11 Blogging Tips Every Beginner Needs (Fast Growth)

Most beginning bloggers hit the same wall. They sit down to write, stare at a blank document, and churn out three paragraphs before running out of ideas. Or they go the other direction: they sprint, write 75,000 words in 45 days, and hit complete burnout before they ever see a single dollar. There is a better path, and it runs through a set of practical habits that cost nothing and can be applied starting today.

This post walks through all 11 blogging tips Alston covers in the video above, including the three bonus tips he adds after the official count runs out. Every tip comes directly from the transcript, including real numbers, named tools, and the personal mistakes Alston made so you do not have to repeat them.

What You’ll Walk Out With

A way to keep writing even when you are nowhere near a keyboard
A dead-simple outline method that cuts your writing time in half
Free Google tools that replace every paid writing app you might be tempted to buy
The Income School Project 24 nine-month rule for setting realistic traffic expectations
A writing schedule that prevents burnout instead of causing it
The five W’s framework for covering every question a reader might have
Clarity on which niche you are actually positioned to blog about, starting at finder.platformproof.com

Tip 1: Use Dictation Software

The first tip Alston covers is dictation software, and it is worth more than it sounds. If you have a long commute, work long hours, or simply cannot sit at a computer for a dedicated writing block, dictation keeps you moving. Google Docs has free built-in voice typing. Many smartphones have it built into their notes app. Separate paid dictation tools also exist if you need more precision.

The goal here is not to write your final polished post by speaking out loud. The goal is to capture notes, rough outlines, and ideas in the moments when you actually have them, so that when you do reach a computer, you are not starting from zero. You are working from raw material that is already organized. That distinction matters when you are fitting blogging around a full-time job, family obligations, or a long commute where your hands are not free but your brain is generating ideas.

If you are already a Google Docs user, you can activate voice typing under the Tools menu and start dictating immediately with no extra software required. Pair this with Tip 3 below and you have a complete mobile-to-desktop workflow for free.

Tip 2: Build an Outline Before You Write a Single Word

One of the most common struggles Alston observes in beginning bloggers is not knowing what to write. He traces that back to one root cause: skipping the outline step. Most new bloggers find a keyword, get excited, and start writing immediately. The result is a post that runs out of steam halfway through, drifts off topic, or fails to answer the reader’s actual question.

An outline solves all three of those problems before you write a single sentence of actual content. And the outline does not need to be complicated. Your title goes at the top. Your main headings and subheadings go underneath as bullet points. That is it. Once those are in place, you are no longer writing a post. You are filling in blanks. The mental weight of the blank page disappears because you already know what each section needs to cover.

An outline also helps your word count. When you are writing to a map rather than guessing as you go, you write faster and stay on point longer. If you have never built a content outline before, a quick search for free blog post outline templates will turn up a dozen usable formats. Pick one and start using it on your next post.

Tip 3: Use the Google Suite of Free Writing Tools

Alston’s third tip is to use Google Docs, Google Sheets, and the rest of the Google workspace tools as your blogging infrastructure. These are free, they work on any device with an internet connection, and they sync automatically across your phone, laptop, and desktop without any setup required.

Alston mentions keeping four or five different Google Sheets open at any given time, filled with blog ideas, keyword notes, and niche research. That kind of running reference document is much easier to maintain in a cloud-based tool that is always accessible than in a local file that lives on one machine. When you get an idea at lunch, you open your phone, type it into your Google Sheet, and it is waiting for you when you sit down to write that evening.

For word processing, Google Docs handles everything a beginning blogger needs: writing, editing, formatting, and voice typing. There is no practical reason to pay for Microsoft Word or any other writing tool when you are starting out. The Google suite is free, reliable, and already built for the kind of multi-device workflow that bloggers live in.

Tip 4: Listen to Podcasts and Read Blogs in Your Niche

If you only write from inside your own head, you will eventually run out of ideas. More importantly, you will miss what your target readers are actually asking. Consuming other content in your niche, through podcasts or competing blog posts, prevents both of those problems.

Alston outlines two specific benefits. First, it generates ideas. You will hear a topic covered at a high level and recognize that no one has written a clear beginner-friendly explanation of that same topic. That gap is your opportunity. Second, it tells you where the market is going. If every major voice in your niche is pivoting toward a specific sub-topic or angle, that is a signal worth tracking.

He uses the example of a speaker niche. If every blog and podcast in that space is writing for enthusiasts and audiophiles, but most searches come from casual buyers looking for basic information, you can step in and own the beginner end of the market. You would never know that gap existed without consuming what is already out there. So do not write in a silo. Read and listen to what your competitors are producing, not to copy them, but to find what they are missing.

