Let me guess, you are thinking of how to start a graphic design blog for your graphic design brand, but you don’t have prior knowledge of what you want to blog about or where you should even begin. Every pro blogger used to be where you are, but not until they knocked off the procrastination and just did it.
Blogging has been around since 1993 and has been transforming lives and businesses to date. At first, blogging was just a means of sharing ideas and expressing opinions on the internet, but today it has gone beyond that purpose.
Blogging could be a life-changing experience for you if you just give it a try. You may not know how much you can achieve with just blogging. Many graphic design bloggers are living their dream lives and earning up to $1,000-$3,000 monthly by blogging, sharing their ideas, and making money through ads and affiliate marketing.
If you want to learn how to start a graphic design blog that will earn you more money than your current job or are tired of the little paycheck clients pay you, then you need to follow the steps I followed.
These steps will help you kick off as a beginner with zero knowledge. It’s a definitive guide from the start to the finish on how to start a successful graphic design blog that will earn you up to $1,000-$3,000 monthly revenue. These aren’t concrete. The figures vary based on your niche and how much investment you have put in.
Blogging and its potential benefit
Blogging has been a very lucrative source of passive income for so many in various industries. It just requires your passion and zeal to want to share your knowledge in the niche you are in. It is your passion for what you want to blog about that will keep you steaming to discover and create more content about your niche.
Blogging will develop and teach you many things that are inside and outside of your niche. It will sometimes take you outside of your industry just to learn about things that will add up to the topic you’re writing about.
So my advice is this: choose a graphic design blog niche that you want to blog about and stick to it until you have truly mastered the ins and outs of that niche. From that point, you can begin to delve further into other graphic design blog niches.
For instance, if you blog about logo design or brand identity design, you can later further your blogging in UX/UI, publishing design, and so on. But always conquer your primary niche first, because oftentimes you will have a gut feeling about your niche when the need arises.
Benefits of blogging
Blogging has so many beneficial opportunities for your online business or brand. Creating a graphic design blog opens doors for many achievements for your brand and also increases sales for your product page. Here are some benefits of blogging you need to know:
Helps you learn online marketing
Running a graphic design blog exposes you to learning, how to sell your graphic design products or assets to customers. Whenever you create logos, posters, infographics, icons, and so many other graphic design assets on your website, your blog will be used as a medium to create awareness and action towards a product that you sell.
Share business news, announcements, and ideas
Graphic design blogs can be used to share helpful content that is invaluable to the audience. You can educate them about the latest industry news, make announcements for new products or services, and share ideas.
When you share relevant and informative content that will solve the problems of your blog visitors, they become interested in your blog and develop an affinity for your blog over time. Thus, having more engagement with your blog, as a result, converts them to leads, and you make money.
Beat the competition in organic search traffic
Your post is equivalent to not existing” when it doesn’t appear above the fold of the first page of Google or any other search engine. To achieve this, your graphic design blog content should be optimized with the goal of ranking on the first page of Google by making the content informative, compelling, and relevant to the searcher.
Allows you to educate customers
Starting a graphic design blog allows you to teach your visitors or audience how to use various products or concepts in graphic design. For instance, you can write a blog post that teaches your users how to create a stunning color palette that will be eligible for their brand by understanding color theory.
If you have a product page, your blog can also be used as an opportunity to make comparisons with your competitor’s products and showcase how much value yours has to offer over theirs.
Unlocks partnerships and opportunities for growth
Blogging introduces you to various industries that will earn you both long-term and short-term business relationships. As you blog your way to the top of your niche, there are times you will need to open deals and create partnerships with brands that share the same goal as yours.
The act of forming partnerships with other brands has so much value for the growth of your own brand. Truthfully, I don’t think there’s any brand that grew stronger without having a network of other brands around it.
Helps you strengthen brand recognition
You want to be recognized, right? You want people to choose your blog or product over those of your competitors. Recognition means people will visit your site more often, therefore increasing traffic, and hopefully, audiences will make purchases, which increases sales.
With your graphic design blog, you can achieve brand fame or popularity when you constantly create valuable content that users would love to ingest. Whether tutorials, podcasts, creative ideas, tips, products, PDFs, etc.
When you create valuable content that has never been read before or products that can develop or enhance the creative lives of other designers, then, your people will see your brand brands to be impactful and will value every information given to them.
We can see popular graphic design blogs and brand examples like 99designs, creativebloq, Smashing Magazine, and Inspiration Grid. You can observe and imitate some of the fashions you like about their blog design and apply them to your own blog.
