When I first started my blog, I was just trying to learn the ropes of web design so I could keep up with the developers at work (it worked!).
But I wasn’t planning for success. I’d only been focused on the techy side of things.
Fast forward to a few years down the track and I actually started caring about promoting my blog and my brand and discovered a few tips to making sure that your blog starts off on the best food and is directed for success from the get go. Looking back, I knew all of these things. I’d been doing them all the time for others, but failed to every do them for myself!
Here are my tips to help you plan for success:
Choose a topic and stick to it
As bloggers, it’s so easy to just write about a tonne of things. I love talking about food, my kids, travelling and think of articles all the time, but it got to a point, where I thought I needed to choose a topic and stick to it. What am I most passionate about? Infertility. So, my blog on the side, Modern Day Missus is focused on helping women with infertility. If you arrive on my blog, you’ll see that is what it is about, and if you look at my recent articles, I go by the 80/20 rule, and 80% are about how to help women survive infertility.
Be consistent with your branding
It isn’t hard to choose a few fonts and colours, and with the introduction of Canva, it’s all too easy to keep choosing a template and sticking to what they give you. A much BETTER option, is to set yourself up with some branding (or get me to help you with this), and then visit somewhere like Creative Market (I could pretty much spend all day here) and get a social media pack.
Start a budget
If you’re planning to get serious with this, you need to start a budget. You ARE eventually going to have to start paying for things, and if you’re serious about blogging, earning an income to boot. Which means you need to plan for your expenses and budget. I guarantee you’ll get a tonne of perspective too when you start to look at what you’re actually spending vs what you’re earning.
Put together a plan
I cannot tell you just how helpful doing this has been for my business. It’s so much easier to have somewhere you keep all of your article ideas, and so much easier to keep on track when you have a clear idea of who your audience is, and what it is that you want to achieve, rather than getting side tracked constantly and getting off topic.