Blogging is a great way to connect with your creativity and interests. It’s not hard to start one. However, I would say that it’s more challenging to keep it going.
This blog post is intended to help those new bloggers or those who are considering to start a blog. I remember how overwhelmed I felt when I started this blog. The world of blogging was very different back in 2010 when I started. Instagram wasn’t launched yet. Pinterest was launched in the same month as I published my first post in March 2010, but no one seemed to know about Pinterest back then. Now Instagram and Pinterest play integral part of blogging.
I am not a well-known blogger with a huge following despite the number of years I have invested in it, but I can tell you that I still love blogging. I get excited about writing and it has provided many opportunities to enrich my expat life abroad.
I took a blogging class called Blogging Your Way in October 2010. I learned a great deal of skills in the online course as I was still new to blogging and struggled to navigate through it at the time. Now I have experienced blogging over 10 years, I would like to provide some help for those who are thinking about starting one.
Here are 12 things new bloggers should know.
1. Your Blog Name = Your Brand
If you are at the stage of choosing your blog name, spend some time before making it official. If you already have named your blog, but still have a doubt, you can change it at any point. It’s easier to do so before you establish yourself online.
Your Blog Name is your brand and image with which you will identify your blog. If you can, I recommend that you search the words you’re interested in using in your blog name to see what you will pull up during online search. I suggest that you name your blog with something unique, easy to remember and related to your content. You don’t want to name your blog with something that sounds really cool, but it is totally irrelevant. You may not want a name that could pull other websites and photos that you don’t want to be associated with, either.
ADVICE FOR EXPATS
Think about the intention. Will you have a blog for a couple of years while you live overseas? Or would you like to continue even if you move back home or when you move to another country?
2. Blog Because You Want To
If you casually want to start a blog in order to make easy money, then I would say don’t. I don’t think that is the right mindset for starting a personal blog. There are people who have successfully made their blogs a source of income. I’m not one of them.
You should start a blog because you would like to have a place to express yourself or to be creative. No matter how small your audience is, don’t be discouraged. If you blog for yourself, the size of your audience wouldn’t affect you emotionally. However, if you blog for money, the number of audience will matter to you. Greatly. It is a big pressure. Think it over if that is what you want in your life.
If you are curious, here is an article published by Lifehacker.com which sums up the reality of blogging and making money. This is not intended to discourage you. It is to tell you that blogging to earn money is not for everyone.
ADVICE FOR EXPATS
Most trailing spouses who follow their employed expat partners don’t get to work overseas. Blogging is a great way to stay connected with the area of your interest and creativity. If you keep yourself busy and happy through blogging during the assignment overseas, that is a great outlet for you while living abroad. You might be able to use your blog as a bridge between jobs. It might lead you to some projects with some local organizations in your host country. You might meet people with common interest. Blogging is a great way to network and connect with others.
3. Don’t Compare Yourself With Other Bloggers
Don’t try to be someone else. Other bloggers have more followers? Other bloggers’ posts come up higher on a search engine than yours do? Others are doing some fun stuff as a blogger, but you are not? It’s sometimes hard not to feel down on yourself when you realize that you’re not on par with other bloggers or you’re falling behind. Remember that you can only be you and your voice is unique.
ADVICE FOR EXPATS
For expat blogs, whether you like it or not, the content ends up competing with travel blogs out there when it comes to search engine optimization. Well-known travel bloggers are most likely professional bloggers and seriously blog for money. It’s simply hard to compete with that if we are casually sharing our daily life overseas. Try to think of something that you will enjoy offering your perspective or expertise rather than trying to copy others.
4. Blogging Requires Patience
It’s going to take some time to find your voice. Building your audience will take time. Be patient. When you see people with a couple of million followers, it feels as though it happened very easily for them. First of all, I would say that type of increase in followers happens rarely. There are 440 million blogs on Tumbler, Squarespace and WordPress according to Mediakix. Techjury reported that approximately 5.8 million blog posts were published everyday. It’s a crazy competition.
Even if an increase in following happens, it doesn’t happen overnight. Not even in weeks or months. It will likely take years for you to build your audience. You may not ever have a huge following, but keep in mind that the size of your audience does not evaluate the quality of your blog. It’s okay even if your growth is slow. What’s more important is that blogging makes you happy.
5. Don’t Check Dashboard So Often
You might find yourself checking your stats on dashboard every hour especially at the beginning. Yep, I was guilty of that. Try not to get obsessed with how many people came to visit your post. It’s not healthy for your mind. Instead, try to spend more time to figure out the way to increase your visibility, which leads to the next point.
6. Learn About SEO
SEO is very important in order for you to have more traffic if that is what you want. Ever changing technology, algorithm, and money making strategy by search engines makes search engine optimization a very challenging task to tackle for casual bloggers. Below are just basics for the beginners to consider.
