Are you a beginner blogger?
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Tools:
WordPress – Web Platform | SiteGround – Web Hosting | Creative Market – Website Themes, Fonts, Other Designs | Grammarly – Writing | Shareaholic – Social Media Shares
Resources:
Kayla Aimee’s Must-Have Guide for Blogging | Scrivs’ Billionaire Blog Club
WordPress – Web Platform
When you start blogging for business or for more professional reasons, you’d want to sign up with wordpress.org.
The BEST in my opinion in web hosting. The key criteria I use to evaluate any sort blog services: quality of service and level of responsiveness of the support team.
Before purchasing anything, I approached SiteGround’s customer service reps with a list of questions. And my experience was great. The rep was responsive and thorough in their answers. Another huge plus was the fact that they weren’t trying to sell me any of their plans upfront.
I also didn’t have to wait a lonnnggg time for someone to attend to me. With siteground, you just click on the chat function and someone is with you very quickly.
Til today, their standards have still been nothing short of fantastic. Still the same top-notch customer service.
Another great thing about SiteGround is how stable their server is. I’ve had sudden spikes in traffic – over thousands in a day – and my website has never crashed. Their stable server also means that webpages load quickly. This is very important as it affects users’ experience. People who visit your site do not want to wait around forever for a page to load.
Also, if you are migrating sites or changing hosts and feel like you can’t do any of that alone. Don’t worry, SiteGround’s reps will take care of all of that for you!
All in all, I love SiteGround and highly recommend them!
Click here to get your SiteGround plan at $4.95/month – 50% off the regular price.
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Creative Market – Website Themes, Fonts, Other Designs
This site is just amazing. I bought my website theme here. There are just TONS of aesthetical tools for bloggers. Fonts, web themes, images, resume templates, photos, graphics. The list goes on. It’s just a wonderful resource for any blogger, with items available at any price!
Click here to start looking at Themes for your website!
Grammarly – Writing
I write alot – in my day job and in my blogging life. It’s always extremely useful to have a tool to grammar check and proofread your articles. Typos and grammar mistakes can be embarrassing!
For Grammarly, all you have to do is create an account and then copy+paste your entire report/article/ whatever it is in the space given. Grammarly will do the proof-reading and underline the words/phrases where it thinks there is a mistake and provide suggestions.
I highly recommend this tool to anyone who does alot of writing. The proofreader is a lot more sophisticated than Microsoft Word’s spellcheck and frequently picks up on errors that I miss!
Click here to sign up for free or upgrade to premium for nifty proofreading and grammar check tools.
Shareaholic – Social Media Shares
If you want social media engagement on your blog, you need social sharing buttons. You also have make those buttons obvious and visible to the reader. Ain’t nobody got time scanning your website for tiny sharing buttons!
Enter Shareaholic. I’ve tried a few others, including the famed SumoMe, but Shareaholic’s features trumps them all. Some things that I love:
- Their dashboard has a very clean interface
- There are different types of sharing buttons – floating, above post, below post etc.
- Analytics and monetization features if you have ads and affiliates to manage
- Highly customizable buttons – colour of buttons, type of share buttons (floating, above or below post), font size etc.
- Responsive support
Resources
I’ve got 2 to recommend. Yes, only two! I learnt this late into my blogging experience – you don’t need to sign up for every single ebook or expensive course you come across.
All you need is a handy resource that neatly ties in everything you need to know about how to start a blog – all in one place.
An important factor behind recommending both Kayla’s and Paul’s products is cause I’ve been following their blogs for quite awhile now. They give great tips and have been bringing in results for themselves for a long time. Both also have a large no. of subscribers (in the thousands), so they know what they are talking about. I’ve applied them and they have given me results!
So let’s dive a little bit deeper, shall we?
Kayla Aimee’s Must have guide for blogging
What I like
This book packs a punch and is a nifty all-in-one guide. What I really like about guides like this is that you don’t have to spend money grabbing ten different guides for different areas of blogging. You get tools for every little area you need for blogging in this ebook.
Kayla covers social media tips, Pinterest strategies, affiliate marketing tips (which she is brilliant at), branding, influencer outreach, how to write and format blog posts and so on.
Her writing flows well and is a very breezy read. I personally love ebooks as I can save them in dropbox, open them anywhere, take notes and highlight important bits.
Who this is for
If you are a beginner blogger, you’d find this incredibly useful resource. It contains every single thing you need to know to kickstart your blogging journey.
For bloggers who have been blogging for awhile, I still think you will find nuggets of useful information in here. Personally, I gained a lot of insight from the branding and outreach sections. There were some useful post formatting tips that I’ve never seen before too!
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What I didn’t like
This was more a matter of us just being in different blogging niches. I blog in the personal growth and self improvement space. So some of her recommendations, unfortunately, weren’t applicable to me (which Pinterest group boards to join for instance).
This is an issue you will encounter quite often if you aren’t in the “Mommy Blogger” niche or “How to make money blogging” space. Lots of courses and ebooks are often written by bloggers from these two niches.
Still, I don’t believe in throwing the baby out with the bath water. IF you are in a different niche, just be discerning about the information you are getting. Do a little bit of your own research too. For instance, lots of affiliate marketing tips aren’t suitable for some niches. It’s good to read around and find out what’s suitable for your blog.
Paul Scrivs’ Billionaire Blog Club
What I like
- Covers a huge number of topics. Blogging SEO, Pinterest and Board Booster master classes, Affiliate marketing, Choosing a niche, Email marketing, google analytics, How to set up your blog in wordpress and content creation. There are at least a 100 videos here – I’m not kidding – and Paul keeps adding more.
- A fantastic supportive community with hundreds of bloggers. You get to connect LIVE with other users, discuss problems, find solutions and encourage one another. Not only that – you get access to Paul himself too. In REAL TIME. Do you have that anywhere else? Most bloggers don’t even reply your emails! I’ve posted questions to him directly in the community and he has always replied almost immediately.
- Blogging challenges. there are 4 28-day blog challenges that walk you through everything you want to do with your blog. I found them incredibly helpful for keeping me on track.
Who this is for
Anybody in the beginner and intermediate levels of their blogging journey. There is always something new to learn and Paul updates his videos frequently. I always check back for new lessons or re-watch videos to take notes.
What I didn’t like
This is just a slight inconvenience for me, but, personally I tend to prefer courses that aren’t solely video-based. (Lots of courses are going this route now btw). I’m a very notes, paper and pen person and prefer reading text.
I’m also always on the go and find ebooks much more accessible than having to download and save a video to my phone or something. OR having to wait til I have a laptop to access a course. But lots of people love video courses, and if you are one of them – this would be great for you!
- Click here to get started on the BBC Pinterest course. More than 30 video tutorials await you! If videos aren’t your thing, get started with the Pinterest manual here.
- Click here if you’d like to get started on Affiliate Marketing.
- If you’d like access to all courses (Pinterest, Affiliate Marketing, Content Creation, SEO and many more), click here for access to BBC Full Course + Membership.
Tip: Join his mailing list via his 12 day FREE blogging bootcamp here: httpss://obstacle.co/ Paul has lots of offers on his courses to his mailing list from time to time. I got mine at a steal for $49 some time ago when he put it on sale.
Don’t hesitate to drop me a comment or an email if you have questions on any of the above.
I hope you now feel less afraid in beginning your blogging journey! 🙂 Also, feel free to pin this post or share it with others whom you know are also struggling with getting their blogs started.
Check out all the free resources and how to work with me here!