How to Launch a Personal Blog

Some of you know that I started this newsletter as “3 tips by Levent” to share my learnings in b2b and then pivoted to my indie journey.

Last week, I decided to open a blog to share my experience & learnings about b2b growth marketing again. I wanted to publish informative articles rather than share tips through my newsletter, so I quickly built a blog site through WordPress. I still believe in blogging as Backlinko did, and publishing 2.000+ words of articles can increase your credibility. And this might bring potential customers for my consultancy service.

In today’s post, I am going to share my learnings about launching a personal blog in the following:

• Domain & Hosting

• Choosing WordPress Template

• Tools I Have Been Using

Domain & Hosting

As it’s hard to pronounce my name - Levent - for most English-speaking people, I converted it to Leo and bought a domain - leoaskan.com - and hosting from a site in Turkey. When choosing a hosting provider, you should ask for WordPress integration and their server’s location.

On my end, customer support integrated WordPress in a minute and servers are located in Europe, so it won’t be a problem for most people to visit my website.

Choosing a WordPress Template

I didn’t want to spend a vast time searching for the best templates. I checked free ones from startertemplates but decided to move with the free template of WordPress. I have been using twenty-sixteen at the moment and it’s so easy to work with. With this template, you can also create sidebars.

You can also check free themes from this site.

Plugins / Tools I Have Been Using

For collecting emails, I wanted to test Convertkit for this project by seeing their user interface and I might try it to send bulk emails later as well.

You should create an account on Convertkit and install the plugin to your WordPress. After that, you can easily add forms to each page to collect emails.

For SEO, I have been a fan of Yoast SEO for almost ten years. They score your article in terms of SEO and readability and share the improvements to increase the score.

Besides those, I installed Google Site Kit to integrate my site with Google Analytics and Search Console. Also, if you want to see how many unique words and characters you have in your articles, you can check Word Count Analysis.

By then, I published eight articles and I will continue to share two articles a week at least.

At the end of the day, I spent 25$ to buy the domain and server for one year. You can start your own blog by just spending this amount. :)

Want to book a free consultancy call with me?

From now on, you can book a 30-minute free consultancy call with me to get my insights related to your projects in the b2b space.
If you want to get my ideas on topics like;

• content marketing,

• b2b paid ads optimization,

• Hubspot,

• lead generating and scoring,

• demo preparation.

You can choose a slot from my Calendly link here.

Updates About Other Side Projects

• Customer Success Jobs exceed 200 followers on LinkedIn and 100 emails. One of the influencers in the CS space - Jeremy Donaldson - included our Linkedin page in his post about a place to look for customer success jobs.

• SaaS Screenshots exceeded 250 emails, but we postponed our launch day because of the earthquakes in Turkey. We are hoping to launch the project in March.

Thanks for reading and see you next time!