The adage, “There’s no time like the present,” is perfectly applicable in current times where everyone has some extra time on their hands for starting a blog. As the world braces itself for a fight with the pandemic, this is an excellent time to stay indoors and finally start that blog you’ve always had in mind.
There are several benefits of starting a blog, especially if you already have a website in place. Chief among which is the fact that you can attract top-of-the-funnel traffic as well as give active-intent customers all of the bottom-of-the-funnel information about your brand or product.
Here are five benefits of starting a blog.
5 Benefits Of Starting A Blog
1. Boost SEO
Search engines love fresh, new content regularly. Couple this with active usage of well-researched long-tail keywords, and you have a winning SEO strategy. Publishing value-driven content that you can link to other blogs and inner on your website will do wonders to improve your website’s SEO and to drive organic traffic.
2. Build Authority
Starting a blog is a great way to build authority in your niche. If you can translate your experience and expertise on a particular subject with well-written and informative blogs, there’s no stopping your blog from being the ‘go-to’ resource center for topics of interest in your industry.
3. Drive Conversions
Higher traffic to your website means more people will read your informative content and browse through your website’s pages. This results in higher conversion rates, meaning more people will be buying your products or completing actions on your site.
4. Better Engagement
Use your blog as a medium to share customer stories and inspirational tales relevant to your industry. Topics like how your business came to be or how to overcome the hurdles of setting up a business in your niche will engage your customers. You can also include video tutorials and high-quality images to make your blog a lot more intuitive.
5. Build Loyalty and Credibility
Starting a blog is a great way to build a loyal base of followers. High-quality content that is a mix of professional advice and relevant information, along with a touch of quirkiness, will help you establish a solid presence. This will in turn, help to build credibility in the mind of your customers as well as prospects and partners.
Tips For Starting A Blog In Lockdown
Given the fantastic benefits of starting a blog, here are six tips to help you get started.
1. Pick Your Niche
The first step of starting a blog is to pick a niche that you know you can own. If you already have a website, then it’s best to stick to the same industry and delve into obvious topics of interest. If you are starting a new blog, then it’s advisable to first identify your expertise and blog about that.
It’s essential to be specific, even in a niche. For instance, technology may be a niche, but it’s a vast industry that has numerous subtopics like software development, programming languages, smartphones, laptops, and more. It’s best to be specific in a niche and blog about only that.
There are two things to keep in mind when picking your niche:
- It shouldn’t already be saturated with valuable pre-existing content that makes it hard for you to grow your blog
- The niche you pick should be something you are genuinely inclined to blog about.
Furthermore, stay updated about what’s happening in your niche and the latest trends. Read about what your peers and competitors are doing and study their blogs to see what’s worked for them and what’s not. Identify gaps where you can create valuable content to address people’s specific queries.
2. Choose The Right Domain Name
Whether you’re starting a blog website or using a blogging platform or merely adding a blog page to your current website, it’s essential to craft a catchy name for your blog and find the exact match domain name for it. You can use your domain name as either a primary link or as a custom-branded forwarding link.
In either case, you should hunt for a domain name that is:
- Short, easy to type, easy to spell, and easy to remember
- Definitive, relevant, meaningful, and descriptive of your niche and the industry you belong to
- Unique, innovative, creative, and one that has a nice ring to it
- Clean, crisp, and free of any lingual or grammatical errors
The best way to find a domain name that meets these parameters is to register the name of your choice on a distinct, three-letter .icu domain extension.
Being a relatively new domain extension, the chances of finding the name of your choice is much higher. In addition to this, the .icu domain extension is independent of geography, industry, and language. This makes it perfect for any blog!
Here are some cool blog domain name ideas:
1. www.retailblog.icu
2. www.amandablogs.icu
3. www.blogcomics.icu
4. www.geeky.icu
5. www.makemoremoney.icu
6. www.passiveincome.icu
7. www.marketingspot.icu
8. www.smallbusinessexpert.icu
9. www.autoblog.icu
10. www.carguy.icu
3. Invest In Keyword and Topic Research
Starting a blog and making it a success is highly dependent on using and targeting the right keywords for the right topics. For your new blog, you need to determine a few focus keywords that you want to rank for and then identify several generic long-tail keywords that will help you to drive relevant traffic to your website.
However, picking the right keywords can get a bit tricky, especially when you are just starting a blog. Unlike popular belief, generic trending keywords will not get you traffic or boost you to the first page of the search engine’s result pages. As a new blogger, you should focus your attention on identifying relevant keywords that have lesser competition and are not as popular as trending keywords.
If you use highly popular keywords, your blog will struggle to rank high since those keywords have a high level of competition. On the flip side, if you use highly unpopular keywords, your blog will not attract any traffic. The trick is to find the right set of keywords that enjoy a decent amount of search queries but are less competitive.
Relying on long-tail keywords usually gives better results. This is because they are more specific, and they reflect exactly what someone would search for using a search engine like Google. For instance, ‘buy formal shoes in London’ is a specific long-tail keyword that most people would be searching for.
Apart from using long-tail keywords in your content pieces, you can also use them as the title for your blogs. Optimizing your blog titles to include long-tail keywords can give you even better results since titles play a critical role in SEO. Take help from the Google Keyword Planner tool and SEMrush to search for the right keywords and topics for your blog.
4. Go All Out On Social Media
For your blog to be a success, you need people to read it and be aware of it. The best way to make some noise and get more people to land on your blog is to harness the power of social media. While SEO is a great way to drive new audiences to your blog, the power of social media cannot be overlooked.
