Bondox's Ramblings

The task of creating a new blog can be daunting sometimes for a newbie. If you are new to the internet, probably you are only interested in checking your email and nothing else concerns you about the internet, then creating a blog might be a serious challenge to you. Reasons for creating a blog are numerous.

There are hundreds of tutorial articles, blog posts and even websites dedicated to teaching newbie how to create their own blog themselves. No need to hire anyone to this for you because they will charge you exorbitant fees. Learn how you can create your own blog within 5 minutes by watching video tutorials on Youtube.

This post is to give you insight about the steps you should follow if you plan to have a successful blog with full authority online. As all blogging coaches will say, your success in blogging depends solely on your passion which means that this post is about creating a blog around what you love doing.

Following the steps below will help you in your quest of building a successful blog.

Step 1: Choose your specific topic to blog about

This step has been the major step all new blogger should understand very well. Before you can start a blog, you need to have something to blog about. What your blog is created for is your blog topic. All articles you post on your blog should be around this main topic.

Choosing a blog topic can look so difficult at start but if you get down with it by doing a research around your passion, your interests, your life and even your environment, you’ll discover a niche (topic) you can write multiple articles on. Choosing a topic to blog about is a separate tutorial on its own.

Step 2: Choose your desired blogging tool

There’s not much to discuss here, I just added this step for you to know that choosing a blogging platform too has a lot to do with your success as a blogger. If you choose a platform you are not familiar with, you might find it difficult to develop yourself at the pace you need to.

There are 2 major blogging platforms; Blogger and Wordpress. Some other platforms we have are Joomla, Livejournal, Moving Type, and on like that. The number of blogging platforms should amount into hundreds. The two widely used platforms (Blogger and Wordpress) are popular because of the functionality, universal acceptability and also because of the simplicity they offer their users.

I was using Wordpress before I moved to blogger after so many issues with my hosting company. I used the self hosted wordpress because of its ability to accept 3rd party plugins to increase its functionality. Whatever function you want with Wordpress that is not available on the platform will definitely be available as a plugin. On the other hand, Google owns Blogger so its users use it because of its easy implementation of their Ad revenue sharing program (Adsense).

So the platform you choose depends on what you want. You can explore the two platforms or even other ones listed above and see if they suites your purpose for creating a blog.

Step 3: Write informative content around your blog topic

You should know this for sure that only a blog with information will gain authority in its chosen niche. Once you are through with step 1 and 2, the next thing to do is to write informative articles tagged around your blog topic. The more informative your articles are, the more trust your readers will have in you and the more authority you command in your niche.

Informative articles are also called pillar articles. Articles that educate or ones that solve problems for your readers are wonderful. Like the one you are reading, it is a pillar article. How-To articles, bulleted articles, important news that will interest your readers are what you should write about. And note that, the articles must have one or two things related to your blog niche so as not to feed your readers with what they do not want.

Step 4: Do the Dos

Do the Dos of blogging

Step 5: Avoid the Don’ts

And lastly avoid the Don'ts of blogging

Having said all these, the next step has to do with your passion for success. Go on and build something you’ll always be remembered for. A successful blog is a result of endless effort of the blogger to build an authority. Blogging is fun, exciting and educative. And lastly it’s a business that gives dividends for an active blogger.

Do you have any other important step to creating a successful blog that are not listed here? Then you can contribute by posting them in the comment section. The post is opened to comments.

As we have Dos in Blogging, so we have Don’ts. There are couple of them you have to avoid in order to build a successful blog no matter what. Being a professional blogger need discipline. You have to keep a list of what you need to do frequently on your blog and also what you need to avoid no matter what.

I have compiled these Don'ts so that you need to avoid them:

Don’t 1. Don’t Spam other Blogs: When commenting on other blogs, don’t spam their blogs with URLS. One URL is fine, two is too much, three is spamming. You’ll easily lose your reputation if you engage in spamming. No one in the blogosphere will take you serious.

Don’t 2. Don’t be Abusive: Some readers can post a provocative comment, shake them off and handle such smartly. Don’t insult or abuse any reader whatsoever. No one will forgive you if you make this mistake.

Don’t 3. Don’t be neutral: Before posting a comment on a blog, you should read the main blog post and comment based on your own opinion. Don’t leave a neutral comment under a blog post that needs your contribution. Participate actively on blogs, don’t just be a “no opinion” type. Also, don’t leave a thoughtless comment. Nobody will visit your blog from such comment.

Don’t 4. Don’t lift blogs’ content: Getting fresh content for your blog can be a huge task for you. You might sometime want to reference an article from another blogger’s blog when you have nothing to right about, when doing that, try as much as possible not to edit the article to avoid violating the copyright law and also leave a link back to the author’s article as compensation for the article (it is compulsory). Plagiarism is a serious offence in blogging. You dare not do it if you don’t want to lose your credibility.

Don’t 5. Don’t write your content for Engines: Search engines (SEs) don’t fetch you money, they fetch you traffic and if you write for SEs and not your readers, you’ll lose all traffic they sent you. This means that, write interesting articles that readers will enjoy reading. You should not satisfy search engines at the expense of your readers. Write more for your readers than search engines.

Don’t 6. Don’t blog for Money: You are surprised at this last don’t, isn’t it? Well to be honest, don’t blog for money, if you do, you’ll get discouraged along the line if the money never come. If you blog for authority, certainly the money (revenue) will come in. If gaining authority is your main purpose of blogging, you’ll never be discouraged. For your success’ sake, just don’t blog for money, blog to build a brand, an authority.

With all the aforementioned, I think we can all review how we blog. We need to look into how we blog so as not to loose in the long run. Not all bloggers follow this strictly but if you do, you will reap the fruit handsomely.

Lastly do the dos... Avoid the donts. Do you have any other thing bloggers need to avoid? Post them in your comments