Having an idea to start a blog is a productive one for sure.
Are you thinking to start a blog for any good reason? If yes..then this article is just for you.
You must be excited to start your first blog. This article will mark out all the mindset preparation you have to make before you start a blog.
Having a blog just for a hobby is fine but if you are thinking about a blog with a business you need to have some patience, planning, strategies, precautions and some knowledge.
Learn the game of patience, blogging will be your game.
Getting into any new business is always full of mistakes same goes with blogging. Bloggers tend to make mistakes while learning, some of them are silly and some are so devastating that it can ruin your blogging life.
Here I am sharing this article with the main motive to mention every important mindset checklist before you start a new blog.
One must have to learn about it now or later. It's better to be now.
Phase 1 - Blogging Startup Mindset Checklist Before You Start a New Blog
1. Your Bold Purpose behind Starting a Blog
Having a purpose for your business is important. Without a purpose, you will only be going to waste your precious time and money.
Your purpose is the only thing which will keep you focused toward your goals and success. One should not start anything without having a proper purpose for it.
I can say this because I have been through it, started a blog without any clear aim to achieve.
I got attracted to others income flow and step into blogging without any questions asked.
What I suggest you, ask yourself questions before starting a blog/business.
Questions like; what is my actual purpose of launching this blog?
Is it going to be a hobby blog or is it going to be a professional blog?
What do I want to achieve from my blog in a long run?
Is it going to be a blog for making money or a community to help other bloggers?
From where do I get content ideas?
How am I going to influence others?
What kind of blog should it not be?
If you can answer your own questions without any doubts then you can go for it. Otherwise, do your research work before starting your blog.
If your research is not enough to clarify your doubts then don't even think to start a blog.
2. Pick Your Blog Niche Wisely
So you have decided to start a blog?
Okay, what will be the main category of your blog?
Suppose you want to start a blog about Photography.
Perfect! But can you write about this topic for next 3-4 years? Many bloggers make this common mistake.
They don't select their blog niche wisely and end up having nothing to write about it after some time. No more content to write on will force you to quit your blogging career.
You can start with a multi-niche blog but all niches should be related to each other. This is important for better reader engagement and good bounce rate. I will discuss about it later.
Before starting a blog you need to find what interest you the most on the internet.
Bonus: here are some profitable affiliate marketing niches to start your blog.
3. Learn about the Competition & What it takes to Start and Run a Successful Blog
You should know about it that the internet is full of competition. A competition that can't be won without any proper strategies or planning.
Note: This is not to discourage you or scare you to avoid getting into blogging. I am just trying to tell you what it really takes to be a blogger.
You need to know more about your competitors before starting up a new blog.
Your competition is what tells you how much time and money you may need to invest in your blog.
For sure there are countless tools available on the internet to spy on your competitors.
Blogging takes a lot of time and effort. If you are thinking that blogging is all about adding 30 minutes of content and investing a little money to it. Then you are so wrong about it.
When I recommend any of my friends to start blogging. The first thing I tell them is "you are going to work on a project without any decent payout for next 2-3 years, Plus you need to invest your money and time to it."
If you can digest it then I salute you and your decision. Blogging is a game of planning, strategies and long-awaited fruitful success. I hope you like the sound.
You don't need to be doing blogging all the time but a proper time management for specific work tasks is what you really require.
You may have read many blogs saying create a blog and start earning in 7 days, if one can do this he must be a wizard from the magical world.
They are just attracting more subscribers to their blog by fake success stories.
To start and run a successful blog you need to work consistently, always have some planning for the future.
Never settle back by small achievements.
Good thing is that 90% of blogging work can be outsourced. But at the start, you need to make it all by yourself only.
After some time when you start earning something out of it only then you should invest on some outsourcing tasks for your blog.
Just remember, Behind every success story is an embarrassing first effort, or a past full of struggle.
Plan out, schedule your tasks, be consistent and stay focused on your aim.
4. Preparation for a Smooth Blogging Journey
Your blogging Journey will be going to be a long one with no specific time intervals.
Quitting in the middle of your blogging journey will get you nowhere but to regret about all the time and money you wasted till then.
It is better to get prepared for every predictable situation you can get in your blogging journey. Keep reading to find out more about what it could be:
#Plan out Your Finance:
If you are thinking to start a free blog. Then you should stick with your hobby blog as without investing on your blog you won't get any income out of it.
Of course, Professional blogging requires some investments. Blogging on free platforms is just a good way to pass your time but don't expect any business out of it.
As a startup, you need to know how much will it cost you to start a blog?
You should know what are the basic investments you may need to make when starting a blog such as, hosting service, domain name, premium theme (recommended if affordable), Premium tools, outsourcing tasks (optional).
