How To Start Your Blog Easily

Once you decide to become a powerful personal brand, the first step is to start creating and distributing content. That’s one of the easiest ways to establish authority in your niche. It is not as difficult and complicated as it sounds.

1) Decide the purpose of your blogging, your niche and outline the goals you intend to achieve. Please bear in mind that you are blogging to increase your visibility and build your influence. In return, when people find you and read the value you have given them, they will follow you and/or patronise you.

2) Decide the platform you are going to be blogging on – WordPress, Blogger, Wix, Squarespace, Weebly, Medium, Nairaland, Facebook? I strongly advise that you use WordPress. It is the most used web platform and has tons of plugins you can easily use to customise your website. You can take your ninja steps further by getting a self-hosted WordPress site (this means purchasing a domain name, hosting service, getting your customised email address etc)

3) Create a valuable lead magnet that your readers will have in exchange for their email addresses. One of the cores of your personal brand is people. A segment of those people will be your community. Take it a step further by communicating and giving more value. Let them get to know your personality. It is called nurturing.

READ ALSO: How To Set Up Your Digital Assets

You can decide to blog once a week, twice a month etc. It is totally up to you. While blogging, there are certain tools you will need on your website and this is for those who use or intend to use WordPress.

– Jetpack:

This tool gives you statistics of visits on your website, where they came from and even further tells you when your website is down.

– Yoast SEO:

A very powerful tool that helps your website rank high on search engines. This plugin streamlines your tags across all data analytic platforms (i.e Google Analytics, Facebook and Twitter Analytics, etc.), as well as make sure keywords are aligned and in the correct places.

– Wordfence security:

One of the most crucial things to do is to keep your site secure from hackers. It is something that you cannot afford to ignore. There may be thousands of malicious bots on the web which can attack your website anytime and destroy your entire work in no time. That is why you must always prevent the spams and keep your website secure. Wordfence features include firewall protection, malware scan, blocking, login security, live traffic monitoring and a lot more. The plugin lets you monitor all your traffic in real-time including robots, humans, 404 errors, logins, logouts etc.
With monitoring your real-time traffic, you can be aware of the security threats your site is facing and take instant action against it.

– MailChimp for WordPress:

If you want to grow your email list, then this is a must-have WordPress plugin.

– Insert Headers and Footers:

While managing your WordPress sites, you may sometimes need to add code snippets to your WordPress site’s header or footer. This means you will have to edit the theme files which could get messy and break up your WordPress theme. Insert Headers and Footer allows you to easily add code snippets to your WordPress site without editing your theme files.

These are my top 5 recommended plugins if you are just starting out. Which other plugins will you recommend to beginners?