6 REASONS TO HAVE A BLOG

When it comes to content creation, the blog is a key and essential piece, since the knowledge and experiences that a company or person may have, can be shown through it. Having a blog can give you advantages that you may not know yet.

But, what is a blog?

According to Wikipedia:

A blog is a way for you to share useful information on any topic. For example, if you have a car rental business and you have a website, you can have a blog within your website where you can share information with your potential customers and visitors about "how to choose a more fuel efficient vehicle" or "road safety tips when traveling on the road"..

6 Benefits of having a blog

Here are some benefits of sharing useful content on a blog:

• Increases traffic to your website
• Helps you with SEO
• It allows you to gain trust among your readers, who can then become your customers.
• It helps you gain subscribers with whom you can build a short, medium or long term business relationship
• It is very beneficial for your personal brand
• It allows you to demonstrate to recruiters that you are knowledgeable about your career in case you are looking for better job opportunities.

What to blog about?

Nowadays there are blogs on almost any topic. Depending on what you are looking for, you can choose one. If you want to work on your personal brand, you can offer information on topics related to your profession. If you have an online store, you can include a blog on your site where you offer information on how to get the most out of your products, offers and any tool on your website.

What you need to create a blog

1. Choose the topic: It is important to be clear about what you will talk about. It can be about your profession, about one of your interests, news, etc., but it is important to know in advance what topic you will focus on..

2. Choose a platform: Many content publishers allow you to have your blog for free, with limited hosting and basic functionality. The most popular are:

• Wordpress: is one of the most complete platforms, with a very useful content editor and a large number of themes to choose from. Many functions are restricted if you don't have your own domain.
• Wix: its drag-and-drop working method is very easy to use and it also provides a lot of attractive themes to choose from depending on the theme of your blog.
• Strikingly: this page is developed on this platform. It is very easy to use, has very attractive templates and very affordable plans. When I tried it, I was fascinated with how easy it was to set up my site.
• GoDaddy: although this company is known for selling domains and hosting, it also offers a website builder very easy to use and with good plans for you to work your brand from the purchase of the domain.
• Squarespace: with very attractive plans and excellent functionalities, it is also a good option to create your blog or web.
• Blogger: this platform belongs to Google. I don't particularly like it, as I understand that they have been left behind and the themes are not very attractive.. 

3. Choose the domain: Continuing with the elements that a blog must have, I suggest you to have a domain, since this will allow you to have a better positioning, both for your website and your brand. If you are working on your personal brand, it can be your name or the name of a topic that identifies with what you are going to deal with. 

It is recommended that you have your own domain name, as this conveys professionalism to your brand, allows you to change your hosting provider whenever you want and allows you to monetize your website.You can purchase your domain from any provider, I use Godaddy, but you can purchase your domain from any other provider.

4. Hosting: The hosting is the service that offers the space where your website will be hosted. It is through the hosting that you can upload your files and information such as images and text of your website. It is the first thing you have to look for, many companies that offer the domain, also offer hosting services. Some companies are:

• Godaddy
• Webempresa
• Hostgator

5. The blog's image: Once you have all that, then you can choose the image, that is, colors, fonts and everything that characterizes your blog. You can choose a template and then change its appearance so that it has your image. Generally, blogging platforms offer free templates, but they have some limitations. 

You can purchase a template from sites such as:

• Mojo Market
• Creative Market

Recommendations

• Choose a niche: think carefully about who you are going to target, take your time to describe your ideal reader.
• Choose the channels through which you will disseminate the content of your blog: newsletter, social networks, etc.
• Include varied content: use videos, images, gifs and any type of content that engages your readers.
• Create quality content: research and look for reliable sources, create quality content to add value to your readers.
• Original content: it goes without saying that copying and pasting content from other sites can be penalized, the best thing to do is to find your own writing style and create original content.
• Keywords and SEO: I recommend you to do a keyword study to position your blog. This is important if you are interested in appearing in the first results of Google.

Have you had any experience as a blogger? Tell me in the comments.