8 tips for setting up your own blog

12 April 2013

Whether you’re an aspiring writer, journalist, photographer, artist, or musician, blogging is the way to get yourself noticed in your industry, and a great way to display your skill set to potential employers. It has become an essential tool for people trying to launch their work and make a name for themselves, and it’s also a great hobby too. So here are our top tips on how to set up and manage your own blog.

Choose a subject

If you want to be a author, then of course your subject will revolve around your writing, and likewise! However, if you’re setting up a blog as a hobby, just somewhere to air your opinions, then you need to decide on the general area in which you will be posting – no one wants to read the boring ramblings of someone who doesn’t really know what to write about! That’s what Twitter is for!

Choose a name

This will stem from your subject, but shouldn’t be something too obvious. ‘My Cooking Blog’ isn’t going to get much attention, especially if no one knows who you are! Pick something quirky that still explains what the blog is about, like ‘Yummy Mummy’ or ‘Food Fanatic’, it sounds far more professional.

Choose a platform

There are a variety of free services for you to choose from when deciding what platform to host your blog on. The most popular ones around are WordPress and Blogger, both of which have great features and guidance for newcomers to blogging. Our advice is to check out a variety of sites, see what features are included with a free sign up and also view a few blogs on them so you have an idea of what yours could look like.

Produce relevant content

This is reiterating what was said earlier - inconsistency will drive viewers away, they are not going to know what to expect from you and will lose interest quickly. If you’re interested in writing in a variety of things, choosing lifestyle or entertainment as the main subject will give you the opportunity to make posts with more variety.

Interact with your reader

If someone reblogs one of your posts, comments on a video, or even tweets you directly, don’t just ignore them, reply! They cared enough to contact you about what you’re posting, it’s just common courtesy to respond. But, if you experience negative or spam comments the best thing to do is to remove them. Platforms like WordPress have Askimet fitted into them, which blocks spam comments from your site and holds them until you can moderate them.

Promote your blog

By this we mean, get your blog a Twitter account and link it so that every time you post something new, it gets tweeted to your followers. Twitter is an essential tool for promotion as it has such a vast amount of people using it, so get your posts noticed with plenty of hash tags!

Another thing that is essential publicity for your blog is making sure it has SEO (search engine optimisation) configured. This means tagging your posts and creating categories to fit them in so that search engines can identify which post will be relevant when people search for a similar subject.

Don’t get lazy

So you’ve set up your blog and you’ve created quite a nice little following, don’t just stop posting! If your viewers are returning to look at your blog regularly and you haven’t posted for a while, they are going to think you’ve disappeared and are unlikely to return. If you’re planning on taking a break from blogging, tell them so they know where you’ve gone and how long for. Transparency in situations like this is essential for keeping your following high.

Don’t breach copyright

Just because an image has come up in Google images, it doesn’t mean you automatically have the right to use it. Like when referencing sources for essay, all things published, be it on a small time blog or big corporate website, need to be credited to the appropriate source. Many photographs, particularly of celebrities, are copyrighted to the photographer and you may have to seek their permission to use the image on your blog.

There are several ways you can avoid breaching someone’s copyright (and avoid being sued!) by using tools such as creative commons or stock photograph sites. Creative Commons is a search engine that brings up images you can use for free, usually if you cite the author of the image. You can search like you would in a normal search engine, but choose where the image is sourced from, such as from Flickr, Wikimedia Commons, or Google images.

But you must check the fine print on these images, as you may have to provide a link or reference to the owner of the image is you choose to use it. An alternative is to sign up for a stock images website where you pay a small fee and are able to download a certain amount of images everyday on your paid licence for use on your site.