Disclosure: CyberNaira content is reader-supported. This means if you make purchases through our affiliate links, we may earned commission but at no additional cost to you. 

A few years ago, I started this crazy thing called “Blogging.” Blogging for beginners is not fun—many obstacles, learning curves, etc.

I must admit.

Lots of pitfalls here and there, mistakes, and challenges. Then came happy moments, success stories, achievements, etc.

In that early beginning, to be precise – 3rd July 2012. I secured hosting from Whogohost web hosting company the day I registered this blog domain.

I had little idea or knowledge of what this blogging for beginners thing is all about. All I care about and know is that I am starting something unique and funny at that time.

I read how a blog is a medium to reach thousands, even millions of people and the rest of the world with my message. I was so excited to start a blog of my own.

Looking back at what I have gone through in the past, I am still going through now.

And what I might meet in the future in building a sustainable blogging business.

I thought it would be good to share with you some of the blogging for beginners lessons I had learned to be Dos and Don’t in building a profitable blogging career.

But remember that this does not reflect any blogger’s general opinion or rule. They are just personal experiences based on my blogging routine, style, and business model.

Nothing Will Be Perfect

Perfection is not attainable, but if we chase perfection, we can catch excellence.” – Vince Lombardi.

Nothing is the only thing that will be perfect. 

Blogging is a continuous learning process where you keep improving your daily activities.

Don’t stop learning, and don’t hit your head against the wall if you don’t get it right at the beginning (you won’t anyway)

So start irrespective of the current situation. Whether you’re ready or not – start that blog today. Here is a complete guide on how to start a blog the right way. 

Passion is not Enough.

People often start a blog based on what they’re passionate about – that could be a skill, ideas, knowledge, expertise, interest, etc.

Whatever you are passionate about could be an excellent way to start your blog.

But there is a problem with this strategy…Passion doesn’t always equal profit.

You may have passion or interest in a topic you feel comfortable discussing, but it will be challenging to turn it into a business if people are not paying attention.

Without attention, the brightest ideas or businesses will go unnoticed. 

If not enough people use search engines to find information about what you’re passionate about, you won’t get consistent traffic to your blog.

Search engines are the most significant drivers of traffic to most business websites. 

If you want to make money with blogging, your blog topic needs to target people who use search engines.

So you must find the balance between starting a blog you’re passionate about and the income side of the niche. Here is how to do this…

  • List 5 to 10 topics that align with your interest or passion.
  • Go through the list and weed out the topics you’re uncomfortable with.
  • Use keyword tools like Semrush and Rank Tracker to research your topic ideas. 
  • Pay attention to search volume, location, cost-per-click, trend, competitors, and keyword difficulty. You need to make a decision based on these keyword data. 
  • Pick a niche with the most income potential.
  • Start your blog – ideally on WordPress.

Read this post for step-by-step information on how to start a blog on WordPress.

Love What You Do and Give It Time

Blogging is never a get-rich-quick business. It takes time to build an audience, traffic, trust, and community and generate income. It isn’t easy to remain consistent if you don’t love blogging.

You must love your work and be committed to your goal, passion, and blog.

On average, it takes 12 to 24 months for many pro bloggers to start making money from blogging. Blogging is not for you if you’re not ready for the long haul.

If you’re looking for a shortcut to money, you must look elsewhere.

Set Realistic Goals And Work it Out.

For many who started a blog, achieving financial freedom is the ultimate goal. Living your dream life, travelling the world, and spending quality time with your loved ones are some of the goals.

But all these won’t happen on their own.

You need to have strategies to make them happen. You must set out the tactics to achieve your goal. Blogging without direction is one of the reasons bloggers fail.

Goal setting is essential to blogging; it will help you focus time and energy on important tasks. Here is how to set realistic goals in blogging.

