Amateur Blogs are not new phenomena or trends. It has existed ever since the internet popped up nearly two decades ago. As the internet grew so did amateur blogging, so much so that today amateur blogs make up a huge chunk of the global blogging industry. If you’re planning to take those first baby steps in the blogging world then you’ve arrived at the right place. Understandably, you must be overwhelmed with so many questions and confusion. How to get started? How to grow your blog to reach a wider audience? What are the steps that are needed to be taken for making a transition into a professional blogger? You probably have many more questions. Not a problem. You’re about to get decisive and conclusive answers to all your questions, bringing unprecedented clarity and ultimately helping you to confidently navigate through the muddled world of blogging.
What are Amateur Blogs?
Amateur blogs are blogs created and maintained by a non-professional blogger. These individuals consider blogs as an avenue or platform for self-expression or sharing their passion or creativity with a wider audience. Amateur blogging, therefore, needs to be seen more of a personal hobby rather than a professional activity aiming for income generation. However, this fact needs to be taken with a pinch of salt. That’s because there are plethora of examples of amateur bloggers making a successful transition to become professional bloggers and earning a handsome income.
It is equally important not to take the term ‘amateur’ literally. The word ‘amateur’ does not denote lack of skills or knowledge. Rather it simply implies that at present blogging is not meant to be a primary source of income or a full-time job.
Benefits of Amateur Blogs
- Self-expression: It is a great platform to express your personal views and unique perspective about things you lost most and care about. This can be anything under the sun, from gaming, food, and travel to movies.
- Development of skills and talent: When you dedicate time and effort to things you love and care about, you also end up polishing and honing your skills. This helps to build your confidence and even push you to turn your hobby into a full-time profession.
- Fosters community building: Amateur blogs can be a great avenue for networking. Since blogging helps you to reach a wider audience, it invariably helps in building a connection with like-minded people or people belonging to your niche or industry.
- Potential income: Though not all amateur blogs aim for monetization, through sheer hard work and dedication amateur bloggers can monetize their blogs through ads, affiliate marketing, and other monetization means.
How to start blogging: Tips & tricks.
Below we’ve shared a step-by-step guide on how to start blogging along with useful tips and tricks that can help in making a transition from an amateur blogger into a successful professional blogger.
Choose a niche:.
The first obvious thing that you need to do is choose a niche. Conventionally, most amateur bloggers end up choosing their hobbies or passion as their niche. However, if you have even a slight inclination to monetize your blog in distant future then we recommend to choose a niche that enjoys some semblance of popularity with people. Speaking strictly in the context of SEO, you need to find out a niche that isn’t highly competitive but at the same time enjoys a high-to-decent search volume (more on this bit later).
The important point to remember is that niches that are already immensely popular are also going to be highly competitive, which will obviously make monetization immensely challenging.
Examples of some of the most highly competitive niche includes food, travel, gaming, lifestyle and technology.
However, if monetization or income generation is not your priority then you can carefreely choose even the most competitive niche or niche that has very low search volume.
Choose a hosting platform:
After choosing a niche, the next logical thing to do is to choose a good hosting platform. The thing is that your website needs a server for hosting your website, this is how your website becomes accessible for millions of internet browsers. Considering how critical hosting is, you obviously need to choose the best & highly professional hosting platform. This will ensure that your website does not suffer an outage or downtime and remains accessible 24/7 and 365 days.
Top hosting platforms:
Kindly ignore free hosting platforms like WordPress and Freehostia. These free hosting websites come with many disadvantages like no custom domain name and limited storage space. These drawbacks can not only adversely impact your monetization prospects but also the credibility of your website. Therefore, it is recommended that you must opt for professional paid hosting services, which charge an annual fee from you.
Designing your website with a professional touch:
Once you’ve bought the hosting plan, the next immediate step is to start designing your blog or website. Now this can be pretty tricky considering that most amateur bloggers have absolutely zero knowledge about website designing. Even though today there are scores of free tutorials on website design available on YouTube and also access to drag-and-drop website builders like Elementor, the learning curve can prove to be pretty steep for most people.
If you’re fine with steep learning curve and also want to save some money then you can opt for the DIY method. But if you have a good budget at your disposal then you can choose the easy way out of hiring a professional website designer.
The advantage of hiring a professional website designer is that your website will surely get a professional design appearance along with good UI and UX. Notably, websites with good UI and UX usually appear more trustworthy, which in-turn helps in attracting more traffic and engagement in the long run.
Make a content strategy:
Now that you are ready with a professional looking website, you must be itching to write your first blog post. Your excitement is understandable, but writing random blogs is not the right way of going about it. What you need is a good content strategy along with a sharp focus on SEO (we’ll speak about SEO in the next point).
