How to Create a Blog with a Future: 7 Crucial Tips

By Leo Babauta

It’s easy to start a blog in just minutes as I explain in my post How to Create a Blog n Under 19 Minutes. You can use Twitter, Facebook, Posterous, Blogger, or Wordpress.com. Any one of these, especially Wordpress.com, will give you a sense of what blogging is like.

But what if you want to build a big blog, one that returns you an income in time?

In that case there are some things you can do to set up your blog, from the start, that will help tremendously. Otherwise your blog will grind to a halt in time. In fact, there are 7 main mistakes new bloggers make when starting a blog. Each one of the mistakes creates a limitation that may not be obvious straight away, but will prevent you from getting the most out of your blog in the future.

Tip #1: Use a blogging platform that will grow with you.

Using a free-hosted service, such as Blogger, Tumblr or Wordpress.com, seems like an easy option for starting a blog. And it is. It’s a great way to get your toes wet. But if you continue down that track, problems can arise.

First of all, using a free-hosted platform can look unprofessional, especially if you just use one of the domain names that come with them: leobabauta.blogspot.com, for example. Secondly, you have far less control over some of the free platforms such as Blogger, which have limited options for design and customization. Third, some of the free platforms will put ads on your site, as a way to support their service.

The smartest way to start a blog is to invest in your own virtual real estate by buying a domain and pay a hosting company to host it. For example, there are low-cost options such as Bluehost.com, Dreamhost.com, and mediatemple.com, that will cost less than $10 (in some cases) per month. This comes with the Wordpress blogging software already installed. That’s a very small investment, compared to the cost of setting up a business in the real world.

Once you’ve bought your domain and paid for hosting, there are some necessary steps, such as setting up Wordpress and learning how to write and publish posts. These steps aren’t difficult to learn, but they can be daunting to new bloggers.

Alternatively, you could use Wordpress.com but take their paid option, which allows you to use your own domain name, customize your design, and more. This might be an easier route for some bloggers, but be aware that you’ll be slightly more limited in what you can customize with your site as you grow.

Tip #2: Choose an attractive topic

Do you know what you want to blog about? Choosing a topic is one of the most important decisions a new blogger has to make. Because which topic you choose can makes the difference between a blog with future, and one that is sure to fail.
A topic has to fulfil two criteria:

· You have to be passionate about it;
· It needs to support a big readership.

The reason you nesd to be passionate about your topic is because you need to create regular articles for the next few years – without losing interest or running out of things to say.

In order to attract a big readership, you need to write about something that is of interest to many people. If you choose a narrow niche, you limit the size of your blog before you even start. For example, if you choose to write about the habits of treefrogs, you may attract a small but possibly passionate readership. Whereas if you were to focus on, say, tropical animals and their habitats, you would never run out of material and could create a blog that could attract a wide range of readers.

Tip #3: Hit on a hot blog title and create a punchy tagline.

There is an art to naming your blog and many new bloggers come a cropper here. Your blog name and tagline should express your brand, and spell out a benefit to your reader. The tagline is the short explanatory line under which should appear under the blog title. For example, Zen Habits has the tagline: Simple Productivity. Taken together, the blog title and tagline should express at a glance what the blog is about.

Of course the domain name and the blog name should be identical. Some bloggers make the mistake of using their own name as their blog’s name. It can work if your name is already well known, for example if you are a celebrity of sorts. If not, I suggest you don’t do it because it’s difficult to establish a strong brand with a name that doesn’t carry any associations.

Tip #4: Create a Brand

A brand is a way a business links a product with a benefit, an idea, a logo, and a look and makes it into one memorable packet. For example when we see the Nike brand, we immediately associate quality sports gear, fitness, and the words “Just do it”.
You may wonder what this has to do with blogging, but actually a blog is a product. If you want to create a successful blog, branding is very important.

Let’s take a look at two blogs that have strong brand, Zen Habits and Goodlife ZEN. The domain, blog name, tagline, and the minimalist design and the content all support the Zen Habits brand which is about simplicity, productivity, and creating good habits. Another strong brand is Goodlife Zen, the blog of my colleague and friend Mary Jaksch. If you take a look, you will see that everything from the URL to the blog name, to the design creates a sense of peacefulness.

Tip #5: Choose a flexible Design

If you build a your blog on a self-hosted WordPress platform, there are hundreds of free themes, or prefabricated designs to choose from. There are a lot of important points to consider when choosing a design, for example, you need to think about how many columns you want, and which kind of background color, header design and font is best suited for your purpose. I won’t go into all the details here – although they are really important – because it would take up too much space.

One of the problems with free WordPress themes is that WP is continually evolving, and ever so often, an upgrade version appears. Because WP is an open source project, any developer can design a new theme. What can happen is that the developer of the free theme you’ve chosen doesn’t change the theme in order to make it work with the new WP version. If that happens to you, you’re left with a mess. Your theme isn’t compatible with the newest WP version and you need to find a new one.

I think it pays to think long-term when looking for a suitable theme. I now use a theme called Thesis. as a basis for my blogs. Whenever WP issues a new version, Thesis is already costumized accordingly. You can also change the look without losing functionality. For example, you can create one, two, or three columns, change the font, and change many other design features – without having to know about coding.

Tip # 6: Write great content

The key to long-term success is to write great content. Great content needs to be:

• extremely useful for your target readers,
• well considered and well structured,
• well written in a conversational style,
• scannable through using lists and headings,
• informative and entertaining

There is a lot more to say about writing great content. It is a skill you need to learn in order to grow you a big readership.

Tip #7: Grow your readership

One of the reasons many bloggers give up after the first six months is that they don’t know how to grow a readership. Actually, this was the theme of our first A-List Blogging Bootcamp. One of the participants, Patrick Stoeckmann of Unwrap Your Mind said:

In just 8 weeks after having been on the awesome Bootcamp of Leo and Mary, I’ve been able to increase my subscriber rate by a whopping 1,700%

How to grow your readership is a big topic. Let me give you some of the main points:

• Get the design and usability of your blog right,
• Create regular great content,
• Write guest posts for other blogs,
• Create viral posts through using social media,
• Network with other bloggers.

How to learn all these skills

It’s possible to learn these skills by trial and error, or by searching for information on the Net. That’s how I started. But it takes a lot of time and many people who are keen to blog but lack technical know-how never get their blog off the ground because they are stymied by problems that arise when you explore each of these seven tips.

That’s why I’ve decided to offer support for new bloggers. Our next A-List Blogging Bootcamp, “How to Create a Blog that Rocks” is an online course that starts gets you up to speed in only 5 days – from point zero to blogging with confidence. The Bootcamp runs from February 12-17, and you can do it from anywhere in the world.

I’ll cover all the points above step-by-step, using articles, videos, and podcasts. You’ll be able to ask questions in daily live webinars, and in the private forum. If you’re already have a blog but want to rev up your blogging in order to create a blog that can give you an exciting future, you’ll find many secret tips in this Bootcamp.

We’ll open for registrations on February 8.
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Here are some related posts for you:
Why Blog? 10 (and a half) Reasons

How to Create a Blog in 19 Minutes or less