Earns you a lot of passive income
Owning a design blog can earn you money while you sleep. This is why most bloggers today stay away from work for days without working, yet their bank accounts get more credit. You can make this a dream come true for yourself by simply creating valuable content and products for your blog and watching your business seamlessly earn you money.
Here are some cool ideas you can use to make money with your design blog:
Sell graphic design resources – e.g. PNG, icons, design templates, mockups, and so many others.
Affiliate marketing – Affiliate marketing is like recommending products or services to your friends and getting a reward for it. You promote someone else’s product or service, and when people buy it through your recommendation, you earn a commission or a share of the sale. It’s a way for individuals to make money by helping companies sell their stuff.
Earn with Google AdSense – Google AdSense helps website owners and content creators make money by allowing Google to display relevant ads on their platforms. When people engage with these ads, the website owner earns a bit of money, making it a way to monetize online content.
This is how to earn from graphic designing works using AdSense:
- Publishers: These are individuals or businesses who own websites, YouTube channels, or mobile apps. They apply to join the AdSense program.
- Ad Placement: Once approved, publishers can place Google ads on their online properties. These ads can be in the form of text, display banners, videos, or other formats.
- Visitor Clicks: When visitors to the publisher’s website or viewers of their videos click on these ads or view them, the publisher earns a portion of the revenue generated by those clicks or views.
- Google’s Advertisers: On the other side, there are advertisers who pay Google to display their ads through AdSense. They hope to attract potential customers or viewers through these ads.
Steps On How To Start A Graphic Design Blog
Making sure your graphic design blog is built on a solid foundation is essential because it is from this point that determines how far your graphic design blog will excel. That is why starting a design with a good background setup is a good investment that demands the proper prerequisites discussed below.
Planning and preparation of your blog
Before starting your graphic design blog and letting the world see your amazing blog and the invaluable content that you want to publish, there has to be careful planning on how things should appear.
I mean, the visual aesthetics Remember how your blog appears and says a lot about your brand. So you should make sure that every color, text, image, and texture you apply is compatible with what your brand stands for.
It is preferable that you rigorously map out a skeletal structure of how you want your blog to look when all components have been put in their various places to create the final result—your blog.
You can check out different graphic design blog layouts and see examples of how every part of the blog plays a significant role.
Choose your blogging niche
This is the part where most blogs fail even before they begin. They fail to have a vivid idea of what niche they want to blog about. It is something that bloggers and business owners often overlook completely. No, I’m not talking about the overall design or layout of your blog or even the content that you write for your audience.
I’m talking about the particular section of an industry that you want to blog about. When you want to start a graphic design blog, make sure the niche you want to blog about must be one you have expertise in.
Your choice of niche shouldn’t be made arbitrarily or be influenced by the positive results or the money you think you can make from the industry. When you pick a niche that you are familiar with and write valuable content about it, you will organically start earning from it with less hassle than trying to fit in.
Feeling too skeptical about the niche you should blog about will naturally help you perform well and grow your audience quickly. Here are a few checklists you should tick before you make that decision:
- What are you passionate about?
- Is this niche profitable?
- What kind of strengths do you bring to the table?
- Make sure your niche isn’t TOO niche
- Identify your areas of interest and expertise
- Research the market and audience demand
- Select a specific niche to focus on
Decide on a domain name and blogging platform (pay careful attention here)
Your domain address (www.mywebsite.com), as the name appears, is the unique address users will use as an identifier to visit your blog. as a unique identifier for your blog.
All of your website’s content will be stored on a shared server or dedicated server, so whenever a visitor types in your domain address on their web browser, the domain server will quickly pull up your content from the host provider’s server and deliver it to the user’s browser.
On the other hand, the accessibility and performance in terms of load-time speed, help desk response, and hosting cost of your blog heavily depend on its hosting platform. Your host provider is like your website’s home; it houses all of your website’s contents and files that make your website fully functional. It is advisable to invest in a fast web hosting platform that delivers content incredibly fast.
However, it is your choice if you want to go for shared hosting (good) or a dedicated server (better). They both have their pros and cons.
Here are some great deals on web hosting platforms you can go for:
Bluehost
Hostinger
GoDaddy
SiteGround
Namecheap
Hostgator
Dreamhost
Brainstorm ideas for a memorable and relevant domain name
After choosing your host provider, the next step is to pick a unique name that fits in nicely with your design blog.