The first important part of your content strategy is to plan the content for your entire website including your home page as well as all the internal pages. Especially focus on the content of your home page since it is the most important landing page of your website.
Conventionally, your content must not only resonate with your target audience but also increase their engagement.
The next important thing to do is to plan content for your blog section.
Among other things, you’ll have to address two fundamental questions:
- Roughly how many blogs you plan to write every month?
- What are the topics you’re planning to cover?
Once you’ve addressed these questions, you must start creating a content calendar, which is actually an important part of the content strategy.
A content calendar helps in planning and streamlining your content creation and the publishing process. In essence, it is important in achieving consistency, which in-turn helps in increasing your website’s engagement and organic traffic.
Adopt SEO strategy:
As we’ve already stated above, SEO has to be an integral part of your content strategy. Focusing on SEO is important even if you don’t plan to monetize your blog. That’s because SEO will help your blog to reach out to a wider audience, which ultimately will help in achieving your core goals like connecting with like-minded people and establishing you as an important thought leader in your industry.
SEO is a very broad and dynamic field but you fundamentally have to focus only on two important aspects.
- Keyword research.
- On-page SEO.
Talking particularly about keyword research, it helps in finding keywords in your niche that have high search volume. This implies that your target audience is searching for these keywords. Therefore, if you write a blog post targeting these very keywords, there is a high chance that it will attract a good amount of organic traffic.
It is important to remember that writing blogs without proper keyword research is like hitting a blind target. In other words, you’ll end up writing blog posts that will attract zero traffic and zero engagement, which will waste your enormous time and energy.
For many amateur bloggers with zero SEO knowledge, SEO concepts like keyword research and on-page SEO may sound little intimidating. But don’t worry. Both are immensely easy to perform. You’ll realize it once you start doing it regularly.
We highly recommend to conduct keyword research with the help of good SEO tools.
Popular SEO tools
Focus on social media:
The astounding and insane reach of social media platforms is all too well-known and, therefore, focusing on social media is very critical. However, many people mistakenly think that social media is only about making random posts. The fact remains that success on social media is possible not only through a proper social media strategy and lot of dedication and hard work.
One of the essential aspects of the social media strategy is creating a social media calendar, which is similar to a content calendar. You’ll also need access to drag-and-drop graphic design tool like Canva. We’d recommend taking the paid plan of Canva. This will not only give access to more designing features but also attractive and professionally designed templates.
Here are some important tips for leveraging social media.
- Choose only those social media platforms that are suitable for your niche. You don’t have to be present on all social media platforms.
- Avoid being over-promotional. Focus on creating posts that can solve the pain-point and problems of your target audience.
- Avoid random postings. Create a social calendar for regular posting. Regular posting helps in increasing engagement.
- Diversify your social media posts to increase engagement. Don’t just share links to your latest articles. Try out different posts like carousels, GIFs and memes, stories, tips, how-To’s and quotes.
- For inspiration and ideas, you can always look what your competitors are posting. Platforms like Pinterest can also be a great source of ideas for social media posts.
Here are some of the best social media tools that will help in running a highly effective social media campaign.
- Buffer (for scheduling social media posts & performance analysis).
- BuzzSumo (content discovery, content ideas and influencer discovery platform).
- SocialBee (AI post generator, recycling content and scheduling post).
- Canva: Drag & drop graphic designing platform.
Collbarte with other bloggers and try other different strategies:
If you’re seriously want to accelerate or speed up the process of popularizing your blog then it is important to adopt unconventional strategies. How about collaborating with other bloggers in your niche and leverage each other’s strength. For example, you can conduct a webinar along with other bloggers for discussing the latest trends or major problems plaguing your niche or else you can regularly write guest posts for popular websites in your niche.
Lastly, you can also try social media ads or even Google ads for promoting your amateur blog.
Be Patient:
It will be very childish and naïve to think that your blog will become a success in matter of few months. In all probability, it won’t. Building a successful blog takes lot of time and effort. Don’t get discouraged if success and results remain elusive. Stay true to your passion and be patient.
Common mistakes to avoid:
- Settling for free hosting.
- Giving low importance to website design.
- Creating low quality content.
- Not creating a strong content strategy.
- Irregular blog posting.
- Not focusing on SEO including keyword research.
- Irregular social media posting.
Conclusion:
Whether it is for inner satisfaction or career aspirations, amateur blogging is a great way for sharing your passion and creative streak with the world. By choosing the right niche, implanting all the strategies as discussed above and avoiding the common mistakes, you can fulfill your goals and embark on a successful blogging career. However, make sure you’ve abundance of patience. Obsessing about quick success can sabotage your blogging journey.