The 7 Things You NEED to Know Before Starting a Blog

welcome to another vlogging video this week's video is about all the things that I wish people told me be before I started a Blog I'm Sophia I have the blog by Sophie lee.com and it is now a seven figure website I have seven employees and well a team of seven um and I've really learned so much and there's so much that I wish I could go back and tell myself or that I wish people told me so this video is going to be going over all these and I think it's going to be really helpful for anyone in the beginning of their blogging Journey okay so if you want like the Nitty Gritty like actual technical how I started my blog and how we write blog posts how we schedule our content our content calendars SEO like every single thing that we do I have three courses perfecting blogging perfecting Pinterest and perfecting email so I would highly recommend checking those out but here are some overarching is it over arcing or overarching things that I wish people told me and it would have just won like it would have just helped I don't know I think one it would help my like mental steak in the beginning because it's so hard to get started and just have the confidence but two I probably would have been able to grow my blog a lot faster so I have my handy dandy list of things let's get started right away okay number one this is so huge and I stand behind this to this day you need a strategy you have to have a strategy starting a blog that makes money is not something that you can just like willy-nilly do you really have to have your goals in place know what you want to do I started a blog when I was in high school which was like years ago at this point but I was like very willy-nilly with it like I would post randomly and it like did not grow at all but when I started my blog in college and I took it so seriously and I had a strategy how many times I posted how I was gonna write the posts how I was gonna get the content out there like a lot of the things that I go in the perfecting blog and perfecting Pinterest and email are the things that like actually helped me Skyrocket the blog you have to be consistent I always say like if you can only post once a week then be consistent and post every single time a week don't post five times a week and then the next week not post at all and then the next week post another once and then five times again like make sure that you're posting once a week so just being consistent because Google will like you so much more and so much of this strategy is getting Pinterest and Google to like you because if they can like you they will put your content out there so much faster and you will grow so much faster number two blogging is not a fast game it is a long game and you need to dedicate a lot of hours to it it's one of those things that takes a lot of time up front but then as you start I mean honestly it takes a lot of time throughout your entire blogging Journey but like in the beginning especially when you're not making a penny from it when you're spending so much time when people are asking you like what are you doing I mean like when I I was a sophomore in college and I was a full-time student I was also working and doing treating this blog like a full-time business and so I had to be so specific and dedicated to my time and there were times where I would be like my friends would ask me to do something and I'd be like sorry I can't work it on the blog and they'd be like what like it just doesn't make sense and now of course everyone's like oh like that was completely worth it I wish I did that back in college but it was so hard doing it and I started making like substantial money like a year into my blogging Journey actually you can go look at my income reports I took so I like very very accurately and every single month wrote income reports in the beginning because they were so motivational to me so we'll link all of those down below so you can see them because I think even to this day they're like extremely helpful I did my blog for like an entire year and didn't really make any money from it and when you say it out loud a year doesn't seem that long like okay I could work on this for a year and then start making substantial money but when you're in it and you're grinding you're doing it every single day a year is a really really long time and people give up and I always say blogging is not hard work it's just a lot of work and that is like the biggest thing that I find people just like give up and it's the people that continue on and keep going with their blog that like end up being very successful three I stand behind this so much especially because I am a hardcore perfectionist but do not make your blog perfect if you were to go back to my original blog that I started oh my gosh I would probably die at how bad it is but don't take a lot of time on it don't take a lot of time on your about page you can go back and edit your post just get things up there do not get hung up on making sure everything looks amazing buy a website theme take courses so you can learn the things way faster instead of you trying to teach yourself instead of you trying to learn how to design a website like it's that those are the things that you're gonna get so hung up on that don't really resonate with money in the future if that's what your goal is and so for me when I started every single thing that I did I had ROI ROI ROI like I would literally repeat Roi in the back of my head Roi means return on investment and I basically wouldn't do it unless that I was gonna get a return on an investment from it so for example my about page like I barely even had an about page I don't even know when I started I had an about page because I knew like this is not going to generate me income no one cares about me they only care about themselves also that's one of the things that you can really get into your head and it's just not worth spending a lot of time on get your blog post up right away don't try to write like 10 blog posts and then publish them no one is going to be seeing your blogs in the beginning unless you're sending it to them so just get them out there so that Google can start ranking them and figuring out what your website is as soon as possible number four get your finances in order this was something that I had to learn the hard way