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As a blogger myself, I’d definitely write some tips for other aspiring bloggers. In fact, I’ve already written several articles about it before. You can check them out here on these links:
- Blogging 101: Our Top Tips for New Bloggers
- How to Start a Blog and Earn Money Blogging
- Starting your own Blog? 20 Best Blogging Tools and Plugins for WordPress
As time passses, however, we learn new things that we can share with others. Here’s a few more tips (and WordPress plugins) that might help you on your blog!
More Tips and Plugins When Setting Up a Blog
1. Use a Mobile Friendly Theme
According to YourWealthyMind’s data, over 43% of our readers use a smartphone or tablet to read our website. There are literally MILLIONS of smartphone users out there and if you want to blog, chances are they will also use their phones and tablets to read your content on their spare time.
Of course, one major difference between reading a blog on a computer vs on a phone is that phones and tablets have much smaller screens. Content that looks good on a computer might not look that nice on smaller screens, and if your content looks ugly or unreadable, that might drive your readers away. If you have similar stats as ours, that can drive away almost HALF of your readers, and that’s a lot of revenue potentially lost.
That’s why it’s important to look for a good WordPress theme that’s also mobile-friendly. Thankfully, a lot of today’s more recent themes have that feature, so all you need to do is look for one that you like. In my opinion, you might want to try paid themes (like the Genesis theme I’m using) as they are updated often and they’ll look different from all the other blogs that use free themes.
2. Use an AMP Plugin
After choosing a mobile-friendly theme, you can take it one step further and setup AMP (accelerated mobile pages) on your website. What is AMP? It’s a way to create simplified and fast-loading versions of your content. It was developed by Google and Twitter, and because of that, they allegedly prioritize websites and blogs with AMP content over those without.
There are two plugins I can recommend if you want to setup AMP on your WordPress website, and the first is AMP by AMP Project Contributors. It’s the most basic one out there and it’s easy to use, so just install the plugin (and other related software), set it up and voila, your content will now have an AMP version.
The other plugin I recommend is Accelerated Mobile Pages by Ahmed Kaludi and Mohammed Kaludi. Most ad insertion plugins will charge you money if you want to put ads on your AMP pages, but if you want a way to insert Google AdSense’s Auto-ads on your AMP pages for FREE, you can use this plugin.
(Small warning: You CANNOT use both at the same time. When I forgot to deactivate my old AMP plugin and I tried activating the second one, that led to a conflict that destroyed my website. I couldn’t even access my admin dashboard. Thankfully FTP was still available so I deleted the plugin from there to fix my website.)
3. Jetpack by WordPress.com
WordPress is probably the most popular software for creating a blog or website, and it makes up more than half of the entire content management system marketplace. It’s so simple to use. All you need to do is install it in your website’s host, login, and setup your themes and plugins and you can start blogging! That’s WAY easier than coding an entire website by yourself.
When setting up a blog, one of the most downloaded plugins for WordPress is Jetpack, and it’s made by the people behind WordPress. This plugin will give you a lot of nice features that you can use on your website, like an automated sitemap, anti-spam software (Akismet), automated social media sharing, list related posts, and more. The basic one is pretty good, but it also has a premium version with a lot of other useful features.
4. Find a way to Monetize Your Blog
Unless you’re blogging simply as a hobby, chances are your website’s hosting and other services need money and you need to find a way to pay for all that while putting food on the table. When setting up a blog, monetisation is important.
One of the most popular ways to earn money is through Google AdSense and we’ve written several articles about it here:
- Google AdSense Basics: A Short Guide on How to Use AdSense
- How to Claim Your Google AdSense Payment Through Western Union
- How to Earn Money on YouTube: AdSense and the YouTube Partner Program (YPP)
Aside from that, I listed some other ways to earn money from your blog on this link.
Unfortunately, it can take a long time before your AdSense account gets approved and, sometimes, you don’t get approved at all. What do you do then? Here’s a little story.
Some time ago, AdSense ads stopped appearing on my website and my revenue went down to ZERO. It turns out, Google was investigating invalid traffic on thousands of bloggers, and my website has been affected (although it’s been resolved now). Thanks to that incident, I found time to read about and try other ad networks.
While I’d recommend Media.net as it’s the second largest ad network, it only approves sites with most of its traffic coming from US and Europe. It did not approve my website because most of my visitors come from the Philippines.
I DID discover another nice ad network, and that is PropellerAds. I’d definitely recommend it if you’re just starting out as they don’t have harsh requirements like AdSense or Media.net. You can create an account and start adding ads immediately.
You can earn a bit from their popunder ads, but if you plan to use AdSense in the future, you need to stop using those. You CAN, however, keep using their “Native Subscriptions (CPM)” system as I believe that is allowed with AdSense. I still haven’t earned much from it though as it looks like a system that needs to be up for a long time to be profitable.
5. Always Save Backups
I learned this the hard way. I used to save a backup after every article posted, and I didn’t save before or after updating plugins. Unfortunately, there had been several occasions where updating a plugin broke parts of my website and articles won’t save or update. A new plugin update a day later usually fixes those though.
One time, however, I decided to use that new AMP plugin I mentioned, but I forgot to disable my old one. This seriously BROKE my entire website due to a conflict and I couldn’t even login to my admin dashboard to undo it. If I restored a previous backup, it would mean losing two to three guest articles. Fortunately, I remembered I can delete plugins using an FTP connection to my host and I used that to fix my website.
Ever since then, I save a backup before and after every major plugin update.
REMEMBER: SAVE BACKUPS OFTEN. Your hosting service might have a way to save backups of your WordPress installation. Cultivate this habit if you want to start setting up a blog. You likely won’t want to experience losing several articles worth of work because of a small glitch.
In any case, that’s it for this article’s set of tips for bloggers. Are there other things you want to learn about? Ask us in the comments below!