March 4

Is This The First Thing That You Should Do When You Want To Blog?

4  comments

Since I love blogging and blog about blogging, I figure that it is important that I Google around about blogging too.

Did you see what I did right there? I fit that word into one sentence four times. Right on!

So when I did this, I started reading other people's blogging tips. There are some amazing list of blogging tips out there. Some folks have 50 tips on blogging and 29 tips on blogging. Heck I even did a post once of 85 tips on blogging.

This got me to thinking that it may be a total blast to read these tips and then create mini podcast episodes about them. I will tell you the ones that stick out to me and what I think about them. We can learn even more about blogging together.

So this is part 1 in the other peoples blogging tips series. What do you think of that title?

This first tip comes from Stylcaster .

Jasmine Garnsworthy wrote this post of 50 essential tips to get started blogging.

1. Choose your blog name.

Coming up with a name for your blog is actually way harder than it sounds. You need something short and snappy that will resonate with your readers and make sense based on the content you plan to produce.

Make sure your name is available on all social media sites and the blogging platform you want to use. If you plan on paying for a personalized URL (like http://www.stylecaster.com) rather than the URL generated by your free blogging service (more on that below), also check to see if the URL is available. You can check this by typing in your desired name at GoDaddy. This site will let you know if the name’s free, and give similar alternatives if it isn’t. It might be a good idea to buy your domain name straight away–through a site like GoDaddy–even if you don’t intend on building a fancy website. Otherwise, someone else might snap it up.

A Great Tip But....

Well, I think that this is a great tip but I would not say it is the first step to blogging.

Do you know what you are going to blog about?

I believe that the first step to blogging is figuring out what the heck that you are going to blog about. To be fair, she may have assumed that you already have that answer.

So if you got that blogging idea, go ahead and write it down.​

But let me go a bit deeper here.

Once you think that you know what you want to blog about, you gotta start confirming that.

How do you confirm that? Well, my advice is to start mapping out the site. See when I started my new tutorial site BlogBuildTips.com I started with an idea and then I created a sitemap. I need to have a list of high level topics. Then I needed to come up with "working" blog post titles. Once I had that, then I could think about a blog name.

The reason that I put these steps first is that if we have a desire to blog, this means that likely have quite a few topics floating around in our heads. Here is a short list of things that I would currently love to blog about:

1. Office Products (I just love them so much).

2. Quitting Sugar (yes, I am torturing myself).

3. My random thoughts on politics

4. A blog full of free images that I created.

5. A blog full of memes

6. How to use Photoshop

These are great blog post ideas but terrible for me (feel free to steal them).

Ok so I could go on and on and on but I won't. So why don't I create blogs about these things? Well there are two primary reasons. The first is, I don't know enough about any of those things to justify a new blog. The second is, that we have to use our time wisely. These topics are not the best use of my time right now.

There are topics that I do know about. There are topics such as WordPress Plugins and Blogging that I can add value with my posts.

So If I went off on a wild goose chase every single time that I had an idea, I would just be collecting domain names.

Now with all of that said, if you already have that topic or you have something that you burn for deeply and you are committed. Then go define those categories, go pre-write 50 blog post titles and then follow Jasmine's tip here.

Conclusion

The best part of her tip by the way is that she urges you to search social accounts and domains at the same time. When I picked ITeachBlogging.com I first looked on Twitter. I wanted to make sure that I could own anything and everything with that name. This is why I just created a SnapChat account. I don't really Snap just yet but no one else can do it in my name now.

By the way, you should check out her post. It has some great tips and we will discuss more of them in the future.

[adrotate banner="5"]


Tags

Blogging tips, How to start a blog


You may also like

Let’s talk about revenue

Let’s talk about revenue

Are You Willing?

Are You Willing?
Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked

  1. This thought process is exactly why I don’t have a million blogs. There’s any huge number of things I could write about and get a few posts but after a while, the content well would run dry. And, honestly, not enough people want to read about x, y, or z for it to even be worth my time. Great tip here and great post expanding on it!

    xoxo,
    Dannie
    http://www.stilefotocibo.com

{"email":"Email address invalid","url":"Website address invalid","required":"Required field missing"}

Get in touch

Name*
Email*
Message
0 of 350