The starting of a blog or website is highly valuable because you need to make a lot of important decisions regarding your blog. And these decisions will have a huge impact on the long-term success of your blog. These decisions can make difference between your blog being a successful one or just being ignored. You must give attention while making these decisions to cripple your chances of building an effective website.
Here are 7 things that you must consider when you start your new blog. These things are going to determine between your success and failure in blogging.
1. Buy Your Own Domain
If you want to take blogging seriously, you must buy your own domain. Having your own domain name means having your own brand on the internet. It’s like a piece of land that you personally own. Many blogging platforms like Google Blogger and WordPress will offer you a free sub-domain. Even some web hosting services also offer domain for free if you buy their services. But domain names are so inexpensive nowadays that there’s no reason to not buy your own one. You can buy a good domain for less than $10 a year. Your domain name is crucial for being able to establish your authority in blogging.
2. Get the Right Domain
Buying the wrong domain is almost as bad as not buying one at all. Your domain name should be short and simple, easy to remember and most importantly relevant to your blog topic. But unfortunately, finding the right domain name today is not an easy task. And it’s the hardest job if you want a .com domain. It would be better for you to get a .com domain, but if it becomes too long to remember than go for a .net or .org domain. Have a reliable and popular domain extension rather than unpopular and country domain extensions. If possible, choose a one or two word domain without having numbers or hyphens.
3. Buy Your Own Web Hosting
Having your own web hosting is as important as having your own domain. Many aspiring blog owners are tempted by free hosting company when starting a new blog, but this can have serious consequences. Free hosting will be slow and will most likely include ads on your blog that you have no control over. Your blog can go down because of a free hosting. Even a low cost hosting can have many draw backs. Many low priced hosting tends to be slow and the customer service and support will almost certainly be inadequate. You don’t need to spend a huge amount of money for buying a quality hosting service. In fact, quality services are very reasonably priced.
4. Design for Your Visitors
Make your blog user friendly. Design your blog or website prioritizing your visitors, not search engines. In attempt to gain strong search engine rankings, the human visitor is often forgotten. Don’t prioritize search engine spiders over your visitors. It’s possible to design a user-friendly website that is still search engine-friendly. If your website or blog satisfies its visitors the traffic will come, and most likely so will search engine rankings.
5. Prioritize the Content
Everyone knows that the content is the king. But a lot of new bloggers get excited about the new site and forget that the content is what will ultimately determine its success. It’s necessary for a blog to look good, but the content of the blog shouldn’t suffer at the expense of its appearance. Minimalistic designs are becoming increasingly popular, and one of the biggest reasons is that they allow for the content to be the focal point. You must give more priority to the content you create because it’s the content that the readers come for.
6. Prioritize the Target Market
Every website or blog is created for some target audience. Try to always keep them in mind as you are creating your own blog. In order to make your blog a success, you’ll need to provide them with what they want. It’s easy to forget about your target market and design the blog how you like it, but what really matters is what your target market will think. Anticipate what they will be looking for at your blog and find a way to meet their needs.
7. Target the Right Keyword
Using the right keywords and phrases is an important part of attracting new visitors. In most cases some research will be necessary to find the best words and phrases to target. Make use of the targeted keywords. Instead of targeting hundreds of ineffective keywords, make use of few effective ones. Don’t use keywords that are not related to your blog topic just to attract visitors. This practice will have a bad impact on your blog’s success.
There are other things that also deserve your attention when you start your brand new blog. But these are the major things to consider. What about you? Share your valuable idea on this subject with us.
