Continuing from: ← Starting a Side Income Blog – Part 2
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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 some 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. Create a good domain name, by registering one that aligns to your niche topic at a registrar, or purchase an aftermarket domain and also 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, Google Analytics and Bing Webmaster Tools, creating a sitemap and submitting it to Google and Bing.
To do Weekly:
Post at least one new article.
Work on updating internal linking for your posts.
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, such as finding new affiliate links.
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Update content that is outdated.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
Consider submitting sitemaps to Google Search Console after creating new articles, until your site gains traction, then only submit sitemaps for major changes to Google.
Images:
When possible, include featured images with your posts.
An SEO consideration when uploading images, including featured images, is using image ‘alt tags’ and informative file names.
Try to choose the correct size for images. Images that are too small will result in too low resolution, making it hard to see and images too large will add extra unnecessary delay to your webpage loading time.
Videos:
Relevant videos should be used when necessary.
They should be high quality.
Links:
It’s important to link internally to related blog posts.
General 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. It can display a coming soon message when someone accesses your domain name. Another example is using a Table of Contents plugin, if necessary, such as the one used by this blog.
- Try to make your blog design seamless and intuitive for users for a good user experience (UX). It should be responsive, meaning it will work on different devices such as laptop, mobile and tablet. Many themes available are built responsive and using theme page builders, such as Beaver Builder to develop your blog, come fully responsive out of the box.
- Utilise social media, such as Facebook and Pinterest. Also integrate links from your site to the relevant platforms you use.
- I think ChatGPT, and AI chatbot, can be used ethically to help with such things as research, brainstorming, finding core topics for your blog and for some AI-generated images, but shouldn’t be used instead of writing content yourself.
- Do a 404 redirect to your homepage when necessary. This is particularly useful if when deciding how to choose your domain name for your blog, you go with an aftermarket domain that is getting traffic you want to try to retain. By installing and activating the plugin Redirect 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 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 it on the internet, it’s a good idea to ensure you have content you can use to consistently post for your blog. It’s also a good idea if you blog regularly and are unable to continue with posting, for example if you’re going away on holidays, to prepare posts beforehand and set up a publish date. This can be done from the WordPress dashboard, by navigating to the quick edit link next to a post and setting your desired publish date.
- Monitor your sites performance through Google Analytics, Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools to gain insights.