  • Be specific – Don’t set vague goals like I want more traffic, I want money from my blog, I want to grow my blog audience, etc…instead, be specific on the amount of traffic you want, the exact amount of money you want to earn and the expiration date. For example, I want to make $10,000 within the next 60 days is more specific, measurable, and significant.
  • Track Your Progress – When you’re specific with your goals, it is easier to measure your progress. If one of your goals is to post 5 timers per week, you can track how well you’ve achieved at the end of the month. 
  • Set Realistic Goals – While your goal must stretch you a bit and lead you to discover your other self, it should also be realistic. Don’t set a goal that’s impossible for you to achieve. If you’ve never earned $100 from your blog, don’t set a goal of making $1000 in 30 days. That’s unrealistic. 
  • Set Deadlines – Setting deadlines for your goals helps you find ways to achieve them. It will keep you focused and constantly remind you of what you must do to achieve your goal. 
  • Break down Goals into Smaller Tasks – This can help you achieve your goal faster without feeling burnout. For example, if you aim to have 600 Twitter followers in 30 days, you already know you need 20 followers daily. Your task is to get 20 Twitter followers each and not 600 followers at once.

Engage Your Audience; They Are Part of Your Community

A blog is supposed to be conversational and not an academic class where the teacher is the only one speaking. In blogging, you speak with your audience and engage them. 

This is part of what you need to learn about how to blog for beginners, especially in copywriting.

To build a community of loyal readers for your blog, you must learn how to write engaging blog content that gets people to share and engage. 

If you want to learn how to write a blog for beginners, here is some helpful content:

Start With a Professional Blog

There are many free blogging platforms to create a blog – Wix, Weebly, Squarespace, Blogger, Tumblr, WordPress.com, etc.

But to stand out and build a brand, you should start a self-hosted blog.

A self-hosted blog gives you many advantages and opportunities to manage and grow your blog.

It gives you more control over your blog SEO, marketing, growth, and audience. You’re not limited by the free blogging platform’s terms and conditions.

How do you write a blog for beginners that gives you complete control over your content and audience, and why do you need to start your blog on WordPress?

WordPress is the #1 blogging platform for many online marketers and businesses.

At the time of writing, about 43% of websites on the internet are built on WordPress content management systems. I advise you to start your blog on WordPress.

WordPress usage statistics

Here is what you need to start a professional blog on WordPress.

  • Register a domain name
  • Purchase a hosting package
  • Install WordPress
  • Select a WordPress theme
  • Install WordPress plugin
  • Create WordPress pages
  • Publish your first post

Here is a comprehensive blog post for a detailed step-by-step beginner’s guide to blogging on WordPress.

Start Building an Email List from Day One

When I started blogging, I did not start email marketing earlier. It is one of the decisions I look back on with regret. Don’t make the same mistakes…

You may be wondering who is going to subscribe to your newsletter.

You don’t need to figure that out; create your email newsletter and publish quality content regularly. Your blog visitors will decide whether to opt in or not. 

Email marketing is among many businesses and marketers’ most qualified traffic channels.

It allows you to engage directly with your readers on a personalized level. You can mention your subscribers by name, location, gender, date of birth, etc.

The problem is that it costs money to maintain an active email marketing service.

As a beginner blogger, you may not earn from your blog now, making it challenging to maintain a monthly active email account.

You can subscribe to the free Getresponse email marketing services if this is you.

The free account allows up to 500 subscribers before you can upgrade to a paid account. Here is the link.

Create Helpful Content

People will read your blog mainly to find solutions to their problems.

This could be in their personal life, business, marriage, health, fitness, hobbies, etc.

Whatever the reason you write to attract an audience to your blog, your content must meet their expectation.

One of the mistakes bloggers make is trying to publish more content within a short period.

The quality of your content is more important than the frequency of publication. Focus on the content quality rather than running to meet a certain number of posts every week.

On average, it takes 9 hours to write a high-quality 3,500-word blog post.

This does not consider the research process, which could take anywhere from a day to a week, depending on your knowledge of the topic.

Some topics will take less time to write; others might take more, depending on your expertise and industry knowledge.

This content you’re reading takes more than 15 hours to write, excluding the research process.

I had to keep a journal, jotting down ideas and memories and writing down each point as it appeared in my mind.

