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One of the most exciting and accessible ways to share your passion or expertise with the online world is to start your own blog. Individuals, businesses, and entrepreneurs alike create all sorts of different types of blogs—and so can you. Read on to learn the first key steps to blogging: from how to choose a blog topic and platform, to blogging best practices like post length and publishing schedule.
Choosing a topic
First and foremost, you'll need to decide on an overarching topic or theme for your blog. If you are starting a blog based on your business, then the topic selects itself: Your blog could be about the work you do day in and day out, or the mission of your business. You are obviously an expert in your chosen field, whether you are the owner of an interior design business, yoga studio, or taco truck.
You might have a desire, however, to start a blog based on a hobby or interest that you’re passionate about. To increase your odds of gaining traction and creating an audience, your blog topic—or your unique perspective on it—needs to be specific enough that it can’t already be found on dozens of other blogs. For example, if you write about your love for traveling, then you face long odds of standing out amongst the crowded travel-blog space. But if your travel blog is focused on traveling by train across Canada or through Europe for less than $100 a day, those narrower topics might allow you to create a community. The same holds true for starting a food blog. There is no shortage of food blogs from home chefs, but starting a food blog devoted to the humble taco or French cooking or backyard grilling gives you a clearer path to establishing yourself as an expert and finding a following within a specific niche.
Don’t forget, your blog should be a topic in which you have some experience, if not expertise. Your devotion to and experience with exploring your topic must be clear from the start. If you are starting a blog based on a new interest rather than an established area of expertise, then you’ll need to show a clear desire to learn about the topic, and recount your journey from nascent interest to established expert.
Choosing a platform and host
Once you’re ready to get started blogging about your chosen topic, it’s time to decide on a blogging platform and host. A blogging platform is the online tool you’ll use to create and organize your posts, and the host is the place where your blog will live on the Internet.
There are many free and low-cost blogging platforms that will act as both platform and host. For a more professional look, however, you will need to purchase a domain name. For example, with your own domain name, your blog’s URL will look like example.com. Many blogging services, including Squarespace, will let you pick your own domain name as part of their base plans. Squarespace’s plans are affordable and include one year of domain registration costs, unlimited photo storage, SEO tools, analytics, and more.
Blogging platforms like Squarespace include a variety of easy-to-use templates that let you customize the look and feel of your blog. You’ll also find organizational and promotional tools that let you add tags and location data to your posts, so readers can quickly discover related articles. These tools will also allow you to link to your social media accounts so you can alert your followers when you post new content.
Blog excerpts are a particularly helpful Squarespace feature. Instead of each blog post displaying in its entirety, the excerpt tool lets you show the post’s title along with an image and the first few lines of your text, with a “read more” link directing readers to open the entire post. Instead of overwhelming website visitors with big blocks of text, using excerpts will ensure your blog’s front page appears lively and scannable, with titles and images that encourage further exploration of your site.
Excerpts are also useful for sharing on social media and getting discovered in search results. The image, title, block of text, and your byline will show up when someone shares the post on social media. This metadata can also show up on search results pages, which will help you stand out from the text-only results.
Finding the best length for each blog post
After choosing a topic and platform for your blog, you can start planning the content itself. Be mindful of length—each blog post should be easy to digest and should speak directly to your audience. Even with a liberal use of the excerpt tool, you’ll want to keep your blog posts to a manageable length.
How long or how many words should a blog post be? Writing for the web is often best accomplished by using short sentences inside short paragraphs inside a short narrative. Readers can get bored quickly, so get to your point quickly and avoid repeating yourself.
If you find your posts are thousands of words each, break them up into narrower topics and shorter posts. Adhering to a shorter length will keep your reader’s attention long enough for them to read to the end—and want to keep reading more of your posts.
Setting a consistent publishing schedule
It’s best to settle into a consistent publishing schedule. That way, your readers can anticipate new content, which will keep your readers coming back to your blog—and your brand.
Think of it this way: There’s a reason Taco Tuesday is so popular. It’s a promotion that a restaurant can use to entice customers to return each week. A positive experience might lead to customers thinking about tacos on other days of the week, in anticipation of the next Tuesday.
Setting a consistent blog schedule works the same way. When you are starting out, set a realistic schedule that you think you’ll be able to keep. It’s better to publish a new blog post once a week for the first few months, rather than publishing a flurry of posts in the first few days but end up with a weeks’ long gap without any new content.
Regular updates help readers get in the habit of visiting your site and also benefit your placement in search results, which favor sites with dynamic content rather than static pages. After a burst of creativity when you pen multiple blog posts, consider publishing them over a pre-planned period of time. You can even schedule blog posts on Squarespace to maintain a consistent schedule.