If you’ve ever read a blog post, you’ve consumed content from a thought leader that is an expert in their industry. And if the post was well written, chances are you came away with helpful knowledge and a positive opinion about the brand.
Anyone can connect with their audience through blogging and enjoy the benefits. If you’ve heard about blogging but don’t know where to start, the time is now. Wondering how to start a blog? Wondering how to start a blog? Wondering how to start a blog? Wondering how to start a blog? Wondering how to start a blog? Wondering how to start a blog? Wondering how to start a blog?
→ Download Now: 6 Free Blog Post Templates
I’ll cover how you can write and manage an SEO-friendly blog with templates to help you along the way.
Chapters
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- What is a blog post?
- How to Start a Blog
- What Makes a Good Blog Post
- Writing Your First Blog Post: Getting Started
- How to Write a Blog Post
- Blog Format Guidelines
- Blog Post Examples
- Quick Blog Writing Tips
HubSpot’s Free Blog Maker
Drive traffic and awareness by creating an SEO-friendly blog for your business.
- Build a professional blog without coding or design experience
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- Create blog posts using generative AI
What is a blog post?
A blog post is any article, news piece, or guide that’s published in the blog section of a website. A blog post typically covers a specific topic or query, is educational in nature, ranges from 600 to 2,000+ words, and contains other media types such as images, videos, infographics, and interactive charts.
Blog posts allow you and your business to publish insights, thoughts, and stories on your website about any topic. They can help you boost brand awareness, credibility, conversions, and revenue.
And most importantly, they can help you drive traffic to your website.
How to Start a Blog
- Understand your audience.
- Check out your competition.
- Determine what topics you’ll cover.
- Identify your unique angle.
- Name your blog.
- Create your blog domain.
- Choose a CMS and set up your blog.
- Customize the look of your blog.
- Write your first blog post.
1. Understand your audience.
Before you start writing your blog post, make sure you have a clear understanding of your target audience.
To do so, take the following steps:
- Ask yourself exploratory questions. Who are they? Are they like me, or do I know someone like them? What do they want to know about? What will resonate with them? You should also think about your audience’s age, background, goals, and challenges at this stage.
- Carry out market research. Use market research tools to begin uncovering or confirming more specific information about your audience. For instance, if you wanted to create a blog about work-from-home hacks, you can make the reasonable assumption that your audience will be mostly Gen Zers and Millennials. But it’s important to confirm this through research.
- Create formal buyer personas. “Buyer personas can be a handy way to keep a human in mind while you’re writing. Coordinate your personas with your marketing and sales teams. Chances are that your existing customers are exactly the kind of people you want to attract with your writing in the first place,” says Curtis del Principe, senior marketing manager at HubSpot.
I’ll share a little more on buyer personas with an example (because they’re that important).
Let’s say your readers are Millennials looking to start a business. You probably don’t need to provide them with information about getting started on social media — most of them already have that down.
You might, however, want to give them information about how to adjust their social media approach (e.g., — from casual to more business-savvy). That kind of tweak is what helps you publish content about the topics your audience really wants and needs.
Don’t have buyer personas in place for your business? Here are a few resources to help you get started:
- Create Buyer Personas for Your Business [Free Template]
- Guide: How to Create Detailed Buyer Personas for Your Business
- [Free Tool] Make My Persona: Buyer Persona Generator
2. Check out your competition.
What better way to draw inspiration than to look at your well-established competition?
It’s worth taking a look at popular, highly reviewed blogs because their strategy and execution is what got them to grow in credibility.
The purpose of doing this isn’t to copy these elements, but to gain better insight into what readers appreciate in a quality blog.
When you find a competitor’s blog, take the following steps: view more
- Determine whether they’re actually a direct competitor. A blog’s audience, niche, and specific slant determine whether they’re actually your competitor. But the most important of these is their audience. If they serve a completely different public than you, then they’re likely not a competitor.
- Look at the blog’s branding, color palette, and theme. Colors and themes play a huge role in whether you seem like part of a niche. For example, a blog about eco-friendly products should likely use earthy tones instead of loud, unnatural colors.
- Analyze the tone and writing style of the competition. Take note of your competition’s copywriting. Is it something you feel like you can successfully emulate? Does it ring true to the type of blog you’d like to create? What do readers most respond to? Be aware of what you can feasibly execute.
3. Determine what topics you’ll cover.
Before you write anything, pick a topic you’d like to write about. The topic can be pretty general to start as you find your desired niche in blogging.
Here are some ways to choose topics to cover:
- Find out which topics your competitors often cover. After you determine your competitors, go through their archive and category pages, and try to find out which topics they most often publish content about. From there, you can create a tentative list to explore further.
