Sparkles and Shoes

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How to Start a Blog, Part Two

| blogging

Last year I wrote a post called So You Want to Start a Blog  and since then I have sent to half a dozen friends who have asked and 5,600 people have visited in the last six months.  In the last paragraph I wrote that I would publish a second part of the series called what do to once you have a blog and said it was coming “shortly”.  Well, while shortly is a loosely defined period of time I will admit it has taken a bit longer to come together – but better late than never.  

To make it a bit sweeter though I have decided to take this follow up post and break it out into two sections because I have so much to say about how to start a blog, part two. The first part, this post, will cover what you can do internally, on your blog, and the second post will be my suggestions for what you should do outside of your blog, hint: social media. Without further ado, what to do once you start a blog, the internal portion, broken into four key sections.

Sparkles and Shoes How to Start a Blog

 

(1) Create Quality Content, Frequently

Once you start a blog it is fine to wet your toes with a few scattered posts, in fact I encourage it, but once you realize this is for you, take the plunge.  Whether that is wading into it waist deep or catapulting off the 10-meter board, that is for you to decide.   You do not have to do it all at once but if you are going to blog, commit. 
 
The first thing is to write frequently. I post Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday without fail and I have been doing it for the last two and a half years.  From what I have come to learn, people expect it. Every weekday at 7am there will be a new blog post on Sparkles & Shoes. What it is going to be about?  Well, that is up to me and while I like to keep my readers guessing, there will definitely be a post.  This does not mean you need to post every day to be consistent, but find a pattern that works for you and stick with it. Are you a once every-other-week blogger? A M/W/F blogger?  I want to know so I can plan how often to check back with your site.  Speaking of posting frequently, every major platform allows you to schedule your posts ahead of time and no, in three and a half years I have never blogging I have never been up at 6am writing for a 7am deadline.
 
Along with a specific cadence of posts I advise you to make sure to focus on a few things to your my blog more consistent. Start with the little things – decide on a font color, I use dark grey, a link color, mine are a deep pink, and a standard photo size, I chose a 700 pixels width. From there decide on the bigger things – are you going to write in the first person or third? Are you going to talk about friends and family? Are you going to show your face?  Are you going use your full name?  How much information are you going to share?  Again consistency is key, but also, don’t be afraid of change. This blog has gone through many, many changes including seven design iterations over the last 1,045 posts but finally I have found my grove.  About a year and a half ago I firmly decided Sparkles and Shoes was a lifestyle blog focused on fashion and on giving readers a glimpse into my life while writing about the things that inspire, intrigue, and amuse me. Why am I telling you this? Don’t be afraid to allow your blog to grow and change with you, if your readers like you, they will follow along! 
 
(2) Make it Pretty
 
Pictures matter people!  No matter how riveting your words people want something to look at – give it to them! I would have never admitted it years ago, but I like words and I like writing.  With an average of 412 words per post I have published nearly 350,000 words on this blog, which is crazy to think about, but with all those words you need images to break it up.  With fashion posts, especially red carpet recaps or features of new trends, I will not publish a blog post with less than a dozen photos, but some posts just don’t lend themselves well to images. For my transition to WordPress post I did not have any great images so I used a shot of a butterfly I took and imposed words over it, very similar to the photo above.  And the thing happened when I published a poem about achieving greatness, I used a photo from my swimming days. I have learned people like something to look at, even when you comment that it is unrelated to the post.  Plus, without an image you are left with that awkward grey square on BlogLovin, no bueño. 
 

(3) Focus on SEO 

As a very, very watered down definition Search Engine Optimization, often refereed to as SEO, is comprised of the things you do to the front end of your website (the part you can see and interact with / what you are reading right now) and backend of your blog to increase and enhance your site’s visibility in unpaid search engine results.  I wrote a post on my favorite WordPress plugins last winter and my favorite pluginWordPress SEO by Yoast is still #1 go to a year later.  For the past two years I have used it in collaboration for every single post I have published and SEO is a crucial aspect of how to start a blog.  
 
