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COMPLETE-BEGINNERS-GUIDE-FOR-STARTING-A-SUCCESSFUL-BLOG-FROM-BACKEND-BLOGGERS Flipbook PDF
COMPLETE-BEGINNERS-GUIDE-FOR-STARTING-A-SUCCESSFUL-BLOG-FROM-BACKEND-BLOGGERS
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COMPLETE BEGINNERS GUIDE FOR STARTING A SUCCESSFUL BLOG FROM BACKEND BLOGGER By Abdur Rahman
Start a Perfect Blog in 30 Minutes Let’s Get Started
Foreword: What this eBook offer? By the end of the day What is Blog?
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Blogging – A short review
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Types of Blogging
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Where to start?
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What is Niche?
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Finding a Perfect Niche
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Web – Hosting
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Why do you need a Web – Host?
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Types of Web – Hosting
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Know your platform
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Do you need a Domain?
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How a domain should look like?
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Advantages of having a Domain name
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Setting up your Blog
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Getting ready to launch your first blog
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Themes
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Widgets and Add-ons
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Pages Pages you must have Post How to write a post Final Thoughts
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COMPLETE BEGINNERS GUIDE TO START A SUCCESSFUL BLOG
Foreword: Why this eBook? Hey you, Usually I call my visitors “bBlogger”, if you are new here, let me welcome you and for the first time, proudly say, “Hey there! bBlogger.” ☺ Welcome to BackEndBlogger & before you get into the journey of building a successful blog, let me explain you briefly how this eBook will be useful and answer the question of “who the heck is Abdur Rahman?” (“Yup, it’s me”) I am an ordinary “Frustrated Engineer” from Chennai. Yes! I mentioned frustrated. At the time of Updating this book, I’m 22 years young, Communication Engineer, following “my dream of living an Independent life”. I finished my college with three standing arrears in hand. Football is the only thing I learned during my collage days. I had totally zero knowledge about my main stream that time. Like any other parents in India, my parents wanted me to join in IT Industry to get bag full of salary every month. Having arrears in hand and couple of resumes in my bag, I jumped into interviews daily. Fortunately, no one selected me. Because of my passion towards Football, I started a blog named “Fifa Modders” during my college days where I share News, Patches, Mods and other Add-ons for Soccer based games. After hundreds of interviews I have no other option than continuing my blog. But as a beginner, I have to google for each and everything I wanted to set up in my blog. And now after all these days, I’m getting a fair amount from my blog, which is feeding me and making my parents think that I’m capable of something. Struggle I had to get that first dollar from my blog is still like a dream for me. The Advice I always give to my bBloggers is treat your Blog as your Child.
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COMPLETE BEGINNERS GUIDE TO START A SUCCESSFUL BLOG
These are the questions that surrounded me while creating my first blog,
Where can I Start my blog? How can I do it for free? What should I write in that? Default look is Awful! How to make it look good? Everybody is telling something called High Quality Post. How in this world I’m going to get it? And the list continues
I always wanted to share all the experience I had with my blog, starting from my day one. So, I started to share my contents through another blog named BackEnd Blogger. And by the end of the day you will get answers for all the above questions.
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COMPLETE BEGINNERS GUIDE TO START A SUCCESSFUL BLOG
Most of the people confuse between a blog and a website. There are two major differences. 1. Blog will be updated frequently whereas websites tends to be constant for some times. 2. Blog allows visitors to interact with them by means of comments, sharing and other social media activities. Now a day’s companies see blog as a medium of path to reach their audience. Some companies incorporated both blog and website under single roof. Blog can perfectly be described as “a regularly updated webpage which will be typically run by one or small group of people, which will be written in a conversational or informal way”. Blog can be anything what you want it to be. You can use blogs to share your thoughts and passion related content. There are several personal blogs also where people used to share frequently about their personal life like what they had for lunch, where they are now, what they liked about the movie they watched today. Yes, they do exist! When blogging started in late 90’s, the first kind of bloggers are these diary bloggers. In today’s scenario, Blogs also known as Weblogs were utilised for marketing. People who are all used blogs as a hobby stuff converted it into their main stream to make some $.
