My blogging life started years ago with a photography blog. Then came the boys and I stopped blogging on photography. But I found this cute little niche of the internet called Brandreppin. Brandrepping is a fun exchange of your photography skills and your child’s modeling skills for fun products, normally from small shops. It’s a fun hobby that I’ve grown into this blog. I still exchange my photography skills and cute models for products, but now I’m making money from it too. Some of you wonderful brand reps out there have an amazing following. You should totally consider transitioning to blogger.
These are the steps I took to branch off from brand rep to blogger.
- Slowly start integrating your other interests onto your Instagram account. I love green living, food, and healthy everything and now blog on those things. I slowly started adding random food and nature posts onto our rep account. This will help you start gaining followers for your blog with similar interests. These will be your first blog readers!
- Figure out your blog name. You want something catchy and fun. If you can tie in your name or topic, even better. You need to make sure that name is available on Instagram and on the internet. I use Bluehost and love it. You can search on Bluehost for possible domain names. You can start on one of the free blogsites, but you are eventually going to want to migrate to a self hosted wordpress for the SEO benefits and the fact that you own your content. This is wordpress.org NOT wordpress.com, repeat after me .org not .com. So to make it easier, I suggest starting on a self hosting site like Bluehost.
- Change all of your social media accounts, or sign up for the main social media accounts with your new name. Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and Google+ are the main social media outlets. You want a cohesive name across all platforms to grow your following fast. Make a text post on instagram using Word swag or another app and announce your name change and welcome your followers to follow you on other social media platforms.
- Start working on that blog! Find an inexpensive theme on Etsy.com or there are so many free themes on WordPress.org. I suggest a minimal theme. Busy blogs have slow loading times and that will hurt your standings on Google, SEO. Plus a pretty minimal theme makes your images stand out. You download that theme to your hard drive and will upload it into your wordpress dashboard and start customizing. Comment here or DM me anytime, if you need help with the technical specifics. I recently helped another brand rep transition to blogger over at Fit Mommy in Heels.
- After you have your blog set up beautifully, it’s time to start writing posts. Write on what interests you. You will not be paid up front on blogs. You need to build a good foundation of posts that show your writing style. Be informative but be yourself. Tell anecdotal stories that relate to your topic. The minimum number of words your blogs should have is 300. It’s not hard to hit that number, and Google will reward you if you regularly post and hit that word count!
So these are the first five steps I need you to start on while I finish my blogging resource guide. I have a huge list of apps and websites that you should utilize to start growing your following and earning some money!
I’m finishing up a guide right now full of resources that I used to make my first thousand dollars from this blog, sign up below to be the first to get this guide in your email!
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