Practice Your Writing Skills by Creating a Blog

Excellent writing skills can benefit an individual in many ways. You can start freelance writing, successfully apply for jobs, improve communication skills, and build personal branding.

Nowadays, you can practice writing skills through various mediums and activities. However, this article will focus on blogging.

There are many other benefits to having a blog, and to cover more of those, we will take a closer look at how blogging can improve your writing skills. Let's get started.

How Blogging Improves Writing Skills

There are plenty of stages involved when creating a blog post, including researching, drafting, writing, editing, and publishing. Over time, each step improves a different aspect of the writing skill.

Overall, the benefits of blogging are:
- Create a new habit. The constant need for content means you need to write regularly. In time, you’ll make writing a new habit, improving your writing skills and blog quality without noticing.
- Be accepting of feedback. You will often receive feedback about your writing, whether directly or through the blog. From this feedback, you’ll have more learning opportunities.
- Having readers increases your motivation. Readers increase motivation through comments, feedback, and general responses toward your blog posts.
- Blogging is a great tool for experimentation. You can test many writing formats through blog posts and update the content if it doesn't perform well.

How to Create a Blog in 8 Simple Steps

Now, let’s jump into the steps to create a blog and start developing your writing skills.

1. Choose Your Web Hosting and Domain Name
The first step of creating a blog is selecting the right web hosting. A website with unsecured connection is more prone to cyber-attacks, so it’s important to choose a reliable hosting provider.

To choose the right hosting plan, start by researching different options. Understand their features, pricing, and other benefits that may help with the successful blog writing process.

Once you choose web hosting, next is picking your domain name. Some hosting plans offer a free domain name for the first year, so consider this option to finish two processes in one go.

When deciding on a domain name, consider including relevant keywords and keeping straightforward pronunciation while making it memorable. Use domain name generator tools, like Domain Wheel, to help.

2. Pick a Blogging Platform
When picking a blogging platform, make the decision based on these categories:
- Best overall blogging platform. WordPress.org is the best overall platform because it caters to beginners and professional users alike. It's a flexible and scalable platform for blogs and offers various blogging plugins.
- Best for beginners. Wix is a beginner-friendly platform with easy-to-use features to create a basic website. This platform has both free and paid versions.
Best for writers. Medium focuses on writing and publishing, which makes it perfect for aspiring writers. After creating an account, you can immediately begin writing the content.
- Best for eCommerce. Weebly is perfect to set up and run an online store while blogging. It’s also a budget-friendly platform with a drag-and-drop blog editor.
- Best for hobbyists. Blogger offers the complete package for niche-based blogs or hobbyists. It’s also a free platform, making it perfect for part-time or freelance bloggers.
- Best for community building. Ghost is the go-to platform if you look to build a community and monetize from it. The platform also includes SEO optimization and app integration.

Whichever platform you choose, ensure that you have complete control over the blog. Then, check for scalability options in case you’ll need to scale up the blog in the long term. Lastly, although optional, check for the platform's advertising abilities.

3. Customize the Website
When customizing the website, ensure it aligns with the blog’s objectives to amplify content quality. Additionally, pay attention to the site’s design relevance with your audience.

There are a few steps to making the customization process easier, which are:
1. Determine the pages’ purposes and pay attention to the UI and UX aspects. If you’re stuck, take inspiration from other blogging websites.
Choose a responsive template if you’re using a website builder or WordPress. Responsive templates cater to users with multiple devices.
Create copy for the page’s heading and content. Construct your words to match the blog’s personality.

When the process is complete, conduct a walkthrough of the website to ensure a clear user journey. In the long run, a smooth user journey significantly affects the blog’s success.

4. Create a Content Calendar
A content calendar is a scheduling system for bloggers to manage their current and upcoming blog posts. Having an editorial calendar allows strategic content planning, maintains content quality, and helps keep the audience engaged.

To create a content calendar, follow these steps:
- Define the content objectives. This process involves researching trending topics and discovering your target audience to decide the blog's 'what' and 'why.'
- Research relevant topics and strategies. This includes the keywords to use for the blog posts. It ensures the content effectiveness for the audience and also helps the writing process.
- Understand your analytics. This process helps measure the important blog metrics, which will improve the blog in the long run.
- Create content ideas. Having content ideas in advance maintains blog quality. When creating content ideas, schedule the posts months in advance.
- Monitor and optimize content. Monitoring the content is crucial for the optimization process. From it, you’ll understand what works and what needs to stop.

5. Start Writing Blog Posts
When writing blog posts, ensure your posts are relevant to the audience. Then, determine the blog type and deliver high-quality content based on your content calendar. Consider using Google Keyword Planner and Google Trends to help.

Additionally, pay attention to the user's search intents, which are informational, navigational, transactional, and commercial. Adjust these intents with the blog content for best results.

These preparations help ensure the blog’s success, from gaining daily traffic to maintaining loyal readers in the long run.

6. Optimize Blog Posts
Having a blog means regularly optimizing it for the search engines. Search engine optimization comes in many forms, including on-page SEO and content SEO, which are essential for your blog's growth.

Optimizing the blog helps you reach the first page of the search engine results page. Additionally, the SEO process improves your writing skills during the copywriting and keyword research phase.

Before optimizing the blog, determine all the SEO strategies you need. Invest in SEO tools like SEMrush, Ahrefs, and MonsterInsights.

Further improve the content by optimizing different aspects, like:
- Include one to two long-tail keywords
- Use relevant keywords strategically
- Add image alt text
- Optimize for mobile devices
- Create meta descriptions

7. Publish and Promote Blog Posts
Before publishing your blog posts, ensure that everything is ready. Check the formatting, spelling, structure, and all the relevant keywords.

Don’t forget to add meta descriptions to the article. Proofread the article and put yourself in the readers’ shoes to understand their points of view.

When all is ready, publish the blog post.

After that, consider promoting the blog post to help boost the ranking. It's a learning experience to improving your writing. Start by sharing the posts on social media or blogging community platforms.

Remember to promote the blog via online ads. Aside from gaining traffic and awareness, creating the ad copy also helps hone your writing skills.

8. Track Blog Posts Performance
A blog post’s performance shows its search engine ranking. It tells how many people saw and clicked on your blog post.

Tracking the performance means constantly maintaining and improving the blog posts' quality. It also lets you know which post is performing well and which ones are costing you search engine ranking.

To track your blog performance, use Google Analytics. Then, understand and measure the essential KPIs, which includes:
- Overall blog visits
- Number of posts published
- Top viewed posts
- Average views per post
- Conversion rate

Conclusion

Blogging has various benefits, and one of them is practicing your writing skills. And when you finally improve your skills to a high-quality level, you can grow and monetize your blog.

This article has covered how blogging improves writing skills, which are:
- Create a new habit of writing regularly
- Constantly improve your writing
- Be accepting of feedback for learning
- Having readers increases your motivation
- Blogging is an excellent tool for experimentation

Additionally, this article explained the eight steps to creating a blog:
1. Choose your web hosting and domain name
2. Pick a blogging platform
3. Customize the website
4. Create an editorial calendar
5. Start writing blog posts
7. 6. Optimize blog posts
8. Publish and promote blog posts
9. Track blog posts performance

We hope you’re encouraged to practice your writing skills and start blogging today. Good luck!