The challenges of blogging broken down for a new blogger

The challenges of blogging broken down for a new blogger

When it comes to blogging, there are many different challenges ahead of you if you're just starting out.  Many people get into blogging because it's the new online journal that anyone can write on for themselves for for their readers.  Most of us on here will blog for profits and we know what we're doing when it comes to choosing a domain, picking the right hosting, choosing out CMS, writing the posts, staying consistent and getting our visitors to engage with our posts.  But what about the common blogger who isn't writing in order to make money?  The ones who are just posting to get their experiences on a blog because they don't want to write it on paper?

Blogging isn't as easy for the common person as you would think, there is actually a lot of confusing things to think about when it comes to setting up your first blog.  For this reason, I'm going to be covering the primary concerns of first time bloggers in this discussion


Getting the right domain
If you're planning on blogging for yourself, your domain name might not be as important to you.  If you plan on writing content for the people, and want to make money off of them later on down the road, you may want to think about your domain name in the beginning so it helps you out more in the end.

Your domain should be short and sweet, so it's easy to remember and type into the address bar within your browser.  A domain with 57 words in it won't be easy to remember and hopefully everyone who visits your homepage is instantly bookmarking your page because I can guarantee they won't be typing out your domain name anytime soon lol.  By keeping your domain short and sweet, you're setting yourself up for easier branding down the road.  It's easier to brand a shorter domain name because people will remember it more often than a domain with 5+ words in it.

Try to get your domain to resemble your niche.  This will help you get noticed easier and it will also help when someone is trying to remember your website. 


Finding the right hosting
The right hosting for a first time blog owner will likely be something along the lines of namecheap.com because they are pretty user friendly and affordable at the same time.  I actually refer people to namecheap for one other thing, their support!  I've had problems with my websites in the past, but I've never had a problem with namecheaps support team because they are amazing  

After you are comfortable with your blog and hosting, you can start looking into different hosting providers for your next website or blog.  Usually you'll be ok sticking to namecheap, but you might want to branch out and try some new things.  It's actually pretty difficult to pick the best hosting provider for you because most of them do the same thing, they just have different branding.


Using the right CMS
There are a few different CMS (content management systems) out there, but I always stick with WordPress because they power a ton of websites that you may visit.  Some of you are thinking "WordPress if for blogs, but you said it powers websites?" and that's normal to think until you learn about premium WordPress themes that are designed in a way to make your blog look and work like a fully functioning website.  WordPress is so advanced that it's not use for just blogging anymore, you can use it for eCommerce and other various websites as well, all while your visitors are unaware of the WordPress CMS powering everything

You can go with a premium theme right off the bat, or you can start off with the more basic free themes that are provided to you after you upload WordPress to your cpanel.  The free themes don't look great, but they will let you get familiar with how everything works prior to investing more money into your blog or website


Writing the content
When it comes to writing up your blog posts and content, it can get pretty over bearing if you're writing for profits.  If you're a casual blogger and don't want to get a ton of traffic and sales, it will be easier on you to post content since you won't be worrying about how many sales you'll make from each post after it ranks within the search engines.

If you're writing for profits, you'll want to be writing at least a few times a week and optimizing your content for the search engines.  You don't want to optimize too much and make the content unreadable, you want to optimize just enough so your readers love your content and the search engines can place you within their rankings accordingly (hopefully #1 lol).

If you don't have time to write up your own content, you can always outsource it to a credible writer (like myself ).  If you do a basic search here on SEOclerks, you can find a ton of great writers who can get content written up for various niches.  Just be sure to do your due diligence so you know you're paying for high quality content that is sure to bring in the readers due to getting your rankings bumped up from the article being perfectly optimized


Staying consistent with your posts
A problem with a lot of bloggers is that the content they are posting isn't consistent.  Your readers want to see new content coming in consistently, not once a day and then you decide to take a break for 3 months.  If the content isn't consistent, the search engines won't see you as an authority and rank you in the top of their results pages.  Not being ranked near the top of the results means you will be losing a ton of traffic, so you need to be writing.

You can outsource the work, like I mentioned before, or you can sit down and write up a bunch of posts in the beginning of the month and schedule them so they go out on certain days.  Scheduling is a great thing when it comes to blog posts, because you can do one day of work and have it scheduled out over the next week or month.  I actually write up 20-30 articles a week for one of my websites and schedule them over the entire month.  Doing this allows me to focus on other aspects of my website, like increasing my conversion rates or my ad campaigns


Getting your visitors to engage
This is a must if you're blogging for profits!  If you're not getting your visitors to engage with your posts, you can kiss the majority of your profits goodbye.  This is because people are coming to your blog and leaving before they comment or engage with something else on your website.

Increase your engagement by asking questions that are enticing enough for someone to want to comment.  They will likely have to make an account on your website, but that's pretty normal so they won't get discouraged at this point.  You will need to streamline everything so the person can easily comment after making their account, otherwise they will get discouraged and leave   You could also make it open to comment, but you'll get a lot of spam if you do because everyone and their grandmother can write a comment on each of your posts lol.



In Conclusion:
Above I talked about the most common challenges a blogger will face when they start their blogging journey.  Most of them will seem obvious to anyone who has ran, or is running, their own blog or blogs, but the newbie blogger will hit some walls that I hope they can overcome after reading this discussion.  Picking a domain name seems obvious, but it's not if you plan on branding it later.  Most people opt for WordPress because it's the leader in bloggin at the moment, and newbies might not know that.  Writing your own content can get overbearing so you might have to outsource the work, don't think this is you being defeated, because plenty of us outsource our own work eventhough we can easily do it ourselves lol




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Thanks!

Razzy