like I am a lifestyle blogger. I am a lifestyle content creator. What does that mean? Who are you talking to everyone in the whole world? I've made that mistake before. I don't recommend it. It is very difficult to grow. Because sometimes next to impossible, is so much easier to really hyper focus in on your audience and on a specific topic. And let me tell you what, I had this conversation with someone a couple years back and whenever she had this moment of realization that whenever she was to like really go in on the one topic that she was most passionate about, rather than spreading herself thin in the other areas. It was like a lightbulb moment of like, oh, well if I hyper focus here. Here's all of these other little content pillars inside of that one topic that I can talk about. Because she was starting to feel like it was really constraining her like she was only going to be able to talk about one specific thing and it was going to be really boring. But when you hyper focus, a world of possibilities opens up, let me tell you what I thought we were choosing a very niche down topic for our company, bloggers, we work with bloggers, we educate bloggers, done. You guys. As you know, there are 5.2 a million different things that go into blogging, and there are experts within this niche on certain things. So we learned very quickly that okay, cool, we can't be the expert at everything there is to know about blogging, we can't be the expert in SEO, in Pinterest in X, Y, and Z, all of the things. So we have this podcast, and we regularly bring in experts to come in and talk about the things that I'm not that comfortable and competent and giving you strategy there. So all of that being said, go narrow, you can expand as you go, it's going to make your life and your brand a lot easier to grow to to just flourish by narrowing down first. All right. Once you've chosen, what you're going to talk about who you're going to be talking to who you're going to provide this amazing content that you're so excited to create. We got to choose a blogging platform. Where is this content going to live? Where are we typing in the world wide web, so people can see it, we got to choose a platform that suits your needs. WordPress is one you've probably heard of, it's most popular because it is super flexible, has a bunch of different plugins. There are other platforms like Wix or show it or SquareSpace that are a little bit more user friendly for beginners, just kind of depends on what you're wanting. I love a self hosted WordPress site, it's my favorite option, because it's going to grow with you. And it's so versatile. So that's my suggestion. But we're going to give you in the shownotes in our guide a whole bunch of different options. So you can just kind of peruse, go try some free trials, go test things out for yourself. And see what you want to do is do some like pros and cons on each of the different types of platforms that you can choose. The next thing that you're going to have to do is choosing a domain name, right? What is the name of your brand? What are we going with? Are we going with your name? Are we going with something different? Something creative? I think going with your name has its pros and cons, I think going with a brand name has its pros and cons. So pick something and make your domain name irrelevant. The biggest thing here is right, like whenever you have that idea, like going and saying is this domain available, and then is it available on all of the different social media sites and reserving it on all of the different places, you want to make sure you do that as soon as possible. And that really plays into what you choose your name to be. Whenever I was starting the brand, bossy life CO, which is the host of the let's grab drinks podcast that I referenced earlier. We had such a hard time coming up with that brand name. Because so many things were taken were like, Oh, this is brilliant idea. Nope. Or like, one of the things we finally started to make a game out of it like, Okay, how much do you think this domain cost? I can't even remember how much like the most expensive one was, but it was like multiple, multiple, multiple 1000s of dollars to buy the domain really well that's not happening. So that's one thing to keep in mind before you get too locked in and just too excited about what your domain is going to be. Go and see if it's available first. Okay. And then with that, choose a reliable hosting service. There's a ton out there, we'll link to a bunch of them for you. We use SiteGround. It's one that's worked really well for us for about four years now, five years now, it's been a little while. So we love it. It's worked for us. Alright, so once you have all of that figured out, you figured out where you're going to be blogging, the platform, the domain, the hosting, you're going to use you've picked your audience. Now it's time to I think this was really fun. Put this design your blog, so like, what's your logo gonna look like? What fonts are you going to use? What theme are you going to use? What's your colors? This is really fun. It can be stressful. There's a few different hacks, quote unquote hacks. stuff that you can use. If you are not so savvy in the design area, I went to school for graphic design. So it lights me up. It is so much fun for me. But we'll link to some options for you. If you're like, No, no, no, I need help with this. And I needed on a budget, I got you. So you want to make your blog visually appealing and user friendly, you want to use a theme, and a layout that really reflects your niche and your personality. The biggest thing here is ensuring that it's mobile friendly, and that your site loads quickly. Like I said, this word is so much fun. For me, I'm such a visual person, and I love pretty looking blogs that makes me want to stay and click around. And that's what you want. You want a blog that leads people on this journey and encourages them to like read one blog post, and then oh, I want to read this one, oh, I want to read this one and just click, click, click, click, click, get those page views up, and come back for more. Right. That's the goal. So I do think it's super important that you make your website look freaking awesome. And if design is not your forte, it's okay. Here, there's there's hacks out there. So one of the things is picking a really pretty seam there, we're gonna leave a link to a whole bunch of different sites where you can go and look around for a theme that you can choose and tweak. So a theme is something that you install on your website, and it changes how it looks. Okay, so think of it like the clothes that you put on your body. Okay, it's, it's the clothes for your website. Okay, and so we have to choose what is this outfit that everybody is going to see SN all of the themes have options to change the color, change the font, upload your own logo. So that's good and exciting, you can tweak them all to make them match your branding. And we've got several companies that sell really cute ones that we'll recommend. And we'll link them all for you in the show notes. So there's things out there to help make it super easy for you. Once you've got it all design, then you're like cool, I think I'm ready to hit publish, I think I'm ready to send it out into the world. Hold, hold on, hold on, hold the horses, grab them back, pull them back in, there's one crucial thing that I want to make sure you do. And that is legal compliance, we need to make sure that your blog complies with legal requirements, such as having a privacy policy, a disclaimer, and adhering to copyright laws, we want to make sure that nobody else can steal your content as well. So making sure you've got all of that, I love to include it all in the footer. So it's on every single page. So you want to make sure you have all of that in place for you. You also want like a cookie policy. And there's a whole bunch of different like little legal things. The good news is, you can kind of set them up and forget about them. It's kind of exciting. The only thing you really have to do is like if something new comes out and you need to like update it. Usually a lot of people will talk about it, including us. So make sure you're a part of our newsletter paying attention to our blogging community over on Facebook, we'll let you guys know if there's something that we think you need to add to your privacy policy. Otherwise, at the start of the new year, you just need to go in and update the date at the bottom of your footer, bottom of your website. We'll link to all the things all the different policies and stuff that you need to have in place to be legal.