how to start a successful blog 1

How To Start A Successful Blog Step By Step

How to start a successful blog, and you might be wondering why people start a blog, the reason is simple:

they want to show to the world their world!!!

We are very lucky to live in these times, teleportation is no longer fiction and the internet and artificial intelligence are with us. (Already).

10 years ago starting a blog was something similar to teleportation at the present moment. You needed to know how to code and the internet was still pretty primitive.

Lucky us, if you want to start a successful blog in 2018, there is nothing easier than that.

If you want to show the vision of your world to the world and you have something you love where you can write a lot about, just do it. If you wanna learn how to start a successful blog, buckle up and read the whole article.

You can reach a huge audience of people and make a business around it pretty easily. If you are interested, and you want to know the best ways to do it, continue to read.

I have a lot of experience with programming, SEO, social media and more. This guide will bring your blog to work perfectly without a hitch.

 

Table of Contents

Setting Up A Blog In 5 Steps.

  1. Decide your domain name and hosting, here the best hosting company TMD-hosting.
  2. Install WordPress on it, and pick a free theme or Upgrade to ElegantThemes.
  3. Tweak your blog design.
  4. Install the plugins you might need.
  5. Write radical content and follow my advice to get visitors.

 

GET TMDHOSTING NOW

 

The most important thing to do to start a successful blog, is to get a good hosting, after years of experience I recommend you to get TMD.

Their customer service, speed and reliability are awesome. If you are using this link you will get free instant chat and someone will help you pick the right plan for you. Also you will get 1 free domain name.

This is the best deal ever starts from $2.95 a month. Trust the Minimalist Boy.

If you want to go with the  flow and what’s trending you can get hosting with Bluehost, I recommend TMD but if you don’t believe me and you want to do it the way they all doing it, Get Bluehost.

how to start a successful blog step by step

 

How To Start A WordPress Free Blog, Step By Step Guide.

In this paragraph, I will give you an overview of the things that you need to do and how to start a successful blog.

The reasons why we choose WordPress, are because it is the most used CMS they have great online support and it is easy. You won’t need to learn how to code to do this, they made it easy for us.

This is just a step-by-step little overview, if you are interested in knowing more detailed stuff, keep reading the post until the end. ( Take 20 – 40 minutes of your time to read this post, and feel free to share it and ask me question if something is not clear.)

 

  1. Hosting And Free Domain: The most important thing to do is to get a good hosting plan, use this link and chat with a TMD-hosting agent and get your awesome hosting. When the process is completed you will be asked to get a domain name. I suggest you do some research before getting the first domain name that pops into your head. Use this website leandomainsearch, type in something you might want about your niche, e.g. exoticfood, and get some ideas. (domain must be not too long, no more than 10-13 characters let’s say. e.g. www.0123456789.com, also I would go for .com .net. .org, or if you need one for your specific country business. Get .it for Italy .be for Belgium, etc., do not go for those new weird one’s extensions like .travel .directory etc.). Also if you have more money you can buy an expired domain here at expireddomains. The advantages of getting a domain there are multiple, your domain will not be considered as a new domain and it will rank faster on Google. Be aware that you need to understand a little bit how to pick the right domain, do not get the spammy ones. Send me a message if you need further help. This is just a tip, but you don’t have to buy a domain on expireddomains. For now, Just get hosting here, and a free domain name with TMD.
  2. Theme and Branding: When your domain and hosting are set up, there will be an option to install WordPress on it. If you wanna do it manually here is a video on how to do it on TMD. Otherwise, you can just pick the automatic feature and install it. (there is a video below). You want then, to start creating your brand, I advise you to create a stunning logo, you can get freelancer here on Fiverr that will make you a radical logo for $5. Then you need to spend time finding a theme, WordPress has millions of free themes. If for some reasons none of them appeals you, you can find some more paid themes here on elegantthemes, those are sometimes nicer, is up to you if using a free theme or a paid one. Invest a lot of time tweaking the theme and making it perfect for your needs.
  3. Plugins and Features: Then, you need to spend even more time finding good plugins and configure the plugins the right way. I will write a lot more about this later in this article, you will need to submit your blog to Google, Bing, and Yandex. You will need to configure your Cloudflare to have crazy results and mostly you will need to find the good feeling and harmony when opening your website. It takes time so do not rush.
  4. Tracking and Grow Audience: You will need to setup your Google Analytics and Statcounter, these are the guys that are going to tell you if you are doing good, from the technical point of view. Also Configuring the webmaster’s tools it will be important. I will talk more about it later. Get all your Social Sharing Buttons in the right place and connect the Jetpack plugin to them. I will talk more about it later.
  5. Write Kick Ass Content: And least but not latest, if you want to know how to start a successful blog, you need to keep in mind that you need to do this for the love that you have for something. Google will be able to understand if you are really loving what you are doing. They have crazy smart algorithms and trust me, they can tell if you are doing this just for money or for love. (you can check if your site got smashed down from Google Algorithm here at barracuda). And of course, love always wins. You need to write very interesting stuff and trying to post something at least twice a week. It is demonstrated that blogs that post at least 17 articles a month with more than 2000 words are getting a lot of views and traffic 60% faster than other blogs that don’t do that. This is how to start a successful blog.

 

Learn To Code A Little Bit So You Can Have The Best Blog Design Ever.

This paragraph is in the beginning but it is not mandatory, is just an advice I can give you so that you will have a better picture of what the internet is and how stuff is put together online. So you can start to learn how to start a successful blog even better.

Learning to code is not something incredibly hard as it was years ago, I think that anyone in this world should learn how to code a little and here are some reasons why:

  1. it makes you smarter.
  2. there is no big difference between playing a video game.
  3. it can be interesting.
  4. there’s a huge demand for coding jobs.
  5. the world is leaning toward an automated robotic society, coders will be always needed.
  6. is fun to do it.
  7. it is challenging and gives you motivation.
  8. you will be able to modify your WordPress website, to the next level

All I can say about this is that they made an amazing website called freecodecamp, do not lose time Googling stuff on how to code.

These guys have laid out a plan to learn just for you, with zero coding knowledge. These coding skills will skyrocket the how to start a successful blog potential.

I suggest you complete the ‘front-end development certification‘ and the ‘chrome developers tools‘,(at least). It is not mandatory but a good advice. (It will not take a lot of your time and you will be happy to do this.)

