Three steps to a successful blog

So that's enough anyway about why I think writing a blog is a great thing to do. If you have been convinced, then now is the time to share those tips of how to go about actually starting your blog.

So, the first thing you're going to want to do is sign up to a blog publishing service, and the first-ever service that I used was blogger.com, which I think is run by Google, and it's absolutely free to sign up. It's very easy to use. It's a very … it has a very simple format, so I would definitely recommend that site. Erm, it still exists! If you are new to blogging and you're not too confident with, like, gadgets and different layouts, it's a very simple layout. What I now use is a website called Wordpress and, again, you can sign up for Wordpress free of charge, and then if you are invested in blogging and you want to personalise the layout of your blog or you want to have your own domain, your own name for your website, then you can add on those extra things later on. But I would say to start off with, I would just go with a free domain, a free sign-up, because you're probably just trying out blogging. You might not actually like it, and that's absolutely fine! But I think it's better to start off with something free rather than invest a lot of money into it, and then see if you like it.

So now that you've got yourself a log-in, you'll want to actually start designing your blog, and this is the fun part – at least for me, I think it's fun. So, the first thing I would recommend is obviously choosing a name for your blog, and a name – although it might seem like a small thing – is actually very important, because it's how people will search you, it's how people will find you and it's the first thing people will see when they access your blog. So, that might be the thing that encourages them to stay, or they might be, like, 'I'm not interested.' And what I would recommend, if you are thinking of a name, is to choose something that reflects the content that you're posting on your blog. So, for example, if your name is Sammy and you like cooking, you could write or you could choose the name, I don't know, 'Sammy's cookbook' or 'Sammy's secret recipe'. So, as soon as someone logs on to your blog, they'll know exactly what your blog's about. If, like me, you might want to write about multiple topics, then I would recommend rather than choosing a name that incorporates the content of what you're blogging about, I would perhaps just use your name, because otherwise it might be a bit too much information. So, I write about travelling, I write about books, I write about … just my thoughts about many different things happening, so there's not very … it's not a very consistent theme all the time. So, what I've done, to cater for all the different types of things that I write about, is just to use my name so that people know it's me who's writing. It's easy to search me on Google.

When it comes to actually writing your blog, I would really stress being as consistent as possible, because if you don't post for a very long time, then people might lose interest in your blog. They might stop following it. I would say try and set a schedule of when you're going to post. Erm, perhaps every week or even every two weeks is a bit too much to start off with, so maybe start at once a month and then if you feel that you have a lot of content that you can offer, that you have the time to blog – because blogging is also quite time-consuming – then you can reduce that to every two weeks, every three weeks, so that you have content coming out regularly and people are staying engaged with your blog.

And my last tip would be to share your blog with your friends and family, and I know this can be daunting, especially if you are just starting your blog. When I first started my YouTube channel, I was a bit embarrassed to tell my friends and also my family. But honestly I think they're more likely than not to be very supportive of what you're doing, and you'll really need that support when you're first starting out because, erm, you obviously won't have a very big following, so your friends and your family are going to be your number-one fans right at the beginning. They're going to help you share your blog with their friends and family, and they're going to help you attract the right kind of people, who are interested in the content you're producing.

So those are my tips for starting out your first blog. I hope that they were useful and, if they were, please make sure to share this with your friends or family members who might also be interested in writing or starting up their own blog as well, so that everyone can benefit from this video. If you do have any tips yourself, then comment below and we can share that with our online community as well. That's all I guess I have for today, so with that, happy blogging! And I'll see you in the next one. Bye, guys!