I Have Just Started My First Blog

This article is a part of "How To Start A Blog" series.

Have you just started you first ever blog?

Then you might be confused on what to do next. Right?

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Speaking theoretically, a blog is made of blog posts. So the first and foremost thing would be to start writing some blog posts for your first blog.

But blogging is not just about writing blog posts. There are many other things you will run into in your blogging life. You will get to learn about most of those extra things steadily as you gain some experience with your blog.

Here, we will discuss about them in short. Because according to me, you should at least have an idea about the things you would be learning with your blog.

So let us have a quick look at a to-do list after starting your first blog.

1. Write Content

Content, i.e. blog posts are the main ingredients of a blog. It has the same importance in a blog as water has in our body.

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Writing blog posts regularly is very crucial for the success of a blog.

It is not at all necessary to write content everyday, but writing content on a regular basis is a must. You can plan to write any number of posts from 1 blog post per week to 14 per week, anything which is convenient to you. It also depends on the type of blog. For example a news blog needs to be updated daily and even hourly sometimes, because you have to cover each and every latest news at your blog to stay in the competition, whereas a blog about computer tutorials can be updated 2-5 times a week and can get a great feedback.

So start planning on a content schedule and try to work with it.

[Don't miss: The Top Secret Recipe To Blog Like A Pro]

2. Enjoy The Traffic Stats

Once you start working on your blog and attract a few people to it, you will get curious about knowing the number of visitors to your blog, the number of page-views,etc.

Some of the blogging platforms have their own stats system for this. But here, I would like to mention the name of the most preferred, easy to use and completely free stats system used by almost every blogger - Google Analytics.

Google Analytics is a powerful yet easy to use stats system. And the best thing is that it is completely free to use. All you need is an Analytics account and your blog. Setting up Google Analytics requires you to place a piece of code into your blog's source code. This process is very easy in case of WordPress and Blogger.

Google Analytics lets you not only view the number of visitors or pageviews, but it has a vast tracking system that lets you find out the visitor's country, the OS, language, average time spent on the site, the visitors flow and many more things.

Other than that, Google Analytics also let you analyse the source of traffic to your blog like search engines and direct visits. Analytics helps you in finding out the keywords that bring traffic to your blog through search engines.

Because of its powerful features at no cost, I recommend every blogger to install Google Analytics at their blogs for a better stats system.

3. Socialize Your Blog

Let me tell you one major source of traffic for pro-blogs.

It is - Social Media

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Social Networks play a very important role in popularizing your blog. Because if you have just started a new blog from scratch, you can't expect strangers to jump into your blog from nowhere!

When you create your first ever blog, social networks are the best and foremost source to bring the first few visitors to it. You can share your blog posts with your online friends and get some feedback from them.

When talking about pro-blogs, they have a large number of followers on social networks. Just when they share their posts on their networks, their followers just flow into their blogs. Establishing a large number of followers will take a lot of time, but you can start from today itself.

Create a Facebook Fan Page, a twitter account and other social profiles for your blog and start gathering some followers for your blogs.

Be sure to regularly update your social profiles with the latest updates of your blog.

4. Gather Some Loyal Readers

As I said earlier, if you have just started your first blog from scratch, then you can't expect people to jump into your blog from nowhere.

Then how to get your first visitors?

I had mentioned the role of social media in the previous point. Other than your online friends, you can give a call to your offline friends and family members to have a look at your site.

You can also start building an email list for your blog subscribers.

What's this?

An email list would contain the email addresses of people who are interested in receiving regular updates of your blog via email. Using such a list, you can inform your subscribers whenever you publish something new at your blog.

There are many third party tools that make this task easier for you like Feedburner and AWeber. Out of these two, Feedburner is a free tool wherever AWeber is a paid service. AWeber is a more professional tool in many ways wherever Feedburner is basic yet sufficient enough tool for managing email subscription.

These tools let you create an opt-in form using which your regular readers can subcribe to your blog's email updates easily with the help of just an email id.

Create useful, interesting and unique content, share it with the world and let your readership expand.

5. Learn Something About SEO

The first question in your mind would be - What the hell is SEO?

Well, let me explain this with an example.

Suppose you have created a site on technology news. Now today you have written a post on 'ABC Mobile' getting launched at so-and-so price. Now if someone searches Google for 'ABC Mobile launch' he would get crores of results.

So what is the possibility that the person will see your site in the result page and visit your site?

This depends on two things - Content and SEO. And actually SEO depends on content a lot.

Now getting back to SEO, SEO is the method or you can say the practise that improves your performance in Google and other search engine results. SEO helps your site get on the top pages of a SERP (Search Engine Result Page)... SEO means Search Engine Optimization...

The full form of SEO itself explains a lot. Isn't it?

Here is an article that will help you understand the meaning of SEO better: What is SEO

So how is SEO performed or done?

You will have to wait a bit. Why? Because if you have just created a blog, you won't be able to understand any term related to SEO. Then why did I mention the word here? So that you bookmark the name for future. After getting some experience in blogging, you would be able to understand SEO and then, it would be the right time to start learning about SEO.

So when to start learning and practicing SEO?

That depends on your learning capacity and the amount of experience gained in the blogosphere. You can start reading SEO guides from the very first day or can start learning the basics after a month or so.

It totally depends on you.

How important is SEO?

Very important.

SEO plays a supporting role to your content. It is SEO + Content that improves your site's performance in search engines and helps you bring traffic to your blog, whereas it is Content + SEO that helps you build a strong readership at your blog.

6. Also Learn Something About These Things...

Apart from writing content and SEO, there are a lot of things you would run into in your blogging life. Whenever you get some extra time for researching about blogging, have a look at these concepts too-

Dofollow and Nofollow
Index, Follow and other Robot things
Alexa Ranking
Google PageRank (PR)
Moz Rank
Domain/Page authority
Backlinks
Guest Posting
Author Rank

I know all these things may be completely new for you, but one day you will have the knowledge of all this. And I assure you that all these things are not as complex as they may seem. It is just a matter of time to understand all these things.

Set Your Goals And Get Started!

So are you ready to start off your blogging life?

Are you determined?

Then go set your own goals and start working hard to achieve them! In this world of blogging, there is nothing so easy, but at the same time, there is nothing so difficult.