Today, we’re hosting a post with some great tips for bloggers.
Setting up a blog can be an amazing experience, letting you share your ideas, help other people and even make a living writing about something you have a passion for. However, if you are going to do it right, there’s more to think about than just the content. Here’s my three top tips for setting up your blog.
Build your blog with the right platform
If you’re going to start blogging, one of the things you are going to need is a good quality, well designed website. A website with an attractive design, where your writing and images are clearly presented, will make visitors stay on your site longer and encourage them to return, leave comments, share your posts on social media and sign up for your newsletter.
Whilst there are platforms available that will provide you with a free website and host it for you, they often come with a big disadvantage; they won’t allow you to make money from advertising and as a result you are prevented from turning your blog into a business.
Instead, you should consider building a website using a platform like WordPress, which offers free software that allows you to create your blog with relative ease. Besides letting you make money from your blog, platforms like WordPress come with hundreds of free themes to suit any style of blog and have thousands of free plugins; these are software add-ons that let you add a massive range of features to your blog. There are over 74 million WordPress sites online and millions of others built using similar platforms like Joomla and Magento.
Use secure antivirus software to prevent hacking
One essential thing you must do when you set up a blog is keep your site safe. Over the years, you may put in thousands of hours of effort to build up a substantial body of work and, hopefully, a significant online audience. Your blog may be financially very lucrative. This is why it’s important to install a great quality antivirus; so your content is always safe and you cannot be hacked. A hacker can destroy in minutes what you have spent years creating. Installing anti-virus software on your blog, right at the beginning of your journey, is an absolute must.
Set up real-time email verification for your newsletter sign-ups
An important way of growing your blog’s audience is to allow visitors to sign up for your newsletter. Doing this means that you can regularly remind visitors who haven’t checked in for a while about new articles or let them know about competitions or giveaways. Newsletters are considered as the key feature to developing a blog into a business, as it’s these returning visitors who are statistically more likely to trust your site and buy something you promote.
Once you’ve put in place a ‘sign up to our newsletter’ feature, you will, unfortunately, get two kinds of subscriber; genuine ones and fake ones. The fake subscribers are often people (or automated computer programs) that sign up in order to obtain a user name and password. They will try to use these to hack the admin section of your site. To protect yourself, make sure the newsletter subscription service you use comes with real time email verification. This will allow you to tell immediately if the email address is real of not. Doing this prevents hackers from accessing the site and stops you having a database full of fake emails. Trying to send newsletters to hundreds of fake email addresses can lead to you being penalised by internet service providers, and even having your website’s email address blacklisted. Try a service such as BriteVerify’s email verification.