Finding a blog name that fits nicely with your design blog can be quite difficult. Sometimes, the domain name you have in mind might have been purchased by another user or preserved as a premium domain name, which costs more to purchase.
If the desired domain name has been taken or is too expensive to purchase, you can use a free domain brainstorming tool to generate the closest term. Here are some online domain name brainstorming tools to use:
Evaluate different blogging platforms and choose one that suits your needs
There are many platforms that you can use to start a graphic design blog. When choosing the best blogging platform for your design blog, you should consider some factors, like the custom-friendliness of the platform.
Does it allow users to create a more personalized blog layout and design, and add CSS to a theme to give it a bespoke look? How much personalization the platform offers is crucial.
Here are the best platforms to use for your blog:
WordPress
Wix
Weebly
Drupal
Square space
Customize your blog’s design
Here is another fun part where things get visually interesting with your blog: deciding how your blog appears is like painting your newly acquired apartment. That’s the same with your blog. You will need to do some painting and apply some visual aesthetics that will make your blog look charming to visitors.
Graphic design Elements like fonts, colors, images, icons, textures, and videos will be used to achieve this. Here are steps to follow to achieve a stellar blog that will look appealing:
Choose a visually appealing theme/template
Themes are used to give your blog a certain look and feel, layout, and features. Themes use templates and style sheets to give your blog the appearance, functionality and features it needs to perform its purpose. WordPress has a lot of themes, both paid and free, for your blog.
Not all themes work well for a certain blog purpose. A theme for a food blog may need special features like a reviews section, a reactions section, and so on to be able to give a better user experience to the visitor. But that same theme won’t be suitable for a news blog.
With that said, you should consider the below checklist before you go down the aisle of searching for a theme to install. It’s important you consider this list of factors:
- Make a list of functions you need
- Decide on your blog’s objective
- Go for simplicity
- Make sure a WordPress theme is responsive
- Check the theme speed
- Check for browser compatibility
- Consider supported plugins
- Compatibility with Page Builders
- Consider customer support
- Think about SEO
- Check the ratings and reviews
Customize the design elements to align with your branding
Remember, branding touches every tangible and intangible part of your brand, and your blog isn’t left out. Clients should be able to feel the visual elements of your brand when scrolling through your blog.
However, when you start a graphic design blog, the design elements (color, fonts, texture, icons, artwork, images, and textures) on your blog should be coherent with every other aspect of your brand they have come into contact with.
Ensure your blog is mobile-responsive for an optimal user experience
Remember when we talked about making sure your blog theme is mobile-responsive? That is a discussion in the context of the theme.
Here we are talking about the blog itself. You should make sure that during the development process, whether you used a page builder like Elementor or you hired a web developer to build your site. You should always consider mobile responsiveness first.
A mobile-friendly blog is a crucial requirement for SEO. In fact, Google prioritizes mobile-friendly websites, stating that it is a crucial factor in keeping your rankings high on the SERP.
Develop a content strategy.
You should have a strategic plan on how to create your content so it reaches your target audience and increases your traffic and sales. Here are the steps you should follow to create a functioning strategy for your blog:
Define your target audience and understand their needs
For any marketing strategy to work effectively, there must be a target audience that the content is aiming to reach. No content will reach its full potential if it doesn’t have a laser-focused target audience that has an interest in the content.
Before you begin creating your content, do market research in your niche or industry and filter the audiences that fall into the category of individuals that will have an interest in what you are creating. Are the audience young, mid-aged, elderly, female, or male? You should run a deep profile of who they are and sort them out thoroughly.
Plan the types of content you want to create (e.g., articles, tutorials, videos)
This is simply choosing the right content that your audience would want to get. After doing your target audience research, you should be able to determine the kind of content that your audience would delight in.
Knowing the platform to find them and the kind of content to give them is how you sell your content effectively. Are they always on the web, YouTube, social media, or podcast channels? This is what research will help you identify.
Create and publish engaging content
Creating engaging content that is invaluable is key to growing your blog’s followers and popularity.
Creating engaging content means that visitors will find your content appealing, and attention-grabbing, want to read more of it, and also want to know more about your brand.
Creating engaging content has some prerequisites you need to meet in order to create a post that is appealing and at the same time invaluable:
Conduct thorough research on your chosen topics
Before writing engaging content for your reader, there is a need for keyword research. Keyword research is the process by which you research a keyword that you want your content to rank for in the search results. This is done by thoroughly finding information like relevance, keyword difficulty, and the monthly traffic the keyword generates.
