This is part one of the series of posts that are coming up over the next couple of weeks, on how to start a blog. This series intended to help newbies to get comfortable with the idea of blogging. I will cover topics ranging from why blog, what to blog about and how to achieve it.
If you don’t know me from professional front, I practice product management, taking ideas to market and help businesses make impact both for customers and their own bottomline.
Given my professional background, I will be approaching this series with the same mindset.
So, how to start a blog?
You should actually start with the question of why and what to blog about. So, lets address that beast first.
- Are you a traveler who has stories to share ? And your friends ping you often to know about that trip you took recently and they ask you to share your itinerary, things to do, etc., ? – Then you are a travel blogger.
- Are you a great cook and want to share your favorite recipes with the world ? The writer in you craves to become a food blogger.
- You get the point…
So how do you go picking your topic to blog about ? When I first started blogging 7 years ago, I was all over the places. Food, travel, paintings, opinions etc., In fact, there is really nothing wrong with that. This is called lifestyle blogging. But, over a period of time, as I changed as a person, I also narrowed it down to mostly travel related topic. Purely because thats what my readers were looking for.
I recommend starting with one topic and doing it well and expand further. Again, this is my product thinking playing out here. Build one thing well that your customers want and expand.
Here are some ways to narrow down your theme.
The Research
- Ask yourself what you are passionate about sharing.
- Ask your friends and family and take a small survey of what they would like to learn from you.
- Read a lot of blogs on your favorite theme and find what other blogs are not addressing and where you can add value.
- Check out websites like Quora.com for questions asked on the theme you are researching and get a sense of what people are looking for.
The Audience
Now that you have the theme picked out, next step would be to define your reader profile. In product management terms, we call this defining the user persona. Here are the reasons why you should consider doing this step:
- Knowing your audience will help you address them with the content that impresses them. For example if you are a travel blogger and want to inspire retired and senior citizens to explore the world, you have to write sensibly for the needs of the age group.
- If you are based out of India and write about how to organize a trip to Cambodia from India, then your target audience for this blog are those who are in India. This blog post won’t cater to the needs of someone living outside India.
What if you have multiple audience groups ?
Great! list them all out and do the following:
- Create multiple categories to organize your posts.
- Example categories would be “Solo Travel” , “Traveling with kids“, “Traveling with parents”
In the upcoming posts on this how to start a blog series, I will show you how to showcase each category of blog posts and capture variety of audience.
Your homework:
Pick your blog theme.
If you would like, I am happy to give you my feedback on your choice of blog theme. Feel free to contact me or leave a comment below.
Are you inspired enough today ?
If you just have one reader and your blog changes their life, your blog is big enough.
By Darren Rowse
Stay tuned for upcoming topics on:
- I am not good at writing mental block
- How to get your blog up and running in wordpress
- And SEO