How to start a successful blog/website/domain in Nepal and other countries

How to start a successful blog

How to start a successful blog/website/domain in Nepal and other countries- 20 min read

Topics covered in this post.

1. Things to know before starting a successful blog
2. How to choose the best niche/topic/category for your blog
3. How to register for a domain. Steps to create/start/register a blog/websites/domain
4. How to write an effective post/article for the blog
5. How to get more visitors to blog. Search engine optimization (SEO) for the blog.
6. How to promote the blog on social media
7. How to earn/monetize the blog to maximize blog earning/revenue

Note:- This post seems to be lengthy but we have tried our best to minimize its lengthiness yet including all important points on "how to start a successful blog/website/domain".

1. Things to know before starting a blog:-

Things to know before starting a successful blog

If you think that blogging is easy and should be able to learn within few minutes/sentences then we would like you to request stop reading this post because blogging is not simple at the beginning but you may find blogging easy if you learn with effort then you can enjoy blogging. If you are planning to be a fulltime blogger and you are just a newbie in blogging then I would like you to stop thinking that right now and recommend you to first start blogging and do it for a few years (minimum 2 years) and then decide either you have to be a fulltime blogger or not. I am recommending you to decide after 2 years because within two years you will know more about blogging and status of your blog and then you will have logic and evidence to think and conclude to be fulltime blogger or not.

Let's come to the point and talk about "how to start a successful blog/website/domain"

You might want to start blogging because of these few reasons…

a. To make money through third-party ads/advertisements like AdSense/Infolinks/Chitika etc. and affiliate marketing.

b. ‎Promote your business by promoting products and services online.

c. To let people know your views on particular things/matters.

2. Choose the best niche/topic/category for your blog:-

Choose the best niche/topic/category

Before starting a blog you should make yourself sure that you have selected the niche which fits you the most so that you can finally succeed in blogging. Go through each step and learn "how to start a successful blog".

Question: How to select the niche for the blog/website? How to choose the niche for the blog/website?

Answer: You may be a student of some faculty or professional or doing a job in a particular field. So it would be better if you choose that niche/topic for your blog which is already related to you. This will help you in blogging and blogging will help you to boost up the knowledge in the field you are already in.

Just assume that you are related to the commerce field and is a student.

Question: What niche/topic should the commerce student choose that would be better for him?

Answer: It is obvious that if he chooses the niche/topic/categories like finance, management, accountancy that would be better for him because this will be his work and passion as he is already doing. And it would be easier for him to write article/content for his blog and blogging will also help in his study as he should go through research for the posts on the blog.

And if you are interested in other niches/topic/category and your passion is in something else than you should go for another niche as per your desire. But by choosing another niche you need to do extra effort to write articles/posts on your blog.

In addition to the particular niche, you may also get your blog to include articles/posts from other niches too. It's up to you what you want to include in your blog as content.

3. Register for a domain. Steps to create/start/register a blog/websites/domain:-

Register for a domain

If you have chosen the niche that fits you the most and sure to start a blog on that niche or mixed niche then it's time to get a domain/website/blog.

Steps to create/start/register a blog/websites/domain

a. Choose perfect website/blog/domain name/URL: Take your time and decide the best domain name for your blog so that you may not be in the condition to change the domain name later. Choose such a domain name which signifies your niche/category so that visitors can easily remember the name/URL of your blog so that they can revisit your blog again and again. Your domain name/URL of the blog should be such that people can guess what topics your blog may cover.

Considering different factors I would like to recommend you to buy a domain from NAMESILO . Read "How to choose domain registrar" for further proofs.

