This simple and effective blogging checklist is for creating your blogging site on WordPress and running it successfully.
Are you new or waiting to start a new blog, then this the right article for people like you.
Before entering the world of blogging, you need to create a blogging checklist, because the checklist will help you do blogging easily and follow the right way to do a wonderful business.
What do you think about blogging, if you are not a technical one? When seeing unfamiliar blogging terms like hosting, domain hunting, niches, SEO, keyword research, people think it is difficult to enter blogging.
Moreover, every unfamiliar word looks like a strange thing. But blogging is an art where you can explore your knowledge and share it with others.
Why did I say that the checklist is important for blogging?
Here the answer comes… The checklist will act as a guide so you get a clear knowledge of how to get a grab in the blogging platform as quickly as possible.
Furthermore, the embarrassing errors in your blog will be caught with the help of a checklist. By reading this checklist, we could save your time for blogging.
simple and complete blogging checklist to start a website from scratch
Setup your website
Find a niche/topic
First, choose your field, in which you will start a blog. You can find a niche from your interests or professional expert. Ensure that your chosen field has scope.
Precise goals
Fix your goals with your topic and confirm that what is the particular takeaway that your readers will get from your articles.
Moreover, choose your topic precisely, take your blogs much deeper in the same topic. Every blog should have a value.
Check related blogs
You have chosen your niche, then look for what other bloggers in your niche are doing and what are all the topics they are covering.
Check it down to that, whether your chosen topic has enough articles online. If yes, then get a unique strategy to stand out from them.
Blogging platform
There are many platforms for blogging, but for professionals, I mostly suggest only WordPress. Because WordPress has many benefits and gives more flexibility. More guides also available to guide you to make the most out of WordPress.
choose domain
From based on your niche, try to get a relevant domain. You can search for domain names from leandomainsearch, namechk, google domain, or from any domain providers. Initially enter your niche keyword, it shows all your relevant available domain names in the market.
We often recommend everyone to go with .com domain extensions. It increases your value. Sometimes you can also choose your domain extensions based on your niche.
For example- if your field of niche is education, then you can go with .education domain extensions.
Get hosting
There are several hosting providers in the market. Try to go with good hosting providers. Good hosting improves your site value and SEO performance.
Bluehost and SiteGround are best suggested hosting providers for beginners and professionals.
If you are doing blogging as a hobby and not interested in investing money, then go for free hosting. Using free hosting has many drawbacks.
Check out – 14 best free hosting providers
Get your blogging website online
Install WordPress
Then After getting a good WordPress hosting, hosting providers allow you to install WordPress on their hosting. In addition, Within a minute, your website will be ready.
Sometimes for beginners, it takes time to learn the functionalities.
To get excellent customer support, go with good hosting providers like Bluehost and the siteground. More than the decade of service with the WordPress hosting offers a great value to the customers.
Choose themes
After installing WordPress, you can see that thousands of themes available for website creation. Choose the good themes, later also you can change themes.
But every time changing themes involve with a lot of customization and time-consuming. So, from initially go with excellent ones.
We suggest you go with premium themes like genesis framework or Astra. If you don’t have any technical or programming knowledge, then Astra suits you better. Astra also has a free version, you can use it and later upgrade it.
Download plugins
However one of the key things in WordPress is plugins, for your every need there is a plugin. Over 50,000 plugins, it has enormous customization to show your blog great in every way. But use your plugins carefully, because it also has side effects.
Pre-publish checklist for a blogging
Professional email
Get your professional email account from your domain name. For example, mail id looks like yourname@domainname.com. You can create unlimited mail id from your domain name.
Design logo
If you are a talented designer, then create a logo. If not, hire a freelancer to design for you. With less than $10, you can get your logo designed.
Choose the audience
Find your perfect audience, for whom you are writing. Choose the audience more precisely, so they can add more value to your site.
Try to give a more detailed solution to every topic you are covering. So you can get repeated visitors regularly. It shows your knowledge in that field.
Find typography
Typography is nothing but the font styles, size, letter space, line space. Fix it common for all your blogs. It shows your standard.
Homepage
Design your homepage. It should be simple and explains completely about the purpose of that website. You can also keep your recent articles or popular articles on your homepage.
Google analytics
You can also add google analytics as a plugin or add it separately. It is the place where you can get all your sites statistics. Google only has complete control over your site.
