First, let me say that although this list might be a bit overwhelming, the most important thing about starting a blog is for you to start writing (and to push that publish button). Your first post mostly like is not going to be your best work, and it shouldn’t be. Each post will get better the more you practice. From advice that I got when I first started blogging: just focus on finishing one post at a time.
All of these tools will mean nothing if you have NOTHING for people to read! Your future blog is not like the Twitter platform; you’re allowed to edit the things you post. I’m still editing things that I posted six months ago! This is due to new information or typos that I didn’t catch back then. Take these tools as personal recommendations to try whenever you’re ready to take a new step at starting a blog!
This blog may have affiliate links. This means that, at no extra cost to you, if you so choose to participate in some of the learning opportunities here, we at Kyrabe Stories may receive a commission as gratitude from the partnering companies. Thank you sincerely for your support and for your desire to learn and grow! I hope you enjoy the blog!
Technically, I started blogging before the official Kyrabe Stories website was created. My earliest posts were published onto this site called Vocal. Although I was glad to finally have my writings sent out to the world, there were two issues:
1) Since I did not own the site, I had to be approved on what I could post.
2) If there was anything I wanted to change in the post, I didn’t have the authority to just edit it.
I learned that what I was doing was called “guest blogging” a few months later. It has its own benefits, but at the time I just felt like I had very little freedom over my own writings. I wanted to have say over…well…what all I could say! I wanted to have control over my own content. This is why buying our own domain and host when starting a blog is so important.
I use Bluehost as my host and WordPress for creating my content since it came with the host. I admit that the first few weeks of learning how to use WordPress had me ready to bang my head against the keyboard. After that, it became a lot more manageable. I’m still learning new functions, but now it’s more of a pleasant surprise than a sudden whack upside the head to learn something new within WordPress. Plus, any issues that I had starting out with designing my blog, Bluehost offered many tutorials to help guide me in the right direction. If you’re now at the stage where you are ready to claim your own website, I suggest starting here.
When I finally determined that my niche would be in personal and professional development for beginners, I figured that a majority of my audience would be young teens to maybe people in their early thirties. In a way, I was somewhat right, except for the “majority” part. I was surprised to see that individuals ranging from ages 45-54 were not too far behind on the charts. On top of that, I assumed that it would be majority females who would be interested in reading my posts whereas the analytics showed that it was close to a 60/40 divide with females in only a slight lead. Without Google Analytics, my assumed targeted audience would have been inaccurate.
We will not always correctly assume who our targeted audience will be. Everyone has their unique interests, and as your blog continues to grow, you’ll need to be able to connect to your audience in various ways (for example, an older crowd will most likely be on Facebook whereas more of a younger crowd can be reached on Snapchat or TikTok). I initially advertised my blog as a place for the youth who were either still in school or who were preparing to get out of school to learn about personal and professional development, but I soon realized that many of us desire to learn these skills across our lifetimes!
I truly did not understand the treasure of having an email list until I took a course about Facebook Marketing on Teachable and learned that only about 1%-3% of our followers will see our content organically. Wait…freakin’ what!? You’re telling me that if I have about 500 followers on my page, only about 5 to 15 people will “possibly” see that I posted a link to my new post without me having to pay for more reach!? That’s a load of bull-dung!
Unfortunately, that’s the case with many situations. With more users joining various platforms, our material might not always be seen. However, there is one place that we have control over how often all of our followers…excuse me, “subscribers”, can see when we’ve posted something new! Through good and faithful email!
Email is not going away anytime soon, so wouldn’t it be worth it for all of your avid readers to know when you have new content for them as soon as it’s released? I truly hope that you nodded your head, “yes.” Personally, I use Constant Contact for this. Whenever someone subscribes to my newsletter, they not only get a welcome email sent right to them, but they also earn access to my complimentary personal development printables, which Constant Contact allowed for me to either add a link to or to add the files directly (I chose link since I wish to add more throughout the year).
Once again, it took me a little while to figure out how to customize my newsletters, but fortunately the learning curve wasn’t a steep one! It’s definitely been worth it though to know that 100% of my subscribers are being notified if I post something new!
Oh yeah, and Constant Contact also enables me to create handy subscribe buttons! ?
If you’ve already been spending years engaging with people on social media in a meaningful way and building up loyal followers, you’re already ahead of the game. If you’re like I am who either started from scratch or did make an account but just let it collect dust, know that building up an audience TAKES TIME!
The bigger platforms to have a presence on would be sites such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, and LinkedIn (good for business connections), but please keep in mind that:
1) There are MANY other options out there with less competition for traffic.
