Do you want to own a blog but you don’t know where to start from or you have been hearing so much about blog and blogging and you really want to have a sound knowledge about it and possibly start your own?
You know, according to the 1% rule, about 1% of Internet users are responsible for creating content, while 99% are merely consumers of that content. For example, for every person who posts on a forum, generally, about 99 other people view that forum but do not post.
For you as an individual, wouldn’t it be amazing for you to be a part of the 1% of internet users that create content? Yes, blogging is a form of content creation.
Content is anything that has to do with the transfer of knowledge and idea and is expressed through some medium, as speech, writing, or any of various arts. It could be through videos, images, spoken words, and many other mediums suitable for knowledge transfer.
For blogging, it has to do with writing, sharing your knowledge through writing. In the rest of this article, I will be sharing more knowledge about a blog, why you should own one, and how to start and grow your blog.
Moving on to the next aspect of this article, which is What is a blog?
What is a blog?
A blog is a journal or diary located on the world wide web and can be accessed using the internet. If you ever own a journal or notepad, you will notice that a large percentage of what you wrote down were some thoughts, knowledge, and experiences you had that you want to document for future purposes or present.
A blog is similar to your journal, just that this journal(blog) can be accessible by every internet user from every part of the world, no matter their geographical location or language.
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As a business owner, with a blog, you can share your knowledge about what you are selling, talk about your business, and many others. basically, just to enlighten your audience about a particular topic or issue.
Types of a Blog
As there are many fields and interests so also have different types of blogs. They are:
- Personal Blog: At the start of blogging years ago, the first type to be launched was a personal blog. Remember we said a blog is a journal or diary that can be accessed by as many internet users as possible.
People decided that they would be taking their knowledge and experiences to the internet and a blog was the perfect answer to their prayers. For personal blogs, they are no rules, just do what works for you and share what you are comfortable with sharing.
This is an example of a personal blog. Source: WordPress
2. Business Blog: A business blog is a standalone website, or a section of an existing business’ website, devoted to writing about topics related to the company’s industry and its sub-fields.
Business blogs have now become a fundamental component of successful digital marketing and are being mostly utilized by online businesses.
An example of a business blog. source: SMEDigest
3. Niche Blog: Niche blogs are blogs on specific areas or industries. Niche blogs may appeal to industry, nationality, tribe, or any other particular group of people. Industries like fashion, food, electrical appliances, and many others.
For example, our blog at Digital Marketing Skill Institute is a niche blog as we write and share knowledge and experiences in the digital marketing industry.
An example showing a niche blog. Source: Digital Marketing Skill Institute
Other types of blogs include affiliate blogs, news blogs, media blogs, reverse blogs, professional blogs.
Whichever blog you decide to start with will definitely fall into one of the types of blogs that exists.
Why blog?
The advantages of owning a blog are more beneficial for you either as a personal blogger, professional blogger, or business blogger. these advantages include the following but are not restricted to the following.
- It is a good alternative to traditional diaries, and people now need to outlet their thoughts and feelings beyond that format.
- SEO toolkit. A blog helps to increase your visibility as search engines can crawl your blog and rank it in search results.
- Blogging is one of the most popular ways of communicating, sharing, and communicating information, knowledge, and news. every day, one person launches a blog and so there are literally millions of blogs online.
Meanwhile, that does not stop you from launching yours, the sky is wide enough for every bird to fly in.
- You can express yourself and also share your knowledge as well.
- For a business, you can use a blog to promote what you do, talk about essential things that will interest your target audience.
- And guess what? You can make money from it. Imagine being paid for owning a blog, I’m sure it sounds well. One of the ways you get paid is with a good audience, you can get people to pay you to run adverts for them on your blog. We call this last one Affiliate Marketing.
P:S In our 90% practical digital marketing course, you get to learn more about how to start and grow a blog with practical experience alongside other features in digital marketing. You should register for it.
What is blogging and who is a blogger?
Blogging is the act of writing content for blogs while a blogger is a person who writes the contents for a blog.
How to start and grow a blog in seven steps
A blog is something anyone interested in, can start and grow on their own, and that is why we have curated this list for you, to prepare your mind if you are yet to start and to reach you if you already have a blog and you are looking for means to grow this blog.
1. Pick a genre
You cannot have knowledge about everything or every field and industry and even if you do, you might find it difficult starting and growing a blog for everything you do.
Another thing to also consider is to avoid confusing the knowledge for each other, it is best to pick a genre. Also bearing in mind that, you will be sharing knowledge and experiences with your audience so it’s best to get a complete and sound knowledge about a subject matter.
You can have multiple blogs around fashion, that is your chosen genre. And you can also decide to talk only about digital marketing terms like we do at Digital Marketing Institute.
The genre you will be blogging about should be one where you have sound and profound knowledge. As you don’t want to start and end up running out of what to talk about.
Even if you have sound knowledge, it doesn’t hurt to keep acquiring knowledge as it will come in handy, so you don’t run out of what to write.
Another thing I forgot to share when I was talking about why you should blog is that our brain was designed in a way that it retains contents we either write or read. So while writing for other people to read and digest, you are also sharpening your brain and keeping it active.
And that is one goal of learning.
2. Identify your target audience
After deciding your genre of choice, the next thing to consider when setting up a blog is identifying your target audience. Your blog cannot possibly be targeted at a general audience, which is why you need to research and identify your target audience.
Research your target audience to get a hang of the right tone of your writing that would capture their attention as well as transfer your knowledge to them.