You will learn then how a webpage works and how to modify HTML, CSS, and PHP Code, which is the backbone of WordPress. I use brackets.io as an editor for my code. This is how I code my sites and how to start a successful blog with bare hands.

The chrome dev tools instead will help you to find out what’s wrong on your page directly from your browser. This is easy and must know skill to master.

 

How To Learn WordPress And What Is The Difference Between WordPress.com And WordPress.org

Learning WordPress is pretty simple, once you are into the backend of your website, everything is pretty straightforward. This guy also has great and simple tutorials, check him out wpbegineer. To be clear this is a picture of how the WordPress backend looks like.( feel free to explore all the functionalities in it.)

how to start a successful blog wordpress backend

I think, by the way, that the best way to learn WordPress, is to make mistakes, play around with all the functionalities in your backend and get better at it.

Also every problem you will have, you just need to use your friend google. E.g.:

  • ‘How to modify the footer on WordPress’;
  • ‘How to change and limit the number of posts per page in the homepage WordPress’;
  • etc.

 

What Is The Difference Between WordPress.com And WordPress.org?

wordpress.com is hosted by WordPress, I really don’t like it and I only use it for login purposes. It is less customizable and you can do less compared to .org

wordpress.org is a self-hosted solution, WordPress.org is hosted by you and if you get TMD you will get a free wordpress.org installation on your host. If you want to do it yourself, here is a video on how to do it with TMDhosting.

My suggestion is to have wordpress.org and connect your wordpress.com account via the jetpack plugin.

This will allow you to log in any of your sites with the same login, enable a 2-factor authentication protection, use Authy app instead of Google Authenticator.

how to start a successful blog wordpress backend enable two-factor authentication on wordpress

You need to set up a 2fa (two-factor authentication) to keep hackers away. Follow the picture above from your wordpress.com account, you will need to enable the 2fa, and scan a code with your mobile camera via the Authy app.

P.S.: save your backup codes in a safe place, an external hard drive might be a nice solution, those codes will be the only way to access to WordPress if you lose or damage your phone.

 

Best Themes To Start A Free WordPress Blog

When all this stuff is done, you need to give your website a nice look and feel. You want to have a responsive theme, which allows users from any device such as mobile, tablet an desktop to be able to see your content. A nice theme will help you on how to start a successful blog to the next level.

To see if the theme is responsive just, go into your WordPress backend themes section, install and activate the theme you might like and then try stretch your browser window. Make it small like a mobile phone, if all looks good, and the menu changes, it is most likely a good responsive theme.

Recently most of the traffic comes from mobile traffic, so you don’t want to miss this opportunity to lose readers after you learned how to start a successful blog for the whole.

WordPress have millions of themes for free, you just need a lot of patience and find the one that might work better for your blog. Something I advice is to create some blog posts and pages and put some random pictures on your blog and then test your theme.

If you learned how to code with freecodecamp, you can easily modify most of the things in the theme that you might not like. Like for instance in my case, I hate to see the powered by WordPress thing in the footer. In the case of the Minimalist Boy, I didn’t like the subscribe to newsletter box that you see at the bottom, I modified the CSS of it.

I had to use the chrome dev tools to figure out what to modify and I have modified the raw code. You will learn all of this in freecodecamp if you will have the patience to do it.

If instead, you are lazy you can get better-looking themes at elegantthemes.com, these themes are paid themes but some of them look very nice.

You can also outsource the coding part or the little thing that bothers you on the default settings to a guy on Fiverr. This is a famous freelance platform. You will find people that for $5 will do a great job for you. Most of these guys on Fiverr don’t know how to start a successful blog, you will need to guide them, do not trust them too much. Only for logos and technical stuff are good, with SEO they tend to be spammy.

You can give them the login to your backend, creating a new user from the WordPress backend, then when the job is done you can remove the user. Do not disclose your WordPress password. Create a user as shown in the figure below, and make a password just for him, delete the user when the job is done.

how to start a successful blog wordpress backend wordpress backend add new user

 

Best Plugins To Start A Free WordPress Blog

When the look and feel is kind of good, you can start thinking about what plugins you might need for your website. Based on your needs you might need different things.

If you feel like you need something like, how to add a rating system to your blog, or even more complicated stuff, just google it:

  •  rating system plugin on wp.
  • better-looking tables WordPress plugin.
  • etc..

Here is a list of the 20 best plugins I find very important and you must have on your WordPress:

1. AdRotate (to manage your ads, I know a trick to bypass adblockers, contact me for info)
2. All In One Schema.org Rich Snippets (for a better SEO)
3. Cloudflare (to speed up your site and more)
4. Custom Permalinks (makes links better looking and custom)
5. Email Subscribers & Newsletters (must have it, to grow your email list)
6. Jetpack by WordPress.com (must have it, a lot of features, discover all the settings)
7. NextGEN Gallery (top plugin for image galleries)
8. Open external links in a new window (open links in a new tab, if you like it, I like it)
9. Polylang (if you plan to have your site in multiple languages like miniminalistboy)
10. Re-Add Text Justify Button (I like to justify my posts, you need this to add the justify button)
11. Redirection (it is very useful, you might need it to redirect pages, I will explain later)
12. Shortcodes Ultimate (must have it, a lot of plugin talks with shortcodes)
13. StatCounter (to track and see your visitors behavior)
14. TablePress (better tables)
15. Tawk.to Live Chat (live chat)
16. ThirstyAffiliate (manage all the affiliate links)
17. UpdraftPlus – Backup/Restore (must have it, to back up your site, you can backup on Dropbox too)
18. W3 Total Cache (cache options, to make your site faster, google like fast to load websites)
19. WP Smush (pictures are optimized automatically, so your site will not slow down because of a pic)
20. Yoast SEO (Top 1st plugin to have, follow the guidance of Yoast to have a good SEO on your posts)

How Do I Add A Blog Post?

Everything you see on the internet and in the URL of your domain name is called, front-end of the website, meanwhile your control panel of WordPress is called back-end. From the back end of your website, you can control all the things that will appear on your front end. If you look at the menu on the left of your WordPress backend there are multiple options. You should understand them all, but the most important that will help you on how to start a successful blog are these ones:

  • Posts.
  • Pages.
  • Appearance.
  • Plugins.

