You can start a blog right now.
Blogging has immense benefits. It can improve your search engine rankings. It can build you a platform that can get you customers and clients. It increases your visibility. It helps you establish yourself as an authority in your field.
But why do most of the people find it difficult to start a blog?
What I have found is, most of the people find blogging intimidating in terms of time and cost.
This is because they do not see their blog as a platform that they can use to communicate their thoughts and share their wisdom and knowledge. They see it as a tool that can help them improve their search engine rankings.
Since they are focused on improving their search engine rankings, they get bogged down when they observe other blogs.
Information can empower you, but it can also mentally stunt you.
Don’t try to do what other blogs are doing
Before starting a blog, they visit multiple blogs. They observe how individuals and businesses are publishing their blog. They see that the blogs that do well on search engines and social media are very long, very well written, and well structured.
“Will I be able to achieve such a standard?” they end up thinking.
I mean, before starting a blog on search engine optimization, do you really want to do what Search Engine Land is doing?
Before starting a general interest blog, do you really want to do what Buzzfeed is doing?
Before starting a blog on content marketing or copywriting, right now, in terms of manpower and budget, can you really do what blogs like Copyblogger and Content Marketing Institute are doing?
No.
This is how you can start your blog right now
Complete your WordPress setup (or get it completed by your web designer). Install a basic, functional theme, but from WordPress (because they are search-engine-optimized by default).
Then start publishing small blog posts. You can write just one paragraph? Then just write one paragraph.
A blog post is not a bullet or an arrow that cannot be recalled.
You can always update older blog posts. You can always add new content. You can always add new images and new links. You can add new data as you come by it.
Right now, the main stress should be the building blocks.
Here is what I would do:
- Install the blog and do the basic setup including a clean theme.
- Come up with a title that genuinely represents what you intend to publish on your blog post. Do not use a confusing title. Create a title in such a manner that it exactly represents what you intend to write, no matter how “average” it seems.
- Write it. Publish it.
- Submit it to Google Search Console.
- Do not worry about how well it is going to do on Google. Not right now.
Do steps 2-5 everyday.
Don’t worry about the length of your blog post. Don’t worry about publishing 1000 words or 800 words or 400 words. Don’t worry about images.
Make sure you have good titles and topics to cover. Then, even if you can write 100 words or 200 words, write them, and publish them. Then make sure that you submit the newly generated link to Google Search Console.
I know. No matter how good your intentions are, ultimately, you want to start a blog because you want to generate organic search engine traffic for your business. There is nothing wrong in that.
But atrophying your effort or postponing the launch of your blog just because you want to cater to certain parameters does not exactly help your cause.
Shorter blog posts may not do well on search engines compared to highly popular blogs in your niche, but they don’t stop search engine crawlers from crawling and indexing your website, which is more important.
Why?
Unless you are publishing 3-4 blog posts every day, if your domain name is new and if Google hasn’t yet indexed it, it may take anywhere between two or three months for Google to even start crawling your content.
So why waste all that time? You may not get higher search engine rankings right now, but at least a pattern will be set.
By the time you are ready to publish bigger blog posts, the crawling and indexing process will start and your more comprehensive content will be found by Google much faster.