45 Things I Wish I Knew Before Starting a Blog: How to Start a Blog for Free in 2022

45 Things I Wish I Knew Before Starting a Blog: How to Start a Blog for Free in 2022

20. Pay attention to your blog’s load times (and make them faster)

Page load times are important whether you’re managing a commercial website, an online store, or a blog.

Google considers your blog’s page load speeds when determining its search result rankings, and your visitors absolutely detest blogs that take forever to load (especially on mobile devices, where most people browse blogs nowadays).

For instance, your bounce rate—the percentage of visitors who leave without viewing a second page—increases as your page load time does. Take a look at this Pingdom data comparison between typical load times and bounce rates:

45 Things I Wish I Knew Before Starting a Blog: How to Start a Blog for Free in 2022

You can use a page performance testing tool like Pingdom or GTmetrix to see how quickly your blog loads.

Here are some tips to make your blog load faster if you notice that it is:

  • Optimize your photos — 50– 80 percent of the average website is made up of images. You may reduce the size of photos without compromising user experience by resizing, compressing, and lazily loading them using a free image optimization tool like Optimole.
  • Use a caching plugin to speed up your blog’s performance by supplying static HTML rather than using PHP for each page load.
  • Choose a quicker host because it will always effect how quickly your pages load.

When learning how to create a blog, it’s important to focus on performance right away rather than treating it as something you can do later.

21. Don’t try to please every single person when starting a blog

You definitely want people to actually…read your blog if you’re launching one. That’s a reasonable assumption, don’t you think?

You might strive to make your blog appealing to as many people as you can in an effort to gain as many “likes” as you can. Although it occasionally succeeds, that rarely does. By attempting to appeal to everyone, you essentially wind up appealing to nobody (OK, maybe I overstated it a bit, but you get the idea).

I’m not referring to picking a limited niche, but rather to giving your site a distinct brand and voice.
Do you have a tendency to use profanity? Next, curse on your blog! Sure, you might alienate some people, but you’re not required to win over everyone. You will get even greater favor with those who aren’t turned away.

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Don’t believe me? Look at Mark Manson:

45 Things I Wish I Knew Before Starting a Blog: How to Start a Blog for Free in 2022

Can you imagine if Mark tried to be some straight-laced personal help blogger? He never would’ve grown to where he is (which is a New York Times Best Selling Author, if you’re not familiar).

Don’t try to please every single person – just try to make a group of people really happy.

22. Stop writing intros like high school research papers

This article from Grow and Convert has had the biggest influence on my blogging, if I had to choose just one piece of information.

45 Things I Wish I Knew Before Starting a Blog: How to Start a Blog for Free in 2022

Content Marketers: Stop Writing Blog Intros Like A High School Research Paper

I was instantly aware of my guilt, which is why it made such an impact on me. I shouldn’t have been taking my high school English writing style to my blog.

I now aim to talk to my readers rather than at them. You should follow suit if you want visitors to your blog to interact with it.

I won’t go over what Devesh stated again because he did a great job of outlining everything. Simply read his post and make an effort to incorporate the concepts into your writing. Don’t hesitate; start doing this as soon as you discover how to create a blog.

23. Don’t wing your content. Make a plan

There are countless topic possibilities at your disposal when beginning a blog. Because of this, it’s simple to wing it and still come out on top. However, as your blog becomes older, two things start to happen:

  • It gets more and more difficult to come up with original content ideas.
  • For your blog postings, you build more sophisticated promotion strategies that involve preparation.

It is helpful to have a plan when that begins to happen. That is an editorial calendar in this instance.

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Your editorial calendar essentially contains all aspect of your content strategy, from concept generation to promotion.

It makes sure that you post frequently, plan out your posts, and have enough time to market your material.

Trello or the Editorial Calendar plugin are free options that are excellent for new bloggers. CoSchedule is one of the most well-known editorial calendar services otherwise.

24. A little bit of maintenance now saves big problems later

Look:

Nobody enjoys performing maintenance. The act of maintaining your blog itself won’t increase its popularity, readership, or income. What’s the point then?
Maintenance, though, keeps everything you’ve built from collapsing around you, even though it might not do any of those things.

I’m referring to issues like:

  • updating your plugins and applications
  • securing your website (and actually testing to make sure those backups work)
  • tuning up your database
  • Making sure no links are broken
45 Things I Wish I Knew Before Starting a Blog: How to Start a Blog for Free in 2022

It is annoying but necessary. A vulnerability that was already patched before hackers discovered it recently led to the hacking of hundreds of thousands of WordPress sites.

Nevertheless, they were still compromised since tens of thousands of website owners hadn’t updated the essential open-source WordPress software.

A little simple maintenance performed today will stop larger issues from developing later.

45 Things I Wish I Knew Before Starting a Blog: How to Start a Blog for Free in 2022

25. You can reach new followers by resharing old content

Sharing your content on social media was already covered. However, consider this:

You’re going to gain more followers on social media as your personal blog expands. Therefore, even if you shared a post when it was initially published, those new followers would not have had the opportunity to view it because they weren’t already following you at the time.

Tomasz Tunguz discovered that reposting previous content still resulted in high levels of interaction. Even though the numbers were never as high as when it was first published, the content still received enough interaction to be valuable:

45 Things I Wish I Knew Before Starting a Blog: How to Start a Blog for Free in 2022

It’s not a difficult idea to grasp…but it is one that’s easy to forget about if you’re starting a blog. Thankfully, you can put this whole process..

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26. Complicated WordPress themes are always not the best themes

I might draw criticism for this. But I’m not criticizing the majority of WordPress programmers; rather, I’m merely taking aim at some of the occasionally seen bloated monstrosities on ThemeForest.

If you choose a theme that tries to do it all, your website may end up loading slowly due to clumsy code and/or a ton of unnecessary queries. Both of those factors contribute to subpar performance and an increased risk of malfunction.

All I’m trying to communicate is

Never choose a WordPress theme just because it’s visually appealing or because its feature list is longer than Infinite Jest.

Try to find at least one of the following while establishing a blog:

  • from a trusted theme creator
  • Well-rated (if public ratings available)
  • periodically updated
  • has all the essential components, including a sidebar that is customizable (widgets, blocks), a beautiful header, attractive typography, and good color settings.

27. Steal your competitors’ keywords, it’s awesome

The topic of primary keyword research has already been covered. However, there are times when I’m feeling lazy and would like to have someone else do the work.

At that point, I visit my rivals and…steal the keywords they are ranking for.

It’s just plain old-fashioned research and “making it better,” nothing harmful. I simply enter my competitor’s URL into my SEO tool to see what keywords they are currently ranking for:

45 Things I Wish I Knew Before Starting a Blog: How to Start a Blog for Free in 2022

I look over their content and compose one that is superior if I come across a tasty keyword that interests me.

This is one of my preferred methods because it enables you to generate both themes and keywords at once.

Furthermore, since you already know where your rival is placing, you can assume that Google will give blogs a high ranking for that keyword as well (which is crucial if you’re learning how to start a blog in a market with a lot of e-commerce websites).

Serpstat is the research tool that I personally use, but Ahrefs and SEMrush are other excellent choices.

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