Here are some helpful tips to help you write better content:

  • Write as you speak, and don’t use two words where one will do.
  • Research your topic ahead of writing.
  • Do keyword research to gather more search terms
  • Analyze the search result for your target keyword
  • Write a content outline to structure your content.
  • Use bullet points – see this section
  • Use Subheadings 
  • Proofread your content – use a free tool like Grammarly
  • Include original images – use a tool like Canva
  • Spend more time on your headline – Use a tool like Coschedule headline analyzer.

The Headline Matters

I have touched on this briefly, but it is worth a standalone section.

Your content headline is the first element of a blog post a potential audience will see to determine whether the content body gets read.

If the headline fails to grab the reader’s attention, the article does not exist. 

The headline is so powerful that many pieces of content are created to begin with a headline.

Look at the newspapers, press releases, emails, newsletters, social media posts, adverts, letters, etc…all these content types usually begin with a subject line. 

That’s how powerful the headline is…

Here is some helpful content to learn how to write attention-grabbing headlines.

Install Analytics

One of the beauties of Internet marketing is that every piece of action can be tracked and measured.

You can track virtually every action people take on your website and measure their effect on your goal.

Analytics tools let you track your visitor’s actions like clicks, visits, gender, location, landing pages, traffic source, scroll, time on site, page visits, engagements, purchases, downloads, signups, etc.

As you can see, you can track any activity on your website.

There are different analytics tools to track many aspects of your marketing campaign; Google Analytics remains one of the best and most widely used.

Google Analytics is considered a default marketing tool for businesses. 

As a beginner, you may not need to install it on your website, but this is one of the tools you can’t run an online business without.

You must track website traffic to make measurable adjustments and intelligent decisions backed by data.

Installing Google Analytics is not difficult; here is a step-by-step tutorial. And if you prefer a walk-through video, you can watch it below.

Don’t Start a Make Money Online Blog

One of the biggest mistakes of blogging for beginners is writing about making money online when in actual sense, they have no real-life examples to show.

Making money online is one of the most competitive niches in online marketing, where experience makes a big difference.

If you don’t have proof of earnings, it’s hard to write convincing posts that will make people take you seriously. 

Writing about making money for beginners without any proof of income is like teaching a group of students how to fly a plane when you’ve never flown one.

You’re not even a trained pilot. How do you expect your students to take your advice seriously?

People will only listen and buy the recommendation of someone they consider an expert or authority.

Start Working on building your expert portfolio and credibility, share success stories and failures, winning and losing, and gradually your readers will consider you an expert.

This was the best advice I read when I started blogging – it took me a while to accept, but I’m glad I did.

The Fewer Plugins, The Better

For many beginner bloggers, this is something you can’t escape

You’d think the more plugins you have on your blog, the better its performance, right?

Wrong…if you want to make a blog for beginners that will be SEO optimized, fast, mobile responsive, and give a better user experience, you need fewer plugins.

You need the right plugins to do the tasks, and most importantly, consider plugins that can perform multiple tasks.

For example, you can use JetPack to: 

  • Automatically share your latest post on social media.
  • Optimize WordPress images
  • lazyload
  • monitor server downtime 
  • enable brute force protection
  • Enable video press
  • Display images in the full-screen carousel
  • Enable testimonial content types
  • Enable portfolio page type
  • And more… 

So instead of using separate plugins for each task, use Jetpack to handle them and save yourself from installing over 7 to 8 plugins. 

Likewise, other plugins can perform several tasks and save you from installing separate plugins for each task, such as WP Rocket.

If you have WP Rocket active on your blog, you can confidently disable many other known optimization plugins like Litespeed cache, W-3 Total cache, Autoptimize, Super cache, Lazy load plugin, etc.

You don’t need these plugins when WP Rocket is enabled on your blog.

Conclusion…Blogging for Beginners

There are a million and one lessons to learn in blogging for beginners; therefore, I have just scratched the surface.

Over the last ten years, I have learned much about internet marketing. I’m sure you have learned more than I do in your blogging journey so far, right?

I would like and appreciate it if you share your experience with us. And the lessons learned from your years in the blogging for money and internet marketing industries.

