By Cassy van Eeden
This is not to say that you shouldn’t start your own blog. However, there are some things that you should take time to consider before you get going.
Chose an audience, find your voice
Before you immerse yourself into the exciting world that is blogging, there are two things you need to establish. The first is defining who your reader is, and the second is deciding what your message is and how you’re going to say it.
The author behind Mukoko, Zola Ndlovu, admits, “One of my challenges when I started blogging six years ago was knowing where to start.”
“Knowing your audience will help you develop content that is compelling to the group of people that you want to reach,” recommends Ndlovu. She adds: “Knowing [this] will relieve you of the pressure of trying to cater for everyone.”
Dale Anne Scogings, the creator of Trinket Spotter, advises that new bloggers should “think about what they want to say and who they want to say it to”.
“A blog needs to have a voice and a purpose if it’s going to gain any traction whatsoever,” she adds.
Plan now for consistency
“Far too many people set up blogs with great ambition and churn out a heap of semi-decent posts frequently before fading out and getting ‘over it’,” comments Scogings. It’s true. So many blogs start out great, but it’s easy to lose momentum when you simply don’t have time.
The good news is that there are steps that you can take before starting your blog to prevent this from happening.
“The best way to make sure your blogging strategy doesn’t lose momentum is to create a content calendar with topics that you want to cover,” says Francois Muscat, WSI South Africa consultant and area representative. He also recommends having a “long list of blog topics that you can write about”.
In addition to having a plan and a collection of ideas, Ndlovu advises building up content before you create a blog: “Before I launched my blog I took two months to just write.”
Ndlovu encourages new bloggers to “intentionally allocate time to blogging, the same you would to the other priorities in your life”.
Choose a platform
So, you’ve decided on an audience and a message, you’ve planned ahead and your content stockpile is plump. Next up is choosing what platform you’re going to use.
Murray Legg, co-founder of Webfluential, says, “The easiest platform to start blogging on is Wordpress.” He adds that: “A large community of developers support the personalisation and added functionality of the platform.”
“I’m on Wordpress and I love it,” says Scogings. She explains that she chose Wordpress because it is “easy to use, customisable and hosts a wide network of bloggers that can add value to your blogging experience”.
One thing to keep in mind is that, if your blog gains traction, you are most likely going to want to host your blog independently. “If you want to be a series blogger you must plan to move to a paid self-hosted blog where you can do so much more.” She says that Wordpress is effective in providing a smooth transition between a free subscription to a self-hosted blog.
Are you a blogger? What advice do you have for anyone wanting to start a blog? Let us know in the comments below.