Starting a blog is super exciting. This blog where I share my solo travel adventures, tips, and itineraries is one of my favorite projects. If you’re considering starting a blog this is your sign to do it. While it may seem complicated to start one, it’s actually pretty simple. In this post I will share all the information you need to start your amateur blogging journey and tell you what amateur blogging mistakes you need to avoid. It’s This post contains affiliate links. When you make a purchase I may get a small commission at no extra cost to you. Find out more here.
Choose a niche
The first thing you need to do it to pick a topic for your blog. Also known as your blogging niche. In the early days of blogging you could maybe write about any topic and it would rank on Google. But nowadays, with so much content being written and so much competition, if you want people to actually see what you write, you need to narrow your focus on just one specific topic.
If you already know what you want to write about, amazing! Feel free to skip to the next step.
If you’re not so sure, then spend some time thinking about it. What are you passionate about? Which topic do you know a lot about? What can you help people with? These are some questions that can help you pick the niche for your first blog.
Niche example
One thing to keep in mind is that the more niche the topic the higher the chance that Google will think you are an expert in that field. And the higher the chance it will show your articles to people. This is also known as ranking your articles. Basically showing your articles as high as possible on the first page of search results.
Let’s go through an example so you can understand what I mean by a good niche. Let’s take travel as an example since that’s my area of expertise. Now travel is too broad of a niche because it can mean so many things. For example, it can mean backpacking, luxury travel, solo travel, travel with children and so on and so forth.
The next step after you identify a broad niche like travel is to ask yourself what kind of travel? So now let’s say you want to write about solo travel. Ok, now we’re getting closer, but we need to narrow it down one more time.
So ask yourself the same question again. What kind of solo travel? In my case it’s solo female travel. Bingo! Now you have a niche.
So the process to identify your niche is to pick a broad topic and then ask yourself twice “what kind of”. I think this is a great way to narrow down your focus.
One of the most common amateur blogger mistakes is that the topic of the blog is too broad. But now you know how to niche down, so you won’t make this mistake.
Pick a blog name
Ok, now that you know what your niche is it’s time to pick a name for your blog. Let your creativity run wild with this one. But make sure you take into account these three things.
The first one is to pick a domain name that’s not used by any other blogger. So if your name is Anna and you think of the name “annatravels.com” do a quick Google search to make sure this name is not already taken.
If your favorite name is already taken by a dot com domain, avoid using the same name with a dot net or dot org (or any other ending) domain. It will be super confusing since the names are basically the same and just the ending is different.
The second thing is to check if that same name is available as a social media handle. Ideally you want to have a presence on social media platforms and you want to have the same handle as the name of your blog. Do a quick check on Facebook, Instagram, Tiktok, Youtube and see if the name you’re thinking about is also available there.
The third thing is to include at least a word related to your niche in the name of your blog. This way it’s easier for people to know what your content is about.
For example, if I search for “solo female travel to Madrid” and in my search results I see the domain names “thesolotravelinstyleblog” and the domain “Anna Banana” I am more likely to click on the article on the “thesolotravelinstyleblog” because I can tell that the author writes about solo travel. You want to indicate that you’re an expert in what you write about, so picking a name accordingly will help with this.
Select the right platform for your blog
So far you know the niche of your blog and you picked a great name for your blog. Now it’s time to select the right platform for your blog. This is the tool where you write your blog posts in and how you publish your posts.
There are multiple free platforms out there, WordPress, Wix, and Squarespace being some of the most famous ones. One of the biggest mistakes you can make if you aspire to one day become a professional blogger is to pick the wrong platform and then have to deal with platform migrations later on. You want to avoid that!
Why self-hosted WordPress is the best choice
So in that case there is only one correct answer to the question “which platform should I use?”. And that’s having a self-hosted WordPress blog. Every single successful blogger uses WordPress as a platform.
WordPress is a centralized platform where you can both write blogs and sell your own digital products. It’s a one stop shop that can grow with your blog. Once you’re ready to monetize your blog with an e-commerce store, with some printables or with a digital course, you can do so easily in WordPress.
Moreover, it’s a platform you pretty much own (except for paying for a domain name and hosting) and you don’t have to depend on a third party for everything. All the other platforms might be easier to use, but you have to rely on them for everything. You want as much autonomy as possible as you grow your blog.
You have more freedom for designing the look of your website. There are so many theme options available. And you can customize pretty much every single thing if you use WordPress. Not so much if you use other platforms.
WordPress.org vs WordPress.com
There are two wordpress platforms, but you want to use wordpress.org! One of the most common blogging mistakes is to pick the wrong wordpress platform when starting your blog.
WordPress.org is a self-hosted platform which means you have to use a hosting provider. However, the platform itself is free and you have full control over all aspects of your blog. You can customize every single thing, you can use custom plugins, you can easily switch hosting providers. Whatever you want to do with your site you can do and it’s usually free.
WordPress.com is a hosted platform, which means that you don’t need to buy separate hosting. But you don’t have a lot of control, similar to the other non-wordpress platforms out there. You have very limited choices when it comes to themes, you can’t use custom plugins, and advanced customization requires paid plans.