2) You do not have to be active on EVERY single platform out there.
I would recommend making an account to at least claim your brand’s name. I also recommend planning out your account name to be consistent across the platforms from the beginning so that you’re not stuck having to one line all of your information cards because you decided to take the underscore out of your name, changing it from @kyrabe_stories to @kyrabestories…consistency, everyone…
I highly recommend learning from those who have been doing this for years! During the first few months, I told myself that I would just teach myself. The problem is that I didn’t realize how much there was to learn! And STILL learn! There’s establishing our Privacy and Disclosure Policies, complying with the Federal Trade Commission(FTC), managing email lists from an external source, and so much more!
After about three months of trying to learn on my own, I finally bought a blogging course. OMG, I am absolutely sure that I would not have gotten this far on my own. There are different instructors out there with varying experiences to teach! The ones I learned (and am currently still learning) from is “It’s a Lovely Life” on Teachable. If you are just starting out, I suggest going through their free “5 Day Start A Money Making Blog Crash Course” course to see if this is a right fit for you. If you already have some experience, then I highly recommend their 30-Day training. From abiding by the FTC laws to finding guest post opportunities to ways to get our brand out to the world, this course teaches a LOT within just a single month!
Please do not go into starting a blog with an “I’ll just wing it” attitude. It’s easy to become discouraged when managing a blog once the exposure of what all goes into it kicks in. It’s time-consuming and some days it’ll feel like we haven’t even made a wee bit of progress. A calendar or planner will not only remind us what needs to be done, but it also helps to jot down things that have been accomplished that weren’t planned for. Did you complete a course on LinkedIn Learning about Creative Writing? Write it down. Did you get accepted for an Affiliate Program (more on this next)? Write that down too! Small progress is still progress to be celebrated, so keep track of this!
It is possible to get accepted into a few Affiliate Programs without a blog, but it helps significantly to be able to say that you have one on top of a Social Media presence in order to fully expand on an Affiliate Marketing strategy. Now, if you’re asking, “What the heck is Affiliate Marketing?” no worries, I asked the same thing too (plus a few hundred other various questions). In the shortest summary I can think of, Affiliate Marketing is when a company gives you a tracking code and pays you commission for every sale that you make from that specific code. For example, each book that is linked on my Book Recommendation page is an affiliate link from Amazon. If you were to click on one of the links and purchase one of the books, Amazon would pay me a small percentage of the purchase at no extra cost to you.
Nope. Not at all. Let’s put it like this. Let’s say I wrote a book and wanted to sell it for $15. Problem is, nobody knows that my book exists; my social media platforms have digital spider-webs on them; I don’t have the patience to maintain my own website. You have the WHOLE package: a huge following of avid readers with a blog that has everyone wanting to know what to read next! I reach out to you, give you a free copy, and offer to pay you a 10% commission for every sale. You read the book and do a single review post, drive up awareness for the book on social media and your newsletter, and sell 100 copies in a month. You just made $150! These commissions will also continue over time as long as people buy the book from your affiliate link, even from a few years from now. Do you think I would be willing to pay you $150 from affiliate links for a $1,350 profit? Heck…freakin’…yeah! Because I know that without your influence and your targeted audience, I would have sold a lot less if any at all.
I currently use three Affiliation platforms: Rakuten Marketing, Impact, and Commission Junction (CJ). There are other options out there as well. Each one has a long list of partner companies, so you may need to set aside time to figure out which companies you’d like to advertise for. Also, when it comes to starting a blog, make sure to add a disclosure at the beginning of each post that there are affiliate links embedded. Remember those FTC rules I mentioned earlier for the legal side of blogging? Yeah, this is one of those rules…
This post is already longer than I had anticipated. There’s a lot that goes starting a blog, especially as a business. I mentioned earlier, the important thing is to create your content and tweak it as you go. You’re not going to learn everything within a few months, and that’s okay. Use this new period to experiment. No matter how many books we read or how many tutorials we watch, trial and error are going to be the most significant teachers in this field. Look for blogging communities on Facebook or other platforms and learn from others. It’ll be a challenge but a rewarding one if you put your heart into it.
Have you already started a blog? What has been one of your biggest challenges as a new blogger? For those more experienced, what was the biggest obstacle that you had to overcome? What is something that you wish you had known when first starting out? Please share your stories in the comments below! If you enjoyed this content, then subscribe to the newsletter for updates and new learning opportunities!
And as always, make sure to just live and learn from one story at a time.
Take care,
Kyndall Bennett from Kyrabe Stories
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