NOTE: You can always save some bucks using online available promo codes while buying any product or services. (Visit our Deals page)
There are many things you might need money for while doing blogging. But blogging with low-budget is also possible. Here are some free & paid blogging resources you can use the way I started my blogging.
#Distractions you Need to Deal With:
I always get distracted with my endless browsing, blog readings, Skype chat, social media tasks and much more.
If you ask any blogger this would be the common issue with everyone.
My everyday job tasks include content writing work, image design work, searching new post ideas, reading other blogs, social media marketing, content marketing tasks, refining my old blog posts, other than this there is much more to include.
How can you say I can't get distracted?
But, to avoid getting distracted start planning out your job tasks or set your working schedule. Working in a flexible time frames is 50% full of distractions.
This is not just for newbie bloggers but also for professionals. Try planning out your job tasks for once and you will see how fast and effectively you can finish your long-delayed tasks.
I am using one good advice from a blogging guru Harsh Agarwal. He mentioned about a technique named "Pomodoro" you can also find phone app for it. It is the best task management app you can get to avoid any distraction and boost your productivity.
The first time I used it, I got my job done within one and a half hour which used to take me around 3-4 hours.
#Stress you can get Working From Home:
Blogging is a serious job you are getting into. There are good and bad things about being a freelance blogger doing all the work from home.
You may probably know about the good things while working from home. But not the bad ones for sure.
As my personal experience in blogging. A time comes when everything is just getting wrong.
Imagine you get a website error which you cannot fix by yourself, you need to talk to your hosting support or a developer.
It will surely cost you around 3-5 hours work delay.
When you get your site issue fixed, your internet connection suddenly stop working. You will call your internet provider and ask for the help, they will file a complaint about it and tell you to wait for next 6 hours minimum.
Again one long work delay.
After 6 hours, your internet is working fine now. But only two small issues cost you work delay of around 9 hours straight.
This could be your happy hours if you were in your office job.
But as you are working from home all these issues need to be fixed by you only. The more you delay the more it will cost you.
How will stress hit you in both the situations?
A person working in an office doing an on-roll job. He can release his stress and tension on his staff, colleagues, can complain his boss about the issues or the work stress.
But when you are working from home. All the stress and tensions are all yours and you can't complain about it.
You will blame yourself for it. This is stress when you work from home.
Working from home without any activity can also get you health issues. You will get less social interaction being working from home alone.
So you need to manage your work and your life accordingly. Avoid stress, get more social, spend quality time with your family and friends.
5. Identify your Target Audience
This one is professional marketing technique which is 100% beneficial for you to get succeeded in your business.
"Setting an aim is always important".
The audience should be your only aim but you need to identify what type of audience you need to target, what type of audience will buy your service, products or may like to visit your blog for content.
If you get a good hold on it. You will surely get success in your blogging journey.
How can you identify and interact with your audience?
- Start a survey or polls within your site.
- Google Analytics can be a great help identifying your target audience.
- Involve in niche related forums, communities, and Q&A sites.
Identifying your target audience is the most important practice for any successful blogger.
6. In Blogging Planning is Everything
Now that you know all the required information. An engineered blogging plan would be a nice thing to do.
Yes, design your blogging plan wisely so that you never get out of planning and managing your job tasks.
There are multiple daily jobs to do along with blogging. So it would be better to have a plan for your tasks. Below I have listed 4 important blogging tasks you need to plan out ?for:
#Plan out your Content Marketing Strategy:
Blogging is not only creating quality content but also how are you going to market your content?
Your quality content needs medium to reach its genuine readers. Reaching out to your real audience is impossible without a proper content marketing.
First, you need to decide what type of content you are going to publish on your blog?
The good old days are gone when there was only textual content, you need to market to reach out to the audience.
Nowadays, content is of many types: Text, audio, video, images, and animation.
A startup can't get a hold of each type of content. But if you can try to pick at least 2 types of content.
Second, What to market? You want to market your blog, your services, your products, or your consultation.
So, Are you done deciding the content type and what to market?
Great! Now the BIG QUESTION is where to market your content? (apart from publishing it on your blog)
Find out best places to market your content.
You need to plan out how and where you going to market your content.
#Plan out your Networking Approaches:
Blogging is all about sharing and gaining. But for that, you need a network full of like-minded people with which you can share and gain.
You need to create a good strong network full of like-minded people.
How are you going to get connected with other bloggers?
For this, you need to create a proper plan. There are many practices for reaching out to your fellow bloggers.
- Follow them on social media.
- Mention their work on your posts.
- Reach out to them using simple email approach.
- Twitter is one best option.
- Ask them for an Interview.
- Start commenting on their posts.
You may need to try different approaches one by one. Anyone can be helpful. You can also signup for networking platforms full of top influencers like Triberr.
#Plan out your Email Marketing Strategy:
When its email marketing one question is always there. When to start doing email marketing?