Choose a hosting provider
Now that you understand why you should opt for a self-hosted blog, let’s talk about hosting providers. These hosting providers basically rent you server space where you can store all the information on your blog (articles, pictures etc.) and they make it available online when someone clicks on your website.
There are a lot of hosting providers out there. However, if you want to make money blogging and apply for a top ad network, such as Mediavine, then Bigscoots is the best option for hosting.
Bigscoots is a Mediavine partner and they offer hosting options for smaller blogs who are part of the Mediavine Journey program (which have over 10K but below 50K sessions/month) and for larger blogs that are part of the full Mediavine program (over 50K sessions/month).
Hosting is important because it impacts the speed of your site, which in turn impacts your core web vitals. Core web vitals are metrics developed by Google that measure the real-world user experience for loading speed and other things.
Once you start having ads on your blog, the loading speed usually goes down. That’s why you want to be in an ad network that optimizes their ads for speed, and you want to have the best hosting option out there. You don’t want Google to penalize your website for taking a long time to load.
Design your blog
Once you have a blog name, a platform, and a hosting provider the fun part begins: designing your site to make is feel like you. There are so many wordpress themes to choose from! While there are a lot of free themes, not all of them are created equal.
So when you pick a theme you want to pick a blog theme that is optimized for speed. It’s not just about cute designs, it’s also about technical performance. Ideally you pick a high performing theme that you can customize such that you create the look you want for your blog.
No need to start Googling what are the best themes for bloggers. I’ll save you time and tell you that most bloggers prefer Astra or Kadence.
Another good option is Trellis by Mediavine. However, this is a paid option, so you probably don’t want it when you first launch your blog. Once you get into Mediavine, you might consider switching to Trellis to optimize even more for speed.
Do keyword research
Ok, we covered most technical aspects of building a blog. Now let’s talk about how to write blog posts. Unfortunately long gone are the days where you write whatever you want and Google shows it to people. Nowadays you need to be more strategic.
As a new blog you don’t have domain authority yet. Which means that Google is not yet sure if it can trust your site and it’s less likely to put your articles on the first page of search results because of this reason.
So what can you do in this case? You need to write on low competition topics. If there aren’t a lot of articles written by more established blogs on a topic, your article has more of a chance to be shown to people.
How to find low competition keywords
To be able to find these low competition keywords you need a keyword research tool. There are a lot of them out there, but I use Keysearch. It does a great job at showing me both the competition and the volume of a keyword. And it’s one of the most affordable options out there. The price quality ratio is very good.
You could, of course, look at what else people ask about when you do a Google search. And you should definitely leverage all the information you have in Google Search Console on search terms. But having this keyword research tool saves me a lot of time when I need to decide which topics I want to write about.
The key here is to pick keywords that have low competition (Keysearch will show you the competition levels and will advise you what score to go after) and high volume. So for example if I have 2 keywords with the same competition level I will write about the one with the highest search volume. This way I increase the chances of my article being shown to more people.
Write blog posts optimized for search engines
Once you find a good keyword, it’s time to start writing. But your writing skills are not the only important thing as new bloggers. What I would say is even more important is the search engine optimization (or SEO for short).
What is that? Well, it’s the title you use, the keywords you use, how your blog post is structured, how long your blog post is, among other things. Now, getting everything right might sound like a lot of hard work, but I have good news. There is a SEO tool specifically designed for bloggers that can help you with it. It’s called RankIQ.
What I like about RankIQ is that it’s a tool by bloggers for bloggers. It’s easy to use and it guides you about how to optimize your articles to have the best chance of ranking on Google’s first page. It scores your title, it tells you what keywords you should use in your articles, and it also advises you how long your blog posts should be.
It is also the most affordable option out there. Other options such as Ahrefs or Semrush cost between $99 – $129 per month, while RankIQ is only $49 / month.
I have been using this tool since I started my blog and I got a few articles ranking on the first page in just a few months. I was also able to grow my blog to 10K sessions / month in just 11 months.
If my results are not convincing enough, a recent study showed that Mediavine blogs using RankIQ increased their Google traffic 468% more than the Mediavine blogs not using RankIQ. That’s a big difference!
Diversify your traffic sources
Your main goal as a beginner blogger is to get traffic. Aka to get people to read your articles. Google is probably the first thing that comes to mind when you think about traffic for a blog, but there are other options as well. The best strategy is to always diversify your traffic sources in case something happens with one of your traffic sources down the road.
The top three traffic sources for a blog are usually Google, Pinterest, and social media.
Google is the search engine that most people on the planet use. So it’s a very important traffic source and I think you should always optimize everything you write for Google.
All the tools I talked about before (Keysearch for keyword research, and RankIQ for SEO) will help you with this. Making sure every blog post you write is fully optimized for search engine optimization will increase your chances of being shown on the first page of search results.
Building your blog’s domain authority
The other thing that can help you rank higher in search results is building your domain authority. If you remember, at the beginning of the article, I mentioned that when you launch a new blog Google doesn’t really know if they should trust your site.
So the other thing you should do in parallel is to build your domain authority, or DA. This optimization process is called off-page SEO, while everything you do to optimize a blog post is called on-page SEO.
