Hello Everyone!
It has been over a year since mycafe101 has been existing, which means it is time to share some experience/tips&tricks with you guys. We don’t have the biggest experience in blogging and we are still learning a lot of things. But we do have a few tips that can help you get started with your own blog. Also we are going to share some of our own experience and lessons with mycafe101 ;)
Choose a name
First, you will have to choose a name for your blog. Be creative and let loose. Let it be personal but it is also important that it is a name that is not too complicated or too long. Keep it simple and easy to remember and easy to write as well.
I gotta be honest with you guys; MyCafe101, is not totally simple or an easy name, but I do not regret the name though. I’m not sure if the name is easy to remember for you guys; it is for me, cause it is personal for me. If the name mycafe101 is simple.. was something I was wondering about later when I took my blogging a little bit more seriously. But I’m not gonna change the name, cause I do like the name MyCafe101 :)
So the name might not be easy to remember in my case, but it is personal. When I started blogging, it wasn’t that serious and I didn’t publish the blog. I just kept it for myself. I just needed a platform to be productive and to explorer and create content and focus on stuff I love. That’s why I came up with the name “Mycafe101”. My own café=platform, where I can be myself, and it will be my 101 place to go to share stuff and create stuff. My own little café.
Pick a domain/host: WordPress & Blogspot etc.
Next; You will have to decide if you want your own domain, invest money on a domain or just a free blog from wordpress or blogspot. I only know wordpress, but I do know that a lot of people do use the other platform as well.
If you want to be serious about your blog I would say go for a domain, but if you are just experimenting and trying it out, then I would not recommend to spend money on a domain immediately. I started blogging on tumblr.com at first, and then I decided to be more serious about blogging and bought a domain. I’ve bought my domain at one.com.I’m still using wordpress through one.com though :)
Layout – Pick a theme
It is very important to have a layout that is easy to understand and that looks good. It doesn’t need to be totally extraordinary but it attracts more traffic if your website looks good. WordPress has great themes that I started using at the beginning but I could never find the “perfect theme” for the blog.
It is up to you what kind of look you want your blog to have; it can be black & white, or colorful, simple or a little “dramatic”. It’s totally up to you. Just make sure that it works; Which means that make sure it is easy for your viewers to click around on your blog.
We’ve bought a theme for mycafe101.com from Pipdig.com. They have some amazing themes for wordpress and also bloggers.com. We’ve chosen af black and white minimalistic style, which is very simple now and we can customize it with sliders and make it look more advanced. At the moment we prefer it being a little simple :)
Content
It is good to brainstorm and have an idea of what exactly you want to blog about, so the viewers can get an idea of what your is blog about, but most importantly so YOU know what you want to do to with your blog. You don’t need to be stuck with the ideas you start off with; We didn’t. We always experiment about what kind of content we want to share with you guys and try to make something differently, if we get bored with doing the same kind of content. It is totally okay to change the content of your blog. The blog is about who you are and what you like, so if your interests or hobbies changes, then the blog will too. :)
We started off with 4 categories; LifeLately, Music, Style & Beauty. Now we also have “Travel” “A Piece of My Journal” “Wedding” and “Motivation”. And we dont regret it. If we ever feel like it is too much, then we will simply just change the content again to make it more “us” :)
Social Medias
Social Media is definitely a must to promote your blog! There are a bunch of different kind of social medias out there: Instagram, facebook, twitter, pinterest, bloglovin, tumblr and probably a bunch of others. We mostly use instagram and facebook to promote our blog. We’ll talk more about these social medias in another post, but you definitely need some to promote and get in contact with other bloggers as well! :)
