YOUR FIRST31 DAYS OF BOGGING

By Heidi Nazarudin

IntroductionThis eBook contains a day-to-day task list that you have to complete for the next 31 days. Some of the tasks are probably things that you are doing anyway, and some tasks might not have crossed your mind to do. But all of them are crucial for you to be on your way to achieve Blogger Babe superstardom.

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Day 1 of Your First 31 Days of Blogging

Your first week consists of these tasks:Day 1: Create an ideas folder for your ideas.Day 2: Think up some ideas for this folder – focusing on your blog topic.Day 3: Decide on your “posting rhythm”Day 4: Plan a week’s worth of blog content.Day 5: Start writing your blog’s first post.Day 6: Build your online presence.Day 7: Write a post to establish your blog-cred.

These tasks might seem easy and you may think you can do them all in less than a week, but they help you build a foundation of what you want your blog to be so taking the time to execute them properly is crucial.

Day 1: Create a folder for your ideas.It doesn’t matter if your blog is on Wordpress or if you’re more of a vlogger on Youtube or an Instagrammer. An ideas folder helps you collect your thoughts and identify themes that you would like to duplicate on your blog.

Summary for Week 1 (Days 1-7) TasksTake a deep breath.

So you have a blog all set up. And now all you have to do is type

up a storm and start posting content right?

Well, not exactly.

The thing about ideas is that they come up randomly. You could be on your daily commute and staring out of the train or watching a movie at the theatre, when suddenly an idea pops into your head. It could

come while you’re taking a shower or walking in the park. The ideas folder is where you store all of these ideas immediately lest you forget them.

Different people can have different versions of the ideas folder. Some may prefer digital folders – on Pinterest, on Evernote, or on the iPad. Others will probably want to keep things in a notebook that they have handy all the time. If your ideas involve newspaper clippings or magazine tear outs, you probably need just a simple shoebox or large file folder to store these clippings and tear outs. Some might have both a digital folder (like a secret board on Pinterest) and also a file folder for all the magazine and newspaper clippings that they collect. The point is to have an ideas folder that will help you collate these ideas as naturally and as easily as possible for your working style. In picking the right format of ideas folder, you may want to consider a few things:

Think about the way you work and live, and go through your usual daily routine. Will it be easy to collect ideas and put them in your ideas folder? Think also about how you blog – do you like rolling around on your stomach in bed – or do you prefer blogging in a café? Someone who blogs in a café obviously would need an easy access to her ideas folder.

Go ahead, create an ideas folder. You’ll need this for your task tomorrow.

Day 2 of Your First 31 Days of Blogging

Day 2: Think up some ideas for the ideas folder focusing on your blog topic.

Yesterday we learned about creating an ideas folder. So today we are going to concentrate on the kind of ideas that you can put in said folder.

The tips below can help you get some ideas for your blog:

• Think about your blog’s topic and the purpose of your blog. No matter what niche your blog belongs to, it is important that you clarify exactly what you want to achieve, i.e. what is the goal of your blog? Do you want to educate? Do you want to share new experiences? Do you want to sell products or establish yourself as a professional in your industry? You can have many goals, but you should have 1 to 2 primary blog objectives and treat the rest as side objectives or secondary goals. The majority of your posts should reflect these primary objectives.

• Think about your blog’s readers. Try to figure out as much as you can about these “future” readers. See if you can come up with a clear vision of the target audience for your blog. Generally, these are the people who are interested in the information you have to share, so you can draw your conclusions from these information.

• Narrow down your readership and focus on a very small subset of “readers”. For example, let’s say you have a beauty blog. Now to create a small subset, limit the characteristics of your special subset of readers. Add qualifiers to your group, like people who are interested in makeup. By thinking about the questions and topics these people might be interested in, you can come up with a few interesting posts for your blog. The ideas don’t have to be completely solid yet. Just list them down and they will be good for consideration later. Here are some example ideas: Which foundation types give the longest wear? What lipstick shades makes teeth look whiter? Which concealers are best for under-eye circles ?

• List out important and informative posts. These are the topics that will have to be dealt with if your blog is to be truly useful in its niche. These are the basic evergreen posts, so to speak, and will have to be covered in order to provide solid information on your blog’s topic.