I can talk about my story on this topic. My biggest mistake was that I didn't start doing email marketing from the start.
This should be done at the time you start your blog.
I waited for my blog to get a hold on to a decent amount of traffic and believe me this really hurts my blogging experience till now.
Mark my words "If you want to make money from your blog, you need blog subscribers more than organic traffic visits".
This may be enough for you to know the importance of email marketing and blog subscribers.
Now the question arises, How to get more subscribers?
How to convert your visitors into blog subscribers?
There are many good practices available to convert visitors into subscribers. But as a beginner, you can start with some of these.
Start offering Freebies and Goodies to lure your visitors to subscribe to your blog. For example, If you have a web designing site you can throw offers like;
For example, If you are a web designing company you can throw offers like;
- 50 Freebies and Goodies for web designers
- 50 Freebies and Goodies for icon lovers
- 30 Freebies and Goodies for creative logo designers
If you are an SEO company you can start offering;
- Grab our 101 SEO checklist for FREE
- Get our Free SEO tips on what not to do for your site
- Get a 30 Minutes SEO consultation for FREE
These kinds of freebies and goodies are proven to attract more subscribers to your blog.
Furthermore, you can change your subscriber's enticing approaches to something different like free online courses, free case studies, free e-books and more.
You can place your subscription box in your site's sidebar widget, header section, within a blog post, at the very end of your blog post, footer section of your site, or you can try creating a landing page for it.
Note: Placing your subscription box in more than three places in a single page is not considered as a best practice. Keep changing their location and offers time to time until you get one with a good result.
There are tools available with better email marketing techniques.
Every one of them provides free trial period membership you can try them one by one to find out which one best suited for your business.
#Plan out your Affiliate Marketing:
For planning out affiliate marketing my first two points from this checklist comes in handy "Your Bold Purpose behind starting a blog" and "Pick Your Blog Niche wisely".
You must have remembered my very first point "Your Bold Purpose behind starting a blog". You may need to think about your purpose behind starting a blog before stepping into affiliate marketing.
If your sole motive is to make some extra cash out of your blogging. Do not skip to plan out your affiliate marketing before starting with your blog.
So I guess you are done deciding about affiliate marketing to be your blogging income source.
Next, you need to decide what your blog niche would be?
Done deciding your blog niche?
Great! What now?
Create a list of affiliate products and services that round-up with your blog niche. But don't just start promoting every affiliate product you find.
If you want to hit for a long road in blogging, first you need to build customers full of trust.
No one will be going to buy any product you refer without having trust on you.
You should be unbiased about every product or service you refer. You have to share every hidden pros and con about that particular product or service.
Don't just promote anything just for the sack of commission. Provide them every possible reason to ignore or to accept that product you mention.
Build a strong relationship with your readers. That if ever you are going to promote any valuable product with your audience there would be some sales from it.
I hope you planning about your affiliate marketing strategies by now.
All these pre-planning will grow your blog at a fast pace without having any misleading during your blogging journey.
7. Balanced Goals All you Need
Blogging is a long-term game and having a single aim will not get you on top.
One need to have different goals. Always set your short-term and long-term goals.
My reason behind having balanced goals:
Achieving short-term goals will motivate you in your long journey, but delays in your long-term goals will only provide you reasons to quit.
Anyone doing professional blogging always has some short-term goals which motivate him to achieve more goals.
Targeting only for long-term goals will get you a blogging life full of stress.
So it's always better to set your balance long and short-term goals to hustle your way to a profitable blogging life.
Wrapping Up Blogging Mindset Checklist with few More Tips & Skips:
I know this is already one lengthy article to read. But I am just going to include few more tips to it.
Everyone makes mistakes on their startups, there is no wrong with making mistakes but learning from your mistakes is what you need to learn.
My main motive for writing this article is to guide every beginner to avoid making silly mistakes while starting a blog.
Here are few tips & skips for beginners for a smooth blogging journey:
- Skip to focus on not so important tasks (like fonts, colors, daily traffic, daily AdSense earning)
- Don't just buy anything do a deep research on it (ask in communities, check out its alternatives)
- Maintain consistency while blogging.
- Outsource tasks when its required don't try to do everything by yourself.
- Your main focus should be quality content creation, marketing your content, social networking, and little optimization.
- Create your project manager calendar.
You may not want to avoid any of the point discussed in above blogging mindset checklist. Or else you would make mistakes to learn it by the hard way.
If you really want to get succeed in your blogging career. This would be the best checklist you will get on the internet.
This was just the starting of my "how to start a blog" series. Stay connected with me and go through the whole series to do smart blogging.
In our next Phase, I will talk about 4 technical aspects to consider when starting a blog.
Stay tuned for the next phase of my blogging series.