1. Post one good quality photograph per post related to your topic if you can. You can find a beautiful photo on Unsplash to use on your blog. Having a photo will help your visibility with traffic.
2. Name your photos appropriately after you download with key words in your post to go with the content. It will help you draw more readers through image search.
3. Give a creative and intriguing title for each blog post. Having an interesting and enticing title as well as meta description will help draw audience when your post shows up on Google Search.
7. Quality Content Over Quantity
Check your spelling. Check your grammar. Those are basics. If your post has hard to understand sentences, readers may feel discouraged to keep reading and will click away from you. It’s that easy. Having a friendly voice is great, but it is not the same as sounding careless. You don’t have to be formal, but it’s important to be coherent. If you are new to writing, try to write with more accuracy at the beginning rather than trying to impress.
8. Regular Schedule
Publish your blog post on a regular basis as opposed to posting many in a short span of time and don’t post for a long period of time. I know that it’s tempting to post as soon as you finish writing. However, it’s better to space out your blog posts. If you find the time to write multiple posts, then use the schedule tool to spread out the posts. Post on the same day of a week at the same time of a day will be good because your reader will know when to expect your new post.
9. Don’t Wait For Your Perfect Article
If you haven’t published a blog post yet or you are a perfectionist, don’t wait until you will write that one perfect post. The more you practice, the better you get at writing. You’ve got to keep working. You can’t spend too much time on editing and caught up on the details of the content. It doesn’t mean that you need to post in a hasty manner. It’s better to post after checking your content, wording, grammar and spelling. After you did that, go ahead and press a publish button or schedule it to be published later. Then, give yourself a little pat on the shoulder.
Writing will get easier.
10. Consider Creating Social Media Accounts For Your Blog
If you would like to increase traffic to your blog, consider creating a business account related to your blog on one or two social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter or Pinterest. It’s important to give your social media account handle name the same name as your blog so that readers can identify you easily. If your blog is named with one thing, but your social media account has an ambiguously different name, readers won’t find you. If you want more followers, make everything super easy to figure out for your readers.
Why is this important? If you would like more people to discover your blog, this is important. I find Facebook the most effective tool to engage with readers. If you love photography and use many photos on your blog, having Pinterest will help you for traffic to your blog in a long term. If you like being creative with words and connecting with readers, Twitter will help. In my case, I notice that when I publish a new post, the biggest traffic comes from my blog’s Facebook followers. Overtime, Pinterest keeps bringing more traffic. The traffic I attract from Instagram is quite small. However, it’s better than nothing.
11. Free vs. Self Hosting
Unless you are going to have your blog for business from the beginning, I would say use a free website first. Especially if you would like to journal your life abroad, a free website would be good enough. I started my blog at chuzailiving.wordpress.com. I found it comprehensive and manageable. It helped me with the traffic since the free hosting comes with SEO embedded in the free package.
After I had moved my blog to a self-hosted site in 2014, the traffic to my blog suffered and decreased drastically. Even after 5 years I still struggle to get traffic on my self-hosted blog and I have never recovered. I’m sure I’m not doing something right. At the same time, there are many more blogs that exist compared to 10 years ago when I started. Competition is even higher these days. One thing I understand is that self-hosing requires you to be savvy with SEO and I’m not. If you don’t have the time to study SEO yourself (I read a book about SEO, but it wasn’t enough) or money (to hire a professional) to improve it, a free website is a good option.
12. Less Criticism, More Positivity
When you publish a blog post that is open to public, the act is the same as journalism. In 2011, UN announced that Journalism is one of the most dangerous professions. Granted that many people in general write a blog for fun, their lives won’t be in danger because of blogging. However, my point here is that it’s good to be aware of the power your words can have.
ADVICE FOR EXPATS
Living overseas comes with all sorts of challenges. Sometimes you may feel like sharing your negative experiences online to vent. Expats and foreigners alike are not the only ones who will end up at expat’s blog. There will be locals in the host country who stumble upon it. Therefore, keeping sensitivity on how locals may receive some criticisms about their cultures is advised. After all, expats can live in a foreign country with the grace of the host nation. It’s safer to keep negativism to ourselves because of the status.
Those who live abroad, especially the trailing spouses who go out and explore the local communities, for an extended period of time have a wealth of information and experiences of the local life that no travel bloggers or professional journalists can match. For those people to publish some positive images and articles about the interesting places or events overseas will hopefully inspire others and shrink the gap between the reality and the perspectives that people who have never lived in those countries have.
There is no shortage of negative reports online anyways. In such a culture, we need more positivity out there, don’t we? Trying to project a positive perspective not only helps yourself, but others. Keep it coming!
If you have any questions, please leave me a comment below.
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