If you have started to create your blog but are still stuck on what to do next, this will help you know what technical information is useful when setting up a blog.

You don’t need to be a technical whizz when it comes to setting up a blog. There are lots of videos and tutorials you can watch to take you through the step-by-step process.

That assumes you want to do it yourself, as there are a lot of designers who do this for a living too.

As well as the actual setup, there are a number of other useful technical processes that are worth implementing yourself

Setting Up A Blog

Plugins for your blog

They help you to customise your blog and add in some useful information and applications

There are so many plugins, have a look through what is available and install the ones you want to try

Remember to activate your plugins after installing

You can always de-active a plugin at a later stage or immediately if you don’t feel it is right for your site

By law, you need to let visitors to your website know that you use cookies. You are using cookies if you are using Google Analytics, display advertising or affiliate marketing. You can find all the compliance information in the comprehensive affiliate marketing guide.

The best and easiest plugin I have found for this is one called Cookie Law Info

I also recommend installing Jetpack, it is a plugin that comes with loads of handy features

If you try it and decide it isn’t for you just de-active

Yoast Plugin

Yoast is one of the best plugins I have used in order to improve my blog and blog posts

After you have installed it, as you are writing your blog posts there is a traffic light system. It will prompt you to change things in your post to turn the light green. This is your SEO, search engine optimisation. You ideally want all the SEO criteria met to ensure the best search results from your writing.

It also looks at your readability and gives you suggestions on improving it

Akismet Plugin

This is a must-have plugin for protecting your blog from spam comments. People or bots will leave comments with all kinds of spam on your blog posts and this can be filtered out. You can manually moderate your comments as well so you can manually ensure no bot comments are spamming your site

About/Contact

An about page tells both your readers and any potential sponsors/brands more about you

It offers a brief snapshot of your personality and what they can expect to get from your blog. There are no set rules on what you should or shouldn’t include. Your blog is your personal piece of the internet so create what you want it to say

Mine is here 

Privacy policy

If you are using Adsense, Google Analytics to track your views, or even Jetpack stats then you need a privacy policy

Disclosure

According to the Advertising Standards Agency, you need to declare your sponsored posts and affiliate links on your blog

I have my disclaimer as the page footer on each of my pages and a sponsored post will always state its sponsored, either within the text or at the end of the post

Google Analytics

You should register for Google Analytics

You can pick a plugin where you just need to place your tracking id into it once and it will track everything. This is so you can monitor your site and see what is being read and where your site is reaching. This will also help later down the line when you try and analyse any of your blog posts

Sumome

It is a great idea to collect email addresses of people who read your content. This plug in allows you to create a pop up prompting readers to subscribe

Even if you aren’t currently doing anything with these email addresses it is still a good idea to collect them

These are just the tip of the iceberg and as your blog develops you may find you add more and more plug-ins to your site

Hopefully, this helped give you more of an understanding of what technical information is useful when setting up a blog

There is still so much more to learn too

You can always add to your site and make amendments as you go along. Your first draft doesn’t have to be perfect, you can perfect it as you learn

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