking for humor? Are they looking for a specific solution to a particular problem? Do they want to read a review so that they can say something based on your decision or based on the information that you have presented?

Paying close attention to search intent will help you generate highly targeted traffic faster.

6. Create great, high-quality content

The quality of your blog posts is going to be the backbone of your successful blog. No matter how great your template is, no matter what blogging platform you use, no matter what is your frequency, unless the content is great, unless it serves a strong purpose, it is of no use.

I advise my clients to focus on quality at the cost of quantity. Yes, quantity does matter but it is of no use if it is not backed by quality. If you need to compromise based on budget or effort, compromise on quantity, but not on quality.

What does quality mean in terms of starting a successful blog? Here are a few things you should keep in mind:

Write for your readers.
Provide applicable solutions and advice.
Satisfy their search intent.
Make it easier to read your content by using appropriate formatting.
Do enough research and find credible data to back up your claims.
Always be accurate when you are presenting statistics.
Try to write mostly on searcher’s query.
Make your content readable on all devices.
Write in a simple language people can easily understand.
Add your own perspective to trending topics.
Whenever possible, use your own experience and anecdotes to explain concepts.
Write on niche subtopics.
Create a knowledge wealth.

7. Don’t ignore promotion and marketing

Your blog is just another business venture, or a subset of a business venture. To start a successful blog, you need to promote it regularly. Simply publishing blog posts won’t do. How can you market your blog?

Maintain a vibrant presence on social media. Promote your links over there. Start a mailing list. You can promote your links with your mailing list. You can also create shorter versions of your blog posts and then post them on blogging platforms like Medium and LinkedIn with a link back to your original blog post. You can also run paid promotions for certain blog posts on Facebook and Instagram.

8. Maintain a repository of blog post ideas

When people try to start a successful blog, this is one of the biggest challenges they face: how to keep coming up with interesting blogging ideas that would serve their audience? You need to brainstorm constantly. You need to keep your eyes open when browsing the Internet.

You can use apps like OneNote or Google Keep to maintain a list of blogging ideas or you can maintain an Excel sheet.

You can also use Google alerts to come across trending topics and interesting ideas for your blog posts. I have set up Google alerts for content writing, content marketing, online copywriting, and other terms for which I want to get regular blogging ideas.

Here is another trick that I follow: when I start adding blog post ideas to my repository, I don’t use them unless I’m hard pressed against the wall. I keep them when I completely don’t find any new ideas. I keep adding ideas to the repository but then for the upcoming blog post I try to find or come up with a new blogging idea by myself.

9. Publish guest blog posts

Once your blog begins to generate decent traffic, people will approach you to publish guest blog posts for your blog. This is a good way of publishing fresh content and bring in fresh perspective. The only caveat is that they will want backlinks to their own blogs.

Some guest writers will want to publish on your blog to get extra exposure from your blog and some will approach you for backlinks because they want to improve their search engine rankings. You can decide whether you want to use the no-follow tag for your outgoing links but if you do that, do let it be known to the guest bloggers.

I provide do-follow link from the author profile section but not from the main blog body content. Anyway, that’s a different issue.

Make sure when you get guest blog posting ideas you maintain the same quality standards that you maintain for your own blog posts.

10. Prepare for a longer haul to start a successful blog

You will need to be patient. You will need to persevere. There are months of struggle behind overnight successes. No matter how narrow your niche is, someone is already writing on the topic because there are billions of web pages being created and published on the Internet every month.

What the others don’t have his persistence, which you have to start a successful blog. This is where you stand apart. Most of the people give up after a month. Be prepared to continuously publish your blog for at least six months without experiencing any success.

That’s why it is important to choose a topic that is close to your heart so that even if you don’t experience much success in the initial months, at least you enjoy writing about it.