If you want to begin expressing yourself online and connect with others, starting a blog may be right up your alley. With bit of punchy writing and an attention to grammatical detail, you can build a site that is followed by hundreds or even thousands. With this beginners guide to blogging, you’ll quickly be off to the races.
The first thing you should do is develop a theme that will tie the entire blog together. If you love American history, for example, you might choose to write about Civil War battlefields. In fact, travel journals are immensely interesting, and you can show off pictures of the various historical sites you’ve visited. Colorful photographs are useful for breaking up large blocks of text. By captioning them, you can bring the information to the attention of your readers.
Sports is also an ever-popular subject that has many millions of readers online. If you are a baseball or football enthusiast, you’ll likely draw in oodles of readers. There are still niches to be found online for sports commentators, especially those people who make predictions about upcoming games. You might also choose to cover a lesser-watched sport as your niche, such as bowling, curling, or even track and field.
If you want to build your brand, which is ultimately the key to monetizing your writing, you’ll want to ensure that your writing is up to snuff. This means, in general, proofreading your daily entries carefully and looking with an eagle-eye for any potential grammatical, spelling, or syntax errors. Blog entries that discuss interesting, pertinent subjects while also being easy to read have a better chance of bringing their writers instant fame.
Use colors that make it easier for readers to peruse your text. Yellow text on a white background, for instance, will simply not work well for most pairs of eyes. In most cases, you’ll want to use regular black text without a lot of extra flair. Larger headlines for articles and sub-sections can be placed in bold or italicized to draw attention to them.
Don’t forget to add links to various entries so that you can direct people to outside sources. This is especially crucial if you are writing semi-academic articles that refer to ideas in history, science, ethics, economics, and literature. Credible links also allow you to move up in the Google search rankings, which will help with web traffic.
You may also wish to allow comments on your blog. This way, people can comment on your posts and a marketplace of ideas can be set up. Comment sections are excellent forums for people to interact on social media, though they do sometimes need moderated, especially if a heated debate breaks out.
When setting out to start your first blog, you’ll want to come into the process with a general idea of what to write about. As long as you stick closely to the theme and write several times each week, you should find success. You should able to bring in more readers as time goes by.
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