Tip 5: Outsource Some of Your Writing

This tip gets pushback from beginners who assume outsourcing means expensive agencies. Alston keeps it simple: if you can find a writer whose work you trust and whose rates you can afford, having them produce some of your posts lets you scale content output without burning out on writing everything yourself.

There is also a secondary benefit that is easy to overlook. When someone unfamiliar with your niche writes about it for the first time, they write at a foundational level by default. That is often exactly what your readers need. If you have been in your niche for years, you probably explain things at an expert level without realizing it. An outside writer coming in fresh will naturally ask beginner questions and write from a beginner perspective. Reviewing that content can reveal gaps in your own approach.

Alston acknowledges that this tip is not realistic for every beginner. If you are starting with limited funds, you are writing everything yourself, and that is fine. But as soon as your blog generates any revenue, reinvesting some of it into content production is one of the faster ways to grow output without burning yourself out.

Tip 6: Make YouTube Videos That Point Back to Your Blog

YouTube is the second-largest search engine in the world. Alston’s case for using it alongside your blog is practical, not theoretical. The workflow is straightforward: write a blog post on a topic, then create a YouTube video covering that same topic, and link the video back to your post for readers who want more depth. Two traffic sources now feed the same content.

A viewer who finds your YouTube video and wants more detail follows the link to the blog post. A reader who arrives at the blog post through Google can click through to your video for a visual walkthrough. Both properties reinforce each other rather than competing for the same audience.

If being on camera is the obstacle, Alston is direct about this: you do not have to show your face. Screen recordings, voiceover slideshows, and camera-off talking-head formats all work well for many niches. Some of the highest-performing YouTube channels in educational and product-review categories never show the creator’s face at all. The specific format matters less than showing up consistently in a second major search channel.

Not sure which niche or topic you should actually be blogging about?

Find the skill or subject you are already closest to monetizing at finder.platformproof.com.

Tip 7: Play the Long Game

This is the tip that trips up the most beginners, and Alston is honest about why. Blogging is slow at the start. Not slow as in a few weeks. Slow as in months.

Income School’s Project 24 course, which Alston references in the video, teaches that most blog posts do not reach their peak traffic level until nine months after publication. That is nine months of search engines comparing your content against everything else out there before deciding where you rank. There is no workaround for that process. Writing better content helps. Optimizing for the right keywords helps. But the time component cannot be skipped.

What Alston recommends doing during that nine-month window is looking for short-term benchmarks that signal your site is heading in the right direction. Project 24 builds these into their curriculum: first organic visitor, first affiliate click, first product sale, first month with consistent traffic. These milestones are not incidental. They are designed to give you concrete evidence that the system is working before you can see the full results in your income.

Go in expecting fast results and you will quit at month two when the traffic is still flat. Go in knowing the real timeline is nine to twenty-four months, and you are watching for smaller checkpoints along the way. The bloggers who succeed are not always the most talented writers. They are the ones who stayed long enough for the traffic to find them.

Tip 8: Create a Writing Schedule and Actually Stick to It

Alston shares a personal story here and it is worth sitting with. When he first started blogging, he wrote 75,000 words in 45 days. By the time he hit 60,000 words, he was completely burned out and ready to quit. The output was there. The sustainability was not.

His recommendation for beginners is four posts per week. That pace builds content volume fast enough to matter while keeping you from running yourself into the ground in the first month. As your blog archive grows and you have more established posts to build on, you can scale that back to two or three times per week. The right frequency ultimately depends on your niche and how much original material you have to say.

The more critical variable is not frequency but consistency. A blogger who publishes two posts per week every week for a year will almost always outperform a blogger who publishes ten posts in the first month and then disappears. Search engines reward consistent publishing signals. Your audience rewards consistent publishing signals. Your own creative energy responds better to a sustainable pace than to a sprint that wipes you out.

Build the schedule before you start. Pick your publishing days. Commit to the number of posts per week that you can honestly sustain around your existing obligations. Then treat that schedule the way you treat a work deadline, not a loose intention.

Tip 9: Talk About Your Blog to Anyone Who Will Listen

Most bloggers skip this tip because talking about an unfinished project feels awkward. Alston’s point is not about self-promotion. It is about content research, and it is one of the most underrated tools available to a new blogger.

When you are deep inside a niche, you develop blind spots. Topics that feel obvious to you are genuinely confusing to someone approaching them for the first time. Your non-blogging friends and family members will ask questions you have never considered. That is not because they lack knowledge. It is because they have the same questions your actual readers have, and they are willing to ask them out loud because they do not know the answers are supposed to be obvious.

Every one of those questions is a potential blog post. When a friend asks, “Wait, but how do I actually know if a speaker is good?” that is a search query. When a family member says, “I don’t understand how blogging makes money,” that is a blog post topic. Pay attention to those questions in casual conversation. Write them down.