Social media accounts
Create your profiles on social media, because Social media gets your initial day’s visitors. Usually, a new site takes more time to get regular organic traffic from google. In those initial days, social media plays a better role. The primary social media are Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest.
Do regular updates, so you can get more followers.
Collect emails
If you are an influencer in any field, then collect emails from them.
Effective blogging tools to write a perfect blog
Outstanding blogs from initial days
Here the major thing, a proper blogging checklist is needed to write and publish a good blog. Writing high-quality blogs takes time and with regular practice, you can prepare your own checklist. But this blogging checklist gives some standard outlines that most bloggers use.
Topic research
Try to choose different topics in your domain. Always have many blog post ideas. For every topic, there is already a blog. so try to give more research and in-depth knowledge in that topic.
Regular brainstorm gives you more topics and content ideas.
Pillar articles
You can choose which type of article you are writing. Whether it could be pillar articles or supportive articles.
Pillar articles are an article that has more in-depth content about a particular topic in your niche. Supportive articles are small articles that support pillar articles.
Keyword research
Every good blog writing starts with keyword research. Choose low competition keywords with high search volume. The keyword is the important word in your writing topic, for which your site is to rank in google.
Using a particular related keywords in all your articles increases your site’s value in that niche. Try to use 2 to 3 keywords for a blog and also using long-tail keywords also has more chance to rank higher. Long-tail keywords are keywords that have 3 to 4 or more keywords.
For example- instead of using ‘start blog’, use ‘start blog from WordPress’. Here the keyword has 4 words, increases your chance of ranking in search pages.
Use subheadings
Use subheadings at regular intervals. Using frequent subheading increases your reading score and try to have less than 250 words under one subheading. Use less complex words to increase readability.
Split paragraphs
Don’t write bigger paragraphs, try to have less than 5 lines for a paragraph.
Place images
Most of the time, using the images in between the subheadings creates more attraction to the readers. Try to give useful and related images to the content.
If you are looking for more information, then go for infographics. Infographics play a good role in the content.
Use media
Incorporate video in your blog, it adds value to your blog. For example – if you are writing any tutorial blogs, then make the tutorial as a video.
Grammarly
Grammarly is a software that helps to enrich your English writing skills. It is one of the important tools that every bloggers use. If you are using google docs for writing the blogs, then you can get it from the chrome web store as an add-on.
Grammarly takes care of all your grammar mistakes, punctuation, readability check, plagiarism, and much more. It has both free and paid version.
For a beginner free version is enough, if you need more advanced versions than go for the paid ones.
Use active voice
When writing blogs, use only an active voice. Increases your readability and shows your attachment with readers. If you use passive voice, it looks you are speaking to some third person.
Transition words
Transition words increase your readability. It shows the connection between the words and improves your language skills.
Give real-time examples
Try to give more examples for easy understanding. Many times difficult paragraphs can be explained in a single example.
Preview it
After finishing writing, always re-check it and do a preview. Always justify the paragraph and check for mobile-friendly. Preview it in both mobile and desktop views.
Highlight words
Highlight important words and sentences. If you are placing a URL to a word, highlight those words.
Checklist for writing SEO optimized content
How normal writing differs from search engine optimized (SEO) writing. SEO writing helps search engines like google to understand what your content is about and ranks your pages higher in search pages.
There is some blogging checklist for writing a proper blog. If you followed these blogging checklists when writing a blog, then you will definitely become a better blogger.
When writing, you can only do your On-page SEO. These are the blogging checklists for ON-page SEO.
Keyword research – fix a keyword you want to focus on that article. You can also focus two or more keywords in a single article. Use it throughout the article wherever it needed. Don’t try to dumb more keywords, it reduces the reader’s interest.
checklist for placing your keywords for on-page SEO
- In title tag – the title must contain keywords
- Image alt
- H2 and H3 subheadings
- In the content
- In permalink
- First and last paragraph
Keyword density – don’t overstuff your keywords. The keyword density around 2% is good.
Use images – keep the images wherever necessary, when adding images use alt tags. The alt tags include your main keywords. Before using the images in the blog, compress the images because larger images will slow your page loading speed.
If you are using WordPress, then plugins will make it easier for you. Meanwhile, ensure the quality of the image.
