Things I Wish I knew Before Starting a blog

Are you thinking to start a blog and wanna be a successful blogger then you must know these things before starting a blog.

if you don’t have a roadmap with the right mindset then you will end up somewhere else. Blogging journey is no different, you need to choose and know some things before you start.

When I started my first blog, I didn’t know anything at all.

Without doing any research, I just started a blog and did many blogging mistakes without knowing the right way then things become complicated and resulting, it didn’t run even 6 months.

Yes! I got failure from my first blog but the best part is I learned from that failure and realized many things I wish I knew before starting a blog.

And in this post, I am going to share those things that I think every beginner must know before starting a blog so you don’t have to face failures in your journey.

So let me start sharing the 11 Things I wish I know before starting a blog

1. Selecting the right niche

Before creating a blog, finding a right and profitable niche is a very crucial step.

Every day thousands of blog created in all around the world so how your blog gonna stand out between them.

It will take just a little before the competition kills your blog.

But with the right niche and some efforts you can create a successful blog.

Let me tell you what’s a Blogging niche?

A blog niche is a carefully researched and analyzed specific topic on which you will write content for your blog.

And this specific topic will be your blog niche.

By selecting a niche you must understand that you are targeting a specific audience interested in that niche.

Let’s understand it with an example,

I want to start a blog and find out that the automobile niche is a good and profitable one.

But it’s a broad topic including everything that runs on wheels like cars, trucks, bikes, vans etc.

So I narrow it down to cars.

Now my blog niche is car related and my audience is car interested people.

But what if I narrow it further down, I mean there are a lot of carmakers like Maruti Suzuki, Mahindra, Honda (by Indian market) etc.

I researched and found out that Maruti Suzuki is the most trusted and selling brand in all of the car companies in India.

So I picked Maruti Suzuki and now my micro niche for blog is Maruti Suzuki cars.

My target audience is all the people who are interested and search about Maruti Suzuki Cars.

Like new updates, information about a car model, new car launches, offers etc.

And I know my targeted audience is good so I can use AdSense + affiliate marketing to generate income from this niche.

Plus, once my micro niche blog starts getting enough traffic. I can also use sponsored posts, banners ads, paid guest posts and backlinks to earn extra money every single month.

I hope you understood what a niche and micro-niche for blog is.

2. Selecting the right platform for blogging

There are two types of platforms for beginners where they can create a blog.

Either it will be a Free platform free hosting blogging platform like Blogger and Medium.

Or a self-hosted platform (paid blogging platform) like Wordpress.

It is possible that some of you want to create your blog free platforms but you need to understand that cannot easily earn money from these free platforms and will face many restrictions.

As long as your using their free stuff, you have to bind with their usage terms and conditions.

Plus, they can shut down your blog anytime they want without giving any notice.

On the other hand, If you choose a self-hosted platform to create your blog, you will get full ownership and control, many ways to earn money from it and you can design it as you feel to like.

I and most pro bloggers use WordPress.

Wordpress is the best blogging platform for a self-hosted blog.

Around 35% all over the net using wordpress to run their sites and blogs.

Note: if decided to choose wordpress to create your blog then find hosting that offer 1 click wordpress installation in their service.

It will just take around 100$/year to start a blog on self-hosted platforms. This is a very small investment if you want to be successful in blogging.

I suggest you, Choose Bluehost Hosting OR Hostinger as they offer Wordpress optimized hosting with affordable pricing plans.

3. Choosing a good hosting

Choosing a good and reliable hosting is very important for any website.

Your blog’s performance depends on it and if hosting is not good enough, soon you will face many problems in your blog like low speed and uptime, poor performance, crashes and errors.

Web hosting: A web hosting simply an online storage disk (like you have offline in your computer), Where you can install and store your site’s file and data.

And the show is always live ready to access by visitors on blog.

4. Blogging takes time and effort

You need to understand, Blogging is not something that will give you success in one day. But one day it will definitely be successful. if you give your efforts, time and patience.

It’s important to set your goal in blogging, know the clear picture why you want to create a blog is it because you love the help others or just want to earn money from it.

You will have to put a lot of hard word for creating quality content and grow your traffic.

5. Content is the king

Have you ever heard this line “Content is the king”?

Yes, quality content is the real king and loved to everyone.

You need to work on your writing skills so you can too create quality content.

It will not only just increase your website traffic but also create loyal readers among them. Who will always eager to read new posts as soon as you publish them.

Focus on creating 1 article over a week than creating 7 articles in 7 days. Because writing quality content takes time until you are an amazing content writer.

You can design your website looking awesome to attract readers but quality content always brings them back as its the real king.

I still remember, when I started the first blog I purchased premium services to set up my blog from experts as I want this blog looks like an amazing site.

But still, that fails, you know why because I don’t know what’s quality content.

So make sure, you don’t do this.

6. Starting small is not so bad

Some people start to think on big things they need to do this or that if entering in blogging.