There are various keyword research tools you can use to find out if you can rank easily for a particular keyword or not. How easy a keyword is to rank depends on the level of your blog’s domain authority.
The rule is that the higher your domain authority, the more competitive keywords you can rank for, and vice versa. A new design blog with no authority and backlinks won’t be able to rank for highly competitive keywords.
Here are the best keyword research tools you can use to find detailed analysis for a keyword you want to rank for:
Keywordsheeter (keyword generator)
Write compelling and well-structured blog posts
Writing a compelling and well-structured blog post involves understanding your target audience and creating a captivating headline.
Organize your content using headings and subheadings, and keep paragraphs concise and engaging.
Provide valuable insights, use visuals, and incorporate storytelling techniques to connect with readers. Include a call to action, edit and proofread your post, and optimize it for SEO.
Format for readability and actively engage with your audience for a strong blog community. Practice is the key to improving your writing skills.
Incorporate relevant visuals (images, infographics) to enhance readability
Sprinkle interesting, relevant visual elements like images and infographics all over your blog post to help readers digest the information better.
It is believed that humans respond to and process visual data better than any other type of data. In fact, the human brain processes visual content 60,000 times faster than text.
That means that a picture is actually worth 60,000 words! Even more, 90 percent of information is transmitted.
Proofread and edit your content before publishing
This is the very last stage of your content-creating process. Proofreading your content means carefully checking for text errors, punctuation, grammar, spelling, formatting issues, and inconsistencies.
You should always check your blog content for these errors before it is published for the audience.
Optimize your blog for search engines
Optimizing your blog for search engines is crucial for the visibility and popularity of your blog and its content. Search engines like Google will be able to access every piece of content on your blog and index it to be able to present it to users who need it.
Here are steps to use to make your graphic design blog visible to Google or other search engines:
Perform keyword research to identify relevant search terms
Identify relevant search terms and phrases that are related to your blog’s content. Use tools like Google Keyword Planner, SEMrush, or Moz Keyword Explorer to find keywords with high search volume and low competition.
Optimize your blog posts with targeted keywords
Incorporate your chosen keywords naturally throughout your blog posts. Place them in the title, headings, subheadings, and throughout the content. However, ensure that the keywords are used in a way that maintains readability and doesn’t feel forced.
Implement on-page SEO techniques (e.g., meta tags, headings, alt text)
Use meta tags, such as meta titles and meta descriptions, to provide concise and accurate summaries of your blog posts. Include relevant keywords in these tags.
Additionally, utilize heading tags (H1, H2, H3, etc.) to structure your content and make it more scannable for search engines. Use descriptive alt text for images to improve their discoverability.
Improve site speed and ensure proper website indexing
Page loading speed is crucial for both the user experience and search engine rankings. Optimize your blog by minimizing code, compressing images, leveraging browser caching, and using a content delivery network (CDN) to deliver your content faster to users worldwide. Regularly monitor your site’s speed using tools like Google PageSpeed Insights or GTmetrix.
Ensure proper website indexing
Submit your blog’s sitemap to search engines like Google and Bing. A sitemap is a file that lists all the page directories on your website, helping search engines crawl and index your content more efficiently.
Additionally, make sure your blog’s pages are accessible by search engine crawlers and not blocked by robots.txt or meta tags.
Promote Your Blog
After content creation, you do not sit and wait for visitors to start visiting your blog. You need to stand up and do some content promotional projects. This way, your content gets to a wider audience faster.
Content promotion could be made through sharing your content on your social media channel, or “paid advertising” using search engine promotional tools, e.g. Google ads.
Leverage social media platforms to share your content
As I said earlier, you can promote your content through various social media channels like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, LinkedIn, etc. Social media promotions are free if want to do them manually by building your fan base, compared to paying to advertise your content on Google Ads.
Social media promotion requires you to have a wealth of followers on your channel to be able to get free visitors to read your content immediately after publishing.
On the other hand, if you don’t have as many followers as a celebrity, you can as well pay for advertisements. The good thing is that some social media promotion costs less compared to Google advertisements.
Consider guest blogging or collaborating with influencers in your niche
Guest blogging is the act of inviting someone outside your company to write a blog post that will be published on your site.
Usually, the act of guest blogging has value. There could be an agreement for link insertion that drives customers from your blog to the writing blog or vice versa, introduces the blog to a wider audience, and ultimately gives the site a boost to your search ranking by acquiring backlinks.