If you click on posts, you will be able to add a new post, you can type in a title and a short blog post, and if hit on publish.

This post will appear on the front end of your website. You will need to get better in tweaking all the features and learning WordPress just playing around. Delete stuff where you make mistakes and get better at it with the time. Your journey on how to start a successful blog it is just started and you will be good at it soon.

You can see a few pictures down below, on how to add a new post and to visit your front end website. I hope you enjoy this how to start a successful blog so far, if yes continue to read, it’s getting more hot now.

 

What is SEO?

SEO (Search Engine Optimization), are the best practices you need to use in order to have your website showed by google, bing etc. I advise you to study a little bit of SEO, you can take courses on Coursera or you can just pay an agency to do so.

I have never paid an agency because I am good at it, but it took me years to learn it. Two of the best agencies that do the job for you are, Traffic Travis and BacklinkBeast. You can decide if or if not to use them. I advise you to learn the best practices and Do It Yourself (DIY). DIY is the best practice to help you on how to start a successful blog, just google the stuff you don’t know.

 

10 Reasons Why You Should Start A WordPress Free Blog

If you got to this point with the installation, you might wanna know some valid reasons why you should start a blog in our times.

I have talked about this already in the first chapter, the thing that should motivate you to do so is not the money, but the love that you have and purpose toward something strong present in your life.

As that said, here my top 10 reasons why you should start a WordPress free blog:

  1. Writing Will Consolidate Your Thoughts: We all have thought, mostly all day long, even while we sleep, the hard thing is to put them together and give them an order. Blogging and writing your thought on paper will trace lines between your mind and body. The neural connections will be more easily connected to your body, your writing and communication will improve, hence you’ll become a less confused individual.
  2. You Will Become More Aware: Reality and Mindfulness are two separate things, while in the reality you might experience something and you will need to act in order to see it. Mindfulness brings back the real you. Sometimes, while writing, you end up making a sentence that in your real world of thoughts was just 5 words into a sentence of 500 words. With blogging then you can reconnect with the reality via your mindfulness.
  3. Better Consciousness of yourself: After you become more aware of yourself putting down sentences on a paper, you will also experience awareness of the situation that you are in. Ultimately it will make your life and somebody’s else life with the same interests as yours less confused and more clear.
  4. Filtering the bad stuff: Someone said one day ‘be able to explain what are you thinking and you will conquer the world‘. Being able to explain or teach something to someone it is the hardest thing, that’s why teachers should be paid more. While blogging you can not put down on paper all of your thought and thinking, but you need to get better and good at filtering the bad and useless and not attractive information.
  5. Create a Routine in Your Life: The more healthy routines you have, the less stressed and confused and depressed you will feel. This is a fact, start a free WordPress blog will need to become a routine that you have thirst for it and you want to do it at certain times of your days. This is a good habit and way to include personal development in your life and how to start a successful blog.
  6. You will make Friends and Inspire Folks: Some people will be very interested in your posts, either you are writing about how to win a game on mortal kombat, or you are talking about a painting of Michelangelo. Some people will love you and will be your friend for life, you will learn a lot from them and they will learn a lot from you.
  7. You will make Money, and it’s free: Apart from the initial investment with your hosting which is $2.95 a month, you will have to pay zero money. But when people will start to love your content and you will have a lot of readers and traffic, there is no way that your love will not be appreciated. The money will come to you on autopilot. What is better than this?( please tell me what else, if you know it).
  8. You will get a feedback and become more confident: Some people will comment or interact with you, if your point and vision are a good one, you will get appreciation. And what else do we need apart from love, self-confidence, and health in life? Starting a free WordPress blog was a nice decision huh?
  9. You can have the whole world eyes on you: With the powers of the internet, you might end up having readers from the most remote island in the Pacific ocean. You will virtually have your presence and thoughts in any location of planet earth. Think about this: it would not be awesome that a reader in a remote place in this world, will read your stuff. He will start using your advice or thoughts or whatever you might think to influence other people around him. The world around this person will radically change and you were the cause.
  10. Is fun to do: It is absolutely fun to do, it is fantastic to see statistics on who search you for. You can absolutely see everything about your audience and you can have a 360 degrees experience with them. I find that blogging and writing are awesome, you can be the next famous guru in something you love and you can change the world. All you need is:

love

passion

dedication

do not give up

hosting and internet connection

 

What’s The Winning Formula For A Successful Blog?

There is only one formula to have your blog ranking first in search results for certain queries.

Write a few posts a week, cure the details, and put passion and love in it!

As I said before google intelligence is able to figure out if you are writing crap or gold. They are using advanced algorithms and intelligence, they are tracking anything that happens on your site.

If they see that people love what you’re doing, you are going to be the number 1, period. This guide on how to start a successful blog and your efforts will put you first in google search results.

Take great pictures, make rad videos, and write awesome content. If you need nice pictures by the way you can use unsplash, I’ve got many pictures from there.

 

How To Write A Blog That Leads To Success

How to start a successful blog on 18 effective steps:

  1. Find your Niche.
  2. Think about what your audience might wanna ear.
  3. Keyword research, you can use free google keyword planner, or this paid one KW finder.
  4. get a nice domain name with your niche keywords inside of it. ( not longer than 12 chars).
  5. buy a super good and fast hosting, with no downtime like TMD-hosting.
  6. Start to make your blog look good.
  7. Install the right plugins on it.
  8. Track everything on your site with Google Analytics and StatCounter
  9. Respect the SEO Practices, learn SEO or use an agency like backlinkbeast.
  10. grow your email list and subscribers, you might need an EMS like Aweber.
  11. get better at writing, and be curious.
  12. learn, learn and learn.
  13. have visions, and take notes.
  14. put the notes on paper.
  15. be yourself, this is the best part of you.
  16. make your audience happy to return.
  17. get feedback from your visitors.
  18. love what you are doing.

 

How To Boost Traffic To Your WordPress Website For Dummies And For Free.

There are many ways you can boost traffic to your websites in order to how to start a successful blog, there are mainly two categories:

  • blackhat SEO.
  • whitehat SEO.

Everything under the blackhat SEO practiced should be avoided, meanwhile whitehat SEO is something that our friend Google like a little more. WhiteHat SEO is best on how to start a successful blog.

 

Backlinks

A Blackhat SEO bad practice, for instance, is paying someone, to make a lot of backlinks for money on spammy blogs.

