Blogging for personal branding is hard. Creating any type of content that cuts through the noise and stands out is even harder.
There are thousands of new blogs created every day. Why should you add to the noise?
Even as more and more content is added to the internet, more and more people are gaining access to the internet every day as well. Starting personal branding blogging can help you craft a voice that carries across all of your social media. Starting a personal blog can also build trust with your potential clients and employers.
In this article we will go over some tips on starting your personal blog.
Set SMART goals
Setting SMART goals when writing and planning your personal blog will help you achieve results quicker and know what progress you are making.
Specific Make specific goals which have specific outcomes and a specific plan for achieving them.
Measurable Make measurable goals where the outcome is well known and the progress can be proven. Reevaluate if progress isn’t being made.
Attainable Make sure that your goal is reasonable and can be accomplished within a known timeframe.
Relevant Your goal should align with your longer term goals and outcomes as well as your values.
Time-based You should set a realistic time and date when you achieve your goal by. This helps with prioritization and motivation.
Choose a theme
Writing within a theme will help you to maintain clarity with what to write about and attract attention from people you want to.
As an example a software engineer might write about software engineering practices. This would help them to attract managers and others within the software engineering community to read their blog. Attracting people from industry will help this person build a network and also learn more through research.
As a general rule of thumb writing within a theme will also help your SEO and help you rank better on Google.
Choose a platform
There are many different blogging platforms and CMSs you can use for your personal blog. Here are a few of the top choices.
Ghost (https://ghost.org)
Ghost is a great choice for your personal blog. It’s extremely easy to setup and maintain with Ghost managed service or you can host it on your own infrastructure. Ghost works out as a blog and for paid newsletters.
Wordpress (https://wordpress.org)
Word press is one of the oldest blogging platforms on the market today. Just like Ghost Wordpress is open source so you can host it on your own or use a managed service.
Wordpress really shines with its extensibility. There is a plug-in for any of your needs and themes for any type of blog.
Write Write Write
Once you have figured out what you want to write about and where to host your site, now you need to start writing. The more content you have on your site the more visitors you will get from search engines and the value you will offer your readers.
Writing is the most important piece when starting a blog. Without writing a blog has no purpose.
Consider SEO
SEO is important to consider from day one on your personal blog. Here is a quick overview of what you need to know about SEO when personal blogging.
Meta Title
The Meta Title is what appears as the title in Google search results. Google not only uses this for the title in results but also when deciding what keywords will rank for a particular page. The title is also important for click through rate in the search results you rank in. GlideSEM had a meta description generator that can be used to generate dozens of possible title ideas in seconds.
Meta Description
The meta description is used as the description text in search results. It’s important to note that this is a key part of keyword rankings for your page. You can use GlideSEM’s meta description generator to generate a dozen possible description ideas with the click of a button.
Keyword Research
Keyword research is a vital part of any successful blog. There are many tools for researching keywords.
Two of the most popular tools for research keywords are keywords everywhere google chrome plugin and Google’s own keyword planner tool.
Distribute your content
Another key piece to personal blogging is distributing your content. There are many ways to distribute your personal blogging content.
One of they main ways to distribute your content is through search engines. This is why keyword research and SEO is so important.
Social networks are also a great way of distributing your content. Using LinkedIn, Twitter, or Reddit works well depending on the type of content you will be blogging about.
Use GlideSEM to write faster
Another smart way to improve your writing is to use GlideSEM. GlideSEM offers many writing tools from a meta description generator to an entire blog post generator. You can sign up with your email below in order to be notified when we launch.