How to start blogging in India-A practical guide to blogging for beginners

A Step by Step Guide on How to start a blog in India

Do you want know how to start blogging in India ? Do you wish to utilize the benefits of blogging for your own good or your business? Are you confused if you should start a blog ? Don’t worry all your questions will be answered if you read this blog post

How to start a blog ? , this question became popular as soon as internet arrived and made available to everyone. Blog has become very important aspect of life for many people all over the world. It has become main source of income for many. Even many brands claim that their main source of income is derived from their blog. So having a blog has almost become mandatory rather than a choice !!!

In this article , you will see how to start a blog in India, the benefits of blogging for business and benefits of blogging for students,. You will see the various steps involved and processes you need to follow while starting a blog. All this free of cost, you just have to allocate some amount for domain registration and hosting 

What is blogging ?

Blog is actually a web-log. Writing log/journals which are self published online. So the tern Blog came from web-logs. Blog can be anything like writing or photography images or videos etc

Blogging started as an individual content posting in a casual manner, and today it has become a main channel of revenue and content marketing for many businesses 

What are the benefits of blogging ?

You must understand that there are a lot of benefits of blogging in many ways be it businesses,brands,students or freelancers.

The major benefits include

1. Free organic traffic and inturn may give your leads for free.

2. Brand name,authority or personal Brand in the specific Niche

3. Possibility of passive income stream if you consider affiliate marketing 

Benefits of blogging for students

The benefits of blogging are numerous and blogging can help students too. If a student is interested in Digital marketing and is looking for a job, then there is no better option than blogging.

Students can practice and experiment their theoretical knowledge on their very own blog and this can even act as their portfolio of blog posts.

Similarly if anyone is interested in travel industry they can start blogging about their interest and display their interest in form of blogging. This will definitely leave a positive impact on employers if you are searching for a job

Benefits of blogging for business

As mentioned above about the benefits of blogging for students, in the similar way there are several benefits of blogging for businesses too.

You know that many businesses have website with number of webpages. But the webpages are static and content is written once or randomly and rarely updated regularly

But through blogging businesses can provide a continuous flow of quality content to its customers or audiences. This will result in domain authority and customer retention for the business. and all this with efforts but free and organic traffic

Through blog posts an quality content brands often have a chance to nurture their leads and result in that desired sale

How to start blogging in India and promote it in 2022-A practical guide to blogging for beginners

How to start blogging in India

1st step in blogging – Drill down on your niche – Niche Selection

You might think that why should you even think about Niche selection in the first place ? Why cant you just write about any topic you like ? Why cant you write to everyone ?

I will answer to this in a one liner “Riches are in the niches”. You saw this over the internet, but trust me this is so true. 

For example if you are suffering from skin problems do you visit a physician or dermatologist for appropriate treatment ? If you have eye problems, do you visit general physician or opthamologist ? Similarly for heart problems cardiac specialist not general physician right ??. I hope you got the point

People look for the experts in that particular field. In the same way, with Niche selection (on continous practice and consistency), you can display your expertise and the readers shall look upto you for quality and authority content.

This expertise or authority cannot be achieved if you are writing for every topic. Similary , your readers will get consfused and sometimes bored or unrelated,if you are writing about several topics in one blog

So Niche selection is very important while you are thinking about “how to start blogging in india” ?

In my view, for your Niche to be successful, Niche selection can be done based on the following main things 

Your passion on the selected Niche

Yes, you heard it right, your passion for the Niche decides your blog success. Blogging is long term process and there will be many ups and downs in the journey.

You will stay focussed and on the journey without diverting , only if you are passionate about the Niche you selected, else you may quit in the halfway or just before the finish line.

There may be many blogs or articles mentioning about the best niches for blogging. But the niche selection is a complete personal choice and depends on only you.

I dont say that the articles about best niches for blogging are wrong, they are absolutely right because those niches have good volume of searches and many have succeeded in those.

Just because someone succeeded in travelling blogging or food blogging doesnt mean that you will succeed too. You can suceed too if yo are passionate about it. For example if you are passionate about Microsoft excel, but if you choose to be food blogger (for reason being best niche), then you may fail as food blogger because your passion lies in excel.

