6 simple steps to create a professional blog

In 2006, Brian Clark started creating a simple blog about content marketing under the name "Copyblogger" and continued to provide useful content, with the aim of satisfying the needs of his audience of marketers and solving the problems facing them. In a few years the blog has grown into a behemoth with three brands, generating more than $ 12 million in annual profits. 

This story inspires any new blogger aspiring to create a professional blog that might someday be his life's most successful project. So, in this article, we will move with you step-by-step to your journey in the world of blogging, and we will talk in detail about the challenges that you will face as a blogger, and how you turned your big, mysterious dream into an interesting and useful digital reality.

Featured topic: The cornerstone of creating a professional blog

The truth that you should know is that it is not necessary to be an expert in the topic of your new blog, but it is sufficient to have a love and interest in this topic so that you will not get bored of repeatedly talking about it. Your personal experiences as an amateur, which may be tainted by mistakes, are of value in the blogosphere, as many readers search blogging content for a personal imprint of things.

For example, if you intend to create a blog about exercising, readers will not be drawn to systematic academic content about exercising. Rather, they would prefer learning about your experience of playing sports, and how much weight have you lost? What are the methods that you tried and failed in the beginning, until you reached where you are now? If you are still confused about choosing a blog topic, consider the following three areas that are very popular in the blogosphere:      

Hobbies and interests

Think about your hobbies and interests, for example: sports, politics, cars, art, humor, history, games, cooking, fashion, beauty, education, decoration, photography, books and reading. Although they are all popular hobbies, your hobby, no matter how unusual it is, may be a successful topic for your blog.

life experiences

Each of us has his own life experiences through which he learned many lessons, and sharing these experiences with readers will be more beneficial than you expect. For example: travel and parenting experiences, philanthropy, internet work experiences and interacting with clients, home learning experiences, etc.

Diary and Thoughts

This type of blog is about everything about you, and includes a variety of topics from your daily habits from the beginning of the day to the end, to your random reflections and thoughts about anything. And it's an easy way to share your thoughts with the world without you having to create a blog on just one topic.

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It is not a requirement that you choose only one topic for your blog, you can combine more than one topic, and there is no obligation to continue blogging on a topic forever, at any time you can change the topic of your blog to another topic you prefer, and you can try more than one topic until you reach Topic you enjoy writing and learning more about.

Specify the name and domain of the blog

After you've chosen your blog topic, it's time to name the newborn baby! If you choose a specific topic to be the focus of the blogging, then the blog name should include that topic in some way. Do not limit your choices to a single word, for example; If the blog is about cars, the title doesn't necessarily include the word car. Words like “drive,” “auto,” “motor,” will also tell people that your blog is about cars.

But if you decided upon creating the blog to discuss more than one topic, it would be appropriate for the title to include your name, nickname, or something that refers to you personally. The next step when creating a blog is choosing a domain name , and here are these tips to help you:

• Choose a domain that makes sense for the user, which means that it is related to the name of the blog.
• Make it easy to write, and as brief as possible, so that visitors do not mistake it.
• Write it without misspellings and do not use well-known brand names.
• If the domain name you chose is not available, try another extension like (.net) or (.org).

Choose a suitable platform for creating a professional blog

The next important decision that you should make is choosing the platform that will host your new blog, and among the most common platforms that you will hear about are: Blogger and WordPress . We will not go through the detailed steps for creating the blog, as they both explain that in detail, but we will help you to decide which one is most appropriate for you according to your needs:

WordPress :

WordPress is a free blogging platform, but it offers some advanced paid options, requires more time to install, provides a fleet of plugins and custom templates, and many of them are free, and is the most appropriate option if you intend to enlarge your blog and add new features to it.

Blogger :

Blogger is a simple free blogging platform with largely basic and limited customization options, which makes it best suited to blogging about personal hobbies. Blogger is a platform owned by Google, so by using your Google account you will be able to create a blog instantly without worrying about any technical complications.

After creating a featured blog: write professional content

When creating a new blog it is imperative that you know some basic practices for writing professional articles and blogs , here are some tips to help you:

• Choose the topics people are looking for an answer to, or use content idea generation tools . Find the answer and offer it in depth and helpful.
• Offer high-quality content that increases your readers' confidence.
• Use storytelling techniques to grab the reader's attention, especially in the introduction to the article. 
• Use photos and videos and format content in an organized way that makes it easy for your visitor to read.

Don't lose sight of SEO for your blog content

Appearing in Google search results is very important when creating a blog, as it is an essential way to constantly attract new visitors to your blog. Improving your visibility in Google search results is referred to as search engine optimization (SEO) . From now on, be a friend of SEO as it is your gateway to appearing in Google search results. In the following points, we will show you the most important SEO techniques you need to improve the visibility of your posts in search results:

1. Use your keywords efficiently

Use the Google Trends tool to search for topics related to your blog that your audience is interested in, write a post about one of these topics, and use that topic as a keyword to focus on in your blog, along with secondary keywords.

