A blog is one of the most common ways of communicating through the internet nowadays. Even though a concept is as old as day, it caught the light much more in the past few years. People from all around use their blogs to let the world know their experiences and resulting views about the world. Starting a blog has become common practice regardless of your age or occupation. Anybody can do it, and truly, everyone does!
Today, if you are unaware of how to create a blog, you are really missing out on many opportunities. Having your own blog can provide you with the pathway to achieve several career goals that would be much harder to achieve otherwise. That is why you must know what is blogging to learn how to start a blog as well.
Businesses have also started using blogs and content marketing to promote their brands. When a company has a blog of its own, it is seen to have authority in its field. For example, if a food truck business has a blog that’s constantly uploading posts about different food recipes, people would see the food truck brand as an expert in the food industry. This will allow it to increase its leads or visits to the food truck and, ultimately, the sales.
What is a Blog?
A blog is the outpour of personal information, experiences, and perspectives. Simply speaking, the content of a blog, in general, is difficult to narrow down because it depends on the blogger what they want to put out. A blog usually comes in the form of a personal website where posts or ‘blog posts’ are presented in reverse chronological order. The newest blog posts appear on top, and the older ones appear after that.
Image taken from Strikingly user’s website
Before you start a blog, you should know that blog content is usually conversational in nature. Anyone reading your blog should feel like you are talking to them directly. This means using personal phrases, emoting, and asking rhetorical questions is all part of a typical blog. In retrospect, blogs are the written form of a person’s inner thoughts, shared in hopes of finding a place for them in the world.
One’s intentions when starting a blog can vary greatly. You may start a blog to convince people to buy your product or simply to find a community for yourself. That is how greatly the content contained within a blog can be spread over a spectrum.
Keep reading further to learn more about blogs and how to make yours interesting to the general public!
The Elements of a Successful and Interesting Blog
Below, you may find some guidance on ensuring your blog is riveting enough to gain you success.
1. Eye-Catching Titles
If you want someone to be interested in your blog's content, then first and foremost, you need to ensure that they are interested in the title of your blog post. Mundane and monotonous titles will get you nowhere. You need to let your creative juices flow when you are coming up with a title for any blog post you are about to post for the public to read.
Image taken from Strikingly user’s website
2. Subheadings
It is pretty natural for someone to want to skim through a blog post before they decide if it is worth immersing themselves into completely. With accurate subheadings, the chances of people wanting to read the entire blog post properly increase. This is because the subheadings are meant to clearly indicate or summarize the contents of the entire blog, alluding to whether it is a worthy read for the viewer or not.
3. Relevant Media
Visual aids always enhance the quality of any content you put out on the internet. The same goes for blogs as well. So whatever the topic of the content you plan to put out through your blog, find creative graphics and explore the different types of media you can use. This is essential to ensure that even initially disinterested people come to your blog.
4. Meta Description
A meta description is a small snippet of your blog post that Google shows any viewer before they click onto your blog’s website. This is important because it is the first glance of your blog that anyone gets to see before even committing to go through the entire blog. People often overlook the importance of the meta description, but it makes a larger impact than you might think. So, you need to keep that in mind when crafting your meta description.
5. Regular Blog Posts
Nobody likes to visit or subscribe to a blog that does not have fresh content uploaded on it regularly. Most famous or successful blogs upload new posts or articles daily. Some even post more than one new article a day. This keeps the audience engaged and wants to visit the blog every day, which dramatically increases your domain authority and enhances your search rankings.
Image taken from Strikingly user’s website
To encourage yourself to write more frequently and regularly, you need to build a blog on a platform that makes the technical stuff easy for you to handle. This will enable you to focus on the creative side of your initiative by freeing up most of your time to do the writing.
Start a Blog Using a Code-Free Website Development Platform
Code-free website development platforms are becoming more common. They are developed for any layman who has the basic knowledge and skills of using the internet to create a website independently. These platforms do not require you to write any code or handle the programming at the website’s backend.
One of the rising website builders is Strikingly. Our platform provides users a user-friendly and easy-to-use interface and ready-to-use website templates. If you build a blog on Strikingly, you save time, effort, and cost of having to make your web design from scratch and enjoy the process of adding content to your blog website with ease.
Image taken from Strikingly
Here is a step by step process to start a blog on Strikingly.
1. Sign Up for Strikingly
Strikingly is a website that helps you build websites for free. And the best part is that it doesn't even require you to write a code or do any sort of complicated programming. To get started, all you have to do is make an account, and you are good to go! If you have used Strikingly in the past, you can log in with the same account to make your blog website. Whether you believe it or not, it is as simple as that.
2. Choose a Template and Make Your Website
Strikingly provides you with an ample number of templates that you can choose and then further customize. Before you turn your site into a blog, you will have to choose the layout of your site by deciding on the template you want to use for it. After choosing the template, you can tweak it with the tools Strikingly provides to customize it according to the look you are going for.
3. Add the Blog Section
Yes, it is as simple as the heading above. You have to go to your desired web page, click on ‘Edit’ and add the ‘Simple Blog’ section to your web page. This will enable you to create a blog on the website that you have just created. Next, you have to click on ‘Add a Section’, to further let the software know where you want to add the blog to your website.
Image taken from Strikingly
4. Write Your First Blog Post
For this step, all you need to do is go over to the section you just added to your website. Then you need to hover your mouse over it until it shows a few options. Then click on the ‘Manage Blog Posts’ option and the ‘Write New Post’ tab that will appear under it. Once you have reached this stage, simply write away, and you will have successfully created a blog using a code-free website!
Once you start creating blog posts here on Strikingly and get more familiar with our tools, you’ll find it even easier to continue growing your blog on our platform. We provide a free SSL certificate to all our users, which adds to the website security of the blog that you build with us. We also handle the hosting for your site, which further releases you from the burden of looking for a suitable hosting service provider.
Although most of our features are self-explanatory, we provide 24/7 live chat support to answer any queries or resolve any technical issues you might face. We have many users running successful blogs built on Strikingly and would like you to join the community.