LSI keywords – LSI (Latent semantic indexing) is a word that related to your title and keywords. Use this LSI keywords throughout the article. For example – if you are writing about ‘how to make icy coffee’ then the related words like temperature, freezing point, ingredients, and much more are LSI keywords.
Name heading tags (h1 to h6)
Name your headings from h1 to h6. H1 refers to a more important heading and h6 refers to the least important heading.
Choose categories – Create some categories and place the blogs in that category. Give more topics in particular categories.
Add author – give the author name. If you have multi-author give separate names.
Pre-posting checklist for blog optimization
After writing good content, some extra things will add much greater value to your sites. Here some blogging checklist.
Internal links – place your older posts links in the recent post, wherever needed.
Outbound links – get links from other good authority sites. If you are giving any product review, place that product links.
Meta description – add the meta description to the blog, it is a snippet which shows in the search engines.
Post slugs – it is the URL link of your blog. Try to make it less. Ensure that different slug for every blog.
Call to action – ask your readers to subscribe or register to your newsletters or asking to click other post links.
In-depth content – mostly try to give more researched content. Cover most things in your writing topic. If you can’t cover everything, give backlinks to detailed blogs. Write blogs greater than 1500 words.
Content upgrade – upgrade your older content at regular intervals. You can also upgrade your older blogs 6 months once. It gives advantages in search engines.
Add popular articles – insert your other popular articles at the end of your blog.
Add social buttons – insert social media sharing buttons. If a reader likes your blog, they will share it with their friends. The more share you get, the higher the chance in ranking in search engines and also increases your traffic.
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To do blogging checklist after publishing a post
Your work doesn’t finish only after publishing the recent post and also there is some blogging checklist you should do. Some promotions and things need to do to reach your blog to readers.
Promotions – share your recent posts on social media. Pinterest, Twitter, and Facebook offers a great value to your blogs. You need to maintain good social media accounts to get regular traffic from social media.
Email marketing – email marketing is a popular way of reaching your readers directly. Every time you post a new blog, sent a mail to your subscribed readers. Collect a mail as much as you can. Use strategies to collect email id. You can also offer a free guide for getting an email id.
Page speed – check your page loading speed. You can check your site speed from google insights. It shows both mobile and desktop loading speed. If your page loading takes more time, then do the proper optimizations to speed up your website.
Mobile-friendly sites – login to google search console, it shows your site’s performance, URL inspection, and mobile usability. With the increasing number of mobile users, have mobile-friendly sites.
Create a sitemap file – you can create your sitemap XML file from Yoast SEO plugin and attach it to the search console, so that google will find your sites.
Important plugins for effective blogging in WordPress
Mostly the blogging checklist has plugins. Many of your blogging problems solved by plugins. Here we have given some important plugins, start using from initial days.
- Yoast SEO – must-have SEO plugin
- WP-rocket – cache plugin
- Jetpack – plugins with many features
- Akismet – blocking spam comments
- No self pings – reduce WordPress self pings
- Social snap – for social sharing buttons
- Easy table of content – for creating a table of contents
- WP forms – for creating contact forms
- Short pixel – image compressor
- Broken link checker – to find broken links in your blogs
Final quick blogging checklist for posting a perfect blog post
Here is a simple but powerful, quick blogging checklist to ensure the things in the blog post before hitting your publish button.
- Include Internal Links
- Use Outbound Links
- Optimize your images
- Post slugs – optimize your URLs
- Have individual Post categories
- Add meta description
- Always do Keyword research
- choose low competition title with high search volume
- Use many subheadings
- Have Small paragraph, it increases readability
- Use Responsive themes
- Upgrade your content frequently, because search loves fresh content
- Write more In-depth contents
- Add social sharing buttons to your blog posts
- Preview content, before publishing
- Use plugins to improve blogging quality
- Use the active voice when writing
- Grammarly tool for reducing grammar mistakes in writing.
- Make your website Mobile-friendly
- Name heading tags (h2 to h6), based on their preferences.
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Conclusion
Finally, this blogging checklist for WordPress helps to reduce your time in every way. For beginners, it takes time to learn the proper checklist for publishing a good blog, but this checklist serves you better.
If you find this article useful, kindly share it with your friends. On the whole, thank you for spending your valuable time.
Do you have any effective things to add to this complete blogging checklist to make it easier? Comment me below.