One of the most powerful ways that Google uses to rank a website are backlinks, that basically are votes that websites with the biggest authority give to your website.

Like, for example, let’s assume you write an article about food, and this article at some points gets published in the new york time. Your website domain authority (DA) will go to the moon.

It is important to focus on the quality of the links instead of the quantity. If you are doing a great work and you will put love, you will be contacted by big guys in your niche and you will have nice backlinks.

I suggest you watch this video, and even more, if you have time just take all the free course here on Coursera.

Whitehat SEO instead is building links in a natural way, and have links pointing to your domain from high authority websites. You can find out the authority of a website, and the links pointing at it with the MOZ bar plugin for chrome.

Install the bar here on chrome, you also need a free MOZ account.  You can activate or deactivate the bar from chrome, DA (domain authority), PA (Page Authority). There are also other metrics, just google the significate and start figuring it out.

Create an effective Keyword research Before Making an article

You need to create a spreadsheet and put down all the relevant keywords you want to rank for, you need to use tools like Google keyword planner or KWfinder, in order to find relevant keyword. You should start to try to rank first with low competition keywords, that have a big search result. (10k – 100k Low) is an Ideal situation.

You can sort all of these options from Google keyword planner and KWfinder, there are also other tools like uber suggest and many more.

So you want to start to fill in the spreadsheet with at least 7-10  keywords you want to rank for and create a longtail keyword on it to rank for.

If you are using WordPress you need to put that keyword in your Yoast SEO part of the website, under ‘focus keyword‘. Yoast will help you to optimize your article based on that longtail keyword you wanna rank for.

Publish more content

Try to publish at least 1 or 2 articles per week or more if you can, at least for the first 6 months/1 years. Articles must be always with at least 2000 words, 3000 words are ideal and sometimes do some cornerstone article with more than 10.000 words.

Google loves new content and if you are keeping up a nice routine and great stuff will come, so you made a nice decision to learn how to start a successful blog.

 

Grow your email list

You need to keep your visitors glued to your site, you don’t want to lose them on the way. You might need an EMS (email marketing service), like Aweber.

Email list building is another key factor in how to start a successful blog.

I like them because are cheap and easy to use. I highly recommend using Aweber to send out your bulk email and inform your audience of what’s new on your site and life etc.

 

Analyze your website data

You need to analyze the data coming to your website, the best way to do it is to install google analytics on it, and StatCounter.

Get the apps for both on your phone and check them out often, you can see a lot of things with those apps.

Try to figure them out a bit. Another crazy good tool I use on a daily basis is SEMrush, I advise anyone to have a plan for them.

They are just giving you out precious insights about your website if you follow them and their metrics you will be first and lead any industry. It is just a  matter of time.

Love + SEMrush = Success.

 

Comment on similar websites or blogs, give useful replies

You can run a simple search, and find other blogs with your interest in it, comment in these blogs, use as for username your website brand or link.

Do not spam links on comments, just give your opinion on a certain topic and interact, be social with the website you are commenting on. use your brand or website link as username.

 

Ask for a guest post

Guest posts can bring you in a lot of traffic, find blogs or big guys willing to let you write a post on their blog in exchange for a link on their website that points to yours.

On top of the fact that these guys have already a lot of traffic and you might get a ton of referral traffic from them. You will also gain authority and trust under the google eyes.

This is a list of some websites that accept guest posts, just send them a nice email, say that you are interested in their content and you want to do a guest post in exchange of some nice work for them for free.

 

Find influencer and use quora

Quora is a website where people ask questions, and they get replies. Just ask questions on Quora and interact with an influencer in your area of expertise.

Start to build your network of whales, and start a free WordPress blog with their help. Do not be spammy or annoying, you will get blocked, just give nice insights into your knowledge. Interact like you would interact in real life.

You don’t stop a guy on the road and ask for 1000 bucks usually, you need to become a friend first get their trust and then maybe they will borrow you 1000$.

 

Publish a resource explanatory article like this one with more than 10000 words

Make a few cornerstone articles where you explain something practical that might be useful for your readers.

I thought that most of the people reading my minimalistboy blog are simple people that are trying to become minimalists.

A guide on how to start a successful blog on WordPress for free might be a nice solution for some guy that wants to become minimalist.

They can start writing their things and their experiences and maybe make a lot of money with a blog. So I wanted to make a clear page/article on how to do it.

I can actually say a lot more than this, but I don’t want this post to be too long so I am trying to shrink it to the bones.

If you have more questions by the way about technical stuff, I would be more than happy to help you. Something I can not live without is my bookmarks in chrome, I have any sort of good website, and tools in my bookmarks that you might need and I can explain to you how to use it.

Keep an eye on Alexa

Alexa is a simple website, that keeps tracks of the most popular websites like if you put google.com on Alexa you will get 1 as results.

Since it is the most visited website on earth. You can get other interesting and simple to see metrics from them so definitely check them out often here. You can put any website in it and see how much traffic they have.

 

Create an effective social media strategy

Be active on main social networks such as Facebook page, TwitterInstagram, and Google+. (Google+ seems to help rankings if you get a lot +1, which is hard)

My advice is also to use Pinterest, Tumblr, Reddit, Snapchat, Quora, Youtube, Steemit, StumbleuponPatreon.

You can use HootSuite to manage all of your social media at once. This last tool is very nice, you can add 3 social networks for free, and unlimited with paid plans.

Interact in facebook groups in your niche and range of interests, start to become a social authority, you can measure your social authority with this website, fill in all your social accounts and try to reach a high Klout score.

Constantly follow and comment on people in your niche, try to grow your audience and followers day after day. Do not push it too much, just make the process natural to avoid ban and blocks.

I am using unfollowspy for twitter as well.

P.S: Include social media sharing buttons on any page, make them fit and look nice.

 

Ask or pay for shoutouts

If you don’t know what a shoutout is, you are back in the times. You can pay money to people with big audiences on social networks to feature some of your content or a link that points to your blog.

This is more effective than paid advertising since you are going to hit people with the interests similar to your blog. Some people can shout out you out even for free or for a favor. Like if you shout them out they might shout you out too. Try to be nice and polite and ask for shoutouts and you will start growing.

 

Find free article submitter websites

Create nice content and then try to submit it to websites like these ones, which are article submitters engines.

