Blogging Tips for Beginners

By Lisa McGrimmon | Published Sept. 22, 2019

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Blogging tips for beginners show you how bloggers make money, how to market your online business on a dime, and how to connect (and how not to connect) with other bloggers.

After I published an article detailing exactly how I use Pinterest for business marketing, a reader posted a few followup questions asking for clarification about some points in the article as well as some more general beginner blogger questions.

I started to write a quick response, but when I realised the answer was turning out to be quite in-depth, and the information would be helpful to other beginner bloggers, I decided my quick response needed to become a full length article.

Then, when my article turned out to be almost 4000 words long, I figured I needed to break it all up into a few shorter articles to avoid overwhelming everyone with information overload.

Here's the original comment that sparked this series of blogging tips for Beginners:

"Lisa, you are amazing. (Thank you. My 16-year-old thinks I'm absolutely terrible, so I will take all the compliments I can get these days!)

I have read this article several times and I am going to bring it to my weekly group of starving artists. This is the absolute first time I have read anything about Pinterest that makes sense to me. You are very methodical in your presentation and answered lots of my questions. But I still have some. 

You state early in your blog "that it is possible to use Pinterest to get enough traffic to build a business that makes a respectable income." What is the source of the income - product sold or the attached ads that show on the blog or both?

If someone is just starting out with not much capital, do you have any suggestions? I am thinking Tailwind and Canva, etc are not free.

As a working group of artists, in your opinion, would it be to our advantage to pull together and begin this Pinterest journey at a group instead of a single person to share the expense and to gain the experience to go it alone?

Could you do a blog on how to be a blogger?

How do you connect to other like blogs?

I find that I am blogging, and occasionally I see someone has viewed the blog, but I have no clue how they even saw it.

Is there an etiquette that goes with blogging? I have a tendency to overthink sometimes.

Thanks again for all your work."

Blogging Questions and Answers

I'm going to cover two of the questions here because my answers to them are fairly brief, so they don't require a full article. I've broken the rest of the questions into individual articles, since those answers are longer.

The questions, which I've paraphrased a bit, that I'll cover on this page are:

• Could you do a blog on how to be a blogger?
• Where can I find statistics about my blog?

Here are my replies to the other two questions:

Where can I find statistics about my blog?

Question:

I find that I am blogging, and occasionally I see someone has viewed the blog, but I have no clue how they even saw it.

Answer:

You can get information about how people find your blog, plus all kinds of other data, from Google analytics. Google analytics is a free tool for online business owners that provides a massive amount of information about your site.

Unfortunately, using Google analytics is a huge topic and way beyond the scope of what I can cover here.

Could you do a blog on how to be a blogger? 

I have thought about covering this topic in more depth. 

When I started this site in 2006, there weren't a lot of options for people who wanted to use their craft-based skills to earn an income online.

Even Etsy was brand new in 2006.

Now, there are so many different options and possibilities for someone who wants to use craft-based skills to grow a creative business online that it makes a lot of sense to me to delve more into this topic.

How to be a blogger is really a massive topic that I couldn't cover off in a single article.

I have mapped out some ideas for writing more about this topic in the future. I do have some other seasonal and time-sensitive topics I need to cover first, but writing more about building a creative business online is definitely on my list of things to do.

I will say that at least 90% of what I know about how to build an online business has come from the company I work with to build this site, SiteSell.

I wouldn't have my business without SiteSell.

I knew absolutely nothing about building an online business when I started back in 2006. SiteSell provided in-depth instruction and guidance for building an online business, a system to keep me on track, and all the tools I needed to put my plan and knowledge into action.

SiteSell's web business building tool, called Solo Build It, isn't free, but it provides excellent value. The cost of a one year subscription is $330. If you were to try to use other sources to put together all of the tools and learning resources you get with SiteSell, you'd quickly spend hundreds (probably thousands) more.