Though getting a domain name is easy but you will have to face a lot of problems if you change domain name/URL of an already established blog because your blog may have already back linked to other domains and might have been indexed on several search engines and you might also have shared links of your blog on several social media's which will be useless if you change the domain name of your blog time and again and you should start doing the same things as you have done to the previous blog to rank your blog on search engines and presence on social media.

b. Sign up for a website/blog/domain: You have two options

First: Paid domain: for this either you can buy a top-level domain (.com, .org, . net, etc.) from a different domain registrar like godaddy.com, namecheap.com, etc. You will have to pay around USD 9 per year per domain and you may get at cheap rates for the first year or first few years and currently, at Godaddy, you can buy a domain just at USD 0.99 for a year of subscription. I would recommend you to get a .com domain which is generally considered as the top-level domain. Before buying domain make sure to search genuine public reviews about your domain registrar.

Second: Free domain: If you don't want to invest/pay for a domain then you may get a subdomain for free on blogger.com, wordpress.com, etc. and if you use these free domain service providers then your website name will have ".blogspot.com" or ".WordPress.com" respectively after your blog URL/name. Suppose your blog URL is "myblog" then it will be myblog.blogspot.com and myblog.wordpress.com respectively.

For Nepali citizens or for registered business in Nepal: If you are a Nepal's citizenship (nagarita) holder or have business with its registration certificate then you can get .com.np and others lots of domain extension for free for lifetime. You can get this free domain in Nepal at register.com.np which is provided by Mercantile Communications Pvt. Ltd.

I would recommend you to buy a domain for a year and you may find several offers from a domain registrar and 0.99 USD is not a big amount. There are good chances of ranking/index top-level domain on the search engines and is preferred by many ad networks and the companies providing affiliate marketing so that you can get benefit in upcoming days when you monetize your blog.

c. Choosing the hosting plan for your blog: The important point, don't use free hosting services that are not trustable. If you use bad free hosting service provider then your website may be down/slow or you may even face data loss/deletion. As free hosting service provider generally gives you limited bandwidth which will be a big problem if your blog gets many visitors at the same time. Your hosted data may be deleted without giving you any notice and they may not reply to your queries and if they do reply then they will just give a reason "you have violated our terms of service".

First: Free hosting: You can use free hosting if it is reliable and have genuine good public reviews on that hosting service provider. You may also use google drive or Blogger.com as hosting for free. Just sign up on the blogger.com and create a blog and start posting. And finally, redirect your blog URL to your domain as you have already purchased. Whichever hosting service you choose always keep the updated backup of your blog so that you can retrieve your blog easily.

Second: Paid hosting: You may also buy the different hosting plan from Bluehost, GoDaddy, HostGator and enjoy blogging avoiding restriction which is generally attached with free hosting services.

4. Write effective post/article for the blog:-

Write effective post/article

After getting a perfect domain name for your blog, you should start creating/ writing article/post on your blog. Before writing an article on your the blog you should make sure that there is the demand for the article on the internet that you are writing otherwise your article will not have enough visitors.

The first research on the internet that people are searching for and loving to read on the internet. You should also check on the internet that niche/topic of the blog post you have chosen is saturated or not. I mean if there are already too many articles the same as you are planning to write then it would be quite difficult to rank your blog posts on the search engines.

You can check this using different free Search engine optimization (SEO) analytical tools (Google Keyword Planner, kwfinder.com, keywordtool.io etc.) and check the keyword difficulty and if keyword difficulty is low (<30) then it's ok and if it's high then you have already lots of competitors and you should write content better than those competitors so that you may rank your posts in a good position in the search engines.

Search the keywords on the search engines like Google, Bing and see the results and visit top (minimum 5) 5 articles and go through it deeply and find what are the points that are missing in those article/posts and then begin writing your own and make sure that your article content is better than those 5 articles/posts you have found in search results. It is not sure that if you think that your article is better than others then this will be the same in the case of others. So, while analyzing worthless of your content make sure that you have judged in an unbiased way and from the visitor's perspective. You may also choose different topic article which is new and is not currently on the internet or is in  a low quantity so that you will be able to get many visitors to your blog post as that post may be ranked in the good position in the search engines.

