Writing has been used as a method of communication, meditation, and entertainment for thousands of years, but only recently has it been so accessible to the vast majority. No longer do you need a publishing deal if you want to spread your work and share your ideas. With the power of the internet it’s possible at the click of a button.
The internet has changed the world in more ways than we can imagine, and many seniors aren’t taking full advantage of these improvements. It can be challenging to learn a new technology later on in life, especially the more technical parts of it, but by using a few simple tools, you can make blogging as easy as using Microsoft Word or Apple Pages.
For a senior, this can be a fantastic way to spend your time, and with a little guidance or the help of a friend or family member, you can get set up in only a couple hours. Once the initial setup is done, it’s as easy as typing and clicking publish, which is why thousands of seniors across the globe are using blogging as a hobby to keep their minds active, communicate with like-minded people and give their opinion on current events.
What is Blogging?
For those who are unaware, blogging is a form of first-person writing where you share what you think on a website of your own. People might talk about their interest in fashion, their favorite sports team, politics or anything else you could imagine. Those who are interested in the same subject often run blogs of their own and might communicate with you through a comment on your article.
Blogging is almost like your newspaper column where you can discuss anything that you please, and instead of followers having to write in their replies, they can post them online. There is a range of different blogging platforms that you can sign up for including WordPress, Blogger and tens of others.
These platforms will give you your free website so that you can get started at no cost. Should you wish to advance from this point, you can get your domain name, but that’s not important for now! Using these simple platforms, it’s possible to get started in under an hour, and you can even customize how the web page looks if that’s interesting to you.
People who are interested and want to follow what you’re writing will be able to type the website into their computers and see your writing and pictures from anywhere in the world. For seniors, this can be a fantastic hobby to keep your mind sharp and to give you interaction with others who care about the same topics as you.
Why Should Seniors Start Blogging?
Writing has been shown by many to be a fantastic form of meditation which can help to keep the brain stimulated and allowed the writer to share their thoughts and thereby improve their mental health. For seniors who are struggling with loneliness or other mental health challenges, this can be a great start to improving your happiness and wellbeing.
Beyond that, writing has been used for centuries as a hobby because it’s incredibly simple and enjoyable, especially since you know that other people will get to read your work. As a senior who is no longer working it can be fantastic to take up writing as almost a second career where you feel that you might have an impact on the thoughts of those who are reading your blog.
Many seniors who are at home alone spend much of their day sitting in front of the television or resting in bed, both of which are great in moderation, but which can be overused. Writing a blog is a tremendous way to direct some of that energy into a hobby that will keep the mind stimulated and sharp, which has a wide range of health and lifestyle benefits.
WordAgents Review: How to Start Blogging
Starting blogging shouldn’t be hard, but many people often overcomplicate the process and as a result never end up starting writing as a hobby. To simplify the process, it’s best to use a dedicated blogging platform which is specifically designed to allow people such as yourself to write with no technical expertise or effort.
To create a blog on these platforms, you will only need an email address to sign up with. Once you’ve created an account, you can customize the way that your blog looks and then begin writing. The most highly recommended blogging platform is WordPress because of its simplicity and customizability which allows you to make the page look however you please.
WordPress for Blogging Simply
WordPress is the ultimate blogging platform for seniors because it has a large and intuitive interface which is easy to navigate. WordPress uses what they call ‘themes’ which are website templates. You can pick from thousands of themes, all of which look different, to decide how your website looks with no more effort than a single click.
Unlike a traditional website which would require you to have some technical expertise to adjust the style of the page, the ‘themes’ of WordPress make it instantaneous. Once your blog is the setup, you can create posts in seconds, which can include as many words as you please as well as images, photos and videos from YouTube and other video platforms.
BuzzSumo for Content Ideation
The second tool which can help seniors tremendously with their blogging journey is BuzzSumo which is an online popularity tool that can show you which pieces of content are the most popular. It works by giving you a search box to type a phrase into, and it will then return the most popular web pages related to those terms.
The reason why this tool is useful is that it gives you a huge list of potential post ideas with little effort. It can sometimes be hard to know what to write about, let alone what types of content people seem to enjoy reading. According to the WordAgents Review from Vincent D’Eletto, BuzzSumo takes the stress out of content ideation by giving you an insight into directly what content is the most popular.
It’s able to do this by looking at social media platforms and seeing how much engagement each webpage gets. They then total the Facebook likes, Facebook shares, Twitter retweets and other social media signals to figure out which articles are the most popular of all so that they can rank them and show them to you.
Evernote for Writing Wherever You Are
When it comes to writing, you can’t always be on your laptop or desktop computer when inspiration strikes. Sometimes you may be at the dining table, in the park or with a friend or family member at their house for dinner. In these cases, it’s useful to be able to write on your tablet or mobile phone, which is possible using Evernote.
Evernote is the most advanced note-taking application on the market, and it automatically transfers your work from your laptop to your cell phone and tablet. This means that no matter what device you use to write on, your work is available wherever you are.
Unlike many other note-taking applications, Evernote is developed to give you an elegant and simplistic interface that allows you to write full articles rather than just bullet point notes. For a new blogger, this is incredibly useful because it allows you to write wherever you are and then transfer those words to your blog once you return to your laptop or desktop computer.
CoSchedule’s Headline Analyzer
Writing the article itself is only part of the job, you’ll also want to ensure that you use a catchy title that will entice people to read what you’ve created. If you’re going to share the post on social media, which is highly recommended to increase your readership, the headline is particularly important because it will be shown to people on Facebook and Twitter.
The CoSchedule’s Headline Analyzer allows you to input your current title into their software, which will then score it and give you suggestions as to how you can improve it. By following their recommendations, you can create a superior title that will bring in more readers to your blog.
Yoast WordPress SEO Plugin
Google, Yahoo, and Bing have one thing in common; they use a complex algorithm to give you the results that you’re looking for when you complete a search on their website. Search Engine Optimization or SEO is the practice of trying to optimize your website so that it ranks higher in these results pages so that more people will come to your site.
As a blogger, this will help you to increase your readership so that more people come to your website and interact with your articles. SEO is a complicated process but to optimize your posts with little effort; you can use a tool called Yoast which is a free add-on to the WordPress platform.
By using Yoast, you can automatically optimize your existing posts, and it will give you a few extra short text fields to fill-in which can help more people to find your website. Yoast is incredibly simple even for those without a technological background and therefore is the perfect tool for seniors who are new to blogging.
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