Top 5 Best Investments For Beginning a Blog!

Top 5 Investments When Beginning a Blog! Hello, I'm Rachel Town, creative entrepreneur who owns Beach Glass Treasure. I'm here to help you out when you're beginning to create your own blog. After you write your first post and are eager to publish.... stop yourself! When you are first writing a blog and hear so much advice from within groups and searches, it's making your head spin, hit the brakes and read further as I give you the top five areas you should be splurging on before you launch. I'll start with #5 and head on down to the #1 that you must consider!

-This post does contain affiliate links, not all of the products with hyperlinks are affiliate links though. If you click on one of these links that happens to be an affiliate link and you make a purchase, I receive a small commission at no additional expense to you.

#5 Social Media Automation

BuzzSumo, SumoMe, Facebook business manager, and Tailwind Instagram & Pinterest automation tools are going to become your best friend as you get more viewers and build your following. BuzzSumo will help you view if your content is trending in specific areas that will allow you to adequately cater to your audience sooner and better than if you never crossed paths with them. SumoMe is a useful tool to increase your traffic, I hyperlinked the title to the price list for you to compare and contrast according to your needs.

Facebook Business manager and Ads manager are going to be where you automate your Facebook business page posts through their scheduler and is best to set up ahead of time. First, create a Facebook business page centered around your main mission and your blog. This will also allow you to apply for the Facebook branded content tool that you will need further down this path if you ever want to be an influencer for a brand. Tailwind, as I've written about before, has recently become an official Instagram automation publisher in addition to a formal Pinterest automation and scheduler. For the Tailwind Pinterest version, it has the added feature of joining niche groups of others just like you, called Tribes which will increase your blog traffic like crazy when done right.

The pricing starts with your first 100 pins scheduled and increases your pin scheduling to 400 pins for $14.99/mos. If you want to improve your pin sharing to tribes, then the price jumps to $44.99/mos for unlimited boosts plus $14.99/mos for the scheduler. *You will not need the sharing booster at this point when you first begin but just keep this in mind for later after you get everything going!

#4 Email list 

Some swear by an e-mail list however, I am going to have to vote against this if you already don't have one going.

Why? Everyone swears by this in all the other blogging about blogging blogs.....

If everyone else jumped off a cliff would you follow?

Yeah didn't think so...

I'll tell you exactly why...

Technology and internet apps are constantly evolving and e-mail marketing made a brief comeback (blogger-wise) in the last 5 years, however, it wasn't meant to be for this. Corporate-wise these companies scale much quicker than most bloggers should be relying on. It depends on your overall strategy though. If you aren't planning on becoming the next Taco Bell or Macy's then this is probably an outdated method if you are just beginning a blog. Which is actually an awesome thing, because you have an open door ahead of you by jumping on where it actually will matter.

So many people read through those pushy e-mails that bloggers pour their heart and marketing soul into and yet those readers appear in the statistics that your watching but don't actually further convert when into sales if they do actually open and read each email. This is not from personal experience, however, a daily scenario that I hear about from other creative entrepreneurs.

Push notifications and messengers (FB or right on your own website) are a much better resource to actively engage with readers and you as a blogger get to spend less time having to automate, sequence and actually write out each e-mail for that e-mail list that is well past the point of even remembering who you are as long as they get their incentive you offered. You don't want to annoy readers by making them jump through hoops if you plan to monetize your blog or have it link to an e-commerce store where you sell actual physical products that you ship.

#3 Grammar Check

Grammarly has saved me from making some huge mistakes! Before you hit the publish button you absolutely need to double and triple check your grammar and sentence structure! Preview the page and make sure your title image appears to match the dimensions of the page as well. I recommend using Grammarly which works right inside your browser, and it can be used for any writing that you conduct even your social media posts as well. This writing enhancer can be used indefinitely for free allowing you to check basic grammar. For sentence structure proofing and more advanced features, it's $29.95/month. They also offer a quarterly plan for $59.95/every 3 months and an annual plan for $139.95/ year which works out to making each month cheaper in the long run.

#2 Visual Design

You are going to want to enhance your content with something visually appealing as well as give your entire main blog page a branding design that adheres to the primary mission that you set out on in the first place. When I started blogging, I used Befunky. However, the limitations of this designing tool were limited, and I quickly grew out of their stock picture accessibility within a week after I had already upgraded. Your designs will not be saved on the website itself. Therefore, you have to rely on hitting the save button and pushing it on over to your computer files. You will find out quickly that this becomes annoying when you forgot to make a separate image for your FB page that you wanted to boost to a new audience. Why? Because your dimensions across different social media accounts must adhere to a specific pixel dimension for your viewers to want to click on your posts. Therefore, I recommend investing in Canva or PicMonkey.

Here's the low-down on both...

Canva is a powerful tool that uses the best match of dimensions that you will need to successfully promote your blog across social media once each post is written. This option can be used indefinitely for free, or you can upgrade to a 30-day free trial of their "work" package to see if its right for you and if you decide to keep the upgrade past the 30-day trial it's only $9.99. The downside of using Canva is that they have a limited selection of free stock flat lay images that are available unless you find some on Google and save them to your computer and then have to upload them. This can be a positive aspect, however, creating flat lays are not as tricky as they look and it will add to your own branding in the long-run.

PicMonkey is another option that I recommend with a similar user experience when you are creating your visuals with the added feature to enhance your photos as well as create more defined collages, and their layouts are better suited to be put into a blog. The downside to this is that they only offer a 7-day trial and you have to individually save each creation over to "the hub" to reaccess it in the future as well as protecting each creation yourself on your computer to add to your blog. After the free trial period ends its $7.99/month billed monthly or $5.99/month billed annually for a premium upgrade.

#1 Hosting site

It is entirely possible to build a following and cater to your targeted niche audience with a free blogging host. I'm still doing it as I type this! Would I recommend Blogger as a host? Entirely.... if you already have a host somewhere and you are connecting your blog to an already established website. Additionally,  knowing how to fix some of your own coding issues or implement HTML and javascript across the board will be needed! I've heard horror stories from other bloggers that quoted hearsay from other bloggers about waking up one day, and their blog was gone after using Blogger..... this is called "click bait" my friend. It means unless you see a screenshot of an example or more information that the blogger didn't have too many glasses of wine that night and accidentally erased their productivity do not believe this exaggerated claim.

If you aren't into coding or are not connecting from an already hosted website from a domain of your own and want a more straightforward route, I suggest Wordpress.org or Bluehost. I've seen through the grapevine that Wordpress has many plug-ins available for every step of the way so this might be your best bet if you want everything seamless without having to connect the dots yourself which can be tiresome. This way you can input more time into your actual content and your visual appearance! Bluehost is another alternative that costs $3.95/month and gives you that piece of mind while still giving you the power to make everything your own along with a professional email to start utilizing, your own domain, and the ability to upgrade your plan as your traffic increases. If you want to read further regarding this about shared hosting vs. VPS, this article I found on the Bluehost website explains the differences really well.

This list should help you determine the areas where to invest before you launch your first blog post or if you only have a few posts on your freshly minted blog.