10 Basic Tips on How to Start a Blog

by Karen Goodman on March 12, 2008

Yesterday I told you about why I decided to become a blogger and how it has made me a better agent.

If you think that blogging could help your business, or simply just sounds fun, here is a basic How-To guide on starting your own blog.

1. Pick a topic

Sounds simple enough, but make sure it is something you are interested enough in to write about every week. You’ll need to decide if you want to keep your posts focused tightly on a topic, or if you’ll add random musing too. Jay Thompson’s blog is mostly about real estate industry news and the Phoenix real estate market, but he also tosses in random posts such as this one. Other blogs stay very on target. Jim Cronin’s The Real Estate Tomato blog opts to only post articles that help real estate agents market their business through websites and blogging and it is refreshing to go there and know that everything I read will be teaching me something new.

2. Research

Do a search on the topic you want to write about in Google, and add the word ‘blog’ as an additional keyword. Read what other people are writing about your topic. Discover which blogs make you want to read more and which ones you find tiresome. Save any articles in your favorites that you find really interesting. You’ll want to link to them later in your articles, and it might be hard to find them again.

3. Pick a blogging host/platform

There are a number of sites that will set you up with a free blog with just a few clicks. Blogger and WordPress are 2 of the more popular ones. Depending on your topic, there may be other options specific for the industry. As a real estate blogger, I could have set my blog up on Active Rain or Real Estate Webmasters, but I opted for Point 2 since it allowed me to integrate my blog into my website.

4. Learn from the message boards

If the blog platform that you have chosen offers a message board as Point 2 does, read everything you can find. Reading everyone else’s questions and the answers will teach you so much about your new venture. If you still have questions, go ahead a post a question of your own. Bloggers are a friendly bunch, and are happy to help out newbies.

5. Go ahead and get started

If you keep waiting until you understand everything, you’ll never get started. As long as your blogging platform allows you to edit your posts after they have been published, you have nothing to fear from early mistakes. You can always go back and edit your posts. When I first started, I wasn’t really sure how to end each post. After reading other blogs, I decided that I wanted to offer a ‘See also’ list of a few other related articles at the end of each post along with my name and website address. I went back and edited my early posts so that they are all consistent.

Just two thoughts…proof read and use spell check!

6. Read, read, read

Keep reading other people’s blogs. The posts you read will give you ideas for great entries of your own. Just make sure to give them credit and provide a link back to the post that inspired you. It’s only polite to give credit where credit is due, and links are a great way to attract visitors to your blog and get better search engine placement.

7. Comments and Links

Let’s talk about search engine optimization (SEO). There are tons of articles out there that tell you how to achieve good rankings on Google and the other major search engines. To get started, read everything you can at The Real Estate Tomato.

The 2 most important issues that affect SEO are using good keywords in your articles and titles, and including links to other sites. The search engines like articles that link to other sites as long as the site you are linking to has material that is relevant to your site. They also reward you when other articles link back to you (but exchanging links is considered taboo and will hurt your search engine rankings). The search engines consider a link to your site as a ‘vote’ by the other site for you as an authority site. The more quality links from other sites to your site, the better you’ll place in Google results.

A great way to start getting links toward to your site is to leave comments on other bloggers posts. Just make sure that your comments actually add value to the discussion, otherwise they are considered comment spam and likely to be deleted. An added benefit is that if your comments contribute to the conversation, other bloggers will often click on your name and will check out your blog. If they find something interesting in one of your posts, they might just decide to link to one of your articles in one of their future posts.

8. Go back and edit

Once you have posted a few entries, you’ll find better ways of doing things. Go back and edit the formatting and add keywords and links to improve the consistency of your blog. Trim down your Tags (categories) so that you avoid dozens of tags with only one or two posts in each heading. It’s better to have fewer categories so that visitors can easily find all of the posts that relate to their interests.

9. Be careful about what you post

Remember that everything you write will be available for the whole world to see. Don’t write anything that you wouldn’t want every client to see. Once out on the internet, it’s pretty hard to control where your words will go. Even if you are simply blogging for fun about a hobby…if you don’t want your parents or future boss to see it, then don’t write it.

10. Have fun

Blogging should be fun. If you get busy and don’t have time to write elaborate articles like this one, then keep them short. Add pictures that you think are funny. If it stops being fun, you should find another way to market your business or find another hobby. If you don’t like what you are doing, your visitors will be able to tell. And if you really HATE writing, then you probably shouldn’t even start a blog. Even if your blog is mostly about pictures like this one, you still have to add some captions.

I have only been blogging since November, so I’m sure I left out some other great tips. For all you bloggers out there, how about showing my visitors the ‘right’ way to leave comments. What else do you think a new blogger needs to know when thinking of getting started?