5 Things You Must to Know to Launch a Successful Blog in 2021

Blogs are everywhere. Celebrities have them, businesses need them and pretty much anyone with an opinion can start one. With so many blogs all over the place, why are some more successful than others, and how can you start one that’s more likely to succeed?

At the end of the day, the main reason why there are so many websites and blogs on the internet today, is simply because it’s so cheap and easy to get started. Heck, you don’t even need to have any technical or design skills anymore, with most site builders offering simplistic drag and drop editors.

A perfect example of this can be seen with the millions of users that have gone through the process to create a blog on Wix. In fact, they even have an ad campaign that shows celebrities creating their own sites in seconds — showing it really is that simple.

However, even with it being extremely quick and easy to start a blog of your own… does it mean that you should? Nothing in life worth doing is easy, and that’s the same with creating a successful site or blog as well.

To stand out from the crowd and create a site of real value, you are going to need to pre-plan for the launch of your site and how you will continue to grow it over time. And that is exactly what we are going to be covering today.

1 – Know Why Are You Blogging in the First Place

What’s the point in starting a blog if you don’t have a reason for one? Well, that is why you need to first think about it and consider the different options available.

Of the many different reasons to start a blog, here are some of the most common reasons:

• Inspire your audience and share your story
• Improve writing ability and being more tech-savvy
• It’s a fun and exciting new skill to learn
• Building a site and brand for your business
• Generate income through content, traffic and ads
• To meet new people and become a voice online
• And many more…

As you can see, when it comes to blogging… you don’t really need to have a reason to get started, you just need to get started.

The more clear of an idea and message you have for your site, the more likely you are to succeed with it. Also, try to stay as niche focused as possible, as this will help with your content creation and audience targeting — which we will be talking about next.

2 – Decide Who Your Target Audience Is

So, you came up with an idea for your site… now what? Ideally, you would want to promote it and bring new visitors to your site.

Before we do all of this, you need to know who your target demographic audience is, where you can find them, and also how they are going to get value out of your site.

This is important because there are already a billion different sites on the internet, already talking about a million of the same things… So why would your site be any different?

With both this point and the previous one in mind, try to think about why you are going to create a site, who it’s meant for, and why it’s better than what’s currently out there.

And if you think your new shiny little blog has no potential or chance for success… just take a look at this story on a woman that created a coupon blog, which then turned into a multi-million dollar success story!

3 – Go Live with Your Social Media Accounts

When you think about social media, you might be thinking this is something you would want to set up after your blog goes live. Actually, it’s best to start it before going live.

There are several reasons for this, but the first is that you can secure a nice set of names across each of the social platforms. It would be best to try and get the same name as your domain name, but this is often hard to accomplish.

When creating your social profiles, try and make sure they are all branded in the same colors and language, so they have a consistent look and feel across them all. You will also want to link back to your site from your social profiles as well. This will help people find your site.

Once your site is live, it’s important to share all of your blog content across each of your major social networking platforms. You can also create a Facebook Fan Page as well, along with accounts on LinkedIn, Twitter and Instagram.

4 – Launch Your Site with Live Articles

Another important thing to consider before actually going live with your site, is to make sure that you have a few live articles for people to read as well.

Many people will go live with their blog and share it with everyone, and only have one article on the site. It’s very exciting to get your site live, but if it’s just one article… then there isn’t much else to do.

With that being said, try to have at least three to five articles live on your site. Also don’t forget to add some nice visuals within each article, and to also link out to any other reliable references or sources you talk about.

5 – Learn the Basics of SEO and Social Media Marketing

After your site is live, you will then want to focus more of your time and effort on the outreach and promotion process. This can best be accomplished through the use of SEO to rank in the search results and social media marketing.

Google will eventually index your site in the search results for free, but you will need a lot of backlinks from other sites and high-quality content to compete against other sites.

For this reason and more, social media marketing is often the go-to method for new bloggers and site owners. Since most of us already have friends and a following online, it’s much easier to share new blog content with friends versus trying to rank in Google.

If you’d like to learn more about the many different ways to bring new audiences to your blog, be sure to read through these 8 recommendations from Forbes.

How to Start Your Blog in the Right Direction from Day One

No matter what type of blogger you are, it’s important to try and make your blog as fun, informative, visually pleasing and useful as possible. With a billion other blogs out there fighting for attention, you are going to need to do something special to win your audience over.

The best way to accomplish this is by making sure you read through each of the questions and data points we listed above.

The more you know about your site, it’s audience and reason for being, the more likely you are to set a foundation for success.

The most important thing for you today is to start planning and getting everything in motion. Blogging is an extremely fun process, but can be slow at times, so best to get started now versus later on.