Should I Start a Blog? 7 Questions To Ask Before You Commit

There are over a billion blogs on the internet. Wondering if you should start a blog? Here are 7 questions to ask yourself before you take the plunge.

Every second day I hear someone saying, “I want to start a blog,” but few people really give a thought to whether blogs are really up their alley.

As Neil Patel says in this video, there are over a billion blogs on the internet. That’s roughly one blog for every seven people in this world.

7 Questions To Ask Before You Start a Blog

If you’ve been wondering whether you should start a blog, here are 7 questions to ask yourself before you take the plunge.

#1. Do I really need a blog?

Writing and maintaining a blog will take a lot of commitment and passion for creating content on a specific topic.

But would your business objectives really be served by starting a blog? Or could other methods such as Facebook advertising or a YouTube channel work just as well, if not better?

Will a blog truly give you the return on investment you are looking for? If so, then don’t wait too long to start your blog.

#2. Who do I want to reach with my blog?

The first step to reaching your audience is understanding where they go to find information about your products.

If your audience largely consists of people who live in your town or use products that they search for in the newspapers, then local Facebook advertising or print advertising might be more suited to your purpose.

Does your target audience read blogs? Or do they prefer to get their information in their inbox? If the latter is true, then an email newsletter might be a better option than a blog.

If however, your target audience reads blogs and uses search engines or social media, you should definitely create a blog to promote your business.

A blog is an excellent way to boost your search engine rankings and get found for a lot of your target keywords. If you know that your audience uses search engines to find information, a blog will increase your chances of getting their attention.

Another reason to start your blog is that it’s an excellent way to provide a focal point for your social media community. Regular blog posts will help you offer something of value to your social media followers.

#3. What do I want to achieve with my blog?

There are a lot of things that starting a blog can do for your business. Blogs can help you achieve the following goals:

• Increase your visibility and search engine rankings
• Brand yourself, your products, your services, your company
• Build a community and network with people who have similar interests
• Expand your reach to those outside your current sphere of influence
• Establish your credibility as an expert or thought leader in your field
• Put a human face on your business
• Reach out to potential customers and stakeholders

Decide exactly what goals you want to achieve with your blog and get focused on them so that you can spend your time and effort in activities that help, not hinder your business objectives.

4. How much time can I spend on my blog?

Serious bloggers not only spend time writing their own blogs but also spend a great deal of time learning advanced blogging strategies to promote and monetize their blogs.

If you’re willing to invest the time, effort, and money to learn how to blog and take courses on blogging for beginners, you’re more likely to start a successful blog.

If not, you should either hire someone to blog for you or seriously rethink your decision to start a blog.

#5. What blogging platform will serve my needs best?

Deciding on your blogging platform is an important step that you should take only after becoming familiar with the features and benefits of each option.

This is crucial because it will be extremely difficult to migrate an established blog to a new platform once you’ve started it. Moving your blog can result in you losing your data, search engine rankings, and readers, so don’t take this decision lightly.

There are several free blogging platforms that each come with their benefits, such as BlogSpot, WordPress.com, and Medium, but for many reasons, I would never recommend starting a blog for free.

Free blogs don’t belong to you, they can be deleted anytime, and they are very difficult to monetize. That’s why I highly recommend investing in a domain name and professional web hosting so you can install WordPress and use it as your blogging software.

Additionally, there are many SEO benefits of using WordPress as your content management system (CMS).

#6. How will I promote my blog?

Why is it good to know how you will be promoting your blog even before you start your blog? Because blogging is 20% writing and 80% promotion.

You need to spend 20% of your time writing your blog and 80% of your time promoting it to succeed.

So deciding which channels to use will help you decide where to invest your time and effort when you need to build traffic to your blog.

Since mastery of any new skill takes time and focus, most expert bloggers recommend that you start growing traffic to your blog by focusing on one channel – such as SEO, Pinterest, or Facebook – and mastering it.

Don’t try to learn all these skills at once or you’ll never achieve mastery. Some of these can be outsourced, while others you’ll have to do it yourself.

Decide what you want to take on and look for service providers to handle the other functions so you can start building traffic to your blog as soon as possible.

#7. How do I plan to make money from blogging?

How do you plan to make money from blogging? To determine what business objectives your blog will serve, you need to measure the metrics that matter to you – branding, blog traffic, leads, sales, or revenue.

Ask yourself what you plan to sell from your blog – affiliate products or your own products? Services, consulting, coaching, courses, eBooks? Or do you just want to use a blog as a personal branding platform?

Decide in advance what sort of results matter to you (branding, leads, sales, revenue), so you can make more informed decisions about your blogging ROI and decide which tasks you should focus on to make more money.

Now that you’ve asked yourself all these questions, are you still convinced that you need to start a blog? Then access this WordPress tutorial for beginners and learn how to make a blog on WordPress.

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