- Choose topics you understand well. You want to ensure you know the topic well enough to write authoritatively about it. Think about those that come most naturally to you. What has your professional experience been like so far? What are your hobbies? What did you study in college? These can all give rise to potential topics to cover.
- Ensure the topics are relevant to your readership. Del Principe suggests checking in with sales and service teams as well. “What kinds of things do they wish customers already knew? What kinds of questions do they get asked a thousand times?” If you’re not serving their needs, then you’d be shouting into a void — or, worse, attracting the wrong readership.
- Do preliminary keyword research. Search for topics using a keyword research tool, then determine whether there is search demand. If you found the perfect topics that are the perfect cross between your expertise and your reader’s needs, you’ve struck gold — but the gold will have no value unless people are searching for those terms.
Pro tip: If you need help brainstorming ideas or lack inspiration, you can use HubSpot’s blog topic generator. It can generate title ideas and even outlines based on a brief description of what you want to write about or a specific keyword.
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4. Identify your unique angle.
What perspective do you bring that makes you stand out from the crowd? This is key to determining the trajectory of your blog’s future, and there are many avenues to choose in the process.
Here’s how you can find your unique selling proposition in crowded blogging niches:
- Write a professional and personal bio. Knowing your own history and experience is essential to determine your unique angle. What unique experience makes you a trusted expert or thought leader on the topic? Use this information to populate your “About me” page on your blog and share more about yourself.
- Determine the special problem you will solve for readers. As you try to find your angle, think about ways you can help your audience surmount challenges typically associated with the topics you’ve chosen for your blog. For instance, if you’re creating a blog about sustainability, then you might help readers learn to compost.
- Choose an editorial approach. Will you share your opinions on trending debates? Teach your readers how to do something? The editorial approach you choose will in part be informed by the topics you cover on your blog and the problems you’re helping your readers solve. Like if your goal is to keep marketers up-to-date on the latest changes, then your editorial approach should be journalistic in nature.
5. Name your blog.
This is your opportunity to get creative and make a name that gives readers an idea of what to expect from your blog.
Some tips on how to choose your blog name include:
- Keep your blog name easy to say and spell. No need to get complicated here. While choosing a unique name is essential, it’s also important to choose one that is easy to memorize for readers. It should also be simple to remember as an URL (which will come into play in the next step).
- Link your blog name to your brand message. The more related your blog’s name is to the topics you cover, the better. For example, DIY MFA is all about writers doing their own Master of Fine Arts in writing at home. Try to allude to your blog’s message, value proposition, and covered topics in one sweep.
- Consider what your target audience is looking for. Your blog name should tie directly into what your readers want to achieve, learn, or solve. DIY MFA is for writers who don’t have the money for graduate school, but want to develop their writing skills. The HubSpot Marketing blog is — you guessed it — all about marketing.
Pro tip: If you help choosing a blog name, try using a blog name generator. And make sure the name you come up with isn’t already taken, as it could lessen your visibility and confuse readers looking for your content.
6. Create your blog domain.
A domain is a part of the web address nomenclature someone would use to find your website or a page of your website online.
Your blog‘s domain will look like this: www.yourblog.com. The name between the two periods is up to you, as long as this domain name doesn’t yet exist on the internet.
Want to create a subdomain for your blog? If you already own a cooking business at www.yourcompany.com, you might create a blog that looks like this: blog.yourcompany.com. In other words, your blog’s subdomain will live in its own section of yourcompany.com.
Some CMS platforms offer subdomains as a free service, where your blog lives on the CMS, rather than your business’s website. For example, it might look like this: yourblog.contentmanagementsystem.com.
However, to create a subdomain that belongs to your company website, register the subdomain with a website host.
Most website hosting services charge very little to host an original domain — in fact, website costs can be as inexpensive as $3 per month when you commit to a 36-month term.
Pro tip: You can connect your custom domain to free hosting with HubSpot’s free CMS or in premium editions of Content Hub. This includes access to built-in security features and a content delivery network.
Here are five other popular web hosting services to choose from:
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7. Choose a CMS and set up your blog.
A CMS (content management system) is a software application that allows users to build and maintain a website without having to code it from scratch.
CMS platforms can manage the following:
- Domains – where you create your website
- Subdomains – where you create a webpage that connects to an existing website
HubSpot customers host web content via Content Hub. Another popular option is a self-hosted WordPress website on a hosting site such as WP Engine.
Whether you create a domain or a subdomain to start your blog, you’ll need to choose a web hosting service after you pick a CMS.
Pro tip: You can get started for free with HubSpot’s free blog maker. Our free CMS offers everything you need to get started– including hosting, a visual editor, and hundreds of free and paid themes to choose from.
