Ever wanted to start a lifestyle blog and become a lifestyle blogger, here is all you need to know from my over 8 years of blogging as a lifestyle blogger.

It all started around 2013 when I began to take an interest in blogging. I realized I had a special ability to understand things, I mean common things around us, and be able to teach them to others in an insightful manner. How about I start writing to educate others through my studies of the world around me, so I thought.

After a few years of writing based on my experiences and narrations of others around me, my lifestyle blog, Knowseeker.com has had a great turn into becoming one of the best lifestyle blogs with special mentions on Feedspot and several other blogs. But the journey has not been a very easy one.

In this post, I will show you what my experience has been with blogging, the challenges, and achievements, and how to survive being a lifestyle blogger in a world where there is so much competition.

Important Starter Requirements for a Lifestyle Blog

To become a lifestyle blogger, the first requirement you need to have is your passion to write insightful articles that will add value to your audience. But passion alone will not take you anywhere.

There are important things you need to know about blogging in general and starting a lifestyle blog. Let’s talk briefly about these starter requirements to start a lifestyle blog.

1. Acquire knowledge about blogging and monetization

The first thing you want to do before you start blogging is to understand the blogging environment, what it is all about, and how you can make money blogging. Failure to understand blogging adequately before starting will make you fall for mistakes you could have avoided if you knew better.

For example, after a few months of starting my lifestyle blog, I started unpublishing my old posts to re-edit them because I later found out they were not written in line with industry standards. You could avoid making too many mistakes if you acquire sufficient knowledge about blogging while you prepare to start.

You also want to know about ways you could monetize your content. I started with Adsense monetization which I still use today. The only challenge with this was that Adsense earnings can be very low if your page traffic is still low.

2. Find a niche you are passionate about

It is important to start in a niche you are passionate about. You need as much passion as you can get when starting a blog because oftentimes, you might be the sole author during that time. Thus, to consistently produce good quality articles, you need to be passionate about the niche, and it should be something you can muster with a significant amount of expertise.

3. Understand SEO

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) has changed so much over the years but the basic principles remain the same. You want to create quality articles that meet the needs of search engines and users alike. Your article needs to have enough valuable information and ranking signals that prove its authenticity and credibility.

SEO is a continuous activity, and as my knowledge of SEO changed over the years, my approach to writing also changed, which is why I still find myself revamping some of my articles today.

4. Start blogging

You don’t have to wait forever before you start your blog. You need as much time as you can get. So it is recommended that you start as early as possible.

You might learn some new things as you practice your knowledge but it is always better to start as early as possible than to wait too long in the name of getting ready.

Technical Requirements for Starting a Lifestyle Blog

To bring your blogging ideas to life, you need an actual blog to start creating your content. Below are some technical requirements for your lifestyle blog.

1. Domain name and hosting

A domain name is the name that identifies your website. For example, this website identifies as Omniwrites.com. This is the domain name. However, you also need hosting where you can upload your website files, images, themes, and so on.

In choosing a domain name, you want to use a name that reflects what your website will be about. For example, Omniwrites is a lifestyle blog that focuses on writing a broad category of content in the long run.

There are a host of domain name providers. You can choose anyone based on your budget but I recommend Namecheap or Godaddy.

After deciding your domain name and domain registrar, deciding your hosting is even more important. This is because your hosting determines how many files you can keep and how fast your site can be, especially now that optimizing your website speed is an important SEO tactic.

At Knowseeker.com, we are currently using the Bluehost shared plan which also comes with a free domain for one year. Namecheap also has a similar offer with a free domain for the first year. However, you are at liberty to purchase a domain name elsewhere and a hosting plan somewhere else.

2. Website design

After acquiring your domain and hosting, you want to start designing your site. Your site design communicates how professional you want your site to look. So you want to be intentional about the theme you choose for your site.

Your site’s design covers both the aesthetics of your site as well as other features of technical SEO as you will see below.

3. Technical SEO

Technical SEO involves all aspects of your website’s framework that affect user experience. Remember, SEO focuses on satisfying users in terms of content quality and user experience.

Aspects of technical SEO addressed by your website’s design include speed, content structure, schema, and user experience. By using an efficient code, you can reduce page loading speed and optimize user experience for your site.

The other aspect of technical SEO involves removing errors in your site’s template that can affect search engines’ ability to crawl, index, and rank your site’s content. By using tools like Ahrefs or Semrush, you can audit your sites for common technical errors that can affect your SEO.

