Continuing from: ← Starting a Side Income Blog – Part 2
Blog Schedule
At this stage it’s important to focus on content for your blog and we will go over tasks that should be considered when starting a side income blog. These tasks include SEO considerations and maintenance and are broken down into initial, weekly, monthly and those specific to posting.
To do Initially:
Choose your topic niche.
Choose your blogging platform, a self-hosted WordPress.org site is recommended. Register a domain name that aligns with your topic or purchase an aftermarket domain and purchase webhosting.
Design your WordPress theme. It’s a good idea to do this in a local development environment.
Prepare content for around 5 posts for your blog. Consider making an about or contact page. Upload your blog with your 5 posts to your webhost and launch your blog on the internet to be accessed publicly through your domain name.
Consider initial SEO strategies, including signing up for Google Search Console and Google Analytics, creating a sitemap and submitting it to Google.
To do Weekly:
Post at least one new article.
Promote your blog through social media, like Pinterest and Facebook, as well as through ongoing SEO, guest posting and to online communities.
Use different avenues to monetise your blog.
To do Monthly:
Update content that is outdated.
Specific to Posting:
Articles (SEO considerations):
Include meta descriptions for posts, using an SEO plugin like Yoast SEO
Submit new articles to Google Search Console.
Images:
When possible, include featured images for your posts.
When uploading images, including featured images, use image ‘alt tags’ as an SEO consideration.
Choose the right size for images. Images that are too small will result in too low resolution and images too large will add extra unnecessary delay to your webpage loading time.
Videos:
Videos that are necessary and relevant should be used.
They should be high quality.
Links:
Link internally to related blog posts.
Tips for Blogging
- Utilise WordPress plugins. For example, while transitioning your blog from a local development environment to live on the internet, make use of a ‘coming soon’ plugin, if necessary, that will display a coming soon message when someone accesses your domain name. Another example is to use a Table of Contents plugin if necessary, such as the one used by this blog.
- Make your design user friendly. It should also be responsive, which means it will work on different devices such as laptop, mobile and tablet. Many themes available are responsive or when using a theme page builder such as Beaver Builder to develop your blog, it produces fully responsive layouts out of the box.
- Utilise social media, such as Facebook and Pinterest and integrate links to the relevant platforms from your site to those you use.
- An AI chatbot such as ChatGPT shouldn’t be used instead of writing content yourself, but it can help with brainstorming and core ideas. It can also help with such things as choosing your subniche topic for your blog and to create images.
- Do a 404 redirect to your homepage. This is especially useful if you start with an aftermarket domain for your blog. By installing and activating the plugin “404 to homepage” in WordPress, it will send any traffic coming in that doesn’t land on an existing page for your blog to land on your homepage, rather than simply displaying an error.
- Plan and prepare blog posts beforehand to maintain blog consistency. Especially relevant when starting your blog. When developing on a local development environment before launching on the internet it’s a good idea to ensure you have content you can use to consistently post. It’s also important if you blog regularly and are for example going away on holidays. If going on holidays, posts that have prepared beforehand can be published at a set date. To set this up, on the WordPress dashboard, navigate to the Quick Edit link next to a post and set the date to publish.
- Monitor your sites performance through Google Analytics or Google Search Console to gain insights. Google Search Console can also be used to submit your sitemap to Google.