How to start blogging right now

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.

Content writing advice: In the beginning it is important to associate your name with what you do or offer

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Yesterday I was explaining this concept to one of my clients. He had sent me links to websites like Accenture and Bains and said that he wanted to emulate their writing style and terminology.

These websites have good content and copy. But they use lots of fluff and jargon. They can do that. They are known brands. Even if they indulge in abstract content writing, people know what these companies do.

When you are a new business, it is very important that your message is unambiguous.

For example, I can throw around big and impressing words on my website, but by the end of the day, I am providing content writing services, or copywriting services for marketing purposes. These terms are important for me. These terms are also important for clients looking to hire a content writer or a copywriter.

Once you have built a brand for yourself, once people know what you do (you do not need to tell what Google does), you can be creative with your language, but for the time being, when you are a new business, use exactly the words and expressions that convey what you do and what you deliver.

Do you take your email signature seriously?

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Every professional email seems to have a signature. What exactly is an email signature?

When I send new emails or reply to the emails that I receive from the others, the following signature is embedded at the end of every outgoing message:

As you can see, there are no images. These are simple lines with mostly rich text or HTML formatting. This makes the signature appear uniform in almost all email clients.

Since most of the messages that I get are from businesses or professional people, I often pay close attention to their email signatures, especially when the signatures are quite comprehensive, and they appear to be larger than the actual message.

What is the significance of your email signature?

Although, my email signature is quite simple, it does not have to be that way. An email signature is not just about mentioning the name of your company or alternative contact details.

An email signature can also be used to convey your branding message and extra information that cannot be a part of the main body text.

It acts like your business card. It helps you create a cohesive message around your business.

You can also give it a personal touch by adding your photograph or your logo, although, do not overdo that, as I have seen in many cases.

Some businesses also use it to mention their corporate policy regarding use of information, contact details and other confidentiality-related matters.

I remember when going “paperless” was a prominent fad, almost every email used to have a message that they are going paperless and they mostly communicate with emails, in the signature.

Many businesses use an email signature for email marketing.

It is often suggested that you should not aggressively promote your products and services when you are sending conversational messages to your customers and clients.

Suppose, you have found an interesting and useful piece of information and you would like to share it with your customers and clients. This piece of information may not have anything to do with your product or service, but you know that it can immensely benefit the people in your mailing list.

In such messages, your email signature can do the business talking. If it contains all your services and your branding message, they also get conveyed along with the information that you are sending, without sounding salesy.

How should you create your email signature?

There is no set formula.

Many years ago, for few months, I used WiseStamp. It creates quite professional email signatures that you can embed with the help of a browser add-on but it also embeds its own logo, which can be removed if you upgrade to a premium version.

If you use Outlook, MS Word has a nice template carrying different signatures that you can simply copy/paste into the Outlook Windows client.

My personal advice would be, do not use email signature generators. They may not look good in all email clients and apps.

Instead, create a simple text-based email signature with the important information within 3-4 lines.

There is no need to include everything under the sun in your email signature. You can include your social media links, a small branding message, link to your website, and the main products or services that you provide.

MailChimp has launched email optimizer driven by AI

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A few months ago, I switched to Substack from MailChimp because for my individual needs, MailChimp is quite expensive. Nonetheless, it is one of the best email marketing tools.

Its biggest strength is the analytics that it provides that help you create highly focused email campaigns. This is something that is missing in Substack but then, Substack does not promote itself as an email marketing service – it promotes itself as a publishing platform. I am fine with that.

MailChimp has been in the email marketing business for quite some time. It means it has massive amounts of data about subscribers and campaigns that can be crunched for bits of highly valuable intelligence.

The success of every email marketing campaign depends on multiple factors and one of the most important factors is the content of your message.

This includes the way you have written the message, the type of images you have used, typography, call to action and the ease or difficulty of going through the message.

The content optimizer – a premium feature – collect data from your various campaigns and then makes suggestions accordingly, on how you should compose your message, how short or long your sentences must be, what sort of words you should use, what should be the nature of the images and the external links, and so on.

This The Next Web feature article explains the new content optimizer in detail.

Are there better editors than MS Word? Depends on what you are looking for

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Are there better editors than Microsoft Word?

Right now, in the realm of conventional word processors and editors, Microsoft Word is the reigning queen.

Compared to MS Word, cloud-based word processors like Google Docs are toys. Not because they lack certain capabilities, but in terms of features, they may have just 5-10% capabilities of MS Word.

Not everyone needs these capabilities. I have been using MS Word for almost 15 years now and I hardly use 2% features of the word processor. This is the reason why people prefer cloud-based word processors and editors like Google Docs.

When you use Google Docs, you do not need to install software on your desktop. You can access it through your browser.

This Fast Company article reviews some alternative text editors and word processors that are better suited to the current, collaborative, work environment. Two of the editors that the article mentions are Notion and Coda.

When I visited the Notion website, I remembered registering a few months ago and then leaving within a few minutes.

Notion seems like the web version of those unnoticeable apps that often come with your mobile phone pre-installed. They act like a bundle to manage your to-do lists, notes, images and other tidbits of information. Most of the people never use these apps.

Of course, I am not saying people who do not have a need for a cloud-based service like Notion would not find it useful.

It may be like the storeroom for all formats of information that you would like to store. You can manage your tasks. You can create to-do lists. You can create content calendars. You can manage your brand assets such as graphics and logos. You can create quick notes. You can maintain your reading list. You can use it as your travel planner. You can even write blog posts.

The point is, if you have been using MS Word, or even Google Docs, for a few years for preparing your drafts for articles and blog posts, you may feel bewildered by this hodgepodge of features. Maybe if you want to make a new start from scratch, you will find it useful.

It is like Canva for someone like me who has been using Photoshop for years. Although the cloud-based graphic tool gets raving reviews on my LinkedIn and Twitter timelines, I find it quite restrictive, especially compared to Photoshop.

Coda comes closer to the conventional documents you are used to. The big difference is that it combines documents and spreadsheets and data from other tools into a single interface. As per the language on the website, “All-in-one doc. No more ping-ponging between documents, spreadsheets, and niche workflow apps to get things done. Coda brings all of your words and data into one flexible surface.”

This may be good for meetings. Or business presentations. Or maybe even research-based articles and blog posts. Books? I don’t know.

As you scroll down the page, you realize that it may also be another version of Notion that endeavors to provide everything you need in your day-to-day professional life, through a single dashboard.

I do not understand the need for Coda because I am not the target audience. In this blog post, one of the founders, Shishir Mehrotra reference to the app being a “Minecraft for docs” – you build your digital assets within the app, one by one, like the blocks in Minecraft, as you grow.

I do not want to build blocks. I just need a rectangular window where I can write. It might as well be Notepad.

Every app and every cloud-based service that has a decent set of features, is going to attract users who have a precise need for these features. Therefore, there are many online editors that are gaining traction fast among niche users.