You can’t go far on the internet without coming across a blog, but let’s be honest: Many sites struggle to stand out in a jam-packed digital landscape. You need to understand how to start a blog that your audience will want to read — while also satisfying your business goals.
The thing is, blogs aren’t a novelty anymore. Readers can spot mediocre content as fast as they can close the tab on their browsers. They crave unique insight and experience, leaving plenty of room for authoritative blogs that offer value.
So, how do you leverage technology and build a blog that appeals to audiences today?
- Our journey starts with the basics: identifying a profitable niche, evaluating competitors, choosing a blogging platform, and designing a user-friendly site.
- After you set up your site, we’ll cover how to grow your blog with content creation, audience building, and monetization tips.
- Finally, we’ll go over legal and ethical considerations to position you for long-term success.
What Is a Blog?
A blog is an online information hub sharing knowledge about a specific niche. Blogs are created for several reasons, including personal interest, for generating income, or for serving as a content marketing tool to attract a target audience.
Blogs started out as “weblogs” in the mid-1990s as people began testing the internet waters. Early blogs acted as an online diary, connecting with people with similar journeys or interests. Soon, platforms such as Blogger and Live Journal made it easy for anyone to start a blog without technical expertise. In the early 2000s, Google AdSense enabled blogs to display ads so bloggers could turn a pastime into an income-generating activity. Brands also began partnering with bloggers who had built loyal audiences to promote their products.
Today, blogs are more dynamic than ever, leveraging technology and multimedia to engage users. In 2024, you can find an array of tools — including AI — powering content creation. SEO, social media, and a variety of marketing channels are helping blog writers find new ways to monetize their online presence.
Reasons for Creating a Blog
With so many blogs out there, why create a new one? Well, a blog can help you:
- Explore your creativity and interests. A blog offers a rewarding platform to share your knowledge and skills. You can use your blog as a portfolio to document a journey or help inspire others.
- Build a personal brand. Create a blog to position yourself as an authority and develop a reputation as a credible resource. Matt Kepnes built Nomadic Matt, for example, to share his tips and expertise for traveling the world on a budget.
- Build a business brand. Blogs are often the centerpiece of a company’s content marketing strategy. Posts are distributed through channels such as social media and email, building brand awareness and driving traffic to support business goals. Hostelling International uses a travel blog to draw readers to its website.
- Support financial goals. Blogs can be monetized through advertising, affiliate marketing, and brand partnerships. They can also be used for selling products and services such as online courses.
How to Start a Blog: Identifying Your Niche
To build an audience, you need to strike a balance between a subject you’re passionate about and what others are interested in learning.
Use SEO tools
Semrush and Ahrefs offer SEO tools to help you analyze keywords for various topics. In addition to comparing search volumes, you can uncover related terms to focus your blog’s content.
Google Trends can tell you if active searches for a particular topic are trending. For example, if you plug “baby food recipes,” “keto recipes,” and “vegan recipes” into the tool for the past 5 years, you can see how interest in these topics is changing over time.
Explore online communities
Reddit, Quora, Instagram, X, and other social media platforms give insight into topics people are curious about. Analyze conversations to see how audiences talk about a topic and the language they use. This can help optimize your blog for voice, tone, and niche interests, as users tend to be more conversational in online communities than with traditional search engines.
Talk to your audience
If you already have a customer base, survey them to understand their pain points. Ask about the content types they prefer and where they spend time online to help align your blog with their interests.
Listen in on social media
Social media listening tools help gauge what your target audience is talking about online. Create a list of keywords related to your industry, brand, and competitors then monitor reach and engagement. You can also zero in on emerging trends.
Conduct Competitive Analysis
Once you’ve established demand for the topic, get a sense of where you fit in the blogging landscape. Understanding your competitors can help you differentiate your blog.
Tools such as SpyFu can give you the scoop on competitors. For example, if you’re starting a financial tips blog, enter a competing site, such as “nerdwallet.com,” into the tool. SpyFu will identify competitors, such as Business Insider, Investopedia, and Forbes. The provided data shows keywords these sites rank for and performance gains or losses. You can leverage this information to learn what your competitors are doing well and where you might be better at meeting audience needs.
