1. Choose The Right Platform
Wix - (www.wix.com)
WordPress - (www.wordpress.org) (BEST FOR BLOGGING AND WEBSITES)
LinkedIn - (www.linkedin.com)
Weebly - (www.weebly.com)
Medium - (www.medium.com) (BEST FOR BLOGGING)
Ghost - (www.ghost.org)
Blogger - (www.blogger.com) (BEST FOR BLOGGING AND WEBSITES)
Tumblr - (www.tumblr.com)
2. Find The Perfect Domain
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| Source: Gandi News |
Choosing the right domain name is very important. I had a wildly successful blog called List25.com which has over 2.3 million YouTube subscribers and over 500 million video views. But in hindsight, I wish I didn’t add a number in the domain because it restricted us to only 25 items in a list.
Here are some quick tips on choosing the best domain name for your website.
Stick with .com domain extension
Choose a domain name that is easy to pronounce, spell, and as short as possible.
Use your keywords and brand name in the domain name. For example, stargardeninghouston.com is more search engine friendly, than stargardeningcompany.com
3. Choosing The Right Hosting is Very Important
Choosing the right web hosting is by far one of the most important decisions when starting a blog because this is where your website files are stored.
Many beginners like the idea of getting free hosting, but choosing a free website hosting is always a bad idea, and it will end up costing you more money and time in the end.
There are different types of hosting plans like shared hosting, managed hosting, VPS, and more. You need to pick a plan that suits your needs and budget.
Compare reviews of different hosting companies.
Support is important for beginners, and you want make sure that there are plenty of options to get help when you need it.
Our choice for hosting is Hostinger. They’re also officially recommended by WordPress, and they’re known for great support.
4. Always Keep Regular Backups
Often users don’t think about backups until it’s too late. In the early days, I chose a cheap web hosting provider that wasn’t very well-known, and they had hardware failure. I lost my entire website because I didn’t have a backup.
Many hosting companies offer limited backups. However, these backups are not guaranteed, and a hardware failure can cause you to lose data as well as the backup.
Backups are your first line of defense against brute force attacks, hacking, and data theft. They are the first step to improve your WordPress security and keeping your website safe.
There are plenty of reliable WordPress backup plugins that allow you to schedule automatic backups and store them in remote locations like Google Drive, Dropbox, Amazon S3, and more.
5. Pay Attention to Image Copyrights and Licenses
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| Source: Ipleaders |
Often beginners just copy and paste images from the internet. This adds liability as your site grows. Don’t just use images from Google because you might have to pay thousands later in image copyright infringement fees. The copyright owner can also report the page displaying their work and ask Google to remove it from search results.
Considering these costs, it’s worth paying for a Shutterstock license to get high-quality vector images to use on your website.
However, if you are just starting out and don’t want to pay for licenses, then you can find several websites offering cc0 images. These images are royalty-free, and you can use them on your website.
Another way to add images to your website is by creating your own. However, most beginners are not graphic designers. Luckily, there are online tools like Canva which enable you to create professional images to use on your blog.
6. Onsite SEO Optimization is Important for Growth
If you’re serious about growing your blog and making it successful, then you need to pay attention to on-page SEO from the beginning.
SEO short for search engine optimization helps you get more visitors to your website from search engines. SEO strategies are divided in two categories, off-site and on-site SEO.
Onsite SEO helps you optimize your blog by making small adjustments in various areas. Now this may sound a bit technical, and it is, but there are plenty of tools that can help you with this.
First, I would recommend you to install AIOSEO on your website. It is the complete WordPress SEO plugin suite, and it will help you with onsite optimization of your blog.
It also allows you to easily create and submit sitemaps to search engines. This enables your website to get listed in Google and start appearing in search results.
Next, you need to make internal linking a habit. Internal links are the links you create inside your content to your own blog posts, pages, and different areas of your website.
For more SEO tips, see our ultimate WordPress/Blogger SEO guide for beginners to increase their website traffic.
7. Keyword Research is VERY Important
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| Source: ReviewsXP |
Often people write great posts, but they aren’t discoverable because they didn’t think about using the right keywords. Most beginners follow their best guesses to come up with ideas for blog posts. You don’t need to do that when there are tools that can help you find out what your users are looking for. You can use these keywords for your blog posts and increase your traffic.
You can use a free tool like WordStream to find the questions your users are searching for. You can then answer those questions in your blog posts to get more search traffic.
Want to know which keywords are bringing traffic to your competitors? Use SEMRush to steal your competitors’ keywords. It also shows you paid keywords where your competitors are running paid advertising campaigns.