Utilize email marketing to build and maintain an audience
Email marketing is a form of digital marketing that requires the use of your customer’s email list to send a broadcast message to your customers about a new product, a sales discount, an advertisement, a request for business, or to solicit sales or donations.
Email marketing can also be a sweet talk method you can use to educate your design clients about the value of your brand so that they will be engaged with it from time to time and also make purchases.
Engage with your Audience
Engaging with your blog followers is a way to build a long-term relationship with them. When you respond to all their comments and messages and help them get around difficult tasks, they will give you credibility and finally become loyal brand followers.
These are ways you can make your blog followers love your brand more:
Respond to comments and encourage discussions
On every popular streaming channel, social media post, and blog post, there is a common act of engagement that brand owners portray.
They always reply to comments from their audience. Doing this strengthens the relationship and makes the followers feel an affinity with the brand.
Offer incentives for readers to subscribe and join your email list
Customers always want value for their money and time, and it is the job of the brand to provide them with that. You should always have an incentive that will make your blog visitors use your call-to-action button or fill out an email form.
Offer them the value they will receive if they subscribe to your email list. You can encourage them to subscribe by doing a giveaway, a coupon code, or a free course pdf download.
Monitor and analyze blog performance.
After setting up and publishing content on your blog, you will need to set up Google Analytics and the Google search console. These tools will provide performance information about your blog.
Google Analytics will provide you with in-depth information like traffic source, page rank, and other vital information that helps you to understand content performance better.
While the Google search console is a free tool provided by Google to help maintain and troubleshoot your site’s presence in Google search results, it can also give a snippet of content performance. Still, it will also redirect you to analytics for more in-depth analysis.
Analyze audience behavior, popular content, and traffic sources
Analyzing your audience’s behavior is how you study them and know their pain points. Knowing how they behave on your blog will give you an idea of the content that interests them a lot, the most engaged content, and the content that could potentially drive traffic that needs improvement.
You could also know the most popular content that drives traffic to your blog and the location they are visiting by looking at their traffic referrals. It could be from another blog, website, or social media platform.
Use data insights to make informed decisions and improve your blog
After getting all this information, you can use the data to create more engaging content that will bring in more traffic and increase sales. Data insight could inform you why customers aren’t taking much action on your blog.
They might exit your blog so quickly, which is known as (bounce rate) they might not be clicking, scrolling, playing a video, or submitting a form( which is known as (event count)
Monetization Strategies(optional)
This is one of the reasons why most people decided to start a graphic design blog, including myself, I wanted to own a blog so that I could passively earn money as a graphic designer. Monetizing your graphic design blog earns you money by registering for ad placement on your blog using Google AdSense, selling and ad placement space, or selling an affiliate product for a company.
Let’s talk more about it below
Explore various monetization methods (e.g., ads, sponsored content)
There are ways to start a graphic design blog that can earn you money passively. It’s either by placing Google ads in certain key areas of your site or by running personalized ads for a company you know personally.
Google Adsense allows you to place ads in different areas of your blog, and whenever a user clicks on it will get a commission into your Adsense account. This amount of commission given to ads clicked differs from ad companies that pay more or less for their ad to be sponsored on Google.
So, whatever amount they paid Google to display their ads on your website will determine how much of a percentage will be given to you.
Also, this percentage can vary and will be influenced by some SEO factors on your blog e.g. engaging content, user page time on your content, site speed, and Ad relevance to the audience.
Research affiliate marketing and partnerships with relevant brands
Affiliate marketing and partnerships with relevant brands can significantly increase the success of your graphic design blog. Affiliate marketing involves promoting products or services on your blog and earning affiliate commissions for successful referrals or sales.
Start by researching and selecting affiliate programs that align with your niche and brand values. Identify reputable brands that offer complementary products or services to your audience.
Building trust with your readers is crucial. Before partnering with brands, evaluate their credibility and reputation. Only promote products you genuinely believe in and disclose affiliate relationships transparently.
Integrating affiliate links strategically within your content, such as in product reviews or curated lists, can optimize your affiliate marketing efforts.
Develop your own products or services related to your niche
You have to start a graphic design blog to enable you to develop your own products. It’s one way you can earn more money passively. Are there design products you want to sell to your visitors? If there is, you can create a separate sales page for it on your blog where they can easily make a purchase.
As a graphic designer, there are so many product sale opportunities you can use to generate revenue from your graphic design blog, e.g. course, physical merchandise, artwork, templates, mockups, and so many others.