Blogging Guide - 6 Steps to Start a Blog the Right Way

If you are new to blogging, you need to do a bit of research before you start your first blog to make sure you don't make the common mistakes made by most bloggers when they are new to blogging. Here are the 6 steps of basic outline that you need to do when starting a blog.

Step 1: Pick blog's topic

What is your blog about? You can either choose to write on multiple topics or focus on particular topic, each has its pro and con. Writing on multiple topics enabled you to attract wider range of readers, but you may upset some readers each time you change topic. On the other hand, if you focus on a particular topic, you may attract particular interest group who found you because of a specific topic you were writing about.

If you are blogging for fun, then writing on multiple topics does not really matter because you are doing it for fun. However, if you are writing for the purpose of driving traffic for a business, then your blog posts should be more focus on topics that are related to your business so that you can drive more targeted web traffic to boost the business.

Step 2: Pick a blogging system

After picking a topic, the next step is figuring out what blogging system best suit you. There are many blogging systems available which you can use to start a blog, among them are: Blogger owned by Google, WordPress, TypePad, Drupal. Each blogging system has it features that can benefit you, you should do some research to find the one that best suit your personality.

Step 3: Select a domain name

Although you can use the free blog URL, but if you are planning to drive serious web traffic, then buying a right domain name is essential. You should put some efforts in finding a right domain name for your blog because it makes different when comes to the search engine optimization. Good domain name should integrate with your main targeted keywords so that it is search-engine friendly.

Step 4: Pick a template for your blog

The outlook of your blog is important to give a good first impression for new visitors and get them to revisit your blog in the future. If you are driving traffic to a money-making website, then the blog template you choose should match the look of your website in term of colors and fonts. You can either choose a designer to custom-made the template, or get a ready-made professional template that is available at a fraction cost or even free.

Step 5: Set up to be search engine friendly

Most of internet surfers land on a page through search engines. Besides getting traffic from paid advertising and links from other sites, you don't want to waste the potential free traffic from search engines. Hence, you should make your blog to be as search-engine friendly as possible. Blog title, post title, image tags are among the key areas you need to focus on and integrate the major keywords into these areas so that you can get good search position on your targeted keywords. In addition, when writing blog posts you should using the keyword or keyword phrase you want to rank for at least 5 to 10 times throughout the blog post.

Step 6: Getting backlinks

Backlinks or incoming links from other website/blog to a blog is an important factor that determines the blog search engine positioning. Hence, once you have your blog set up, the next important thing you should do is getting as many backlinks as possible from other blogs or websites. There are many ways to get other websites to link to your blog, among them are: article submissions to article directories, writing comments at other people's blog, ask questions on websites such as Yahoo Answer, getting links from social networking sites such as YouTube, Facebook, Twitter & MySpace.

Summary

There are the 6 steps of basic outline that you need to do when starting a blog. Following these steps help to get your blog to a success level faster by avoiding the common mistakes made by most bloggers.