Alston also notes a mental health dimension here. Blogging solo is a genuinely lonely experience. You are writing by yourself, often at odd hours, with no immediate feedback loop. Talking through what you are building with people you trust gives you an outlet and sometimes produces useful redirections on your niche focus or content angle.

Tip 10: Use the Five W’s Framework for Every Post

Who, what, when, where, why, and how. Alston calls this the five W’s framework (with “how” included), and using it as a final checklist before publishing is one of the more practically useful habits in the video.

The idea is simple. After you finish writing a post, run through all six questions to confirm your content covers the full picture of your topic. Here is how that looks in practice for a post about a budget speaker under $100:

Who is this speaker for? (commuters, home office workers, casual listeners who want background music)
What makes it worth buying at this price point versus spending more?
When would someone choose this over a more expensive option?
Where can they buy it, and what are the shipping and return options?
Why does sound quality matter at this price range?
How does it compare to the next tier up in price?

Alston demonstrates this with a memorable example from the video: a stick of gum. What are its dimensions? Who standardized those dimensions? How have the dimensions changed over time? Are they consistent across every brand of gum? A mundane object becomes a multi-angle topic the moment you apply the framework. The same logic applies to any topic in any niche.

Running this check before hitting publish also keeps you on topic. It is easy to start a post about one thing and drift toward something adjacent. The five W’s checklist pulls you back to the core question your reader actually typed into Google and confirms you answered it before they leave.

Tip 11: Stop Overthinking It

This tip has a blunt delivery in the video and it deserves to stay blunt. New bloggers, especially those chasing passive income, tend to obsess over details before moving forward. They spend two weeks choosing a domain name. They rewrite an introduction five times. They read a post over and over looking for something to fix.

Alston’s advice is direct: write the post, read it once, maybe twice at most, then publish it and move to the next one. Every minute spent refining one post is a minute not spent writing the next post. And in the early stages of a blog, volume and consistency matter more than perfection. A post with 85 percent polish that is live on the internet beats a post with 100 percent polish that is still in your drafts folder.

The domain name example is worth repeating here. Alston points out that some of the most successful companies on the internet have domain names that bear no obvious connection to what they sell. The name matters far less than people think. Pick something reasonable that is in the general vicinity of your niche and move on. Time spent agonizing over a domain is time not spent writing content that actually drives traffic.

Bonus Tip: Make the Blog Reflect Your Actual Personality

Alston goes beyond 11 here because he has more to say and it is worth including. Readers can detect when a blogger is performing a personality that is not theirs. If you are naturally analytical and direct, your writing should read that way. If you try to inject humor into every post because you think that is what audiences want, and you are not actually a funny person, readers will notice the mismatch and trust you less for it.

Authenticity in a blog is not about being emotional or revealing personal details. It is about being consistent with who you actually are across every post. A technical writer covering a dry topic can build a loyal readership. A casual voice covering the same dry topic can also build one. What does not work is performing a style that does not match the writer behind it. Your readers are spending time with your words. They will figure out whether those words are honest or not.

Bonus Tip: Keep Creating Content Until You Succeed

Before you start, define what success means for your blog in concrete terms. One hundred organic visitors per month. The first affiliate commission. A single product sale. Whatever it is, name it and keep publishing until you reach it.

Alston makes a point that sticks: bloggers often quit right before results arrive. They are standing at the edge of their first real traffic bump, and they walk away because they cannot see it coming. The ones who eventually succeed are not necessarily smarter or better writers. They are the ones who kept publishing long enough for the compound effect of consistent content to kick in.

Use the short-term benchmark system from Tip 7 to stay motivated during the long months when traffic is still low. Small wins, first organic click, first comment, first share, are not just noise. They are early signals that the foundation is working. Build on them instead of ignoring them.

Bonus Tip: Take Time Offline Every Week

The final tip is the one that most productivity-focused content drops, and it is one of the more important ones. Take at least one day per week where you are not writing. Light research is fine on that day. But give your brain a full break from production.

Alston connects this directly to the burnout story from Tip 8: 75,000 words in 45 days, exhausted by 60,000. The blog was still there when he came back. The traffic did not disappear because he rested. But the energy he had in week one was nearly gone by week six because he had spent it all too fast.

As a new blogger, you will be excited. The income potential is real and the early momentum is motivating. That energy is useful. It is also the thing that pushes beginners to overcommit in the first month and crash before they ever see results. Build the rest day into your schedule from the beginning, not as a reward you earn after publishing a certain number of posts, but as a structural part of your routine. Your health and your long-term creative output both depend on it.