Take this a step further and evaluate how your competitors position themselves:
- What type of content do they publish?
- What kind of user experience do they offer?
- What social platforms are they active on, and how do they interact with audiences?
- What advertisers and partners do they work with?
It’s a lot of information to sift through, but it’s critical for developing a blog strategy. For example, you might find a competitor’s blog to be text-heavy and differentiate yours with podcasts and video content. Or, you might see an opportunity to distinguish your travel blog by incorporating accessibility tips.
Establish your authority
Website authority emphasizes to Google that you’re an expert on a subject, which is easier to demonstrate if you specialize in a niche. You can build a comprehensive content inventory and cultivate a targeted audience to attract ads, partners, and brands that want to reach this customer segment.
Choosing the Right Platform and Hosting
When you’re ready to build your website, choose a blogging platform that satisfies your immediate needs and offers opportunities to expand in the future. You might not need ecommerce capabilities now, but once your site gains traction, you may want to sell courses, ebooks, or merchandise. Leave yourself room to grow without switching platforms.
You’ll also need to consider your technical expertise. Platforms such as Wix and Squarespace offer easy drag-and-drop editors, so there’s no coding involved.
WordPress provides full customization with plenty of plug-ins and integrations.
When evaluating blogging platforms, consider whether they offer:
- Simple, easy-to-use interface
- Variety of templates
- Integrations for customizing user experience and workflow
- Built-in SEO tools, such as keyword research, image-alt text, customizable meta descriptions, and suggested optimizations
- Ecommerce capabilities, including product pages, shopping carts, and payment processing
- Sign-up forms for mailing lists
- Analytics for monitoring site traffic and growth
- 24/7 support, including live chat or telephone service
- SSL security
AI website builders
AI website builders, such as Hostinger and Wix ADI, use artificial intelligence to create blogs. Simply enter your blog name, a description of your site, and relevant keywords. The platform chooses the layout, colors, font, and images. You can adjust and customize the site to your preferences. For those with coding experience, platforms such as CodeWP use AI to help develop advanced features for WordPress sites.
Hosting
Depending on the server that hosts your blog, your site speed and security may differ. A shared hosting service, like HostGator or Bluehost, where multiple sites share one server, is cost-effective but may run slowly if other sites are consuming significant resources. However, you pay more for a dedicated server. Cloud hosting platforms, such as AWS and Google, use a network of servers to increase resources and enable you to scale when needed.
Blog Design and User Experience
A clean, attractive website is like a welcome mat, inviting readers to step into your site and explore. Make sure your blog is easy to navigate, as any friction in clicking links or filling out forms may cause visitors to abandon the site. Use the following as a checklist for optimizing your blog’s visual appeal and functionality. v
Aesthetic appeal
Consider the look and feel you want to achieve with your blog, and pick colors that set the right tone. Choose a layout that balances text and visuals — pages should be attractive but not cluttered. White space helps distinguish different site elements so users can find what they need.
Readability
Use a legible font size and line spacing so it’s easy for the eye to move smoothly from one line to another. Be consistent in applying the font throughout the site and choose contrasting colors for the text and background.
Intuitive navigation
Create a logical site architecture and group content so it makes sense to the user. Use standard navigation cues, such as a menu bar, across the top of the page.
Page speed
Things happen quickly online, so your site should load pages and process requests quickly. Test your site’s Core Web Vitals regularly, as they affect user experience and search rankings.
Mobile responsiveness
About 58% of all web traffic comes from mobile devices, so your readers are likely browsing on a smartphone or tablet. To accommodate these users, Google crawls and indexes the mobile version of most sites first. Ensure your content resizes to fit neatly on smaller screens, and links and buttons are large enough to select. Fonts should be legible without users zooming in, and mobile pages should load quickly.
Dynamic content
Make your blog a dynamic experience to spark curiosity and engage audiences. Where appropriate, consider using:
- Images, charts, graphs, and infographics to break up copy and make points easier to understand
- Video content to bring concepts to life
- Interactive quizzes and slideshows
- Augmented or virtual reality for creative storytelling
- Virtual tours for immersive experiences, such as the ones offered by the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History
Content Creation and Strategy
To help your blog gain traction, you’ll need a sound strategy and process. It all starts with research, then you’ll need to create a system to publish exceptional content regularly, like a content calendar.