For example , the topic of the blog might be "designing a children's room," and thus this is the main keyword, along with secondary keywords such as: "designing a modern children's room" and "designing a girls' room." To learn more about how to choose keywords, read this article: Your Comprehensive Guide to Keyword Selection Effectively 

2. Choose an attractive headline

Title is the most important component of your blog post, and choosing a catchy headline is an important skill you should master when creating your blog. The title that does not attract the user will not encourage him to click and read the content, at the same time the title should include the keyword in order to help the search engine to understand the content of the post.

The types of posts that attract readers include: questions, lists, secrets and mistakes, and learning how. While finalizing the title, keep the title natural, relevant, and clear to the readers, and make sure that the number of characters does not exceed 60 characters, as this is the number of characters that appear in the search results without truncation.

3. Write a description for the post

A post description (Meta Description) is the content that appears below the title in the search results to briefly describe the post. So, write a description of the blog that is no longer than 160 characters that catches the reader's interest and includes the keyword.

4. Improve user experience

Google revolves with the user experience as it goes, and at a time when the blog will provide a good user experience, the search engine will reward it with a higher ranking in the search results, for that:

• Organize your posts into categories so that users can easily find posts on a topic of interest.
• Reduce the number of ads, as the many ads annoy the reader and may prompt him to leave the blog quickly, and prolong the time of page loading, so show a maximum of 3 ads in your blog.
• Test the speed of your blog, the Internet means speed, and if the speed of your blog decreases, there will be problems with browsing for the user. Use Google PageSpeed ​​Insights to check your blog's speed, and within seconds the tool will show you a detailed report on which blog components need improvement.
• Use internal links, as readers prefer internal links in the article if they are useful and relevant to the content, which made the search engine prefer them also and use them as a factor to improve the ranking of the page in search results. Link your previous posts to the blog post in a useful way if the context needs to do so.
• Small size of images. The images are large in size, although they are high-resolution, but they slow down the loading of blog pages, and the solution here is to use one of the image compression sites such as iLoveIMG and TinyPNG that reduce the size of the images significantly and maintain their quality.
• Format internal addresses. Internal headings help the reader navigate the content in an easier and clearer way, and by including subheadings your keywords, you will also help the search engine to understand the content of the post.

Promote the blog

The great content that you create on your blog is not enough for blog marketing alone, as you should devote some of your effort towards marketing your blog as an essential step in creating a blog. Fortunately, most of the effective methods of blog marketing are free:

Email marketing

Encouraging readers to visit the blog again is important because it helps convert casual visitors into true blog followers who come back over and over again. The most appropriate way to do this is by email marketing . Collect the e-mail addresses of visitors after obtaining their permission, and send them mail messages from time to time with the latest blog posts.

Marketing through social media

Share your posts up-to-date on your various social accounts , do not be lazy about performing this step, believing that you have just finished creating a blog that is still not professional, and that your first posts may not be of interest to many, you may be surprised by the degree of interaction with the post and the participation of interested people with their friends .

Guest posts

Contact the owners of other blogs and offer them to post a post on their sites. Submit through the blog high-quality content and place a link that leads to your blog in the folds of the content. This step holds the opportunity to get traffic from your blog host audience to read more of your helpful content. To find popular blogs that accept guest postings, browse promotional articles services and post on Fives.

Internet forums

Join the membership of popular forums related to your blog topic, add your blog link to your forum profile, then write helpful posts that make forum members want to visit your blog.

Publication Continuity

In 2015, a blogger named Robert Ryan conducted an experiment to test the effect of stopping blogging on the number of visits to his blog. He stopped posting new posts on his blog for 251 days, which led to a 32% drop in traffic. Therefore, keep blogging constantly so that your blog does not go into the darkness of forgetting followers, publish a blog at least once a week, and keep a reserve blogging balance if you are exposed to emergency circumstances that prevented you from blogging such as travel or illness.

Blog marketing represents the ultimate goal of creating a blog for some bloggers, so all they want is to provide an opportunity for others to read their thoughts and engage in a community with similar interests, but your success in gaining real followers for your blog carries an opportunity for you to make a profit from blogging, which is the next step And last.

How to make money from creating your own blog?

There are three main ways to profit from your blog:

Providing consulting or services

We previously discussed email marketing as an important marketing method to get a permanent following, and it is the same method that will help you make profits from creating a blog. The list of email addresses you have gathered will allow you to contact your followers again and again. 

In addition to the e-mails that you send to your followers with your latest posts, you can offer your services or announce the provision of consultations in mail messages over a long period of time so as not to cause inconvenience to readers. For example, if you have coaching experience and a sports blog, offer followers a personal coaching service.

Blog ads

After you build a large base of readers, you will be able to earn money from displaying ads on your blog. It is not possible to predict the exact amount of profit that you will earn, as profits are related to several factors such as: the number of visitors to the blog, the shape of the ads and places within your blog and their visibility, and the purchasing power of the readers.

Host articles

As your blog grows you can offer to host a guest article on your blog for a fee. It is imperative that the guest article topic be consistent with the blog’s content so that the reader does not feel the post is paid and the advertising tone is clear. It is only necessary to accept hosting of posts that you trust in order to maintain your credibility with readers.   

It remains to know that making a profit from your blog will take some time, and it comes as the last stop on the way to creating the blog, as this requires you to successfully pass each of the previous stations, in order to be able in the end to get the best opportunities to make a profit from the blog.