In order for a blog to be considered a success, it has to abide not only by the strategy implemented to reach its goals, but also the foundation that supports it.
A content strategy that brings fruit to a content marketing and social media marketing strategy is important in generating blog traffic, which you can turn into leads or customers. But how the blog is built and set up is just a crucial, if not even more.
Without using the right and most appropriate tools to run your blog on, you may have built a blog that's not optimized to your liking. Worse, your blog may experience downtime due to the amount of traffic it is received.
Therefore, before writing and publishing on your blog, you need to first understand the technical aspects on which your blog runs. Below are the factors that you need to consider when in the process of setting up your blog.
Domain
The one thing you need to keep in mind when choosing a domain name for your blog is memorability. Ideally, your blog's URL should be short enough so your target audience will remember its address so they can type it in their browsers. Also, your domain name should end with a .com extension, which is the most popular among all extension and helps in making your blog name much more memorable.
From an SEO perspective, having your keyword appear in your blog name is considered an on-page factor to help your blog rank for your chosen term (though no longer as helpful as before). However, you need to balance out SEO and usability of your blog's domain name. If you use your target keyword as your domain name and has too many characters, people may find it difficult to remember the name of your blog.
Pro tip: If and when the domain name for your blog has been taken, you need to research for available domain name ideas and choose which among the ones you've come up suit best to your needs. This post will not only teach you how to find alternative domain names, but also find out the best one using A/B testing.
Web hosting
If you plan on purchasing a web hosting service for your self-hosted blog, choose one that can maintain the speed and performance of your blog regardless of the number of people viewing your blog at the same time. Also, make sure to take the services of a blog hosting service that has a 24/7 customer support. This is so when something wrong happens to your site, you can reach out and get them to fix the problem anytime.
Pro tip: If you are torn among the web hosting services out there, refer to customer reviews and read what they have to say about the hosting service. While everybody will be as honest as possible about their experiences, you should use your best judgment and consider reviews that you feel will help you decide the best hosting for your blog.
Blogging platform
Not all blogging platforms are built the same. Some are best for journalists whose focus is to publish their articles or stories (Ghost, Medium) while others are preferrable for design-challenged bloggers who wish to build an attractive blog by dragging and dropping elements onto a page (Wix, Weebly).
Most prefer the customization that CMS platforms like WordPress and Squarespace offers. In particular, the former powers 23 million sites. One of the reasons that propels WordPress's popularity is the wealth of plugins to choose. These can be used to add social media buttons to your site, optimize your blog entries for SEO, and even make your blog run faster and more efficiently.
Pro tip: Despite the number of blogs using WordPress, it does not mean that you should use it too, which is why there are different blogging platforms to use. Read this post to determine which one is the most appropriate for you, depending on the factors you value the most.
Final thoughts: Blogging is much more than just the content you publish in it. By reading this post, you should at least have a better idea on what makes up a blog and how you should treat these technical aspects before building one.