They want to be perfectionist from the start and soon when things don’t go as they are thinking they feel discouragement and left it.

Don’t let this happen with yourself. Don’t rush things.

You need to understand that starting small is not so bad as you think, focus on one thing at a time instead of multitasking.

And then go step by step.

As a new blogger, learn new things and implement them in your blog.

7. Always backup the blog and content

You will not know the importance of the backup until the day your blog content is completely lost or some malware infected your blog.

Why taking risks?

When you can create backups of your blog and content.

Creating backups will save your time from recreating your blog from the start in case if ever your blog’s data lost, stolen, hacked, infected with virus or malware.

Until you have a backup, you can restore always.

So how can you create a backup of your blog?

There are many plugins like UpdraftPlus that lets you create backups.

But as a safety precaution, you need daily backups of your site as you know hen your site gonna hacked or data lost.

So again, how can you create daily backups?

Well, you don’t need to, Choosing a good and reliable hosting will solve this problem.

Many hosting companies daily automatic backups.

So check your current hosting if they offer daily backups of your site or not?

If not then my friend you highly need to change this hosting.

I suggest you select Hostinger hosting as they are pretty affordable and also offer daily automatic backups of sites.

Plus, they also help in backup restore if ever your site got hacked or faced malware problem.

Like I did recently but they immediately restored my backup.

That’s how good their service.

8. Learn keyword research

As a new blogger, you should understand the impotence of Keyword research and learn this skill.

Because Keyword Research is the first step that must be done before writing a post.

Without keyword research, you can’t optimize blog posts for SEO.

so, what is Keyword Research?

Keyword research is the process of finding and analyzing the search query that is searched by people on search engines.

So you can write around that keyword and fulfil the searcher’s intent.

In SEO: fulfilling user intends will help you get higher rankings on google.

Believe me, once you got little practice keyword research is not a difficult task.

You can use Google for free keyword research.

Read this post to know more about- How to Smartly Use Google for Keyword Research?

9. Basic SEO is important

Every Blogger began writing any post with a target to get ranked and featured on Google’s first page.

But to conquer this target he needs to do proper SEO on that post while writing.

So learn some basic of SEO like what is on-page and off-page SEO to understand how it works.

Then Install Yoast SEO plugin on your blog.

Yoast SEO is the most installed SEO Plugin in WordPress and regularly helping 5 million users to write an amazing SEO optimized post.

This plugin so amazing and will helps you to Optimize your post for proper SEO in a systematic way.

For installing this plugin go to plugin>add new plugin

Search Yoast>install and Activate it.

After writing a post, It will divide that post into 3 divisions in terms of SEO optimized.

Green – mostly optimized

Oranger– partly optimized and requires more efforts

Red– not optimized

Make sure your Target is turning it in green for mostly SEO optimized.

Don’t worry, Yoast SEO will tell you if you made any errors while writing an SEO optimized post.

Here are some tips from Yoast SEO that helps to write SEO friendly blog posts.

Make sure your post fulfil searcher’s intend and gives detailed information on what’s they are looking for.

• Must write your targeted Keyword in the first paragraph of the article
• Put your target keywords many times in different formats like bold, italic, underline but don’t overdo it, try to add 4–5 times in 1000 words.
• Use many other different Keywords related to the post.
• Interlink your other posts to this post
• Use at least 3–5 external links
• Put alt tag in images
• Try to add a video, this will boost your SEO but also increase the bounce rate of the site.
• Remember these points while writing a post and that will be mostly SEO optimized.

10. Consistency is the key to success

Want to be successful in blogging then consistency is the key.

Most bloggers will tell you to post 2-3 posts every week. Yes, it is consistent but I know not everyone can do that until they have writers or outsourcing.

You can be consistent at your pace, 1 post in a week, 15 days or even in a month.

But make sure to publish a post in that time frame.

That way your readers and even search engines will know that you are a consistent blogger and rank your content faster.

In fact, I tested this in my Micro niche blog, where I published 3-4 posts every week for 2 months and then observed that my posts are ranking higher in less time than previously when I was with no consistency.

Then I knew the power of consistency.

As the matter of Semclouds, I am consistency publishing a new post every week.

11. Website speed matters most

And the last but not least, website speed is very crucial for your blog performance.

Even google suggest high-speed sites to users.

Your blog’s performance depends on it and if hosting is not fast enough, soon you will face like low-speed loading time problem in your blog.

And if your blog is slow visitors will leave it before they get the chance to read your content.

That why choosing a good and reliable hosting is important.

Again I suggest Hostinger Hosting for fast loading experience.

After a good hosting, you can use cache plugins to improve loading time for your blog.

Themes are also effected on loading time so make sure to select a lightweight theme.

Final words

These are 11 things I wish I knew before starting a blog back in time.

But know you knew them and don’t need to waste your time.

So tell me which you find most useful and thinking of implementing in your blog.

And if you have any question or query related to blogging feel free to ask me on comments.