– So now you will be having this question in your mind… Who are these people? Why do they share their day to day activities in internet? The answer lies in the simple fact, everybody wants their voice to be heard. Blogs gave utmost freedom for people to reach their thoughts to hundreds of thousands 3
COMPLETE BEGINNERS GUIDE TO START A SUCCESSFUL BLOG
of people every day by means of internet. In today’s world, you can see blogs giving film reviews, food recipes, nutrition tips and some niche dedicated blogs focusing on Sports, Cooking, Health, Blogging (Like BackEndBlogger), WordPress etc. Some of the terminologies used are: Blog: A place where bloggers used to publish contents frequently. Blogging: Habit of writing a blog. Blogger: People who maintain a blog. For example: BackEndBlogger is a blog to teach bloggers about blogging ☺
Personal Blogging: These people share their day to day experiences in their blogs. Business Blogging: These bloggers will blog to gain more traffic, exposure and mainly customers for their business. Professional Blogging: These bloggers will blog to gain money online. Their career goal is to earn salary through their blogging effort. Sounds like me ☺ Niche Blogging: These bloggers will focus on a specific topic instead of covering wide range of areas. My suggestion is, this would be a perfect option for beginners. Reverse Blogs or Guest Host Blogs: These blogs allow users to post in their blogs. Affiliate Blogging: These bloggers will market some brand products through their blogs. Media Blogs: Media Blogs are based on the type of content they publish. Some examples are Vloggers: Posting Videos, Link logging: Curating content from other websites, Art Blog: Posting photos and sketches. Freelance Bloggers: They are paid for providing their services. 4
COMPLETE BEGINNERS GUIDE TO START A SUCCESSFUL BLOG
If you want to start a blog, the very first question you need to ask yourself is “do you really need a blog?”. Yes, I meant it. First you need to think whether you can spend enough time for your blog. To make a blog successful, you need to spend a lot of time to tweak your post regularly. If you can’t spend enough time for your blog, you won’t get enough benefits from it. If you are ready to spend some time for your blog, its well and good. Now the next question will be “what to blog about?”. For a beginner, my suggestion would be to start a blog about something related to your passion. You need a lot of time to spend for a blog, if you are not passionate about it, you won’t be spending enough time. Choose a niche which you are passionate about and start a blog in that particular topic. Main point is you need to have enough knowledge about your niche, it doesn’t mean you have to be master of it, though you must be capable of solving some of the frequent problems faced by the people in and around that niche.
You can actually divide all blogs into two categories, Lifestyle blogs and Niche blogs. The difference is nothing but a simple statement, if you are going to blog about everything it is a Lifestyle blog and if you are going to concentrate on a particular topic it is called Niche blogs.
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COMPLETE BEGINNERS GUIDE TO START A SUCCESSFUL BLOG
When finding your perfect niche, make sure you are blogging for money or not. There are many topics which will get you lots of traffic, example Free top-ups, Free Recharge etc. But these topics won’t get you money. For money blogging you have to find a niche, which will get you traffic along with money. Don’t pick a niche which is hard for you to write about. So, a perfect niche will be related to what you like, must have good traffic and should have some monetary value. More than that, choose a long-term niche. It should have a future, that means you should be able to write on that topic for next few years. “Don’t ever pick a topic that doesn’t interest you”
Let me list out some of the niches…
• • • • • • • • • • • • • • • •
Health and Nutrition Football Cricket Blogs Entrepreneurship SEO Marketing Baby Equipment’s Food Clothing Technology Parenting Real estate Personality Shopping Baby Development
This contains only few topic, you can also choose your own topic. 6
COMPLETE BEGINNERS GUIDE TO START A SUCCESSFUL BLOG
– Web hosting is nothing but storing your website online. It is a service that allows your site to be viewed by the visitors. Hosting provides separate storage for your site on the internet. There are two types of hosting • Free hosting • Premium Hosting Free hosting provides storage for your site on their server for free, but you will face a lot of problems related to uptime, bandwidth etc. Getting a premium hosting will make you overcome all of these problems and you will also be getting a quality customer support.
When you make a website or blog and you want people to see it, you have to publish it with web-hosting services. So now the question is, should you go for free hosting or paid hosting. The answer depends on your need. There are many blogger services who provide free services, but if you want to get money from the blog or you want to maintain your blog for long term. I suggest you to go for self-hosted blogs.
– For blogging you may consider two types of web hosting, Self-hosting, Platform hosting. As a beginner, you should go for platform hosted blogs rather than self7
COMPLETE BEGINNERS GUIDE TO START A SUCCESSFUL BLOG
hosted blogs, the reason is you can set up your blog within two minutes using blogging platforms. Some of the famous blogging platforms are Blogger, WordPress, Tumblr, Medium, Squarespace etc. Blogger suits best for beginners and the other hand 28% of worlds blogs and websites are using WordPress. My suggestion would be, if you are a beginner start a blog in blogger, use it for a couple of weeks and jump to WordPress. People usually confuse between wordpress.com and wordpress.org. Wordpress.com is a blogging website owned by a parent company Automatic like Blogger owned by Google, Whereas WordPress.org is an open source software in which you can change anything and upload.
