6 Blogging Tips for Beginners: Planning, Graphic Design & Social Media

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This is a guest post written by Johana M. Caba, M.A. You can find her over at her blog JM Integrated Marketing!

If you are new to blogging, you might be apprehensive about how to get started. Blogging for beginners can be hard. New bloggers have to work on creating their websites, opening social media accounts, or plan to use their personal accounts, and they have to choose a niche.

On top of that, in many cases, it is their side hustle and not their full-time job.

For some, blogging can lead to a full-time job opportunity. Through affiliate marketing and other content marketing avenues once you’ve acquired a large following.

You might already have the perfect idea for a blog and know exactly what audience you are targeting, but you might not know where to begin. In this post, we will be going over my 6 best tips on blogging for beginners including planning, graphic design and social media marketing.

Table of Contents

1. PLANNING

When you’re starting your blog in the beginning, you need to know 2 main things

What you’ll be writing about
What problems you will be solving for your target audience.

A great way to plan is to create a content calendar. In a content calendar, you can decide when to post on your blog, when to share posts on social media and when you can sit down to write.

Having a physical planner or a digital content calendar will help you tremendously. It will keep you organized, help you plan out your writing and editing, and help you keep track of your goals.

I find that personally, a physical planner helps to keep me accountable which helps me be productive. If you need more content planning help, check out 5 Essential Content Planning Tools and A Content Calendar How-To Guide.

2. BRAINSTORM CONTENT IDEAS

For many bloggers, the most difficult task is to brainstorm content ideas. You want to make sure that what you share is

Easy to digest for readers
Engaging for your audience

The goal should be to create value for your audience with your content. You want to ensure that they are benefiting from your content.

For example, if you share content about blogging for beginners. You are creating value for new bloggers by

Sharing content that provides them with tools
Educational information to help them in their personal blogging journeys

When you brainstorm ideas, you want to make sure that you are answering a question that your audience has or providing a solution to a problem that they might be having.

3. GRAPHIC DESIGN

Creating a visual to accompany your content might be the scariest task you face as a beginner. You are not a professional graphic designer and might not have any idea where to start.

But you do know that you need graphics to share with your posts, and on social media to get engagement. You also need the right tools that make it easier for you.

A great tool to use is Canva. Because they have thousands of pre-made templates for social media graphics. Including Twitter, Pinterest, as well as blog post templates for your banners and newsletters.

With pre-made templates. you don’t have to worry about finding the right font pairings and color schemes that will work best with your brand.

You can also buy premade templates from other bloggers as well! I have some Pinterest Pin templates available in my Etsy shop!

Recommended: 3 User-Friendly Graphic Design Tools

4. SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING

Personal and business brands need social media. In order for you to achieve your blogging goals, get views, have others post comments on your blog, and to boost your overall engagement- you need to share your content on social media.

The good news is, you don’t have to create paid ads to reach your audience. All you need is a good social media marketing strategy to reach your audience organically.

In order to create a good strategy, you need to first understand your audience. Research their demographics such as their;

Age
Gender
Education

After you have a good picture of your ideal reader, create a persona to help you determine

What they need
Where they spend the majority of their time online
What type of content they engage with most

By understanding these different components, you can create content that speaks to them and share it on the platforms that they use the most often.

For example, for my blog, I know that my audience spends most of their time on Twitter. Therefore, I know to share my content there with graphics that are created specifically for this platform.

5. COLLABORATIONS

In order for you to increase your Domain Authority (DA) and create your personal brand, you need collaborations. Especially as a new blogger, you will need to share your content and network with others in your niche.

By networking, you’ll find more opportunities to collaborate and to write guest blog posts that can help you to create more backlinks. These backlinks to your website are important because when coming from websites with a higher DA, they signify that you are trustworthy to search engines.

Ultimately, this also helps you rank higher in search engines, which will help drive organic traffic to your site.

6. STAY ACTIVE ON SOCIAL MEDIA

Staying active on social media helps with the algorithms of these platforms. If you share your content and try to understand the algorithm of the platform by also looking into your own metrics, you can reach a larger audience.

You should pay attention to what type of content gets you the most link clicks and what type of graphics get you the most engagement. It will also help to use short links such as bit.ly because it tracks how many link-clicks you are getting.

With Twitter, you can check your audience and when they are most active by going on the analytics section of the platform. This is also true for Pinterest.

If you have a business account with Pinterest, Instagram and Facebook, you can track

Your engagement levels
The times of day your audience is most active

Along with other metrics that will be important to understanding your target audience. It’s important that you stay active, which you can do by automating some of your posting.

You can also schedule your posts ahead of time using platforms like Hootsuite. This will give yourself time to plan, write, and edit new content.

This will also give you time to relax and take some time to yourself. It is important that you take some time for yourself in order to benefit your mental and physical health!

Plan your social media posts quicker and easier with my social media content calendar available in my Etsy shop!

About the Author:

Johana M. Caba, M.A. is a public relations professional and social media manager/marketer. She shares thought-leadership articles on her business blog (JM Blog) and on her social media accounts.

Johana recently earned her Master’s Degree in Professional Communications from William Paterson University of New Jersey.