It is day one of your blogging journey. And you are excited! You have stopped the procrastination and finally got down to actually starting a blog. Maybe you are on WordPress or Blogger or maybe you decided to hit the ground running by self-hosting – it’s all good!
Just like you spruce up your home in readiness for visitors, so should you do the same for your blog. After setting up your blog, you need to ask yourself; is your blog ready for visits? How do you ensure that it will impress the visitors enough to rope them in for more visits thereafter?
Here is a checklist to remind you the essentials that your blog needs from the get-go:
1. An ‘about’ page:
This is how your blog introduces itself to your readers, your prospective clients…the online world at large. Having a blank ‘About’ page gives the impression that you do not care about your readers enough to tell them what you are all about. Use this page to connect with your readers from the beginning.
2. A title:
In the same way people refer to you using your name, your blog needs a name for identification. The title is what will give your blog an identity and since people connect with things they can identify, not having a title for your blog denies it the much needed identity.
3. Categories:
Every post you put up must fall under a certain category depending on the subject matter of the blog post. Having categories gives your blog a better, organized outlook. It also makes your content more discoverable by SEO tools.
4. Social media share buttons:
You want to be able to share your posts with the click of a button. The social media buttons make it much easier for you to share your content on your social media pages (e.g. Facebook, twitter, Google+ etc.) and you should take advantage of them
5. First post:
This is the icing on the cake. Your first post sets the tone for your blog. Though it might not be the best post you will ever write for your blog as we tend to improve with time; it should be fairly good to start with. Good enough to make people take you seriously.
If all the above check out for you, then you should delve into blogging confident that you have the basics in place. There is of course much more that you will learn as you continue blogging, but it always helps to start from somewhere, doesn’t it?