Know your platform If you are a beginner, its best to choose Blogger.com, blogs from bloggers have both advantages and disadvantages. Advantages • Getting AdSense approval will be easy considering other platforms. • Can set up blog in 2 minutes. • You can use your custom domain for free. Disadvantages • You won’t get a professional look.
To get a Professional look, you can go for WordPress.com, but wordpress.com also contains some major disadvantages. Advantages • Professional look. • Easy to configure. 8
COMPLETE BEGINNERS GUIDE TO START A SUCCESSFUL BLOG
Disadvantages • You can’t use your custom domain for free. • You need to have a business account to add more plugins, themes and add-ons.
To have a full-fledged blog in which you can edit everything, you should go for self-hosted WordPress blogs. For self-hosted blogs, you should buy a hosting for your blog from online hosting services. Advantages • • • •
Best suited for professional and money-making blogs. Thousands of free themes, plugins and add-ons. Can add custom domain for free. Professional look.
Some of the best hosting sites for WordPress.org includes. • Hostinger (Get 47% OFF on your purchase by using this link) • Bluehost (Recommended personally by Wordpress.org) • Godaddy Try to choose a best platform that suits you.
Domain is nothing but a name your visitors used to find your website online. It can also be stated as an address to your site, owning your own domain will surely make changes in your success. Having a domain name will make you look professional. Free Blogging platforms refer your sites as their sub domain. Blogger domain will be like yourdomainname.blogspot.com and WordPress.com will add yourdomainname.wordpress.com. So, it’s preferable to have a custom domain names. 9
COMPLETE BEGINNERS GUIDE TO START A SUCCESSFUL BLOG
Domain name of your blog should say something about you and your blog. The domain is like an address to your house or like a name to your child. The domain name allows your visitors to easily remember your site. Make sure your domain name is small. If your blog is teaching about WordPress to beginners then, use something like wpbeginner.com instead of wordpressbeginner.com. Try to choose a domain that matches your blog. It should be based on your topic keyword. It must have a slang based around your topic. It should be humorous or memorable.
• It allows your reader to easily remember your site. • Having a domain of your own makes you look professional. • When you have a domain, you can change your web host with impunity. Since your domain name is a separate service, you can easily point your domain name to your new host.
Even if you end up using a hosted blogging platform and you don’t need any premium hosting, you can buy a domain separately and mask it with your platform. After you register your domain, check the help text of your domain registrar to mask the domain with your hosting site.
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COMPLETE BEGINNERS GUIDE TO START A SUCCESSFUL BLOG
Setting up your blog only needs maximum of 10 minutes. By now you should have decided you niche, hosting platform and domain. Let us now set up your blog. Since this eBook is for complete beginners, let me show you how to set-up a blog in Bloggers. Consider the following My Niche: Blogging Hosting Platform: Blogger Domain name: bskuare
Step 1: Go to Blogspot.com Step 2: Sign in using your Gmail account. Step 3: After Signing into your account, it will show up something like this.
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COMPLETE BEGINNERS GUIDE TO START A SUCCESSFUL BLOG
Step 4: Click on CREATE NEW BLOG button in the middle of the page. A new pop up will appear showing something like the below image.
Step 5: In the Title tab, Type the name of your blog. Here it is BackEnd Blogger 12
COMPLETE BEGINNERS GUIDE TO START A SUCCESSFUL BLOG
Step 6: In the Address tab, Type the domain you want for your blog.
Here “.blogspot.com” will be suffixed automatically to your desired domain name, if you have purchased custom domain name, you have to configure it after setting up your blog. Click on the create blog button at the bottom of the pop up. Now your blog has been launched. You can visit your blog using your domain name. In my case bskuare.blogspot.com.
To change themes, go to your dashboard, which will be something like this.
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COMPLETE BEGINNERS GUIDE TO START A SUCCESSFUL BLOG
Go to themes tab and select a theme you want from the list of portfolios’ available and click on Apply to Blog button. You can also download free themes from other 3rd party website which will be in .xml format and upload it to your site by clicking on “Backup/Restore” button on the top right corner and choose your file using Choose file button and click okay. Some of the 3rd party template providers are • • • • •
Gooyabi Templates Colorlib CSS Author A Themes My Blogger Themes
Your blog is lot more than just your posts and pages. Adding widgets will actually enhance your blog’s performance. With thousands of widgets out there to choose from, you will be confused to know what to include and what to leave out. So here is the list of best widgets to add in your blog.
