Welcome to Inspired to Blog!
Hello! My name is Josie, I am so excited to have you visiting my newly established website (personal blog) where I plan to share all the ups and downs, ins and outs of my blogging journey, along with pockets of my shining personality~!
To be honest, I didn’t find myself asking “what should my first blog post be about” or “who is my target audience”, because this blog is going to be more of a personal diary of how and why I was Inspired to Blog! But I do intend on giving insightful tidbits, recommendations, and sharing an occasional income report (when I’m rich *****). You make of it what you will.
Inspired to Blog
Ever since I started my journey into blogging (circa 2019) when I purchased my first domain, albeit a painfully slow start, I’ve now come to the precipice of financial freedom. Just this week, I made my first affiliate income commission, got paid for a sponsored post, and started building starter websites to flip for profit.
There is so much potential in the online world of publication. You can publish, publish, publish, and the potential of being discovered just soars exponentially. A quick backstory: In 2020, in a period of natural quarantine as a mother to a newly born 3-month-old, I found myself asking “what I am passionate about?” To be honest, I could never answer these types of questions, and I ended up searching google to find some answers.
I stumbled upon an interesting resource and spent about 40 minutes answering a bunch of questions, only to discover that it would take days for me to get the results. But after a long year of introspection and reevaluation, and the email from findyourvalues.com with my results, I discovered what my highest values and priorities were. The results were profound – I could not how much clarity I received after studying my results.
It just so happens – that – my values heavily coincide with my motivation to produce content for the web. According to the results, I have the highest inclination to be self-directed with freedom of action and freedom of ideas. In other words, I value being able to share and show others my ideas and actions. Hence, why I found blogging to be in alignment with my personal desires.
I think a lot of people share this propensity to want to show and tell in their lives, hence the reason why people have been blogging since 1994. Perhaps you, my reader, have decided that you are interested in the pursuit of online publication, and now find yourself asking “What could I even blog about?”
What are 4 types of blogs?
The most common types of blogs are personal, business-oriented, niche-focused, and affiliate-based.
A lot of the time these types of blogs can actually overlap in their purpose: such as a personal blog that has affiliate-based recommendations and links. Or a business blog that is niche-focused, for example, a cleaning company that wants new customers writing about “how to sanitize an office space.”
This blog I’ve created here is a mixed bag of all the categories. I am writing with a personal disposition in regards to my business goals as a blogger. My niche is related to blogging and all things that entail a successfully monetized blog (including but not limited to affiliate-based income).
If you wanted to start a blog, you could essentially start it in any category. People have been doing it since the dawn of blogging.
When did people start blogging?
Historically, when blogging first became a thing back in the early 2000s (actually 1994*), many people ventured into starting personal blogs because they were happy to share their worldview with others, and what better way to do so.
The first blog ever created was originally referred to as a “personal homepage”, a man by the name Justin Hall wrote a post on examples of HTML used around the web. He included links to those examples and that was the start of the now $412.88B industry. Who would’ve thought?
Eventually the “personal homepage” evolved to a “weblog”, a short phrase for “logging the web” and finally it was shortened to “blog” in 1999. That’s when the notorious blogger.com showed up, alongside another blogging platform known as livejournal. I won’t give away my age, but I was definitely a part of the last generation to live without a digital footprint.
With blogs, people just wanted to write, others wanted to share pictures, and eventually, people started to realize they needed to get their businesses online if they wanted to be discoverable at all.
What is a personal blog?
A personal blog is a website with diary-like entries that are meant to be shared with an audience. Personal blogs are especially interesting because the authors get to put their personalities on display.
A personal blog can touch on different kinds of niches, such as many travel blogs and mom blogs. These can also be referred to as lifestyle blogs. A good example is this blog where the owner has a dietary restriction and writes about what she cooks on a weekly basis.
What is a lifestyle blog?
A lifestyle blog is a website focused on the specific way of life, interests, or activities of an author or audience base. Lifestyle blogs are geared more towards the actual lifestyle and less on the author themselves.
For example, fitfabfitness.com is a website focused on a ketogenic lifestyle and touches on other subjects such as weight loss, nutrition, and fitness. These are all different ways of life that people may observe, thus making it kin to a lifestyle blog.
What is a niche blog?
A niche blog is a website with a very narrow focus, designed to hone and own a category of interest through topical relevance. Many seasoned and new website owners will create niche sites to build authority for a certain topic.
There are many examples that can be drawn for niche websites, and they are also fun to think about and to create. Maybe, you are passionate about sewing and like to sew clothing for children. You can actually start a niche website for that specific subject and pick a domain name that has to do with that area of expertise. Off the top of my head, you could do something like: sewingforgirls.com,
What is an affiliate blog?
An affiliate blog is designed to promote products and/or services for another business as an advocate. Affiliate resources can be embedded in any website, and it also should be disclosed on the website somewhere to let the user know that there are products for sale that the author can earn a small commission from.
This is called providing an affiliate disclosure, you can be an affiliate of many programs and get small commissions here and there for purchases made through your hyperlinks.
What should your first blog post be about?
Well, it is up to you really how you decide to move forward on your blogging journey.
I do recommend starting where you have the most interest, doing a little brainstorming, and seeing if after that exercise you still feel the same passion for the subject.
You want to make sure you select a good domain name, that you set our pillar topics relevantly, and that you have your ideas set out ahead of time to keep your momentum going. If you happen to run into any kind of writer’s block, there’s actually a great software that I use to help me get unstuck, It’s known as Frase (and I swear by it). I will be writing a whole article dedicated to Frase, so you can learn why it would be beneficial to you in your blogging journey.
Skipping the hard part – and just buying a website.
It may come as a surprise, but you also don’t have to start a blog from scratch. You most definitely can purchase a starter website that already has the content structure and theme in place. You will want to make sure that the website has more than 25+ posts, and that it has aged a while to get a good yield from the purchase.
It is easier to scale a website up that already has been crawled by google. Check out the listings at Blogsforsale.co for websites you can purchase and start working on.
Be Inspired!