• It’s time to create a mind map. It’s a famous technique used for brainstorming, and though it seems like a very simple strategy, it can actually be quite useful when you’re trying to sort through the ideas in your head. To create a mind map, you should put the main topic in the middle then start branching out to other related topics. Soon you will have a cluster of balloons filled with different ideas. Next, add even more ideas to the new ideas you’ve come up with. It’s a chain, with each topic creating more sub-topics and bringing up more content ideas. Continue doing this until you’ve exhausted all the ideas you’ve listed down.

Note: If you have a digital ideas folder, list down all the ideas you managed to come up in the mind-mapping exercise above and store them in a Word document.

The main goal of this exercise is to show you how to get as many post ideas from your ideas folder.

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Day 3 of Your First 31 Days of Blogging

Day 3: Decide On Your “posting rhythm”I’m sure now you have a lot of ideas in your folder so I bet you’re very excited to start writing. But hold on, there is a few more tasks to go through before you start posting. Today’s task is to figure out your

posting rhythm.

Get a calendar and start marking out a proper schedule where you can blog steadily and regularly. Here’s what you need to do today to determine your posting rhythm AKA how many posts you can realistically write each month:

• Start with a 30 day (monthly) blogging schedule. Look at what you have on your plate for the next 4 weeks. Pick out the times (it does not have to be every day, but it needs to be a few days a week where you can spend one to two hours writing for your blog. Mark these days on your calendar as time set aside for blog writing.

• Figure out possible scheduling conflicts. If there’s work, school, other commitments, a holiday or events coming up on your calendar, you’ll have to take this into consideration. It’s also important to take into account other external schedules like chores etc. that might affect your timetable.

• Handling a blog isn’t just about the writing. It’s about a lot of other necessary administrative tasks, too. You’ll also have to consider networking, blog promotion & marketing, design updates and/or tweaks. So add that into your calendar as well.

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Given all of the information you’ve considered above, it is time to give yourself a rough estimate of the number of posts you can write in a week. Do not force yourself to take on too many blog posts. Pick out the comfortable number of posts you can handle and stick to this rhythm. You don’t have to schedule posts every day but you need to be a consistent publisher.

Schedule your post publication. One thing about posts is that you don’t have to publish them immediately after writing. If you want to space your posts out, set a weekly schedule for publishing your posts – like maybe every Tuesday and Thursday.

So basically after this exercise, you will now know much time you actually have for writing posts; and so you will know how many posts you can actually write in a month.

From the total number of posts you can write in a month, you can now have an estimate of how many posts you can schedule per week – which is usually: Posts Per Week = Number of Posts In A Month / 4 (number of weeks in a month)

And now it’s your turn. How many posts can you write in a week?

I promise that’s all the math we have to do in this course. See you tomorrow!

Posts Per Week = Number of Posts

In A Month

4 (# of weeks in a month)

Day 4 of Your First 31 Days of Blogging

Day 4: Plan A Week’s Worth Of Blog ContentYesterday you managed to get a rough idea of what kind of posting

rhythm you have – you now know how many posts you can actually come up with in a week.

And now it’s time to build the “road map” for your blog. You can now start scheduling the posts topics for your first week. In fact, it’s fine if your content plan extends beyond the first week.

Okay, Let’s assume you can come up with 3 postings in a week. And you have decided that you will schedule posts on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. When scheduling posts, it is a good idea to have specific topics published on specific days.

For example, if you blog about fashion, you can have a Makeover Monday, Wild Wednesdays (posts about wild or out there fashion trends, or Fabulous Fridays (posts about runway styles). This allows your readers to anticipate the upcoming post. It’s an easy way to connect and give readers something to look forward to each week.

And as with everything else, creating a proper content plan for your blog’s first week can be broken into several tasks. We’ve already established all the other blog-related tasks that you may have to deal with, apart from the actual writing i.e networking, blog promotion & marketing, design updates and/or tweaks. Using this information, pick the days when you’d like to publish a post. (It can be 1,2 3 or even all days of the week, depending on the rhythm you are comfortable with.)