Similar Posts

45 Comments

  1. Awesome 67 Tips for Building a Trust Worthy Blog that generates money.Thanks for the share.

  2. author comments csgo ranks says:

    Nice post thanks for sharing

  3. Thank you Shamsudeen, I am not as experienced as you but still found a couple of things that I wasnt aware of. Bloging for Gardening Services Wanneroo is a start and now can try the different approaches you mentioned.

    1. Thanks, Frank, glad to read you find it useful. If there is anything I can help you with, don’t hesitate to reach out.

  4. author comments sajjad rahman says:

    Very helpful , thanks for share advice.

  5. I need to thank you for this wonderful read. Thank you for shared great content. keep it up.

  6. Thanks for the article. Perfectly what I needed as a newbie

  7. Nice post thanks for sharing and good work

    thanks

  8. Hi Shamshudeen,

    Interesting read. I like that you highlighted #2 as a no-no, and I agree with you. Passion alone can make it because, if your love is not profitable, You won’t make money. Therefore, you must create a balance between emotion and profitability to enable you to scale your blogging business. For instance, if your passion is no making you money, niche down further, or try another niche market.

    1. Hi Moss,

      That’s true…Passion alone can’t do it in the today marketing world. There has to be a balance between passion and profitability for it to work out. Especially if it is meant to put food on the table.

      Thanks.

  9. Nice and helpful information about Blogging. It really helps the users who are coming to make carrier in blogging. Thanks, Your Post Such a great & informative post.

  10. Intriguing read. I like that you featured #2 as a no-no, and I concur with you. Enthusiasm alone can make it in light of the fact that, if your affection isn’t gainful, You won’t profit. In this manner, you should make a harmony among feeling and benefit to empower you to scale your blogging business. For example, if your enthusiasm is no creation you cash, specialty down further, or attempt another specialty advertise.

    1. Thanks, Zamin,

      Blogging is business, so we need to treat it as such.

      A business that doesn’t generate revenue will soon fold up. Passion won’t pay the bills. Cash will.

      Thanks, Zamin, nice having you here.

  11. Pleasant and accommodating data about Blogging. It truly helps the clients who are coming to make bearer in blogging. Much obliged, Your Post Such an incredible and enlightening post.

    1. Thanks, Rahul,

      Yes, this is a good read for beginners, and I’m sure it will help set them on the right path to success.

  12. What an article! I really impressed on you. And Great thanks for sharing this article. 🙂

  13. thanks for sharing this post i am a beginner in blogging this all 67 tips are really helpful for me keep posting such tips this helps every beginner a lot.

  14. Impressive post specially the points you mentioned about the strategies could help me in my business. Some of the points were familiar to me and some of them are very fresh tips for me.
    Thank you so much for sharing this post with us. I’ll follow your blog posts from today onward.
    Great Job!

  15. author comments Bruce Williams says:

    I read Your Post & I must say it’s really very Nice Information and helpful for us… Thanks for Sharing

  16. author comments Muntasir Mahdi says:

    Thanks for the article.
    I appreciated the writing and the information you’ve given here.
    You have a good writing skill.

  17. Hi thanks for sharing this post, I am thinking to start a blogging wast stuck what to write how to write, this post definitely made the things quite easy, I request you keep writing so it helps a newbie like me.

  18. it is wonderful to be here with everyone, I have a lot of knowledge from what you share, to say thank you, the information and knowledge here helps me a lot

  19. Hey Adeshokan,

    In my opinion – adding fresh, new and informative content to your website is essential for SEO and building traffic.

    More importantly, it creates trust and nurtures relationships with current or future customers.

    If you want to be a successful blogger you need to have a specific audience to which your content will be delivered.

    You should know who are the people who will read the posts in your blog. So having Niche Is the first thing you need to decide upon.

    It will benefit you in the long run as blogging is something which will need a lot of dedication and time from your end.

    Promoting your content or ideas through various social channel is really significant when you want to successful.

    Eventually, thanks for sharing much informative guide on this topic.

    With best wishes,

    Amar Kumar

  20. author comments Abhay Kumar Gupta says:

    Thank you for shared great content. keep it up.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.