If you want to start blogging or are considering a career as a blogger, you need to think about the reasons why you want to do it.

Do you want to be a blogger because you love writing? Is it because you want your readers to buy your product or service? Is it because you want to help people with problems within your niche topic of writing? No matter why you want to do it, if it's important to you, then starting a blog is all worth it.

Blogging offers creative freedom, the opportunity to publish your work, and potentially earn a living from your writing in the near future. There are endless opportunities for someone with a blogging platform, and the type of content you can put out there on your platform is also entirely up to you.

How Do You Start?

So, how do you start a blog? How do you become a blogger? There are so many people who want to start writing blogs, but they don't have a clue about how to get their foot in the door.

How on earth do you actually begin? The first step is deciding what you want to write your blog about.

Picking a niche that you're interested in and most knowledgeable about helps refine exactly what the blog's purpose will be. Finding a topic that people will read, and one that you'll enjoy writing about, will make your blog stand out (and make it something you'll want to stick to).

You don't just have to stick to one niche; you can have two or three, but make sure the niches aren't too different. For example, my niches when I write my blogs are spirituality, digital nomadism, and introvert life. Each niche is different, but they can overlap in ways, as I can talk about how spirituality helps with my introverted life, or how digital nomadism is introvert-friendly. Overlapping your niches can blend them into one, and make your brand a little more diverse, but well recognisable.

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Once you've nailed down a niche (or a few niches), it's time to start writing. Knowing what your audience is searching for can help you understand search trends and content that performs well. Google Trends can help you see trends globally, and can give you the chance to search for terms over time.

What is trending? What is hot within your niche? Google Trends is great for coming up with blog post ideas. If you click the three horizontal lines in the top left of the site and go to 'Trending Now', you can see, you guessed it, what's trending now! You can look at individual categories to niche down what is popular in Google Search, and it's a great way to make you familiar with what people are reading and what they ultimately want to read.

This doesn't mean copy exactly what blogs are doing well, because that doesn't make your site special. Using SEO keyword research tools alongside search trend tools (like Google Trends) can give you data on what words should be included in your content. Ubersuggest is a good one to use, albeit it is a freemium site which requires a subscription after a few uses.

You can enter keywords into the search tab and see the overview of said keyword, its search volume, and the location breakdown (so what users in different countries are searching for these keywords). This can not only help you know what is working for the most popular blogs, but it can also help you understand your audience more.

Another useful feature of Ubersuggest is that it gives you keyword ideas for your blogs and shows the volume of people using it. Take 'spirituality' as an example in the search box, Ubersuggest shows that 'spirituality definition' as a keyword has a volume of 18.1k, and 'quotes for spirituality' has 12.1k views. These numbers can help you formulate some blog titles that are SEO friendly and will be an interesting catch for your reader.

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Publishing Your Blogs.

Once you've written a few blogs at hand, now it's time to publish them. It's up to you where you publish them, as there are so many sites to do so, but you'd rather choose the ones that are the most used.

Medium and Substack are the ones I’d strongly recommend, especially Substack as it gives you an option to create a subscription package once you get enough subscribers to start monetising your writing, if that's what you choose to do, of course. Posting frequently on your blogging platforms will help you start making a name for your site, and thus build a reputable writing portfolio which you can share with friends, family, and other writers.

Most people give up on their blogs after, say, the first few months, because they don't feel passionate enough about the project to continue forward. Being consistent with your blogs will allow you to expand your audience and perhaps make a future monetary endeavour from it. Depending on what you decide to do with your blogs, it's still important to keep up a streak of producing 1-2 blogs a week to drive more traffic and readers.

My Personal Blogging Experience

Let's talk a little more personally about my blogging experience. I started blogging because I knew I had a passion for writing. I loved to write, and blogging gave me that freedom to just write with no boundaries, and write about whatever I wanted and whenever I wanted.

I’d write on Substack, Medium, Word Press, and magazines, such as TTM, in the hopes to help people with my words. I'd write, like I said before, in the spirituality niche, particularly on how to develop a spiritual lifestyle in a simplistic way. I usually write self-help manuals or give my advice on topics that people desperately need answers to.

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Little and often, I step out of my niche to talk about other subtopics, like introversion, personality, and lifestyle. They don't entirely step out of my niche topic, but it gives me the chance to diversify my blogging platform and write about something a little different. My overall experience with blogging has been nothing but free and exciting. Every day, I wake up looking forward to my new blog piece, and I'm always ready to start my research on what I'll be writing about too.

Conclusion

So if you love writing and want to start a blog, the best advice is 'less thinking, more action'. People spend too long dwelling on what they could do, and think too deeply on what to do, when to start, and how well it's going to do. Put your thoughts into action and start writing. If you're truly passionate about your blog and you stay consistent with it, then no doubt, you will find success in your future in blogging (with the right tools to ensure your blog is attractive to the right audience, of course).