Your blog might have content for teenagers’ consumption, but your tone of writing is meant for adults, your target audience cannot get what you are trying to pass across to them and that of course will not bring traffic as well as your goals for establishing the blog will not be achieved.
If there is a call to action on the blog, your wrong audience will not act on it because they won’t even bother to read your header although looking like adult content has teenager content in it.
identifying your target audience will also guide you in marketing and promoting your blog on the right social media platform For example, a blog meant for business professionals, might be best promoted and advertized on LinkedIn rather than Instagram.
You can do this research by asking from people around you and as a corporate organization, you can carry out a survey within your colleagues
Another research to consider is keyword research and I will be sharing more details about this in the other part of this article.
3. Register your blog
A blog cannot exist in your mind or in your notepad, which is why you need to register your blog. After you must have selected your chosen genre, identified your target audience, the next thing is to proceed with setting up your blog on the world wide web.
To do this, you need two things:
- A domain name that represents what you want to write about.
- A web hosting account
You can register your domain name on Namecheap
And proceed to build your website with Elementor
In our 90% practical digital marketing course, our students get close supervision from our coaches to set up their blogs as well as other aspects of digital marketing.
4. Start writing
Having fulfilled all requirements stated above, you can now start writing. You might have already started writing on your friend’s blog as a guest writer or you have the drafts on your gadgets, whichever one it is, you can now start writing.
We want you to take note of the fact that to get the best out of blogging, you should create quality content, content that will make your readers thirst for more from you and your brand.
Your content should be captivating enough and also well detailed with the right knowledge. You don’t want to give your audience thin and watery content. Make your content rich with knowledge and see if your audience won’t come back for more.
This is a blog template from Elementor. Source: Elementor
5. Create awareness
After you must have followed through the previous steps and you have started writing, create awareness for your blog regardless of the type of blog it is.
People will never know something exists if you don’t tell them although SEO will help you reach a wider audience at the same time you have to promote yourself and your blog.
Make good use of your social media presence either as a brand or as a personal blogger to create awareness for your blog. Generate traffic to your blog by yourself, be proud of what you do, and seize every opportunity you get to share the links to your blog.
In your newsletter through email marketing, you can share snippets from your blog and direct your readers to read more about that article on your blog. On your social media platforms, you can do the same thing as you did in email marketing, share and refer them to your blog.
Another way you can create awareness for your blog is by being active on forums like Quora, Nairaland, and any other question forums where you can provide answers and at the same time refer interested readers to your blog.
6. Keyword Research
Another thing you should also consider while writing on your blog is to do keyword research. Get keywords that your target audience is searching for and write about them.
Keyword research is a core aspect of SEO that involves identifying popular words and phrases people enter into search engines in an attempt to figure out what to rank for.
Remember part of the reason why you are starting a blog is to share knowledge and know what your audience is searching for. Keyword research helps you to create effective content as well as helps you to improve your creativity by backing it up with data.
You can get related keywords and sprinkle them all over your blog post, this will get your page to rank in search results by search engines.
Google planner is one tool you can use to do keyword research. As you will see in the image below, we searched for the keyword “Fashion” and you can see the number of searches for that keyword.
So if we want to pick this keyword, we will ensure that our headline, subtopic, and the entire body of the article have sprinkles of the fashion keyword and that is how to do get the best out of blogging.
An example of keyword research on google planner. Source: Google planner
7. Use SEO
SEO is an acronym for Search Engine Optimization, it is defined as the procedure put in place to improve the quality and quantity of website traffic to a web page or a website through organic search.
When an internet user makes a search o a search engine like google, responses pop up, the process of making sure that your blog/ articles come first when a question or request is made by an internet user is what we call search engine optimization.
The machines that make sure this happens are search engines, and they optimize your blogs by crawling through, indexing them, and ranking them when there is a need for it.
To get this to occur, you needed to follow the rules of SEO. One of which is that the articles on your blog must have the right keywords and they must be evenly spread in the article. When a search engine notices that a word is being used more often in an article, it ranks it faster to appear in the search results.
In this example below, you would see that as soon as you input what you are looking for, within few seconds, you get responses and one of these responses tops the list.
To achieve this, your headline must carry your keyword for that article, you sprinkle your keyword into the article and you get a better chance at ranking on the search engine.
We have other search engines like Bing, Google, Yahoo
Frequently asked question
What is a blog and how does it work?
A blog is a journal or diary located on the world wide web and can be accessed using the internet.
If you ever own a journal or notepad, you will notice that a large percentage of what you wrote down were some thoughts, knowledge, and experiences you had that you want to document for future purposes or present.
It works as a platform where you get to share your knowledge and experience about a subject matter either as a brand or as an individual. It helps to promote visibility and existence.
Contents on blogs are called blog posts and they are always in a conversational style, as you have to engage your audience as if you are having a physical conversation.
What are the types of blogs?
We have but not limited to the following
- Fashion blogs
- Lifestyle blogs
- Music blogs
- Fitness blogs
- Digital marketing blogs
- Career blogs
The list is endless, for as many topics that exist, you can always have a blog for them.
Conclusion
Blogging is one aspect of digital marketing that cannot be taken away or set aside. Individuals and corporate organizations can make use of it to generate leads, promote their visibility and also contribute to the knowledge bank of its audience.
In our 90% practical digital marketing course, we teach our students how to make the best use of blogging to get the best out of digital marketing as well as other aspects of digital marketing.
Read more about blogging
The key fundamentals of successful blogging
Blogging strategy for Nigerian Businesses: 6 key techniques to attract visitors to your blog
Reach your Target Audience: How do you identify your audience?