Plan - the first step towards blogging

Hello everyone. As promised, I present you the Blogging Series. I will share some tips and tutorials for starting a blog successfully and how to enhance the look of your blog as well. Following will be a series of tutorials, a step-by-step detailed instructions on how to start your blog and how to develop it little by little.

First in the series is: PLANNING.

Before you step directly into creating your blog, it is very essential for you to Plan on things. This applies for everything. What does Planning mean?

"A detailed proposal for doing or achieving something"  - {Google}

"An intention or decision about what one is going to do" - {Google}

As you can see it clearly states that 'laying something out about what you are going to do in a detailed manner so as to get yourself an idea as to how your action is going to be. 

In blogging. do the same. Plan first and then Implement. It helps your work easier and you get a clear idea on what you should work on, how and what resources are required for you to put it into action. It is not that difficult as it seems to be. It is just a little bit of time you spend that makes things easier for you later on and saves time. 

Let us see how we can Plan for creating a blog. The following few steps will help you Plan your blog and its details in advance. Take a paper or your notepad and note down your ideas on each step as you go. 

1.  AN IDEA

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You must definitely be here if you are planning on creating a blog. 

Answer to these questions:

• How did you get the idea? 
• Did anything inspire you?

You must have definitely been inspired by someone's work or blog (definitely, I was). So think for a moment what brought you here and why are you taking this step.

Now that you know about what caused you to start a blog, lets see on yourself and what you are having in mind. 

• What blog are you planning to start?
• Why do you want to blog? 
• How do you want to present your posts and ideas?
• When are you going to start on it?
• And how are you going to be different from other bloggers out there?

When you have answered to these questions, lets move on to the second stage.

2. RESEARCH:

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In the beginning, it was just a general idea of what you want to blog and why. Lets us see the next major step for blogging 'Research'. It is a must in any project you do, be it even blogging. Now that you have a general idea, you have to go in-depth and analyze and collect information out of it for your needs.

• Visit various blogs
• Visit similar blogs
• Analyze the content and writing style, their photography, their blog design, structure/construction, elements, etc
• Know about SEO (search engine optimization) and a little about tags and titles
• Read posts of other blogs and see how and what methods they use to attract readers
• What blogging platform they use {Blogspot, Wordpress, own domain}
• In what span they have come to reach this place in blogging
• etc.

There are so many other research items that you can extract from the internet about blogging and from various other bloggers. By now you should now have a clear idea, fixed mind and visual diagram of how your blog will be and what it should contain and so on.

3. ROUGH SKETCH

Now on the paper sketch a skeleton of how your blog should look like. 

• Blog header position
• Posts position
• About me snippet position
• Gallery position
• Pages you want
• etc.

Take time and draw until you are satisfied with the look and overall structure of it.

Some examples:

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It need not be detailed or specific, just a rough sketch would do just to get yourself an idea as to what goes where and it further gives you an insight on what you should include in your blog.

4. THEME

You have have seen a lot of websites and blogs by now while research. There will be a theme to each and every blog and a color scheme involved. Take my blog for example. I have two color scheme and a theme like hearts and floral gadget titles with the same color scheme.

It is time for you to decide your theme and colors now. {You can definitely change anytime you want} Is this really necessary? No, it is not. Then why? It gives you blog a more beautiful and even look and it makes it more visually appealing as well. 

• Theme
• Color scheme  {www.colorhexa.com, www.colorcombos.com, etc. has a huge collection of color and color comnibations with their codes}
• Fonts {http://www.dafont.com/, http://www.1001freefonts.com/, etc.}

You will be using the color and fonts throughout your blog {sidebar widgets, posts, etc.}, social media, branding {business cards, logo, etc.}, etc.

5. BLOG NAME

Select your blog title and sub-title if you want and also design a simple logo for your blog. 

• Blog title
• Sub-title
• Logo (this can be done even later on)

Now that we have seen how to Plan, we have moved one step toward blogging. Later in the series, I'l be teaching you how to create your blog and how to custom design it.

I hope you liked the first part of it.

Happy Blogging!