How to get started with blogging, a beginner’s guide to SEO, marketing and ideas

I often get asked what tips I would have for someone starting a blog, so I thought why not just write a post to answer all of these questions. This blog post covers talk of SEO, social media marketing and the content itself to get your blog game at its strongest. 

I have been blogging since 2016 and in that time have grown my readers, followers on social media and won a blogging award. All of this started because one day I thought up BooksNest and click publish on my very first blog post.

This is not a technical guide to setting up your blog, this is taking the stance that you’ve already chosen the platform to host your blog and you’re ready to start creating. If you do need any help with this, the closest advice post I have is my post about going self-hosted (something you might not want to think about if you’re only just starting off). 

What will you be blogging about and what will you call your blog?

First things first, have a brainstorm and work out what you want from your blog and what your brand will be. It’s good to have an idea of the direction you’d like your blog to go in, this will be your niche. AKA, the topic you are so passionate about that you just have to write about it. For example, my blog started as just being about books, but has now grown to cover blogging tips, mental health and some travel.

So once you know what it is you want to write about, it’s time to think about how you want this to look. Your brand. I’m not talking about Copyrighting your name and buying every version of the URL. But some blogs have a certain look that is distinctive to them. For example, it’s been noted that I like the colour yellow, this seeps into my blog and social media accounts. My name has always been BooksNest, with a change of logos and colours over the years.

Once you’ve settled on a name, you might want to create social media accounts with the same name. Of course, you don’t have to do this, but it can help to be consistent over your platforms. It also prevents someone else using the name if you ever wanted to switch to it in the future.

What’s the best way to bring readers to your blog?

I work in Digital Marketing, which means it is my job to send customers to the right places. This mirrors over to my blogging career too, when wanting to guide my readers in the right direction.

If you’ve created your social media accounts, this is the best place to start. Give your social accounts room to grow, and then once you’ve started to build up an audience, share links to your blog and try to convert them to blog readers. Sharing your blog links alongside graphics that display what your blog is about can make these marketing posts more visual and appealing to your audience.

I use Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest and Facebook to advertise my blog. Most of my readers come from Twitter, because this is where I share my content the most often. Every time I publish a new blog post I share it on Twitter and then make sure I schedule it in to share a couple of weeks later. I wrote a blog post about where my blog views come from, so you can see what works best for my marketing.

• How to reach 10k followers on Instagram

• How to understand Twitter analytics and grow your following

What kind of content should you be posting on your blog to encourage readers?

This will vary depending on the type of readers coming to your blog. You will also see trends over time the more you write and publish your posts. It’s interesting to look at these insights to learn if the posts you enjoy to write the most, are in fact your most popular posts.

Take a look at what other people in your niche are sharing, maybe it’s a book review or a wrap up post for the month. This is a great way to see what is popular and get inspiration for your own posts. I’m often looking to my fellow bloggers to see what is trending and then craft my own posts from this inspiration. You can see a blog post I published that talks about where I go to look for blog inspiration. 

As long as your content is interesting, passionate and offering your reader something they are interested in, you should be winning. The point of creating a blog is to offer you an outlet to spread your passions, so you should always try and keep this in mind when creating your content.

What if your blog content isn’t receiving many readers?

I cannot stress this enough, but it takes time to build up a reader base. It has taken me three years to really get going and it’s only really been in the last year that I’ve really seen my views increasing. The reason it takes time is because you need to build up credibility as a blogger on both Google and your social media.

The more relevant and search engine friendly content you post, the more Google will favour your blog and you will feature higher up in relevant searches. Similarly, the more you post general, organic content on social media, the more people will start to recognise your work. They will start to see you as a recognised blogger in your niche and somewhere to go for well-trusted and interesting content.

Just keep doing what you love and you will get there!

How can you best optimise your blog posts for SEO?

SEO stands for search engine optimisation and means how friendly is your blog for Google to bring it up as a result for search terms. If you google a term relevant to your blog post, you want your post to come out on top. Of course, sometimes this is a hard goal when the search term is quite popular and not very niche. But you can do a few tips and tricks to make sure your blog is featuring relevant keywords and the correct information to be seen favourably by search engines.

For beginners, the two main tips I would suggest are naming your blog posts correctly and including metadata.

Naming your blog posts: Give your blog posts SEO friendly names that include as much as possible in the title about your post, including relevant keywords. For example, I have a post about requesting ARCs, I have called it How to request ARCs from publishers, tips and tricks to being sent proofs and where to find them. I’ve made bold some keywords and phrases that could be entered into Google in which my blog would be relevant to answer. I’m covering many different ways people could phrase their search.

Metadata: This is the text that appears below the title of your post on Google. You should include as many keywords as possible here without going too over the top on the wording. A sentence or two at most is enough. for the above post, my metadata was: If you’re a book blogger looking to request ‘advanced reader copies’ from publishers but aren’t quite sure how, I’ve put together a guide to help. Again I’ve highlighted keywords and phrases in bold.

If you get in the habit of writing for Google, it will benefit your blog in the long run. I don’t suggest you change how you write your blog posts, but include these tips in your titles and metadata and that will be a great start. If you’re using WordPress, the plugin Yoast is really good for adding in metadata and looking at how well your blog post will perform from an SEO perspective.

Why should you create a blog and what is the point of blogging?

Because IT IS THE BEST THING EVER. If you’re just starting out and you’re asking yourself if you should really be dedicating your time to this blog, the answer is yes. If you can. Only if you can. Don’t put unneeded pressure onto yourself and work that will stress you out. But if you’re able to, creating a blog could be one of the best things you do.

Blogging has opened up so many doors for me and given me such pride and joy in my work. I have gone on to make so many friends because of what I do and I just love it. I’m so glad I started three years ago. It does take time yes, but it is so worth it to see something you have created growing to be a place peope enjoy to visit.

I hope you’ve taken some helpful tips from this post! Let me know in the comments if you have any of your own to add.