 

Find Niche Related Forums and post relevant comments and content

Find Forums that have content related to yours, I know a very nice trick to do so. Just go to your google search bar and type this:

inurl:forum YOUR-NICHE-OR-KW

E.g.: if you are looking for a forum about dragons, put: inurl:forum dragons

how to start a successful blog forum research

Make your login, and start interacting with the multiple forum communities, this is a very nice and working method btw.

 

Give Away a free epub giveaway to include in exchange for an email

Create an awesome piece of content, where you are going to lay out an overview of your online business.

It is very common to create an epub or more simply a pdf book, where you write 80 pages or more of relevant stuff that people can read at any time or even print.

You can create the book and give it away for free in exchange for an email, Aweber made it easy for you. You can create pop-ups or banners that request your visitor to put their email in exchange for this awesome piece of content, for free.

So again get Aweber for both email marketing and email growing.

 

Become the king of Infographics

I am not very good with Infographics, but I have heard that are the holy grail to catch up some interest and shares and retweets and more. Infographics are pictures that include important data about a certain topic. You can create easily infographics with this website called canva.

 

Avoid any kind of duplicate content, Google hates duplicates.

Do not try to copy and paste cool articles into your blog, google hates duplicates, they have algorithms able to figure out who posted those sentences before on the web.

If some of your articles will have exact match case sentences your website will be penalized.

Write always new content and never copy and paste any information from a blog to your blog. You can use these websites to see if someone copied your website Copyscape and siteliner.

 

Make videos on YouTube

Youtube have a huge power, is the 2nd most visited site after Google and people are lazy, they rather listen or watching some things instead of reading.

Create awesome videos and content, and link to your website in the video description. If you are going to put your face on youtube and people will like you, you have made the jackpot.

I advise you to create a profile and install vidIQ Chrome Plugin, this will help you with the video SEO. And create custom thumbnails again with Canva.

 

Post slides and powerpoints of your speech or presentations on SlideShare

A lot of people uses slideshare for work, the good thing about SlideShare that you will find an audience of rich and well-affirmed people, business guys or CEO.

So post your slides and theories on Slideshare, you might need a LinkedIn account to do so. Like if you put slides on how to start a successful blog I bet a lot of rich people would be interested in it.

Create case of studies, people just love this kind of stuff, a case of studies and infographics will skyrocket your business and WordPress blog.

 

Submit your great content in PDF to sites like issuu

There a lot of publisher engines, like issuu, you can submit to them nice content, and if people will read it, they will share it and use it all the time.

You need to create a good PDF version of your article, it has to be PDF so you avoid duplicate content. It needs to be your work, and you should include references to the original article in the footer of the PDF.

It is up to you to find more sites like issuu.

 

Be active on Reddit and relevant subreddits

Participate and be active on Reddit, this is the biggest website in the world, it contains any kind of information. It is also called the ‘front page of the internet’.

You need to subscribe to subreddits relevant to your niche and start being part of these subreddits.  Like this one is the subreddit for minimalism r/minimalism.

Do not spam links, they will ban you in a matter of seconds. Aim to grow your karma first, it will take months and months.

When your karma starts to be high, you can throw in a link to one of your post once in a while. Don’t do too much linking, instead comment and become an authority of the subreddit you are subscribed. If your comments are not seen or nothing happens, it means that you’ve got shadowbanned.

This is the official website to check if you’ve been shadowbanned amIshadowbanned. (just put your username in it, and if you are shadowbanned, it’s over. You will need another account).

 

Find your Flow and Interact With Disqus

Disqus is one of the biggest commenting networks on the web, millions of comments are on it, make an account here at disqus.com.

What I usually do is to create a several accounts and comment 1 or 2 times a day, with nice content and relevant comments.

I never post any links in the comments because I will be flagged as spam otherwise. What I do is to put my website name in the ‘name’ settings of my Disqus, like in this case my name would be minimalistboy.com.

Doing so I will create a nofollow sometimes dofollow backlink on a nice website and people interested in my comment can visit my website. Disqus is very powerful.

 

Unleash Blogger.com the Google Free Blog

Create a blogger account with your brand, and comment on other bloggers.com websites with content similar to yours.

It is very easy to find other blogs and follow them and interact with them. Blogger is the free google blogging platform. Without any doubts, bloggers should not be underestimated.

Everything that is from google creates power in your hands.

 

Create awesome signatures

You need to put your signature everywhere you can, a good signature is made of your brand name and a link to your site.

Create awesome signatures for e-mail, forums, blog posts, and more.

 

Install a Push Notifications system on your website.

I am not going to much in detail with this, I use push notifications on my websites all the time but I usually code them all.

I have no push notifications here on MinimalistBoy because for someone might be too intrusive, I want to keep it minimal.

But if you want to add push notifications on your website I strongly advise you to use these guys here FoxPush.

They will give you 50.000 users that can subscribe to your notifications for free. It is crazy! Other services that are more famous for PushCrew, works less good then FoxPush and gives you only 1000 subscribers. So definitely check out FoxPush.

 

Create Artificial Intelligence Bots with Chatfuel

Power up your Facebook pages with bots, you can easily create intelligent bots with chatfuel, you can create your auto reply messages pretty easily.

It is possible to integrate chatfuel with Telegram as well via API and create telegram bots. You will have a nice reply rate on your facebook pages and sometimes you will be able to guess your visitor requests.

I advise you to check as a human all the messages at the end of the day. But bots can be useful to redirect a user to a certain part of your website. Like if someone keeps saying the word ‘food’ you can redirect them to an article about food.

 

Put a live chat service like tawk.to on your website

Having a live chat support on your website might be great, not to be modest but this service here is 100% free, is called tawk.to.

There is a WordPress plugin to install called tawk.to, and you will be able to see from the tawkto dashboard visitors in real time.

You can interact with them, you can see from where are they from and what are they are typing or even looking at even before they do it.

This website and plugin are a must have it, it is fully customizable and the free version is great already. Check out Tawk.to 

 

You need to have pretty links and website structure

Your links and website structure needs to be pretty, you don’t want to have links like example.com/43/t/rar/2018myblog what you want is something nice and easy to look at like example.com/my-blog .

Use dashes to separate the words in the URL do not use capital letters and avoid special character.

You want to have also images in your posts, and you want to describe your picture to the best using the ALT text feature. This will help Google identify what is the image. So always describe your images with the ALT text option.