Honest Drawbacks: What These Tips Do Not Cover

These tips are practical and grounded in real experience. A few honest limitations are worth naming directly.

Outsourcing requires money you may not have yet. Tip 5 is only realistic once your blog is generating some revenue. Until then, you are writing everything yourself. That is completely normal. Tips 1 through 4 carry the weight until outsourcing becomes an option.

Nine months is a median, not a guarantee. The Project 24 timeline reflects real data from a large student base, but individual results vary. Competitive niches with strong authority sites can push the ranking window out further. Use nine months as a planning assumption, not a hard deadline.

Four posts per week may not be realistic for everyone. Alston’s recommended starting pace works well if you have significant writing time available. If you are blogging around a full-time job and family commitments, two well-written posts per week maintained consistently will outperform four rushed posts per week that stop after six weeks.

YouTube is a second full-time job if you are not careful. Tip 6 is excellent advice for the long run. But YouTube has its own learning curve: thumbnails, titles, video editing, upload schedule. Treat it as a phase two strategy once your blog is generating reliable traffic, not something to launch simultaneously with a brand new site.

Find Your X

Before any of these tips become useful, you need to be writing about the right thing. Not just a topic you find interesting, but a topic where your existing knowledge and experience give you a real edge, and where there is an audience that will read and buy.

The fastest way to find that topic is the free tool at finder.platformproof.com. It asks a few targeted questions about what you already know and helps match you to a niche or skill set that you can actually monetize, rather than spending months writing in a direction with no real market. Start there before you write your first post.

Frequently Asked Questions

What dictation software does Alston recommend for bloggers?

Alston specifically mentions Google Docs’ built-in voice typing feature as a free starting point. It is available under the Tools menu in any Google Doc. Many smartphones also have dictation built into their default notes apps. Paid dictation software exists for higher accuracy or offline use, but the Google Docs option is free, requires no installation, and syncs automatically with the rest of your Google workspace.

How detailed does a blog post outline need to be before I start writing?

Simple is better. Alston describes an outline as the title at the top, followed by main headings and subheadings as bullet points. You are not writing the post yet. You are mapping the structure so that when you sit down to write, each section already has a defined purpose. A five or six bullet outline is typically enough to cut writing time in half and keep the post from drifting off topic.

Is Google Docs good enough for professional blogging, or do I need paid writing software?

Google Docs handles everything a beginning blogger needs: writing, editing, formatting, version history, real-time collaboration, and voice typing. It is free, cloud-based, and syncs across every device automatically. Unless you have a specific workflow that requires features only a paid tool provides, there is no practical reason to spend money on writing software when starting out.

How long does it actually take for a blog post to rank on Google?

According to Income School’s Project 24 framework, which Alston references directly in the video, most blog posts take up to nine months to reach their peak traffic level. Search engines spend months comparing your content against competing pages before settling on rankings. Lower-competition niches can move faster. More competitive niches can take longer. Nine months is the right expectation to build your plan around.

How many times per week should a beginner blogger publish?

Alston recommends four posts per week when you are starting out, scaling back to two or three as your archive grows. The more important factor is consistency over frequency. A blogger who publishes two posts per week for twelve months straight will almost always outperform a blogger who publishes ten posts in the first month and then disappears. Pick a pace you can sustain, and protect it.

What are the five W’s in blogging and how do I use them?

The five W’s framework covers: who, what, when, where, why, and how. Before you publish any post, run through all six questions to confirm your content answers the full picture of your topic. This catches missing information, keeps you on topic, and increases the chance that your post answers every question a reader might have, which is what search engine ranking algorithms reward. Run the check on every post before you hit publish.

Do I have to show my face on YouTube to use it as a blog traffic source?

No. Alston explicitly addresses this in the video. Screen recordings, voiceover slideshows, and camera-off presentation formats all work well in many niches. Some of the most-watched educational and product-review channels on YouTube never show the creator’s face. If being on camera is the thing stopping you from adding YouTube to your content strategy, that barrier does not have to be real.

What should I do when I feel burned out from writing?

Alston’s direct experience here is the most useful answer. He wrote 75,000 words in 45 days and hit a wall at 60,000. His recommendation: build rest into your schedule before burnout arrives, not after. Take at least one full day per week away from writing. Light research is fine on that day. But give your brain a break from production. The blog will still be there. The traffic will still accumulate. Your long-term consistency matters more than anything you publish in a single week.

Sources

YouTube video: “11 Blogging Tips Every Beginner Needs (Fast Growth)” by Alston Godbolt — youtu.be/Idauw0yiAJA
Income School / Project 24 — blogging timeline and benchmark framework referenced in video
Google Docs Voice Typing — free dictation tool available at docs.google.com under Tools menu