7 Questions to Ask Yourself Before You Start a Blog

Many bloggers today start blogs without a clear conscience and purpose for starting the blog. They don’t plan on how they will start and run a successful blog. This is why most bloggers abandon their blogs to start new ones.

I also failed in my first attempt to start this blog. Everything was blurry. So many tasks at hand and can’t tell where to exactly start. I look back and wish I know all that I know today before ever starting a blog.

If you plan to start a blog that you won’t abandon in the long run, there are questions worth asking yourself so that you determine what direction you will go.

To save you the workload of what I went through to figure out about the whole blogging thing, I want you to ask yourself the questions below and take into consideration your answers before you get started with your new blog.

1. Why am I starting this blog?

This should be the rule of thumb and your BIGGEST WHY?

If you don’t define your purpose from the start, you will have no clear direction. You will have to ask yourself why you want to start the blog. Is it for the money, fun, or building your writing skills?

Your ultimate answer will set a path you want to take and the effort you put on the blog. Having answered this question, you can keep your blog on track in terms of marketing and content delivery.

2. Who Are My Targeted Audience?

Just after determining why you’re starting the blog, you should consider your intended blog readers.

You need to determine what age groups or kind of people will be reading your blog articles and what niche suites them.

The quicker you determine, the better.

Knowing your intended audience will lay a roadmap right from the development of your blog to finishing. You will get to know the kind of content to deliver and how to drive traffic to your blog.

3. Where and how to get traffic?

A few weeks or months after you might have established your blog, you’re going to have to concentrate on promoting your blog to get new readers apart from your family and friends.

The simplest and cost-effective way is social media and there are also some other ways you can promote but come with associated costs like Google and Facebook ads.

The earlier you decide on how you’re going to drive traffic to your blog, the better. If you’re starting a content marketing blog, is much easier to learn with it, unlike a business blog, for every cent you spend on it will either make you happy or frustrated.

4. How Often Will I Post?

Creating and maintaining a blog can be tiresome and you need to put extra effort into it. If you want to maintain a steady reader base who will always visit your blog, you got to be updating the blog frequently whether daily, weekly, or on weekends. It’s always advisable to decide in advance how often you will be updating it.

Whatever rate of posting you decide, you stick with it, you don’t want to lose readers.

5. What kind of content will I be producing?

Determining the niche for your blog is very crucial. You need to figure out what niche content you will be producing (for example fashion, tech, business, agribusiness, etc.). Once you get these figured out then you can have a targeted blog audience who has interests in reading those particular articles.

Knowing your niche will prevent you from producing irrelevant content that may not be informative to your blog readers.

Consider blogging about what you’re passionate about and all the blog topics will come. It will even be easier to drive traffic to your blog.

6. Where do I hope to see the blog 5 years down the road?

Before you think of developing the blog, you should think about it- long term or short term. The life span of the blog is determined in this stage.

If you determine the longevity of the blog, you get the aggressiveness and effort you need to put on the blog to meet the set objectives and targets.

Summary

Starting and maintaining a blog can be very difficult when you lack a sense of direction. You can ask yourself a few of these questions to make the task easier in the long run.

Share with me in the comments if you have one or two things to add.