Fill in the slug, and the meta description according to the Yoast SEO advice.

 

Install Grammarly Chrome Plugin To Have no more Typos

Google Likes nice written websites, if you start to have too many typos and syntax mistakes, you will get somehow penalized.

Thank, god they have created Grammarly. This website and its chrome extension are great. They will correct any typo on your website mainly for free.

Only for a super advanced correction, you will need to upgrade, if your English is bad you might wanna consider upgrading.

 

Internal and external links, what you mean by that?

When writing a post, you need to point to your blog other relevant articles about that topic, for instance, you have 4 articles talking about Japanese food. You want to add one link to one of your post saying if you wanna know more about this specific kind of food I have another post here.

Also, external links need to be relevant to the same topic, you want to put links to other websites, that have the same content as yours. Like if you have an article on Japanese food, you need to find interesting Japanese food blogs and point to them.

This will help Google recognize what’s the page is all about.

 

Submit your website URL to important directories

Submit the URL of your website and the good meta description of your website to websites directories. Here is a good list of nice directories to submit your website. In my case, it would be https://minimalistboy.com 

 

Apply to include your site in google alerts and news

And the jackpot can be done if you apply to include your website in google news and alerts. If you are producing awesome content, and you comply with their terms why not.

This will boost your traffic to the max. If you wanna know more and apply for google news and alerts you can do it here.

 

Got Money? Use paid advertising with Adwords, Facebook ads, and Bing Ads.

If you have money to invest and only if you feel like it, you can do some paid advertising with Adwords, Bing Ads or Facebook ads.

These guys will put it your first for certain keywords for money, you can create nice ads with AdWords for $0.01 per click.

You can generate an incredible volume of traffic with a budget of $10 a day that will benefit your website. Learn paid advertising, I advise you to follow a course on AdWords or Facebook ads like these ones. Doing so and start building a lot of nice traffic but you can also blow a lot of money if you don’t know what you are doing. Learn how to start a successful blog with paid advertising via those courses down below.

 

Mastering Majestic and SimilarWeb Metrics

Like Moz and Semrush, Majestic and SimilarWeb are Giving you nice insights about your website, they are telling you exactly what you are doing good or wrong.

You need to learn to read those metrics, but I think that is worth to make a free account with them and start playing around. These 2 websites especially majestic are fundamental if you plan to grow traffic and to do a nice SEO strategy on your website.

So you better start now and master these tools for good.

 

Constantly control your website speed and performances

Google love to show their customers fast and nice looking websites, you might not be able to see the difference between 1 second and one nanosecond like google.

If your sites loads in 3 seconds meanwhile another one with the same content loads in 0.5 seconds, your website will go down the list in the search results. Speed is the first thing to take when trying to achieve the how to start a successful blog challenge.

The easiest way to test your website speed is via gtmetrix, this website is great and will give you insights on how to make your site faster.

Alternatively, you can use the Google PageSpeed Test, I find it less interesting but good as well.  Remember they a key factor in the site speed is also your hosting, that’s why I always recommend using TMD-hosting.

 

Technical aspects of how to start a successful blog

This section of the article is very important and it might be a little complicated for someone, you can decide to skip it, or just read it for curiosity. The part that talks about the submission of your website to google, bing, and Yandex via webmasters tools should be done and understood.

So let’s get started with some technical background and stuff you might wanna do to make search engines happy. This is how to start a successful blog best guide on the internet.

 

Submit your website sitemap to Google, Bing, and Yandex

What is a sitemap? 

A sitemap is a list of all the links and images and content that you have on your website, this will help crawlers to crawl your website.

Google periodically crawl your website in the background and checks if all is in the right place and if new content was created.

These crawlers are bots that are indexing your website and create a blueprint of everything that is happening on your site.

An important thing to do when you start your website is to submit the sitemap to the most important engines, which are Google, Bing, and Yandex.

If you have started your website on WordPress, like described in this post, you will access to the URL of your sitemap via the Yoast SEO plugin.

If you can not see the XML Sitemap tabs, you need to go in your Yoast dashboard ⇒ Features ⇒ Advanced Settings Pages.

Log in to your website backend and scroll down to SEO, and click on XML Sitemaps as shown in the figure below.

seo xml yoast sitemap

You can find your XML Sitemap here: XML Sitemap

Click on XML Sitemap, and that one will the URL that you need to submit to google, bing, and Yandex.

 

How to submit the sitemap URL to the search engines

To submit the sitemap URL to search engines you will need to create your google, bing and Yandex webmasters profile. You can create your account via the links here below:

Once you are logged in to your console, you want to add a new property as shown in the figure below, verify the propriety with the method that sounds easier for you.

I always choose the HTML tag method, but there are easiest ways to verify your property. Once the property is verified, add the sitemap and submit it.

In my case for minimalistboy I would have to add sitemap_index.xml and click Submit as shown in the pictures below.

Some people advice to submit all the version of your website, and then in the option to prefer one to appear in search results. All the version of your website means that you will have 4 URL’s, like so:

  1. http://minimalistboy.com
  2. https://minimalistboy.com
  3. http://www.minimalistboy.com
  4. https://www.minimalistboy.com

You might not have an https SSL certificate yet, but if you follow the guide I will teach you how to get one for free, and many other nice things.

In the options in the webmaster console, you can pick your preferred version, I have picked for me https://minimalistboy.com

The process is alike for Bing and Yandex, follow the same steps:

  1. create a webmaster account.
  2. add property.
  3. verify the property.
  4. submit the sitemap.

 

Setup your Cloudflare and be ready to rock

Next thing you should do is to set up your Cloudflare, it will take me forever to guide in the procedure, maybe I will make another article about it. (Cloudflare is a CDN)

But you should have your website running on Cloudflare for multiple reasons, some of the reasons are here:

  1. free https SSL certificate.
  2. faster website.
  3. easier control of your DNS.
  4. save bandwidth.
  5. protection from hackers.
  6. it is free for our needs.

Follow the pictures above, you want to add your website to Cloudflare, then pick a free plan, and at the end let Cloudflare manage your NS servers.

You need to go to your domain provider, in our case TMD if you used this guide, and go to the domain manager section shown in the pictures below. Replace the actual NS with the ones given from Cloudflare. Follow the pictures below.

