10 Steps to Start a Blog on a Track to Success – 2026 Edition
If you are considering starting a blog, you may find sorting through all the options to get started a bit dizzying.
I know I did.
But after being in the industry for nearly 20 years, there are thankfully many great services and tools out there to get started blogging on the right foot.
So in this one, I wanted to lay out the steps I'd take to start a blog in 2026 that will hopefully put you on a track to success!
- Notes: We recommend reading through this entire list before taking a single step, as many of the steps are more intertwined than sequential. For example, you'll likely want to verify social media handles are available for your ideal brand/domain name before registering your domain, or you may want to publish blog posts before registering with Search Console. Since so many things go hand in hand and could be done concurrently, we need to keep the big picture in mind alongside these focused details. This is why our first three points will focus on developing your blog idea before a single penny is spent setting up a site!
- These recommendations are what we would do if we were launching a professional blog with the intent to build traffic and monetize. You do not necessarily need to do any of these recommendations if you are just pursuing this as a hobby. That said, we still recommend it as these are conventional best practices because you never know what the future may hold.
5 Social Media Conspiracy Theories That Could Have Legs
Who doesn't love a good conspiracy theory?
In the world of blogging, content creation, and social media, there are a ton of them that are, we'll be the first to admit, very outlandish.
But still, many conspiracy theories have some kernel of truth in them, no matter how small (whether we know about it or not!), and that is where things can get rather interesting.
So let's put our tinfoil hats on and talk about some social media conspiracy theories that are out there right now!
Note: These are all conspiracy theories we have heard in passing that, to be clear, are likely nonsense. While we cannot say that any of these are actually true in this reality, given everything going on, we wouldn't be surprised if some elements are more spot on than we realize.
A Blog Caching Setting That May Impact Ad RPM Calculations
After switching my local blog from Mediavine to Raptive in late 2025, I have had a bit of an unhealthy obsession tracking my year-over-year performance in RPMs to figure out if one network performed better than the other. (I have the full data on Mediavine vs Raptive so far here.)
But around March of 2026, something interesting happened- my RPMs cratered from YoY increases of +40-50% to YoY decreases of about 5%.
That is a massive swing which, on the surface, could have some strong implications on network-to-network performance.
But after doing a deep dive into my ad analytics and talking to Raptive directly, we found an interesting setting change that was the most likely culprit here- we switched from WP Rocket to Perfmatters for caching. In doing so, we stopped deferring Google Analytics from loading, and the new setup started tracking a lot of short pageviews that previously were not counted, and our RPM calculation changed dramatically. (Raptive has an article on this, too, and our experience syncs up pretty well.)
It turns out, it likely had little to do with network-to-network performance at all, and was primarily due to a tracking change!
So in this one, we thought we'd break down what we saw, how we figured this one out (assuming this theory is correct, of course), and share a bit about why all of this is important only really if you engage in benchmarking.
How to Refresh Old Blog Posts With Intro Summary Boxes
As part of my push to revive a dead blog, I stumbled upon recommendations to add summary boxes at the start of articles.
In a way, these summaries check a lot of, pardon the pun, boxes when it comes to refreshing old blog content- they can have a few hundred words and be a “substantial” update, they are immensely quotable by AI Overviews and LLMs, you can sneak some affiliate links in for users who may bounce, and, perhaps most importantly, adding them into an article also gives you a chance to re-read old content and do more updates further down the page, too.
So in this one, I thought I'd share more about my approach for using summary boxes to refresh old blog posts!
5 Things to Know Switching a Private Facebook Group Public
In late 2025, Facebook announced that private Facebook groups would have the opportunity to switch to public for the first time.
This was music to my ears, as my private Facebook group had grown substantially in recent years, from just a few thousand followers when I initially switched it to private to over 140k followers at the time of writing this article.
But despite the announcement, the rollout of private groups going public was neither instant nor uniform, and larger groups seemed to not get the option until much later. It wasn't until June 2026 that I had the opportunity to switch my group to public, and after consulting with our own private Facebook group here at This Week in Blogging, I made the leap as the positives seemed to outweigh any potential negatives I was worried about.
So in this one, I thought I would share some observations of what happened after the switch to help those who may be considering doing the same.