Blogging is an excellent way to share your passion, whatever it is. If you’re an individual, writing a blog is kind of like writing a newsletter about your life. You become more thoughtful and, therefore, more aware of what’s going on in and around your life. As a business owner, a blog is one of the best ways to keep in touch with current and future clients and customers. Your blog is your incentive to reach out more often. It’ll be easy to promote upcoming activities and special deals.

A blog is born.

In December of 2017, I moved from SW Florida to Raleigh, NC. Ballroom dancing had always been a big part of my life and I didn’t want to give it up. Even though I wanted to stay in the dance industry, I’d made a commitment to take care of my baby grandson, Logan. It would have to be something that I could do while he napped and after he went home. What about a ballroom dance blog? It’d be a great way to share my passion for dancing, such as what to expect in your lessons, how to choose an instructor, and more.

Take a look at this recent post, “Practice Partner…It Takes Two to Tango” for a taste of Dance Safari’s excitement about ballroom dancing.

Let’s get started.

After you’ve made the decision to write a blog, the first thing to do is choose a blogging platform. For me, it was an easy choice to go with WordPress because bloggers highly recommend it. In addition, there are a number of different plans to choose from, even a free one.

Dance Safari began its journey with the Premium plan. However, I soon upgraded to the Business level. The Business plan offers the ability to add plugins (which enable customization) and it has advanced SEO monitoring. It makes it easier to write better content.

WordPress makes it a cinch to get your blog up and running because it offers such good customer service. You can see a list of the benefits that come with each different WordPress plan here.

What’s next?

Next, choose a domain name.  Then, if it’s available, purchase the rights to the name and pick a WordPress.com hosting plan.  As soon as you do that, you’ll be ready to prepare your first post.

Share your passion when you blog using these 4 tips.

These items all pertain to the overall appearance of your post.

1. The presentation of your content is an important aspect of your blog. Do a little research about the best style for your blog posts.  WordPress has lots of different themes (or styles) to choose from. There are plenty of tutorials online. Just check out a few and get an idea of what works for other bloggers.  
2. Grammarly.com is a free writing assistant that checks grammar and spelling.  Additionally, a plagiarism checker is available with Grammarly Premium.
3. A thesaurus will be a life-saver. You’ll find that it’ll help develop your vocabulary. To be sure, it’s very distracting for the reader to see the same word over and over again. Dance Safari uses https://www.thesaurus.com.
4. You’ll definitely want to insert media into your post. But, keep in mind that you can’t just put anything you want in there without permission from the creator/owner.  

It’s time to learn about the Creative Commons license

Wikipedia says, “A Creative Commons license is one of several public copyright licenses that enable the free distribution of an otherwise copyrighted “work”. A CC license is used when an author wants to give other people the right to share, use, and build upon a work that he or she has created.”   Here’s the link to get to Creative Commons (CC) search, https://search.creativecommons.org/ to look for pictures, videos, and music.

One more thing to keep in mind is that using social media is an excellent way to get more readers. And, that’s the point, isn’t it? Ultimately you want to share your passion with the people who support you. With this in mind, be faithful to self-promotion. To be sure, it’ll help you grow your business. Above all, be proud and share your gifts with the world.