It will take a few hours or less, or more, it depends, once the DNS is managed by Cloudflare all it will be better.

I suggest you go through all the main settings from your panel. To have the https SSL, you need to click on CRYPTO, and then go down and put always use https, the picture below.

cloudfalre always https and ssl enabled

 

Step By Step Cloudflare Optimization For Best Results

So now you have your Cloudflare account and your website managed by them. There is a bar on top with a lot of options. I will go through all of the options, And I will tell you what to enable or not.

cloudflare top bar with all the optionsP.S.: When I put nothing is: OFF or Default settings.

  1. Overview: This is just an overview of your domain, you can easily put your site into developer mode.
  2. Analytics: Here you can see your site analytics, the attacks from hackers and the bandwidth saved.
  3. Crypto: SSL ⇒ Flexible; Always Use HTTPS ⇒ ON; Opportunistic encryption ⇒ ON; Automatic HTTPS rewrites ⇒ ON.
  4. Firewall: Leave It Default.
  5. Access: Do not touch it.
  6. Speed: Autominify ⇒ Check them all; Enable Accelerated Mobile links ⇒ ON – ON; Brotly ⇒ ON; Rocket Loader ⇒ Automatic.
  7. Caching: Caching Level⇒  Standard; Always Online ⇒  ON.
  8. Workers: Do not touch.
  9. Page Rules: You need to add at least these two rules. 1st Rule⇒ Click ‘Create page Rule’ ⇒ put in the first field http://*yourdomain.com/* replace only yourdomain.com with yours ⇒ add setting ⇒ pick ‘ always use https’ ⇒ First ⇒ Save and Deploy  2nd Rule ⇒ ‘Create page Rule’ ⇒ add setting ⇒ pick ‘ Forwarding URL’ ⇒ status code ‘301’ ⇒ in the first slot on top put  www.yourdomain.com/* where your replace yourdomain.com with yours ⇒ in the second slot underneath 301 you put https://yourdomain.com/$1 where you replace only yourdomain.com with yours ⇒ pick ‘Last’ ⇒ Save and Deploy. You should have the HTTPS rule as first always. See pictures below just to make it more clear.
  10. Network: Websocket ⇒ ON; IP Geolocatizion⇒ ON;
  11. Traffic: Leave it like this.
  12. Customize: Leave it Default.
  13. Apps: this is super interesting, there are a lot of apps that are doing crazy stuff, play around a little bit with them, and find the ones you might like the most. The must have it are Google Analytics, Back To Top Button. And many more. This is a very interesting feature of Cloudflare.
  14. Scrape Shield: Put all of them ⇒ ON.

These Cloudflare settings are going to make your blog blazing fast, and this is the first step so that you can achieve how to start a successful blog full potential.

 

Setup Your Google Analytics

After all of these settings and learning on how to start a successful blog, we need to keep track of our visitors or least know if someone visits our website.

To do so the most fundamental tool is Google Analytics, This can be enabled from your this link. You will need to create an account and get your Google Analytics Tracking Code.

Follow the pictures Below, and use the Google Analytics Cloudflare app to inject the code.

When the settings are completed, you will need to learn a little how it works, but with the menu on the left, you can find a lot of features.

You can see your visitors in real time, you can see so much stuff and I advise you to download also the Google Analytics Mobile App.

So you will be able to see what’s going on on your site from your telephone.

 

Setup Your Statcounter

In addition to Google Analytics, because I love numbers and stats, I always install statcounter on my websites.

The mobile app ‘Statcounter’ is very straightforward and the data are easier to read compared to Google Analytics.

It is an awesome website and mobile App. I suggest you to learn how to read the stats afterward, and if you want to install it on WordPress Here a Simple Video.

Also, you will need to create an account with them first here at statcounter.com. Add your projects and settings. Then install the StatCounter WordPress plugin.

 

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

 

Why hosting is so important?

Hosting is important because is where all your stuff and work will go, you don’t want to get a bad car with a lot of miles. You would rather have a cheap car that will still work for a while, this is how to start a successful blog.

Having a good hosting plan will save you money and efforts you put in your blog. I came up with TMD after years of disappointments with other companies.

I love them and talk about them all the time as the best cheap solution. There are other solutions that are even better but are a lot more expensive and not worth it unless you have a huge business.

You can always pass to better solutions later on when you start making more money. If you want to take the leap and get the best immediately check out LiquidWeb.

 

Do I have only to use WordPress to make a blog?

No there other CMS (content management systems) such as, Joomla, Drupal, Mautic etc.. But WordPress is by far the one that most of the users use and with the widest range of solutions and support.

if you are very into how to start a successful blog you can also learn how to code with FCC and you will make your own coded website, but this will take at least a few years.

 

Whats’ the cost of having a blog?

The cost of having a blog is usually around 40$-50$ dollars a year for your hosting and domain, it might go to 100 – 150 a year for better solutions like cloud hosting or VPS. How to start a successful blog? Have the best hosting first.

 

Will my name published on the internet and have no privacy?

If you don’t pick ‘keep my whois anonymous‘ plan when buying your domain, your name will be visible as the registrar. It will be public, usually to get a WHOIS privacy domain is a few bucks more.

 

How blogs make money?

Blogs make most of the money with people interested in your stuff purchasing stuff on your blog, and of with big guys interested in advertising on your blog.

Some people are willing to pay a lot of money based on the traffic you have.

There are blogs with 10.000 visitors a day that can ask up to 1000$ a week to put an ad or to write an article about them.

 

What if I lose my drive in blogging?

It means that you need to be more perseverant if you really love it or change niche or really focus on what you want in life.

Blogging is a full-time job and you need a lot of time to do it. It is all about writing something you love and it will be no efforts and money will come on autopilot.

 

How to make my site available in more than one language?

WordPress has a plugin called, polylang, it is a little tricky to understand, but there are many tutorials online. MinimalistBoy is using polylang and I have my website in English and Italian.

 

What if I have a technical problem I can not solve?

You can always contact me, I am a solutionist problem solver usually, and or you can hire someone on Fiverr. Otherwise just google your problem and Google will throw the best answer for you about how to start a successful blog and life in general.

 

How do I become good at WordPress?

You need to look at tutorials and mostly play with it when you make mistakes just keep making mistakes and get better. You can always delete your trashy stuff and no one will see it, as long as it stays in the backend.