Instead,you may choose Excel as your Niche and start blogging about it and you may exceed and excel in that niche. So you must sit and think about te Niche where your passion lies.

Good Volume of searches

Being passionate about the Niche is definetely the main criteria. But there should be People searching for the content you are write. If No one searching for conent/topic you write, then it’s of no commercial/business value to your content.

Think about it, you wrote a detailed blog on a topic like 5000 words or so. The article is well-written, but if there is no one to read, what is the use of that ?.

If you desire to derive some commercial value out of your content, you must write for the people, what they are searching for. So you should check if there are sufficient searches about your Niche

Knowledge or Hands on Experience in the Niche

Knowledge or hands on experience is very much required for you to blog on your Niche. This may seem contradictory, as I said the guide is for begineers and I emphasise that knowledge and experience is required !!!

This guide is definetely for beginners but your passion in the selected Niche made you read this blog, made you took that first step in thinking to start a blog. You may had several thoughts like “how to start a blog in india”,”how to promote blog for free”,”benefits of blogging”, “how to earn by blogging in india”. You will get clarity on all of your thoughts or questions running in your mind

As mentioned above, due to your passion in your niche, you might have read a lot about your Niche, sometimes you may even tried it hands-on (whatever your Niche may be). You become mature and go to a level above than yesterday or yesteryear when you consistently do the reading and research

Simply put the more you read, the more you have words to write about your Niche. You just have to be one level above your readers. Think about your college days, there were many classmates like 50 or 100 or even more in same class.

But you observe that there are some classmates who were able to teach their fellow classmates. How do you think they did that ? ( Im not just talking about class-toppers or super-intelligent, it’s a complee another thing).

Im not a class topper, but there were some days (actually rare !!!!) even I taught my classmates some topics where they were stuck. Its just that I learned/read the topic and did that a bit more than my classmates to whom I taught.

So, just read more ,try hands on experience, documet your journal (here its blog writing) and repeat 

Customer Avatar – Buyer Persona – Target audience

Customer persona or Buyer persona are so interlinked, that is the reason I wrote about it just after the Niche selection. I say that next step of Niche is the customer persona.

In Niche selection you find out what your area of interest is or field of interest is. In creating your customer avatar/Buyer persona You identy who your ideal customer/audience is 

As per definition Customer avatar is your ideal customer who is interested in your product or service. In this case it is your blog content

You cannot simply say that everyone is your audience, that will be an indirect way to say that no one is your audience.

Target audience may be created by considering the following major factors:

Who – who is your target audience ? These include the demographics information like age,occupation,income,maritial status,Job title,location,education etc

What – What does he want to achieve, what are his goals . Goals may be like He wants to achieve Rs 1 lakh per month through digital marketing or He wants to scale his digital marketing business from 1 lakh per month to 10 lakhs per month etc

Why – Why he is unable to achieve his goals ? wht are the pain points or the challenges faced by him ? and what are the obstacles faced by him ?

By knowing his pain points and challenges faced by him in achieving his goals, you may try to resolve his pain points by fitting your product or service in the gap and help him achieve his goals

Where – Where does he gather the information from ? Where does he hangout often ? 

By knowing the sources of information he accesses, like which blogs or pages or websites he visits you can try to place your quality content in front of him. Even by knowing the social media platforms he uses, you can be infrnt of your ideal target audicne by being active on that particular social media platform

How – Now the final part , after knowing about your ideal target audience, how will your product or service solve his problems and help him achieve his goals ?

Now that you created your target audience and understood him well, we go ahead and create some quality and authoritative content so that target audience may gain from your content.

You do this with some keyword research and competitor analysis, and after that using SEO (search engine optimization) you will put your content before him when he is searching for the content.

Keyword research – Competitor analysis – Search engine optimization (SEO)

I know the terminology may make you afraid, but they may not be as fearful as you think !!! let me put it in simple terms

Keyword research

Keywords are nothing but the search terms the users enter in the search engines when they are searching for content or looking for answers. Keyword research is nothing but understanding the search volume of a particular keyword and knowing its search volume.

You can access this information using various tools like Ahrefs and SEMrush. As already mentioned previously you will be writing content for which people are looking for, using the keywords. Similarly, if there is no search volume for a particular keyword, it will be waste of time to write content around that keyword or topic

Competitor analysis

Once you got he information on search volume of a particular keyword, you must know how many others are targeting the same keyword ?. You may notice that , when you search on search engine you rarely go to second page of the search results, right ?

