How To Start A Successful Blog (The 9 Things They Didn’t Tell You)

Everybody seems to be writing about it.

Everywhere you look, there are blog posts that show you how to start a successful blog.

These posts have a ton of great content, and walk you through the basics of starting a blog. But there’s one thing missing, ok maybe xx things missing.

So if you want to learn how to start a successful blog, you need to think outside the box a bit, and do the things that not everyone is telling you.

How To Start A Successful Blog (The Basics)

Like I said previously, there’s some very good information out there on starting a successful blog. These posts walk you through the basics such as:

• Choosing a domain name
• Advantage of the self-hosted route vs WordPress.com
• Finding A Host
• Basic install / configuration of WordPress

A quick Google or YouTube search will give you all the information you need.  If you want a head start, you can check out Neil or WP Beginner, both of which are very reputable. 

But wait, there’s more.

Before you publish that first post, there’s a few other things you should keep in mind.

Take a look at the following…

The 9 Things They Didn’t Tell You

If you truly want to start a successful blog, there’s a number of other things you should consider before publishing your first post. The intent of this post isn’t to provide a detail description on each of these topics, rather it’s meant to provide a few points that will get you thinking.

Update Your Permalink Structure

You’ll need this for your SEO Strategy. Think of the Permalink as the structure of the URL for each of your posts. You’ll want this to be descriptive enough to help the search engines when they come crawling.

Update Your WordPress Settings

There are countless settings in WordPress that you can update to personalize your blog. You’ll want to spend some time getting acquainted with the WordPress dashboard, before you jump too far into things. 

Install A Backup Plugin

Oh boy, what do you do when your blog gets hacked, and all your content disappears? Don’t think this will ever happen to you, chances are it will at some point, and you should plan for it. 

Having a backup plugin running on your site is a nice insurance policy in case you ever need to do a restore.

Be Careful Of Plugin’s

Speaking of plugin’s, don’t go crazy. They have a tendency to slow down your site and can post security risks if they haven’t been updated in a while. Only download what is truly necessary.

Check Your Site Speed

Google loves sites that load fast, so be cognizant of site and page speed. While images are great, they will slow down your site unless you compress them. Look into image compression plugin’s that can help with this.

Run some site speed tests on your blog to see how your performance is doing.

Learn The Basics Of Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

This is a big one, and there’s a whole lot to learn. If SEO is a foreign topic to you, spend some time researching it before you get too far. There’s both on-page and off-page SEO topics, and they are both important. 

If you don’t at least put some focus on SEO, you’ll never “Rank” for the keywords you want to focus on. Without that, people will never find your brand.

Find Other Bloggers In Your Niche

I’ve said this before on this blog…  The secret to a successful blog is networking. If you want to network with other bloggers in your niche, you need to find 5 or 6 that can help you. Once you have this list, you can start focusing on them to help build your brand.

Read Other Blog Posts

Since you spent the time finding other bloggers in your niche, read their blog posts. Not only will this help you identify the bloggers you want to follow, but you’ll learn something along the way.

Comment On Other Blogs

And since you spent the time reading the post, why not leave a comment telling the blogger how much you enjoyed the article. Don’t just leave a simple “great article” comment, put some thought into it. If you can write a thought provoking comment, other readers will notice and may want to check out your blog as a result of this.

Have you noticed a common theme with the above items?

They are all focused on driving traffic to your site. Whether it be from Search Engine Optimization or Networking, you need that traffic to succeed.

Remember, you can write the greatest post in the world, but if nobody can find it, who’s going to read it?

What Are You Waiting For

So go on, now that you’ve got all of the above accounted for, hit that publish button.

I can’t stress enough how important networking is if you want to start a successful blog. You need to get your name out there, let these other bloggers know who you are.

The success of your blog depends on it!

How do I know that? I was there. I was creating content, updating my blog, and nobody was reading it.

That all changed a few months ago when I discovered networking. I implemented a strategy and it’s working so far. If you want to follow my progress, and pick up a trick or two along the way, just click here.