Go all out on your Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn handles to promote your blogs. Use attractive images and insert the right hashtags to reach more people. You can even create custom images on Instagram and change the link in your bio to drive traffic from the visual social media platform.
The idea is to get as many people as you can to read your blogs and share it with their network. You can even invest in paid promotions every now and then to reach a global audience swiftly. Use hashtag tools to search for relevant hashtags based on the topic of your blog post.
5. Produce Great Content
This is probably the most important tip since the sustenance of your blog highly depends on the quality of content you create. While optimizing for SEO and doing social media promotions will drive traffic your blog, the only thing that will make them stay and visit again, is great content.
Writing compelling content that is informative, well-structured, and packed with relevant examples and analogies will do wonders for your blog. You will quickly establish yourself as an expert and engage your users in a way where they will become your promoters. Because of word-of-mouth marketing is still the most effective way to get your name out there.
Avoid making your blogs too salesy since most people who land on your blog want to leave with new knowledge, not an advertising message about how amazing your product or brand is. Instead, address a concern or highlight an issue and subtly mention how your product or business can help resolve it.
6. Install The Best Blogging Plugins
If you are using WordPress for your website or your blog, installing the following plugins will make your life much easier and will help you to impart a better user experience.
- Yoast SEO — Optimizes your blog for the best SEO results.
- JetPack – Jetpack helps in spam filtering, malware scanning, and brute force attack protection
- BackupBuddy — Enables to store and backup all your blogs on a regular basis.
- WPForms — Allows you to create various types of online forms
- Google Analytics — Provides valuable statistics and insights into the performance of your blogs
- Edit Flow — Offers a smooth workflow management system for multiple authors.
- Grammarly — Ensures that your blog is free of grammatical and spelling errors.
10 Content Ideas For Your New Blog
It’s every blogger’s dream to have months’ worth of blog post ideas ready beforehand. But that’s easier said than done. The problem is not only about finding new and exciting topics but more about immersive and value-oriented issues.
Think of it this way, there might be numerous topic ideas that you could think of, but are they all interesting enough for your audience? If your blogs aren’t interesting enough, you will struggle to shine and reach more people.
Let’s look at ten blogging ideas which can help you get great traffic through to blogs:
1. Personal Stories
When starting a blog, it’s an excellent blog idea to share your personal stories in a series of posts with your audience. Nothing engages readers more than reading about someone else’s story. Doing this will help your audience connect with you and your brand on a personal and emotional note.
Talk about your life, professional hiccups, your achievements, your failures, or even small incidents.
2. Product Reviews
Writing product reviews is one of the best blogging ideas as everyone wants to know just how good or bad the new product or service is. Since there are abundant products in the market, from technology to retail to food and beverages to cars and bikes, you can specialize in your interests and write product reviews in your niche.
You can use the following points to write great product reviews:
- Include an attractive picture of the product
- Mention its benefits
- Highlight its flaws
- Give your overall opinion about it
3. Interviews
When starting a blog, try and schedule a few interviews with experts in your niche. Interviews are an excellent way to diversify your blog and get expert people to share their thoughts on your platform. Guest interviews are a great way to build authority. Doing interviews with renowned experts is one of the most effective ways to get your work out to relevant audiences that probably don’t know about you.
Be sure to interview influential folks from your industry that your readers are interested in.
4. ‘How To’ Blogs
Google is filled with people searching for ‘how-to’ posts. If you are writing about a specific niche, do cover articles that with a ‘how-to’ guide that makes it easier for your audience to discover your blogs on search engines.
By using the right keywords and SEO best practices, your blog could rank high in search results when people perform search queries on Google about a ‘how-to’ post related to your niche.
5. What’s Trending
Write about what’s trending in your industry. Your blog should always keep your readers informed about the current trends of your niche. Simply identify what’s trending, gather facts about it, write a quality article about it, and post it.
6. FAQ Posts
Write simple FAQ posts to answer common questions or queries that your readers might have about topics related to your expertise or niche. If you can answer these FAQs and address people’s questions, it will instantly build credibility and interest among your readers.
7. Study Your Competitor Blogs
Before starting a blog, see what your competition is doing. Competition is often strategically helpful. Regularly check and read the blogs published by your peers and competitors. Don’t just read, but try to study them and understand the things that they are doing better than you are.
Run through their blog topics to find any topics that you haven’t covered yet. Do not plagiarize or blatantly copy their blog posts. Also, remember to read through their comments section as there may be a few good blogging ideas hidden there suggested by their customers.
8. Write About Common Mistakes to Avoid
The only thing that works better than telling people’ what to do’ is by telling then ‘what no to do.’ Writing about things like ’10 things to avoid’ or ‘5 things you are doing wrong’ is a great way to attract people and write about tips, tricks, and hacks about your niche to help your audience not to make mistakes.
9. Case Studies
If you are starting a blog and struggling with where to begin, then writing case studies is a brilliant way to show your level of expertise and provide value to your readers. Case studies are even more effective than customer testimonials since they show the true magnitude of your knowledge.
10. Guest Posts
Not all your blogs need to be written by you. Guest blogging is a great way to generate new content without actually writing it. Inviting an influential and well-respected guest blogger to write for your blog can break the monotony and give your readers a fresh perspective.
Most guest bloggers have a massive social media following and a robust online presence, and having them write for you will surely do wonders for your blog.
Final Thoughts
So, there you have it, a complete guide for starting a blog in lockdown. If you are new to the world of blogging, then these tips will surely help you get some skin in the game and make your blog a success. It’s essential to take the first step and simply start. And don’t forget to get your domain name with .icu! Search for the registrar of your choice here.
Happy Blogging!