If you are on WordPress, and it is one of the reasons I switched from Blogger, WordPress SEO by Yoast is the best plugin ever. It gives you very easy fields to fill out at the bottom of each blog post so you can set your focus keyword, SEO title, and meta description. Once these are filled in all you have to do is hit refresh and it will give you an SEO score; poor, okay, or good, based on a variety of factors like your keywords density (it should be between 2.0% and 5.0%), alt tags, the number of characters in your page title, your copy score on the Flesch Reading Ease test, the number of outbound links (you should have at least one), the number of words in the body copy (you should try and always have at least 300 words per blog post), and a variety of other metrics. If you achieve a “good” rating the amount of people who find your post organically usually triples! Let me know if this is something you would be reading a post or two about. 
 
Having worked in organic SEO at a previous job I learned just how important it is to not only set a topic for your post but to build an entire strategy around it.  For example yesterday I chose the phrase cute doormat for, you guessed it, my post on cute doormats and it was important to not only to set a focus keyword and but also incorporate that into your SEO title (which is different than the title of the post), the slug (the very end of the post URL), and the meta description.  You can see a screenshot below of a recent post with an image of what this plugin looks like in action! 
 
How to Start a Blog - WordPress SEO by Yoast Plugin Cute Doormats Example
  
(4) Source Everything
 
Have you ever heard that copying is the sincerest form of flattery?  Maybe in terms of fashion but online it is called stealing. Plagiarism. Fraud.  These are all scary words but I use them purposefully. If you are going to write a blog and really want people to read it, it needs to be original.  That said, from time to time you will need to content that is not your own – whether a stock photo, images on how to style an item, or an image from someone else’s blog.   Just because they are on the Internet does not mean they are free to use. 
 
And this is not coming from a lofty position on a high horse – I am hesitant to admit, but hey, I try to be very honest here, in my first few months of blogging back in 2012 I did not realize the importance of sourcing your photos. Downloading something from Google images and uploading to your blog is just so easy. But if you did not take the photo, link to the source, do not steal.
 
– – – – –
 
I could go on for days and days and days about blogging so even while that was 11 paragraphs there is still so much I want to say, but I hope this intro was helpful!  I am going to try and ultimately have this series be the best answer and go to response for emails like this one I received last month,  “Hey fantastic blog! Does running a blog such as this take a massive amount work? I have no understanding of computer programming however I had been hoping to start my own blog soon. Anyways, if you have any suggestions or tips for new blog owners please share. I know this is off subject but I just had to ask. Thanks!”
 
I hope you have found this helpful and please let me know what you would like to see in part three! 
 
 
 
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Comments

  1. Ah, thank you for posting this! It could not have come at a better time. I just launched my blog yesterday and could not have a further clue from what I’m doing, so this helps immensely. Thank you!

    I found your blog just a bit ago, it is adorable and I love all you post! I see that you also live in New York and my blog is about my life in New York. I would love to hear anything you had to say! Thanks again for these tips!

    Leah

    http://www.urban20something.com

  2. These are great tips. I suck at knowing SEO but I’ve been using Yoast for a year; not sure I see a difference at all. And since I switched from blogger to wordpress and use jetpack, I notice a huge decrease in traffic which could also mean it just wasn’t accurate before. Ugh, the struggle is real. 😉

    http://asequinloveaffair.com

  6. This was such a great post! I definitely agree that our readers need to know when to expect posts. I personally enjoy the the Mon/Weds/Friday format, but during The Bachelor/The Bachelorette we also do Tuesdays. Anything we do extra is just the cherry on top for the audience, which is cool.

    I also use Yoast SEO and am getting the hang of it. Highly recommend.

    So glad I came across your site! Bookmarking 🙂

    xo NM

    http://givememora.com

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