9 Tips for NEW Bloggers: What you Need to do Your FIRST YEAR Blogging

hey there I'm Anastasia and you can check my blog at Anastasia blogger.com I've been doing this fulltime since 2018 but I can tell you for a fact the first year of blogging was the most difficult because you have to make a lot of very important choices while not knowing the whole picture and learning as you go so in this video I will show you the nine main things that you should do in the first year of blogging to set it up for success and while all of these tips are very important you really don't want to miss the tip number six because it's something that you cannot fix later but first up you need to install Google analytics on your site it's free and at the same time it is the most comprehensive website Analytics tool and you don't need to use any other WordPress plugins to track analytics it takes just 5 minutes to install Google analytics code on the back end of your site you can find lots of tutorials even here on YouTube and follow the steps so I won't go into more details now on this and once you have it installed you will learn a lot about your website visitors are they coming in from social media or maybe from search engines how long are they hanging around which pages on your site are the most popular and remember you have to use Google analytics because any AD Network or potential sponsor will ask you for stats from your Google analytics and not from any other odd Plug-In or Analytics tool by the way if you have jetpack plug-in on your blog by any chance to track visitors then get rid of it it's slowing down your site and not helping you learn anything more than Google analytics could tell you the next tip is to create a Google search console account for your site this used to be called Web Master tools when your blog is new you can help Google find and index your pages Faster by manually submitting your new pages in the URL tool in search console here here you will also see how your s's doing in search results and which keywords it is ranking for and it gives you a heads up if any issues might prevent Google from indexing your site I noticed that a lot of beginner bloggers do have Google analytics but they never even hear about the search console so I thought it was important to mention it as well the next tip is do not overspend in the first year of blogging the truth is and most people will not tell you this honestly and bluntly so the truth is is that you won't make a whole lot of money in the first year of blogging you'll be lucky if you make anything at all I was lucky to get traffic from Pinterest and I'll talk later a bit more about it in this video and I will explain who can benefit from this platform and by the end of the first year of blogging literally around my 11th month since I started the blog I managed to get accepted to medine and made my first $1,400 with media Vine ads when 90% of my traffic was coming from from Pinterest but again even that was by the end of the first year of blogging so because you won't see much money from the blog I think you might feel better if you haven't wasted a lot starting a blog some bloggers will tell you that you have to start with the best and most expensive hosting provider which can cost over $100 per month but I don't think it's wise to splurge on hosting in the first year when you barely get any visitors to your blog personally I started with a self-hosted WordPress blog on Blu host it's super affordable less than $3 a month and you even get your domain name for free in the first year with blue host I stayed with them for over a year and even though I I mentioned that I gained more than 100,000 website visitors in my 11th months of blogging blue hosts cheapest plan sustain the traffic Spike and I wasn't forced to pay anything extra you will find the link to blue host in the description below and it gives you a discounted price on their WordPress hosting package now another potential expense is a WordPress theme but you can actually start with a WordPress theme that's known for good s side speed for example with Astro theme and it has a free version so you could later upgrade it to a paid version when you start making some money with your block now if you want a more step-by-step guide to starting a block I have a free resource for you that's a 7-Day course delivered to your inbox with instructions and video tutorials I'll give you a link to it up there and also in the description below now the next tip is establish a routine use a Content calendar when I first started blogging I really quickly realize how important it is to keep things organized and consistent if I didn't stick to a Content calendar I'd just stop posting and get demotivated so I started using a Content calendar to schedule my blog posts and point out all of my cool ideas it's like having a road map for your blog you know and there's a little tip from my early days set a blogging schedule that's realistic for you as a beginner I managed to put out two posts a week I focused more on quality and nailing SEO with each post rather than just cheing out content trust me it's not just about quantity quality is King especially these days when Google has its helpful content updates and you just cannot afford to have any lowquality Pages because each one of those pages will drag your entire blog down in search results the next one is build an email list right away but the Smart Way building an email list is hugely important but don't just add a form that says sign up for my newsletter that's a waste of space on your site and most of the beginner bloggers do exactly that and then I hear voices like oh well email marketing doesn't work for me it's useless my email list isn't growing maybe it was your voice well you have to give people a specific reason to sign up for your list it can be a free be a checklist a free challenge a printable an ebook and so on the next step to building a successful email list is that you need to have engaging forms to capture more subscribers for example this is a form on my blog for the Pinterest suo checklist it took me just 5 minutes to customize the template you can not only select here the character but even a lot of different animations and I will show you here the Taran and the moonwalk options this forms with characters are shown to convert up to two times more than traditional forms but of course should you want you can also easily in one click hide the character you can create forms with super easy userfriendly drag and drop tools from vism forms who kindly sponsored this section of the video see I selected one of the form Styles uploaded my checklist cover I could choose to add or to remove the name field remove the elements that I didn't need on the form for example the logo and I edited the text on the button this me forms integrate directly with many email providers in other cases you might need to use zapier and to publish the form we just need to copy the embedded code and paste it on the landing 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