Other Aspects of Blogging You Need to Know

1. Publishing niche posts

When you have set up your domain, hosting, and site’s design, it’s time to begin publishing blog posts. For a lifestyle blog, you need to understand what kind of posts you need to publish.

The lifestyle niche is a broad niche featuring different categories relating to our everyday life as humans. Sub-niches in this niche include productivity hacks, DIY tips, relationships, travel, general well-being, friendships, gossip, and so on.

It is not very feasible to write on all aspects of lifestyle by yourself on the same blog. So, you can narrow down to three or four sub-niches and gradually diversify up as you add more authors to your team.

2. Keyword Optimization

Another important aspect of SEO you must pay special attention to is keyword optimization. This is a technique for writing articles that best address searchers’ intent for a particular keyword or keyword cluster.

For a new lifestyle blog, you first need to know how to do keyword research which involves looking for low-competition keywords that are easy to rank for. I personally use the free Ahrefs keyword tool for my keyword research and it has proven to be a very helpful tool.

To use this tool, I insert random seed keywords into the input field and click on “find keywords”. It will show more keyword variants as well as long-tailed keywords with their difficulty and traffic volume. You can get creative with this tool to find more keyword opportunities to write for.

Once you have identified a good keyword to write for, the next thing is to write a well-optimized article for it.

For example, if you type “how to become a lifestyle blogger” into the keyword finder, you will get the keyword difficulty and traffic volume as below:

From the above, you see that the keyword difficulty is easy with a low traffic volume of less than 100. However, this is the kind of keyword you want to target as a small blogger irrespective of the search volume. You want to get your page closer to the first page as possible.

In deciding which keywords to find, you want to look for seed keywords that are related to what your website is about. You don’t want to find keywords ranking for sports content for a relationship blog.

The last very important thing is to ensure you write a well-optimized article for your chosen keyword. This usually begins with knowing the search intent for that keyword. To know the search intent, key in the search keyword on Google to see which titles are ranking for that keyword.

For example, by searching for “How to become a lifestyle blogger”, you can see which pages are ranking for the keywords and how you can write your own title and post.

Another way to find the intent is to think as a searcher looking for information on Google. Ask yourself, what would I be looking for if I search for this particular phrase or keyword? By doing so, you can know what content you need on your post to make it relevant to your chosen keyword.

3. Social media sharing

After creating great content, you want to share it with your contacts and followers on social media. This is a great way to get your initial traffic and to let people know what you are doing.

Sharing your content helps you build your initial audience base until your posts start ranking on search engines and getting organic traffic.

Like me, you can set up automatic sharing on your social media once a new post is published. You can also implement social sharing buttons on your site via which you can easily share your posts across your social media including X, Facebook, WhatsApp, and so on.

4. Email Subscribers

Creating an email subscriber list is also a way of distributing your new content to your audience. You can first implement a subscribe form on your website and send a bulk message to your social media contact list, preferably Facebook or WhatsApp, asking them to subscribe to your mailing list.

This can form your baseline subscriber list until you start getting organic traffic from where you would also get new subscribers naturally.

5. Link building

Building backlinks is described as the single most important factor to demonstrate a site’s authority and ability to rank. It is the process of getting links to your site from other websites.

Link building is also the most difficult part of SEO because it depends largely on the willingness of the other person to link back to you and at what cost. However, central to this willingness is the quality of your article. If you have a very high-quality article, they will be more willing to link back to it than if you don’t.

There are many ways to get backlinks to your site. These include guest posts, link-building outreaches (where you ask for links to your new articles), and so on. However, the entire process of building backlinks can be very difficult and exhausting, especially when you also worry about creating content.

If you have enough money to spend, you can hire an expert in link building who could help you do the work of submitting guest posts, or request links to your site on your behalf.

Final words

Learning about starting and running a lifestyle blog requires continuous efforts and persistence. It may not yield your desired results immediately but with consistency, you will find a way that works for you.

Lastly, focus on delivering good quality content to your audience instead of loading keywords into your articles to rank higher on search engines.

My journey as a lifestyle blogger has not been the smoothest ride. I have had my ups and downs but the joy is that I am not where I used to be, and I am closer to where I desire to be.

For more resources on blogging and SEO, check the following links:

• SEO – What is SEO? Search Engine Optimization Explained
• Linkbuilding – How To Get Backlinks From Big Sites

Happy blogging!