how to start blogging in high school *ultimate guide*

Hey, friends!

As I mentioned in my two-year celebration post, blogging has been one of the most amazing things that I have done. It’s helped me grow in my writing & marketing, grow my platform, improve my photography, be consistent, and make so many new friends. In today’s post, I’m going to be give some tips on how to start a blog in high school!

Put in the work & effort and your 100%. As with a lot of things in life, you get out of something what you put into it. If you consistently work hard at blogging, your blog will grow. This isn’t to say that you will have overnight success (spoiler: you won’t), but it does mean that if you’re putting effort into creating good content, marketing well, and connecting with your audience then your blog will grow!

Decide whether blogging is just a fun hobby or you want more from it. There’s a difference between whether you’re blogging just for fun or whether you want it to turn into a job or grow your business. Both answers are perfectly fine, but you can’t blog for fun and expect to have the amount of follower someone who is serious about blogging has.

Choose your priorities. Everyone knows that high schoolers are busy with school, sports, and other things. I was telling my friend Kate (go follow her blog because she’s amazing! 🥰) a few days ago that I have too many hobbies to do all the creative things I want to do. Between school, writing, running, youth group activities, running my small business & family stuff, do I really have time to add more to that? Probably not, but I’ve realized that blogging is a priority for me and something I love doing, so I always make sure that I do it each week.

Set aside time to blog.This goes along with my point above, if blogging is a priority, then I need to set aside time to do it! On Mondays, Wednesdays, Fridays, and Saturdays, I work on fiction writing (novels & short stories, whether that’s drafting, plotting, or brainstorming), and on Tuesdays and Thursdays, I work on blogging. I usually write my posts on Tuesdays, and then take photos, write emails, and respond to comments on Thursdays. After a while, you’ll have a routine of blogging every week at that specific time.

Focus on the photos. If you haven’t noticed, good quality photo (and even videos) are essential for blogging. It is absolutely 100% essential that you have good photos in your blog posts, on your pages and just around your blog in general. They say a picture is worth a thousand words, and that is absolutely true.

Decide on a “person” you’re writing to. Honestly, this has been so helpful for me, especially for the past couple of months. I literally just have some imagined person that I’m constantly writing blog posts to. I won’t go into specifics about my particular “person” or as they’re called “persona” because your persona and my persona are going to be different, but I will tell you that I know where this persona shops, where they like to eat, their favorite foods, what they wear, what they don’t like, what platforms they’re on etc, etc.

Plan your posts ahead of time. I try to make sure I have at least an idea of what I’m going to write a few weeks before the post is published. I actually created a blog planner to help planning posts and keeping track of tasks that you can get here for free!

Invest in what matters. If you’re going to have a successful blog, you’re going to have to invest in it at some point. And I get it, you might not have $$$ to spend on your blog right now or ever. Here are 4 things I’d recommend investing in for your blog:

1. Upgrade your plan or switch to self-hosted for a .com website. (Bluehost is my favorite for hosting – Click here to get 70% off hosting for your first two years!)
2. Use a high quality smartphone camera or DLSR camera and get Lightroom OR find a good source for payed stock photos and get some pictures of yourself professionally taken.
3. Find a theme that works well for you and is highly customizable. Depending on your blog, this might be free or you might have to pay for it. My theme is from Code + Coconut and they have some gorgeous themes for a great price, and their customer service is amazing. I’d totally recommend checking them out!
4. Get a professional email (e.g. [email protected]) so your emails to your email list aren’t going to spam. I use Zoho Mail and it’s very affordable and works well!

Don’t invest in what you don’t need. I just wanted to note that often the process of starting and growing a blog can seem kind of daunting, and there might be things you think you need that are preventing you from just starting now. Here are some things you don’t really need for starting and growing your blog

• A new laptop, keyboard, mouse, etc. (I *kind of* broke this rule because I started my blog using my Mom’s old laptop and then a few weeks after it launched, I got a new macbook air but you definitely don’t need a new laptop to have a sucsessful blog.)
• Upgrades to programs like Grammarly, Bitly, Convert Kit, and Canva. (Okay so I know that there will be a lot of people who would disagree, but especially when you’re first starting out, this is not where I would invest my money. I do think that eventually these will be things you’ll need to have, but they are all pretty expensive and if you can’t pay for them with your business, then you’ll be losing money every year. I do have Canva Pro because I use it for my business, church & enough other things that it’s worth it for me but if you are just using it for blogging, I’d don’t recommend paying for it.)
• Multiple tripods, a bunch of lenses, a backdrop and a huge lighting setup. (Assuming you’re doing your own photography, I think there is a ton of misconceptions about what you actually need to get started. I do love my camera and use it for the majority of the photos around my blog, I do use a tripod for quite a few of my photos and I do have some basic lighting equipment. However, I don’t have a huge backdrop and lighting studio, etc. Typically, I shoot photos of myself outside or on my bedroom’s white wall, and I go outside and for my flat lay photos I usually just shoot in natural light)

other blogging related posts

In case you want some more tips, here are a few other posts I’ve written about blogging!

• blogging 101: why i switched from wordpress.com to wordpress.org, blogging tips + a free blog planner
  
• introducing daisies & design co. and my favorite blogging resources {my blogging process, pt. 1}
  
• you asked, i’m answering {time for a q&a!}

now, it’s your turn!

If you’re a blogger, what’s your favorite tip from this post? And if you aren’t a blogger, what are some things you wish bloggers would do more or less of?