Perform keyword research
With your target audience in mind, use keyword research to guide your topic selection. Identify a mix of broad keywords for core content and long-tail keywords to answer precise questions. Consider the buyer’s journey and create content for audiences both at the beginning of their discovery and further along in the decision-making stages.
Organize themes
With keywords in hand, organize your content into themes so you can take a strategic approach to writing. Let’s say you’re building a financial tips blog. Start with a few topic clusters, such as loans, savings, and mortgages.
Break these down further. Within the loans category, you might focus on car loans, student loans, and lines of credit. Research long-tail keywords related to these subtopics, such as tips for paying off loans and student loan repayment calculators. This method ensures that your content doesn’t overlap and ideas don’t fall through the cracks.
Manage content creation
Once you’ve identified individual blog topics, consider the format types your audience prefers, and plan your content.
- Use an editorial calendar. Schedule blog posts with deadlines to keep you on track. If you’re struggling to maintain your schedule, consider outsourcing to a blog writing service.
- Create content in batches. Instead of writing in bits and pieces, set aside time to create related content all at once. This ensures a consistent approach, and you won’t have to duplicate research.
- Write detailed content briefs. A content brief summarizes article details, such as keywords, word count, intended audience, purpose, and topic outline. This document keeps you and your content team on the same page.
- Repurpose content. Consider presenting content in different formats to satisfy audience preferences and quickly grow your content inventory. Take key points from an article and translate them into an infographic, or turn a webinar into an ebook. As you publish more content, you’ll cement your topical authority.
Balancing content quality and quantity
It might be tempting to push out as much content as possible when starting your blog, but search engines and audiences are increasingly discerning about quality. Google’s E-E-A-T guidelines and the more recent helpful content system update emphasize content with experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness. In other words, your content must deliver exceptional value before it can surface in search engines. Incorporate unique insight, such as examples based on your experiences, case studies, or statistics from your research.
A note of caution: Many bloggers are dabbling in AI to speed up content creation. While AI can help with ideation, OpenAI’s terms of use state you can’t represent its output as human-generated. In other words, you can’t ask ChatGPT to write an article and publish it as your own — but this is a good thing. While AI content could rank in Google in theory, it still requires human assistance to address the first-person experience and perspective that satisfies E-E-A-T principles.
Building an Audience
You’ve built your blog and put together a brilliant content strategy. The next step is to create awareness and cultivate an audience, because quality alone won’t attract traffic to your blog. Here are some tactics to raise your online visibility:
- Search engine optimization: Follow industry standard best practices for getting your site to rank well in search engine results.
- Social media marketing: Identify the platforms and online communities where your audience is most active. Begin building an online presence and engaging audiences using hashtags.
- Social networking conversations: Share your expertise by commenting on posts or answering questions. For example, LinkedIn’s collaborative articles are making an impressive splash in search results.
- Cross-promotion: Partner with websites that have a similar target audience so you can reach new readers.
- Guest posts: Offer a guest post to authoritative sites in exchange for a link that drives traffic to your site.
- Email marketing: Build your email subscriber list to market directly to your audience.
- Analytics: Regularly analyze your blog’s performance. See which pages are most popular or where most of your readers are coming from to build on your success.
Once you drive traffic to your site, keep your readers engaged. Link strategically between posts to encourage audiences to explore other pages on your site, and ensure your content remains fresh and interesting.
Monetization Strategies
When your blog gains momentum, you can generate income. You have to demonstrate a minimum level of traffic to attract advertisers and partners, but as your blog grows, more opportunities to earn become available.
Balance your need to create revenue with the needs of your audience. Littering your site with ads can get in the way of the user experience and impact your credibility. Similarly, your audience depends on you for your opinions, so don’t recommend products simply to earn money through sponsorship or affiliate links.
Advertising
Ad networks, such as Google AdSense, Mediavine, and SHE Media, place ads from brands interested in reaching your audience and get paid by the view or click. You can also sell space directly to advertisers if you find a business interested in sponsoring your site.
