Have you been thinking about starting your very own blog lately?

These days, anyone, from any background can start a blog using nothing but a few simple steps and a free account. Not only is blogging a great marketing tool, but it can also be a powerful source of income for people who want to work online.
However, if you want your blog to be as profitable and successful as possible, then you need to make sure that you know what you’re doing from step one. Here, we’re going to look at just 10 of the things you’ll need to think about when you’re starting your own blog.

1. Blogging Requires Dedication

Before you start blogging, it’s important to ask yourself why you’re going to blog in the first place. If your goal is exclusively to make money online, then blogging might not be the best choice for you. There are plenty of ways to make cash online, and blogging requires a lot of time and effort if you want to grow a powerful audience.

2. Blogging Isn’t Free

There are plenty of blogging platforms out there like Tumblr, WordPress, and Medium that are all free. However, if you choose to start a free blog, then you won’t officially own your website, and that means that you’re going to have some limitations you’ll need to work with. If you want more flexibility with your designs, and a great web address, combined with plenty of monetization opportunities, then you’ll need to think about hosting your own blog.

3. Know Your Audience

If you want your blog to be a success then you need to know what you’re going to be writing about, and who you’re going to be writing for. There are already a lot of blogs out there, so you’ll need to think about how you can make yourself stand out from the crowd. Choose a topic you feel passionately about, and define your target audience, then try to speak to those customers with what you write.

4. Quality is Crucial

The important thing to remember when you start blogging is that you need a careful combination of both quality and quantity if you want to be successful. While quantity is key if you want to be recognised by the search engines, you’ll also need to devote yourself to quality if you want to keep your readers around for as long as possible.

5. Be Social!

In today’s saturated marketing world, it isn’t enough to simply write great content and expect your customers to find it. When your blog is new, nobody is going to find your articles on the search engines. Instead, you’ll need to think about how you can create traffic proactively. One of the best ways to do this is by using social media to promote your posts.

6. Know the Basics of HTML

Because the internet is littered with simple and powerful blogging platforms, CSS, and HTML knowledge doesn’t have to be an essential for everyone. It’s possible to customize plugins and themes without ever having to look at any code. Still, basic understanding of HTML can help you to achieve exceptional things when it comes to editing the appearance of articles by hand or fixing simple errors.

7. Make Sure You Know SEO

Learning the basics of Search Engine Optimisation can be essential when you want to use your blog as a way of generating income. Search engine traffic can be essential to long-term growth, and knowing even a few simple tips about SEO could help you to become more successful in the long term. There are plenty of articles out there that are sure to tell you everything you need to know about optimising your website.

8. Understand Copyright

When you start blogging, you need to make sure that you understand what you have to do when someone steals the content you produce without your permission. This can happen more often than you might think, and it’s a good idea to figure out how you can protect your images and articles.

9. Design is Crucial

The design of your blog can determine whether someone chooses to read your content or not. It’s one of the many elements that determines the first impression a customer gets of your brand. If your blog is hard to read, then people won’t trust your company, and they’ll be more likely to go searching elsewhere for the information they need.

10. Be Authentic

Finally, if you really want your blog to be successful, then you’ll need to build a relationship with your target audience. Often, this means using your content to show your human side, and prove to your audience that you’re worthy of their attention and trust.