Tips for Blogging Newbies – Tip #1 ~ Research & Decisions

Posted January 31, 2014 by Emily in Blogging Tips and Tricks / 2 Comments

I was once a newbie to blogging. Sometimes I still consider myself one. However, I have learned a few tips that I figured I’d share.

Research

I know, I know, it sounds stupid, and you probably do a lot of research already. But seriously doing some extra research won’t hurt. Honestly, it’s something I wish I did before I started blogging. I just jumped right into it and thought “research is for losers”. BIG MISTAKE. It’s one of the things I would redo if I could go back in time. My advise is for you to visit other blogs. All different kinds of blogs, even some of the ones that aren’t book related. Visit the popular ones. Visit the newer ones. Just see what other people are doing and how they are doing it.

To help you, I’ll tell you a few things I wish I learned before I started blogging.

The commitment – blogging takes a LOT of time, if you want to run a successful blog.
Social media is necessary. How else are you going to reach new readers?
Ways to follow
Design – like which platform would work for you the best
RELAX AND HAVE FUN!!!!

Decisions

Another key aspect of blogging for beginners are the decisions that need to be made.

To start of you need to decide

on a name for your blog
if you are going to use an alias and what would it be (I kind of use one)
where you are going to host your blog

The name of your blog is very important. It’s what people are going to know you by. Think of your blog as a future brand. The name you come up with will be the one everyone knows. It is CRUCIAL that you pick a name you like, as it would involve a lot of work if you want to change it later. Having trouble on deciding on a name? Ashley at Nose Graze has some really good pointers for how to choose a good blog name.

As for the alias part, like your blog name, it probably would be difficult to change later on. There are a lot of reasons on why one would choose to use an alias. I sort of use one. My name is Emily, but how many people in the world are named Emily? The answer is A LOT. So in an attempt to be more unique, I chose to blog under the name Emz, a nickname for Emily. Now people can’t get me mixed up with all the other bloggers named Emily. That’s just one example.

Another thing you must choose is where to host your blog. This would be a good thing to do a little research on. The most popular blog hosting sites are Blogger and WordPress.com. Both of them are free. Blogger is owned by Google so if you have a gmail, you don’t need to go through an extra registration process. Also, Blogger lets you change your theme (design) while there are a few restrictions on WordPress.com. WordPress.com is not to be confused with WordPress.org, which is a paid service. (There are premium accounts on WordPress.com too). TIME TO DO RESEARCH….

Have any questions?

Ask them in the comments!

I’ll try my best to answer them.