Courses and workshops
Many bloggers generate revenue through courses, workshops, or coaching. There are a few different models for this. The website Simply + Fiercely supplements its home organization tips with courses at various price points.
Meanwhile, cooking blogs such as the Canto Cooking Club offer a monthly subscription for on-demand cooking classes.
Affiliate marketing
With affiliate marketing, you earn a commission each time someone from your site clicks a link to purchase on another website. These links are usually included in blog posts as product recommendations. Amazon is the most well-known affiliate partner, but The Home Depot, Walmart, and Lowe’s also offer affiliate programs. The Penny Hoarder, for example, uses affiliate links and discloses them at the start of articles.
Product or services
Offer personalized coaching or consulting services to your audience so they can benefit first-hand from your expertise. The courses we mentioned on Simply + Fiercely include live coaching calls with the blog founder.
You can also set up an ecommerce shop to sell items your audience might be interested in, whether it’s an ebook you’ve written or products you’ve developed. Yoga with Adriene, for example, has a shop featuring branded clothing.
Brand sponsorships
Some bloggers secure sponsorships with brands that have a similar target audience. With these arrangements, you receive compensation for mentioning or promoting products in posts — through financial payment or products to review. You may also receive giveaways to run contests or promo codes for your readers.
Legal and Ethical Considerations for Your Blog
When you’re publishing in a public space, you’re obligated to do so responsibly. Taking an ethical approach to your blog helps establish professionalism and credibility and sets the foundation for your site’s longevity.
- Trademarks: Perform due diligence when branding your blog by ensuring the name isn’t already in use. Consider trademarking your final choice for protection.
- Copyright: Don’t use images, text, video, or other content without permission or attribution. It’s best to create your own content and use royalty-free or stock photography.
- Disclosure: Disclose whether you’re paid to write about something, receive a commission, or have a stake in something you write about.
- Libel and defamation: Take care not to make false statements on your blog that can negatively impact someone’s reputation, as this can lead to legal action.
- Be respectful: Be careful about sharing personal stories, photographs, or information without permission.
- Inclusive language: Use gender-neutral terms and watch for language that marginalizes or excludes certain groups. Consider that a diverse audience may be reading your content.
- Headlines: Be respectful of your audience and deliver what you promise in your content — misleading headlines can diminish your audience’s trust.
- Accuracy: Verify facts with credible sources. If you make a mistake, correct it as soon as possible.
- Accessibility: Make your content accessible to users of all abilities. This includes alternative text for images and ensuring your website is compatible with assistive devices.
- Privacy policies and disclaimers: Explain how and why you collect information and any terms and conditions for using your site. Disclaimers can protect you if you’re writing about health-related, legal, or financial topics — suggest that readers consult with a professional before taking action.
Additional Resources
While starting a blog can be daunting, you don’t have to go it alone. Plenty of tools can help you get your work done efficiently, as well as lead you to communities where you can ask questions and interact with other bloggers. Some of these tools and communities include:
- Grammarly: Use this popular writing assistant to polish your copy and improve grammar, spelling, and writing style.
- Canva: This graphic design tool makes it easy to create images for blog posts and social media content. Both free and paid versions are available.
- Looka: Need a logo? This tool uses AI to create one for you.
- Pexels: Find free stock photos and images for your blog.
- Lumen5: Make your blog more dynamic with AI-generated videos.
- Yoast SEO: This WordPress plug-in helps you optimize your content to rank better in search engines.
- Google Analytics: Monitor key metrics and find ways to improve your blog’s performance.
- Trello: Organize your workflow and keep track of deadlines with this project management tool.
- Google AdSense: Display ads on your blog to earn revenue.
- Reddit: Connect with fellow bloggers on the r/Blogging subreddit. You might also pick up some search engine optimization tips on r/SEO.
Your Roadmap to Blogging Success
Building a sustainable blog begins with researching topics your audience is interested in, ensuring a demand, and differentiating your blog from competitors. But to shine online, you need to plan and create outstanding blog posts that demonstrate expertise and offer more value than other sites in the SERPs.
Helpful, thought-provoking, and original content connects you to your audience. Learn how Crowd Content’s blog writing services can help you scale your content creation, from keyword research to quality assurance, and take the day-to-day details of writing and editing off your plate.