 

Am I too old to start blogging and learn WordPress?

WordPress is made for anyone, as long as you have 50$ a year and you are able to turn on a computer and check your email. Learning WordPress will be nothing much harder than that. So you are not too old to learn WordPress, and you are doing good to read this how to start a successful blog guide. Start now, read this blog post, ask me questions, I will help you.

 

What is the biggest challenge on how to start a successful blog?

The biggest challenge is to see visitors on your site, follow chapter 2.3 of this table of content of this article. Try to use some of the methods you might find easier for you, and you will get traffic sooner or later. Then it will be so rewarding and you can say, ‘I have learned how to start a successful blog.’

 

Do I need to follow this guide in its whole?

The most important part is to get a good hosting add learn WordPress. The other part of this guide is a huge help to bring you to success on how to start a successful blog. If you follow along with any point of this guide, your blog will lead to success, no doubts. It just takes times, sometimes years to have a lot of traffic.

 

I don’t understand how to get visitors to my website, I write cool stuff but no one reads it.

You need to read chapter 2.3 and start putting some momentum in what you’re doing. You need to start having people to share your posts is key on how to start a successful blog. Also, do very fine keyword research.

 

WordPress.com or WordPress.org?

I advise you to use always wordpres.org, it is absolutely better, but I know that for some people wordpress.com might be easier to start. You can always start with wordpress.com and go for .org then. TMD will help you with the transition in 2 seconds.

 

I host my website already somewhere else, how do I migrate to TMD?

You just give your FTP access to the blog to TMD, and they will do the migration for you. They will take care of everything, the database included. How to start a successful blog is almost at the end, read the conclusions soon.

 

What is the difference between a website and a blog?

A website is usually a page where you put up your services and address and contact information. A blog is somewhere you keep alive and where you talk about your business with no stop.

Usually, all the most famous websites have a blog on the side. This is called content marketing, you need to keep your website alive with new content in order to be appreciated by Google and rank high. Do blogging is the perfect solution on how to start a successful blog and a website.

 

Conclusion on how to start a successful blog

In this long article, we talked about heaps of things, the goal of this article is to learn how to start a successful blog. If you follow this guide and deeply understand it, I am sure that your blog will be successful.

In a few steps, the most important things to do are this in this infographic:

  1. get hosting here with TMD-hosting.
  2. install WordPress.
  3. create your brand.
  4. persist, and do keyword research.
  5. write good stuff, with love.

 

GET TMDHOSTING NOW

 

how to start a successful blog infographic

SHARE THIS IMAGE ON YOUR SITE

Disclaimer: After a lot of research and work I came up that the best hosting solution and paid themes are TMD-hosting and ElegantThemes. I use them my self after I have tried many others, I love them and if you use this guide I will get a small affiliate commission as a partner that will help to grow my business and yours. Start hosting from $2.95 a month now.

 

This is a very long article, always refer to the table of contents on top of the article called how to start a successful blog. I advise you to read and deeply understand Chapter 1. and 2.

Chapter 1: is about how and why you should start a blog. And how to start a successful blog.

Chapter 2: until 2.2.1.1  talks about the goals you should have in mind in order to stand out of the crowd and a little bit about SEO. This might help you with how to start a successful blog.

Chapter 2.3: is all about how to drive traffic to your website and to keep your visitors happy with your content. You need to drive traffic so that you can say that you are on the right track on how to start a successful blog.

Chapter 2.4: is not mandatory but strongly advised, doing so will make your website nice looking under the google eyes. Also tracking and analyzing your visitor’s behavior with analytics is very important.

Chapter 2.5: is all about frequently asked questions. FAQs about how to start a successful blog

If you liked this articles and you want to ask questions please comment below, I will be glad to reply to any comment. Feel free to share it with family and friends, you’ve got all the sharing buttons at the bottom of this page wink, wink.

Also, donations are welcome, I am not asking for any money but if you feel like reading this was worth a penny, feel free to do it. I hope this helped you and gave you all the hints on how to start a successful blog.

Thanks a lot for reading how to start a successful blog.

 

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19 thoughts on “How To Start A Successful Blog Step By Step”

  1. This is a very thorough explanation of starting a blog. I think you’ve covered everything. Thank you for sharing in such great detail.

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    1. Well,thanks a lot for the comment! Feel free to share it and if something is not clear, just ask! Thanks for the appreciation

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  2. Wow, this is such. comprehensive guide and I love how you have created a map at the top so you can jump to the key thing you want to know. This is such a great guide for a beginner!

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    1. Thanks a lot, it took me a while to do it, some parts might be a little vague and needs to be studied more, but if you have technical questions I can help you out! Let me know, and thanks for the comment !

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  3. It takes a long time to read it, but it is worth it. The technical part is very interesting and underestimated! I agree that Site Speed is key factor. Thanks for this

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  4. This is a great comprehensive guide getting started and setting up your blog. I also love the table of contents at the top! Very useful and thorough

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    1. Hello Dustin!I appreciate a lot that you liked it!

      I think that if anyone follows these points, can get a big success within 1 year. Feel free to ask any question if you have it, and share it with your friends that might need help starting a blog.

      Thanks

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  5. Thank you so much for this! I put this under my favorites tab! Very detailed explanations, and very helpful. Will definitely get a lot farther with this article. Thanks!

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    1. yeahhh, bookmark it! I have just started this blog, I will post great content hopefully on weekly basis! Talking about life, minimalism, pshychology and how to make money from home techniques. Thanks for the appreciation, feel free to ask any question, if something is too hard or not clear.

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  6. This is quite an extensive guide. I love it. I have a self-hosted WordPress blog. It was daunting when starting out, but I feel like I generally know what I’m doing now.

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    1. Yeah, for some people it might be hard! It’s good if you have a self-hosted wordpress! Thanks for the comment

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  7. This article is great for the newbies to blogging field . It includes all the detail one would like to know before starting blog of their own . Really great article!

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  8. I’ve been blogging for a while, but you presented sooooo many great resources, that I’ve bookmarked your page to get back to it for reference in the future.

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    1. Yes you did the right thing! There’s many valid points,if you use them all Google would like it so much!

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  9. Takara Ayana says:

    Great tips! I recestarted a blog and probably missed one of these steps. So this is very helpful for me.

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  10. Very cool and effective

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