You can build your blog’s DA by getting backlinks. What is a backlink? It’s when another site mentions your blog in one of their articles and adds a link to your blog.
The top 2 ways to get backlinks are to write guest posts for another blog with a higher domain authority or to help a journalist when they write an article about a topic you’re an expert on and ask them to include a link to your blog when they published that article.
You can do a Google search to find more established bloggers in your niche and contact them to ask if you can write a guest post. Most bloggers say yes since they remember the help they got when they first started and want to pay it forward.
What you do not want to do is buy backlinks. They are usually low-quality backlinks from spammy sites and Google can detect that. You will end up hurting your website instead of helping it.
Pinterest is another great traffic source for bloggers because it pretty much is a search engine. All you have to do is create some pretty pictures (called pins) and publish them on your Pinterest account. Make sure to add a link to the blog post when you pin the pictures such that people can click on it to read the article.
There are some bloggers for whom Pinterest is their number one traffic source. The key here is to produce multiple visuals for the same blog article and to constantly pin new images.
One thing to avoid is to avoid posting multiple pictures with the same link to your article in the same day. That’s because Pinterest thinks you are spamming since you’re sending people to the same link. Most people advise not use a link more than once a week.
What you can do instead is to pin pictures for different articles every day. That way you increase your pin volume, but you send people to different links, so Pinterest won’t penalize you for spamming.
The other thing to keep in mind is that Pinterest is a very visual platform. Which means that creating pretty pictures and using pretty fonts when you write on the pictures is very important. It needs to catch the attention of the people searching on Pinterest so they click on the link to your blog.
The good news is that you can easily do this in Canva, a free design platform. And you can find inspiration for your pins by doing a Pinterest search and seeing what Pinterest shows you. What you see are usually pins that do well, so try to use a similar style using your personal pictures.
Social media
If you have an established social media platform, then you should use it to promote your blog posts. If you don’t, then don’t worry too much about it. Just focus on Google and Pinterest instead.
Most people on social media are there to scroll on videos, not to find blog articles, so the click through rate will be pretty small anyway. I say that from my personal experience. I have a large following on Instagram, but I don’t get that many clicks when I share a story about my new blog post.
Out of all traffic sources, social media is usually the lower one. I wouldn’t spend a lot of energy on social media channels if I were you.
Monetize your blog
Even though your goal is not to go into professional blogging and have this be your full-time income, you should still know the options you have about monetizing your blog. It can turn into a nice little side gig and it can be one of your additional income streams.
Ads
The first option you have once you hit a certain threshold of views per month is to apply to an ad network so that you can show ads on your blog. That way every time a person reads your blog posts and the ads are playing in the background you will make some money.
Technically you can show ads on your blog anytime if you apply to Google Adsense, but this is the lowest paying option out there. You will make a few cents or dollars only.
On the other hand, once you have 10K sessions / month you can apply to Journey by Mediavine and your earnings from ads can turn into a few hundred dollars per month. My advice would be to wait until you get to 10K sessions and then apply to a top ad network like Mediavine.
I think if you optimize your blog from the beginning using the tips I gave you in this blog post you can get to 10K sessions per month in a year.
Once your blog grows more and you hit 50K sessions / month, you can apply to the full Mediavine program and your earning will be in the order of thousands of dollars per month. Getting to 50K sessions per month will probably take an additional 1-2 years depending on your niche, number of blog posts you write, and competition.
As I said before, even though this might not be your full-time job, why would you say no to a few thousand dollars each month?
Affiliate links
The other very lucrative income stream for a blogger are affiliate links. There are affiliate programs for pretty much every niche such that you can include these links in your articles no matter what topic you write about. Once a person buys something using one of your links you make a commission at no extra cost for them.
If you’re in the travel niche there are 2 main affiliate programs that aggregate providers in the travel space. That way you only have to sign up for these two platforms and you can add affiliate links for a lot of travel brands.
The two platforms are Stay22 and Travelpayouts. My favorite one is Stay22 because the conversion rate is so much higher (at least for me). Stay22 offers affiliate links for hotels, flights, car rentals, and activities.
Even though I like Stay22 better I still use Travelpayouts because they have some brands that are not Stay22 partners, such as bus and train ticket providers.
Digital products
Depending on what niche you picked for your blog, you could also monetize by creating digital products. For example, if you’re a photographer, you could offer presets or you could sell your pictures.
The other option here is to sell digital courses. To continue with the photographer example, you could create a course where you teach people to become photographers so they can start their own photography business. Or you can niche it down and teach them about wildlife photography or something else.
Even though the market is becoming saturated with online courses, if you’re good at what you do and you enjoy teaching you can create a course.
Email list
The other important thing to set up when creating a blog is an email list. That’s because it’s the only traffic source you own. Google might change its algorithm and Pinterest might change too. And then one day you risk your traffic tanking because you can’t control these algorithms.
When you have an email list you can periodically send them newsletters to tell them when you publish new blog posts, to tell them something you didn’t include in your blog post, or to just share some more personal things and bond with them more.
You can also include affiliate links in your newsletters, so it’s another option to monetize.