As we know images speak more words so choose attractive images for your posts and images should be relevant to the post and should be helpful for the visitors/readers. You can create own images/pics/diagram or download images from free images providers like Pixabay.com or others and edit them if required.

You can use Microsoft OneNote to write the blog post as it is easy to categorize your blog posts under different heads and you can also create subpages and have lots of additional features like tagging. After you have completed writing posts you should now get ready to publish the post after doing Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for the post (for SEO read point 5 below). Nobody loves articles with grammar and punctuation mistakes? You can use Grammarly to correct grammar and punctuation of your blog post using Grammarly extensions/ add-ons/software. If you want to write an article on the go using your mobile then you may use apps like Google Keep, Evernote, OneNote, etc. which will sync your posts from the mobile device to the web and you can easily retrieve it from your computer.

5. Get more visitors/traffic to the blog. Search engine optimization (SEO) for the blog:-

Increase traffic by Search engine optimization (SEO)

It's not enough just to write a good article, your article should be SEO optimized so that it can be found by the search engine and get listed on the top position in the search results which will bring more traffic/visitors to your blog.

After or before writing an article/post for your blog you need to consider SEO factors. You have to give a final finish to your blog post before publishing. As mentioned in step 4 above, after choosing a keyword and targeting that keyword by your post, you should make sure that you have done SEO for your post. Search engine optimization is a quite long topic so I would not like to dig into it. You can learn about SEO by searching on the internet. You may use some of the SEO tools like (Google Keyword Planner, kwfinder.com, keywordtool.io, etc.). Some of these tools are free and some of them are free with limited features.

You should also take care of the images of your post that images are search engine optimized (SEO) so that your images will appear in image search results and add traffic to your blog. Name images to file with the keywords that you have targeted in the post and don’t forget to add "title text" and "alt text" to your images.

Build an index page on your blog and submit the index page of your domain/blog/website to search engines and get your blog indexed on search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo, Yandex, etc. Fix the errors if found while getting your blog indexed by search engines. Look for keywords that are bringing visitors to your blog and then you may update your blog posts to include more keywords on your blog post so that your blog post will cover more keywords and finally, increase traffic/visitors to your blog.

Use Google Analytics to know the blog visitors locations, time spent on the site, bounce rates, new and returning visitors statistics, gender, age etc. of visitors so that you can work on your blog and increase the traffic to your blog.

6. Promote blog on social media:-

Promote blog on social media

After creating and posting articles on your blog you need to share article/post link on social media like Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus, LinkedIn, Reddit, Tumblr, Pinterest, Stumbleupon, etc. Create a Facebook page and a Facebook group for your blog and add your friends to the Facebook group and start sharing links. While posting your post link on social media just include a few important paragraphs from your post on which people may have the interest or may make them click on the link you shared. Keep the best/main image of your blog post as the first image of your post because many social media will just show your first image from your post in the link previews. And again choose the best hashtags (#) while sharing links. It's easy on Tumblr and Twitter as it shows auto suggestions (popular # being currently used on that social networking site) for tags as you just type # followed by initial characters of your hashtag.

Sharing blog posts links will benefit you even you don't have many friends, followers, subscribers as the links may appear on search results on the several search engines so, go for it.

Reply to the comments on your blog or social media. Build relationships with your visitors, try your best to solve their problems so that they will be back again. If u don't reply then they won't comment again and they might also avoid visiting your blog.

7. Earn/monetize the blog, blog earning/revenue:-

Monetize blog

So lastly, if your blog is doing well and has good traffic then you may monetize your blog using different ad networks like Google AdSense, Infolinks, Chitika, etc. You may also signup for affiliate marketing on different websites like Amazon, Bluehost, etc. Remember your blog should meet certain requirements before you become eligible to monetize your blog.

I hope you got the answer to "how to start a successful blog?"

I wish you happy blogging and earning… All the best.