7 tips before building your blog
When you start blogging seriously, you probably would consider these few tips. These tips were made based on my experience in building and running my own blog for almost three years.
1. Passion
You need to have passion in writing blogs. You should consider writing blogs not because you want to earn money from it, but because you love writing and want to share your life experience to others. Start from the heart, they say. If you’re a passionate person in blogging, you would not give up easily just because nobody commented on your posts.
2. Focus
What do you love the most in life? Do you like reading, watching movies, or travelling? You should have a blog with topics that are not too broad, but not too narrow either. Okay, so nobody would be angry with you if you want to have a blog with various topic discussions. However, then blog readers would be confused in finding your blog’s identity. Just imagine, if suddenly you find a topic about cooking roasted chicken in this blog. Would you find it weird?
3. Dream
Can you imagine what your blog would be like in the future? Where will you lead the blog next year? You should think yourselves as an entrepreneur. They start by dreaming and creating steps to achieve those dreams. Set as higher dream as possible. If you want to have a blog as famous as TechCrunch or Mashable, then start by creating steps to explore the possibilities to achieve it.
4. Identity
If you have found the topics of what you want to blog, then start checking alternatives for your blog name. Your blog name should suit your topic and preferably, you should have a domain that have the same name as your blog. Your blog and domain name will be your identity. So, be careful when you choose the name. The name would stick with you as long as the blog lives.
5. Frequency
Write as many posts as possible. With each post, put certain keywords that resemble what your blog is all about. The more you write, the more articles would be indexed by search engine. Someday, when a person search something related to the information about your blog topic, he would find your blog among the top list.
6. Design
Blog design is part of your identity. Even though you have great contents, nobody would read your blog if it’s not user friendly designed. You should avoid using free templates for your blog. If there are a lot of blogs out there with the same designed as yours, your blog identity would be blurred. In the future, you should consider designing a custom template only for your blog.
7. Start ’selling’ yourselves
Promote your blog in your daily activities. Make a name card with your blog URL on it. Tell your business partners about what your blog is about and how it would help them gain good information in it. You can also join a mailing list or groups discussions with topic related to your blog. Give some introductions and teaser of your posts in those groups.
The more you write good quality posts, the more your audiences would see you as an expertise. Hopefully, these posts would lead in giving you good project opportunities related to your competences.
Just like what I got when certain clients like what I wrote in my blog.
This post written by Pitra Satvika. He is currently active in his own company, Stratego, as client service manager and creative strategy.
baldeagle #1
April 11th, 2008at 10:11 am
These are great tips! I would only add one item. Know your topic and be prepared to do research on it. Blogs that are just based on thoughts and feelings get really old. Your mother cares how you feel and what you ate today, we don’t. Teach us something, present facts in a new way, or surprise us and we’ll come back for more.
Again, thank you for a great post!
arifr #2
April 11th, 2008at 10:00 pm
it’s hard for somebody to focus in one topics.like me..any suggestion?
Pitra #3
April 12th, 2008at 1:47 pm
#2 If you like talking about AdSense, then just blog about AdSense. If you love watching movies, then blog about that and analyze it further. Don’t worry about lack of knowledge about those topics. By writing those topics in your blog, naturally then you’d likely googling something about those topics. In the end, you would learn some new knowledges in doing the searching process.