Makeover

MondayWILD

Wednesday

Fabulous

Friday

Take a look at the items you have in your ideas folder and select a topic for each publishing day you’ve marked on your calendar.

Now, you should already have marked off a few hours for writing these posts. Just remember that you’ll have to save a special day in the calendar for a post (aka The Special Post) discussing your credentials in your niche. (More details on that special post later).

This is what a blogging schedule is all about. A blueprint or a road map that you can follow. Just make sure to follow the posting schedule as strictly as you can to cultivate discipline. Soon enough, maintaining a blog will be a much easier part of your life and you won’t see it as a burden.

And one last reminder: you will have to review your writing and publishing schedule from time to time. Changes to your lifestyle and your readers’ reaction to your posts could affect the schedule you’ve set for yourself. In time, you’ll be so in tune with the rhythm that changing the schedule to fit your situation better will be a very easy exercise.

Now get cracking on that posting schedule. hot color trends

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Day 5 of Your First 31 Days of Blogging

Day 5: Start Writing Your Blog’s First PostNow it’s time to go ahead and create the post you’ve been dying to write. Usually, writing a blog post can take approximate thirty minutes to an hour. However, the length of time required for creating the first post will actually depend on a few things. These factors to consider include your expertise on the topic, your writing efficiency, and your target audience. All of these things can affect the way you write the post, and whether or not you can

write a post quickly will depend on all of these factors and more.

Your First Post’s Content: Your first post is quite important as it’s going to be the first post to launch your blog. If you think of your blog as a “book”, then the first post is like the introduction page. This introductory post, therefore, will have to include a few key items. First, the launch post should introduce the blog and the blogger, i.e. you. Second, the post should explain the rationale behind the blog. What is your reason for creating the blog? Finally, try to discuss the knowledge gap that your blog seeks to address. The knowledge gap refers to the questions and problems that your blog will discuss. In a way, the final part of your launch post should let your readers know what sort of assistance they can get from reading your blog.

Apart from these important items, your first post may also include a few more helpful details.

If you have a strict publishing schedule, you could inform your potential readers of this and let them know what to expect weekly. It’s also a good idea to start inviting your readers to stick around. You could offer them. alternative means of following

your regular posts, for example through Facebook or a newsletter (email) subscription. Finally, you can also ask for feedback or suggestions, as well

as ideas for future posts.

Here is a quick step-by-step guide to writing your first post:1. Write a draft. It’s a draft, so you don’t have to worry about perfect grammar, spelling, or even flow at this point. Just write.

2. Save and close your document, then relax. Go do something else for a while. Take a walk, watch TV, or exercise. This is important.

3. Come back and read your draft with fresh eyes. At this point, it’s important to consider your target audience and see if the post addresses their concerns. If there’s anything missing or you think you need to add content, do so.

4. Copy and paste the post in your blogging platform. Do not publish it yet. Save the post as a draft.

5. Ask someone (your friendly guest reader) to read and comment on your draft. Sometimes, it’s a good idea to have someone else read what you wrote. Look for someone who could be a potential blog reader. Don’t ask your Grand-Aunt Edith to read a post you wrote about the pros and cons of “How To Pair Hot Pants and Uggs In The Summer”. Having someone else read your post actually helps you identify areas where you might have been remiss. You might have certain details omitted because you expect your readers to already know about these things. You might have missed grammatical or spelling errors. If there is some criticism, take it with an open mind. I know it’s hard, but try to look at it from your reader’s point of view and see if they have a valid point. Take all of your guest reader’s concerns and feedback into account and see if you need to make any changes to your post draft.

• Know your blog’s niche and target audience. This is the most important foundation of any blog, and clear focus will help you write the right posts that your target audience will appreciate. This task will actually impact the stability and focus of your blog as you move forward.

• Have a few ideas saved up for your next few posts! As you try to keep your publishing schedule for the next few weeks, you’ll be very glad you’ve stored a lot of good ideas to draw from when you attempt to create content.

• You now have a first post, even though it’s unpublished. It’s the post that will introduce your blog to your readers.

And that’s it for today. See you tomorrow!

So it’s the end of Day 5 of 31 Days of Blogging You should now:

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