Blogging For Beginners: Setting Up Your Blog For Success (+ Free Blogging Checklist)

Blogging can be overwhelming, especially for beginners. It is with everything we learn: It is confusing and frustrating at first.
You do something completely new, but when you set up your blog and learn a few basics, it gets easier and easier.

And then you will start to enjoy blogging – if and only if – you set up your blog for success from the beginning on.

What I learned and recognized with new bloggers is that they want to save money at all costs and I totally get it. You don’t want to invest in something if you don’t know if it will work out or not.

And while blogging is gladly not very expensive there are still some things you should consider and purchase because they will save you a lot of headache, frustration, time, energy, and also money in the long run.

If you want to start blogging and make money with it, there are some things you better do right from the beginning on.

I can tell you from my own experience that I wish I invested in some blogging tools and resources from the beginning on instead of finding free ones.

And to learn from people who know what they are talking about.

Later, when I started monetizing my blog, I figured out that the free ones haven’t been very helpful and that it cost me a loooooot of time and energy to change things on my website.

Of course, you don’t need anything and everything that’s sold out there on the internet but there are a few resources you definitely need to succeed as a blogger and which I can highly recommend.

Btw, it’s not as costly as it sounds.

Investing in the right resources is very important, but there are other things to consider that have nothing to do with investing in your blog.

I’m talking about getting clear about why you want to start and grow a blog and how you plan on doing so.

Contents

How To Set Up Your Blog For Success

Before you start blogging you have to define what success means to you.

Are you going after traffic (visitors and page views) because you want to sell ads or do advertorials and collaborations? Do you want to create your own courses or programs and sell them? Do you want to sell other courses and products as an affiliate?

(No idea what I’m talking about? Read more about it here)

Or is it your main goal to make as much money as possible as early as possible?

Whatever you choose, the strategy is different and you need to be crystal clear about what you want to achieve. The earlier, the better.

I created a blogging checklist you can download that gives you an outline of what you need to do step by step to set your blog and your blogging adventure up for success.

Besides the step-by-step checklist, I also included links to resources, step-by-step guides, and helpful tools you will need.

You can download it here:

Setting Up Your Blog For Success: Start Your Blog

I don’t want to go into all the details about how exactly you start your own blog. You will find the checklist for starting a blog inside the blogging checklist and also in my detailed step-by-step guide about how to start a blog. (It is called “How To Start A Travel Blog” but it is not only for travel blogging, but it works the same for every niche).

Setting Up Your Blog For Success: Get Your Legal Ducks In A Row

While this is not a very sexy topic it is one of the most important things you have to include in your website/blog: privacy policy, disclaimer, GDPR, etc.

These pages are legally required and I have an amazing resource for you where you can learn more about it and get the templates you need. They are created by a lawyer who is also a blogger and who specializes in the legal stuff you need for your website, blog, and online presence.

You can learn more about it here.

Setting Up Your Blog For Success: Create A Blogging Plan

As a new blogger, it is very helpful to create a plan (blogging calendar).
A plan about what you want to publish, when, and how often.

A plan about which categories you want to fill (e.g. about a specific destination if you write about traveling,…).

A plan about when and where you want to share your blog posts on the different social media channels and so on.

I think you get it. Create an outline of what you want to achieve and don’t overwhelm yourself. Don’t put too much on your blogging calendar because if it overwhelms you, you eventually stop working on it at all. If you need help about how to create a blogging plan and creating and batching content you can read more about it here: creating and batching content like a pro

Setting Up Your Blog For Success: Learn All About SEO

SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) is the key to bringing in more traffic (readers) to your blog. In my experience it is the best way to have constant organic traffic from Google.

If you do it right, your blog traffic increases steadily.

It’s important to learn at least the basics of SEO and how to find keywords lots of people search for. Also, you want to know, especially as a new blogger, if you can rank for them. If you have to compete with big and strong sites for the same topic, it will be very hard to rank among them.

Your goal with your blog posts is to appear on page 1 in Google. The more people see your blog post the more people will read it.
The best tool out there to find keywords for your future blog posts, which is at the same time affordable, is Keysearch.

I personally use it for every blog post I write, and love it, because it is easy to use once you know how it works, and it is cheap.

They also have tutorials on how to work and use Keysearch. If you decide to give it a try and enter KSDISC, you will receive a 20% discount. Once you know which keywords to use in your blog post you can then write your article.

The next step is to install the YOAST Plugin inside WordPress. (If you want to learn how to do so, read more about it here.)

There’s definitely more about SEO you need to know, but this is a good starting point. I will give you more details about SEO in future articles.

(If you sign up and download the blogging checklist you will receive future articles about blogging, SEO, and everything you need to know about becoming a successful blogger.)

Setting Up Your Blog For Success: Social Media And Marketing

Besides writing your blog posts with SEO in mind (and of course your reader), you need to market your articles by sharing them on social media platforms.

I recommend signing up for the most popular social media platforms and then concentrating on one platform until you feel like you mastered it. Then you can start using the next platform and so on. If you start right away with all of the social media platforms that are interesting for you, it can be quite overwhelming.

My favorite platform is Pinterest. Pinterest is not really a social media platform. It is more of a visual search engine and most bloggers (myself included) receive besides Google most of their traffic from Pinterest.

Depending on your topics and your readers you will have to try out which social media platforms work the best for you. Your goal is to get readers to your blog.

Especially if you want to make money with your blog you want to invest time in social media platforms that help you to bring readers to your blog.

So test which platforms work the best for you and concentrate on them.

Setting Up Your Blog For Success: Blog + Repeat

So this is an outline of how you can set up your blog for success.

You find all the necessary steps in the blogging checklist. There are also helpful links included to articles and tutorials that explain in detail how it works.

One last thing: Be patient! It takes at least six months until you will see some results and get organic traffic from search engines like Google.

Don’t give up too early. Rome wasn’t built in a day either.

Save on Pinterest:

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zuletzt aktualisiert am February 6, 2023