1. Email Subscription Form (Must have) One of the best way to build your readership and develop your community is to convert your blog readers into email subscribers. It will allow them to share your content in their network through these emails. 2. RSS Feed (Must have) RSS feeds are usually little more passive than the email subscribers, still many people prefer RSS Feeds than email. So, having RSS Feed has same benefits as having an Email Subscription Form. 3. Author Profiles
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COMPLETE BEGINNERS GUIDE TO START A SUCCESSFUL BLOG
Author profiles will be useful if your blog contains guest posts of other bloggers. It is a great way to give credit and promote the hard work of your contributors. 4. Social Share Buttons (Must have) Instead of promoting your contents on your own, lets share this burden with your visitors. This will help your post to reach people not just in your network, but also to the network of the visitors who share your content. 5. Comments-Section (Must have) One of the main difference between a website and a blog is that, blog will allow the users to interact with the author. So as far as I’m concerned, comment section is one of the must have widgets for a blog. 6. Search Bar (Must have) Having search bar’s will make your visitors to find the content they are looking for easily. 7. Topics and Categories Like Search feature, Topic and Categories widget will also help your visitors to find posts on the particular topic they are looking for.
8. Recent and Popular posts It one of the best option for enhancing your blog’s content discoverability. This will allow you to show case your freshest and best-selling articles. 9. Social Follow Buttons (Must have) It is an indirect way of subscribing to your blog and content.
Most of the widget’s will be available in Blogger platform itself. Go to Layout tab in your Blogger Dashboard. Click on Add a Gadget button in any of the area of your blog. This will pop up a window like this.
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COMPLETE BEGINNERS GUIDE TO START A SUCCESSFUL BLOG
Choose the Widget you want and click on the “+” button, the widget pop-up will open again, then click on the save button. Like Themes you can also add 3rd party widgets to you blog. To do so, you have to get the HTML/JavaScript codes for your widget by googling then go to your layout and click on the Add a widget link on the blog layout, In the pop up choose HTML/JavaScript, paste your code in the pop up and click okay. Now the 3rd party widget will be added to your blog.
You can get various widget from the following sites 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.
Edublog My Blogger Tricks Blogger Plugins BlogSpot Tutorial MS Design
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COMPLETE BEGINNERS GUIDE TO START A SUCCESSFUL BLOG
Blog pages will be more static than posts. They will remain day to day until they are rarely updated. They are displayed independently for posts. Basically, you should use pages to share information with the readers, which you didn’t expect to update frequently. They don’t have time stamps, so publish date and time won’t be visible. Tags and Categories are not applicable for pages.
The following are some of the essential pages you must include in your blog.
1. About Page The About page is obviously a “Must Have” page. According to recent stats the About Page is the most viewed page of Any blog in the internet. Create a good, optimised and valuable About Page, it will go all the way up on your google analytics stats. 2. Contact Us This page tells the visitor how to contact you. You can provide your email address directly or you can use contact forms else you can use social buttons.
3. Privacy Policy Privacy Policy will be required for certain types of sites like sites offering services and products. It is also required when you are advertising through AdWords and similar networks. This is the page where have to say what you are doing with visitor’s data and how you are protecting their privacy. Make sure you content is clear and be honest with your visitors.
Make sure you include these pages in your blog. If you are not sure how to write them, try to use templates available in the internet or write it with 17
COMPLETE BEGINNERS GUIDE TO START A SUCCESSFUL BLOG
some pro’s. These pages are also required to apply for Google AdSense, one of the best monetising network for your blog.
A post can be a sentence, a paragraph or an article. In terms of blogging, each article is a post. These posts are dynamic and have time stamps, that means published date and time will be visible. Tags and Categories can be applied to the posts. Post also appears in RSS Feeds where pages won’t. A Complete step to how to post in your bloggers blog is explained Google’s Blogger Help page.
Step 1: Know your Audience and think about a topic they would wish to read. Step 2: Start with that topic and a suitable title. Step 3: Every post must contain an Intro. Step 4: Organise what you write. Step 5: Start writing your post. Step 6: Edit your post and format. 18
COMPLETE BEGINNERS GUIDE TO START A SUCCESSFUL BLOG
Step 7: Always insert call to action at the end of each post. Step 8: Tweak your post for on-page SEO. Step 9: Publish!
Try to master the steps above, learn about some way to take your blog posts to next level.
Building a Successful and profitable blog takes time. You should browse the archive of BackEnd Blogger to learn more tricks on building a perfect 2
profitable blog. Bookmark b .com’s Store page, as this is where I publish new eBooks.
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