so like I said a few a few points ago is that it's a long game but then once you start earning money it really happens quickly and this is one of the things that I wasn't prepared for because as soon as you start generating substantial income you obviously have to start paying taxes and it can be tricky so just be prepared to set up your LLC make sure you know if you have to contact a lawyer your bank accounts just different stuff like that so that you are fully prepared for when that time comes number five Niche down the more Niche that you can be the faster your blog will go grow obviously you can have a wider Niche but the fact of the matter is is it's just going to take a lot longer for me when I started my Niche was college dorm rooms and I really stuck to that and because it was so Niche Google was able to pick up really really fast that my blog was about college dorm rooms if you like another example that I always give because I think this is just a genius idea is a dog block like if you write every single blog post about your dog or not even about your duck don't worry about your dog write about other people's dogs and how they can better help their dogs Google and Pinterest will start knowing oh okay this is a Blog about dogs when someone searches something about dogs I'm gonna put this website up there first is if you were to start a blog about dogs and college dorm rooms they would be like is this about college dorm rooms or is this about dogs um so the more Niche that you can get the faster your blog will grow and I get that it's hard to Niche down you don't have to Niche down it's just gonna take you longer number six know your goals I'm a super super goal oriented person and having goals in place is what really helped me stay confident and stay very like tunnel vision to what I was trying to do uh I should really do a video on like all of the goals that I had during the different years because obviously I like I had end goals like my end goal with all of my blog was to start a design firm which I did this year so that's like huge but in the beginning obviously they were a lot more like short term um like make the first a thousand dollars um get a thousand email subscribers get into an ad agency like different things like that and having those goals year by year I was able to plan out my months and years and look at okay if this is what I want to hit next year what do I have to do right now to hit those goals and number seven is something that I have to remind myself of it but the hard work is completely worth it starting a blog is one of truly the best things that you can do it can lead to just so many opportunities for you I've seen it firsthand and like what this Blog has turned into is something more than I could ever imagine it I've started multiple businesses from it multiple six-figure businesses from it and none of it would have been possible without the blog websites are the way that the world does things when someone needs something or when you're trying to figure out something what's the first thing you do you go to Google and you search it and that will take you to a website or a Blog basically the same thing and it's not something that's going to change for a really really long time that's going to be consistent and so getting your blog started and spending the time working on it can lead you to things that you would never imagine in the future I treat in my blog like a marketing engine for the future opportunities that I wanted I knew that I didn't want to have a Blog for the rest of my life but I knew that starting a blog right now and spending a lot of time getting this blog out there getting Google to know what I'm doing getting people to resonate with my blog and view me as someone as an expert in that space I knew that that could be my marketing engine to then start my other businesses which is exactly what I've done and that's what you can do too also you have the freedom I can work whenever I want wherever I want which is incredible and it's just it just leads you to so many things like I just think so many times like especially like I just think about like okay when I was feeling so dumb in college for doing this now look at all the people that probably looked at me like what the average are you doing like now they're probably like I wish I would have started a Blog by that back then because look at where I could be now and that's exactly what you can do too so that is my little Spiel on all of that I just think that there is so much to gain and there's really not a lot to lose it's such an inexpensive business to start like you can start a blog for fifty dollars which what other business can you start for that inexpensive and um it can lead you to a seven figure business which I am proof of it takes a lot of hard work and a lot of strictness but you can definitely do it so that wraps up this little Ted Talk that that turned into um I hope you enjoyed this week's blogging video make sure to subscribe to the channel make sure to check out my other videos I post once a week where actually I took like a little I was posting every other week and now we're back into posting every single week but make sure to check out my blogging courses I know I'm biased but even read the comments on the YouTube videos and then also like we screenshot all of the reviews that we got people really really like the courses I designed them to be like my dream courses when I was starting that would have just helped me grow my blog and earn money so much faster so definitely check those out um they're also like a super great price compared to other courses too but that really sums it up so I'll see you at next week's blogging video

Channel: Perfecting Blogging | By Sophia Lee Blogging

Views: 11,971

Keywords: blogging tips, blogging for beginners, how to start a blog, start a blog, blogging tips from a full time blogger, tips for new bloggers, blogging tips for beginners, blogging advice, how to start a blog and make money, blogging tips for new bloggers, your first month blogging, new blogger, blogging tips 2022, blogging tips 2023, first month blogging, first month blogging tips, by sophia lee blogging, sophia lee blogging, blogging tips and tricks, beginner blog, blogging

Id: SxOhJjJONck

Length: 12min 36sec (756 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 16 2023