So, everyone out there put the efforts to be ranked on the first page, so competition arises. Before deciding on the tpoic and keyword , you must understand the competition and how fierce the competition is. This competition is called keyword difficulty (KD).

Keyword difficulty tells you how difficult it is for you to rank in search engine for that particular keyword. The higher the number the more difficult to rank. So for beginner we attempt for lower keyword difficulty keywords

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Keyword research and competitor analysis are actually a part SEO itself, but being the importance of these two, I mentioned about them separately.

Now, SEO – search engine optimization, simply put is optimising your content and blog in such a way that when any user searches for content related your niche or selected keywords , your content must appear in the top search results.

Ranking in the top in the search results for a particular keyword is very crucial because most of the users click only the top 3 results of a search. This is a free traffic for which there is no need to pay, but we need to work hard to get in fron of the target audience/users.

Rankmath SEO wordpress plugin will make the task a lot easier for you. Its very simple to install and very simple to use. It assigns a SEO score for the blog post. Rankmath also gives you suggestions to improve in case your SEO score is loww, so that you can rank your content better

Buy Domain Name for your blog

Now, that you are ready with all the research,keywords, competitor analysis,Topics to write you must go and get your domain name.

Domain name is like address of your shop but in online real estate. https:makemytrip.com, https://neilpatel.com these are some examples of domain name.

You need to consider few points while choosing your domain, but its simple and its better to keep it simple. You can check my blog post on how to choose domain name

This blog post shall guide you with choosing domain name. The best place to buy a domain is https://namecheap.com you can find the cheapest price here.

or wait till I tell you about the web hosting too, as many web hosting companies provide domain name and web hosting in combo plans at very competitive prices. And in some cases domain name is even given free of cost as freebie with hosting plans

Web hosting

Web hosting is required for your website to be hosted on. Physical stores or shops are in general taken on rental basis on real estate, in the similar way web hosting is the virtual rental shop space for which monthly or annual rental needs to be paid

I can write a lot about web hosting, but I already wrote a blog post on Best web hosting for beginners and it covers the affordable and best hosting companies available with best pricing plans

If you are in hurry and dont have time to check my post on web hosting, I say that hostinger web hosting is the most affordable for beginners. Hostinger also provides you with a free domain name for the first year

How to promote your blog for free

There are several ways to promote your blog. Here we see how you can do it for free

 – As soon as blog post is published, share it with all your friends family relatives etc

– Send an email to all your subscribers mentioning about the new blog post published

– Share it on your social handles so that your followers or friends can read it

– To take it to next next and automation you can use tools like missinglettr (free plan available)

How to earn by blogging in India

There are numerous ways of earning through your blog , if you write informational and rich content. some of the ways are :

• With blog post, through informational content you can establish yourself as expert in your field and gain trust from your customers and target audience. This facilitates smooth sales , if your business has products/service
• One most popular way to earn from blogging is through Affiliate marketing. Affiliate marketing is promoting other business’s products/services for a commission
• If your blog is successful and ranks good in search engines, you can start providing your expert services for a fee
• You can start writing reviews or product details and comparisons in collaboration with the companies for a fee from the companies like sponsored content or paid partnerships/collaborations

FAQs – All your questions answered here

Q – What is blogging what are its advantages and disadvantages

Blogging is a way to showcase your authority and expertise in the particular domain or field. In a way through informational content you can gain trust from your audience and establish yourself as expert in your field. This simplifies the sale process as the audience already have trust in you or your business

The only disadvantage i see here is , if you are writing copy-paste content or just spinned off content , then Google may stop ranking you

Q – What is meant by Micro blogging

Micro-blogging as the word says it’s a short form of posting micro content in short and concise manner. You already know twitter, Facebook etc., all these are examples of micro-blogging platforms.

This Micro-blogging helps the audiences who want to consume short content quick and fast.

Summary

So, In this blog you read about various steps involved in starting a blog , Hope you are much more confident now to start your blog and wish you all the best for your blogging journey.

Please let me know how you feel the blog post is , and do let me know if you want me to add anything else here , do comment