Are you looking for an easy guide on How to Start a Blog? In this article, I will show you and guide you step-by-step on how to create a blog in 30 minutes with just the most basic computer skills.
If you follow those steps then after completing this guide you will have a beautiful blog that is ready to share with the world. This guide is made especially for beginners.
First of all, there are other blogging platforms out there like Blogger and Tumblr. But every serious blogger uses a self-hosted WordPress site because of its creative freedom and flexibility.
If you are a beginner then you can use Blogger or Tumbler. These are free platforms and the Blogger is from Google, so it somehow helps you to rank. But you need a good domain name to start. We will discuss this topic later, So stay tuned.
1. Select a niche for your blog
To start a blog, you have to select the right niche for your blog. Selecting a niche is very important for a blogger. If you are thinking about What is a Niche and how it helps, just read this carefully.
A lot of beginners do not know about niche and how to select the perfect one. A niche is a particular subject or topic, like Space, Health, Food, Beauty, SEO, Travelling, etc.
Before selecting a niche, make sure to pick a niche that you are the most interested in and the one you are passionate about. Check and make sure it has enough audience interest on that niche or topic. People should search those niche related topics on search engines.
Also, check the size of your selected niche, get the knowledge of the competitors of that niche, and analyze the monetization potential.
This way you can start a successful blog and this can help you to find the right active readers.
2. Pick a domain name and hosting
Selecting a good domain name is very important. It also helps in ranking factors. Your domain name will be the name by which you will be known online, no matter what niche you choose. It is your blog’s unique address on the Internet. And your domain name should be the “dot com,” or it may be country or niche-specific.
Users who know the domain name can simply type it into their browser’s address bar and visit your blog. And the others, who do not know will be able to discover your blog through search engines such as Google and Bing. So you definitely need to find a unique blog name and domain name.
After selecting the domain name, the next step is to select a good hosting provider for your blog. A hosting provider allocates space on a web server for a website to store its files and data. And the amount of space allocated on a server to a website depends on the type of hosting you selected and depend upon the plan you selected. The main types of hosting are shared hosting, dedicated hosting, VPS, and reseller hosting.
Before purchasing any hosting plan, you should check the features they provide and do check that the hosting make sure your blog is available 24/7 for your potential readers. Also, most hosting companies will also provide you a free domain for the first year when you buy their services.
The wrong web hosting can cause many problems with your blog. So select your hosting carefully and do check the review of the hosting provider before purchasing any services.
If you do not want to start a self-hosted blog and want to start with blogger.com then you do not need any hosting. Blogger does not require extra hosting, Google host everything on their servers of the contents of your blog.
3. Starting a blog on WordPress
There are some free blogging platforms but, If you are serious about blogging, the free blogging platform is not a way to go. There are many cons and limitations of a free blogging service like traffics, limited monetization, customizations. So I always advise others to start on a self-hosted blog, like WordPress.
If you use WordPress, you will have no limitations related to your blog content. Your blog will look more professional, better looking, and can be improved later on.
There are more than 82 million active users of WordPress. WordPress is one of the biggest blogging platforms in the world, with countless plugins and add-ons and almost infinite ways to design and layout your blog.
WordPress is the best option for a blogger because it is open source (free to use), it is very flexible with a lot of free and premium blog themes, it has a large developer community and they update and improve WordPress regularly, and most importantly, you will have full control over your blog.
4. Select a theme and design your blog
When you set-up and link your domain with the hosting, you have to install WordPress, and this is a very easy process. Almost every hosting providers provide WordPress and you only need to click install and fill-up the names, email, user name, passwords, etc and after that, you are ready to go.
Once you successfully install WordPress, just go to the main dashboard by entering username and passwords. This is where you can make any changes you want to your blog. Everyone has a different idea of how they want their blog to look. One of the great things about WordPress is that you can change your entire layout and design with just a few clicks.
Inside the WordPress dashboard, under the “Appearance” section, you will see the “Themes” option. When you click Themes, you will be presented with some popular themes. You can click on the WordPress Themes button and search for free themes. There are more than three thousand themes available on WordPress.
Readers judge your content just by looking at your blog’s style and appearance. The first-time readers will notice the overall appearance of it before they even take a look at the content. So select a theme that looks great on your blog’s content and justifies and suit your niche.
A quick guide for you to choosing your theme is to read the theme description. In the description, you will know about the theme and do not forget to preview the theme before selecting, and do not forget to check the rating. Rating of the theme and preview helps a lot to select the perfect theme.
You can also buy premium themes from online stores and easily apply them to your blog just by uploading the theme file. In my opinion, in the beginning, do not go for a premium theme. Because you are not earning from that blog and a premium theme can increase the budget list. So in case you are not able to find the appropriate free theme, then you can buy a premium theme that suits perfectly for your blog.
In case you do not like any part and want to change any color and texture, you can easily customize and design that part into your theme section, and do not forget to design and set a unique logo for your blog.
5. Write and publish blog content
After successfully build and design your blog on WordPress, we are at the writing and uploading step. Before you start your post, you need to make some pages that will describe your blog briefly and create a bond between the visitor and you.
The most traditional page of any blog is the About us page. This page tells new visitors what it is all about your blog, who you are, and why you run a blog about your niche topic.
On the next page, you should create a Contact us page. This page allows visitors to your blog to directly communicate with you. You can add your email address or you can add a simple HTML contact form that visitors have to fill-up. Also, you can add your social media links so that they can follow on them and to contact you easily.
After that, you can write your first blog post. Writing a post is the same as creating a page. In a blog post, you can select categories and tags. I recommend you to write almost 10 to 15 blog posts every month. It would be better if you write a post every day. And make the quality of the content good. Because Quality is everything.
6. Optimize your blog content for SEO
Optimizing your blog content is very important to get traffics to your blog. Search Engine Optimization the process that everyone uses to drive organic traffic to their blog. SEO helps to rank your blog on search engines such as Google, Bing, etc, and helps to send more traffics to your website.
First, you should know how to write quality content for your blog. For that simply follow these tips. Explain briefly your main blog post’s topic and idea. Next, explain simply by just giving an example. The example helps the readers to understand clearly. Last, give a simple way to execute the idea. If you follow and apply these tips to write your blog post, and execute these tips, then you can easily write quality content for your blog.
After that, you should focus on keyword optimization. This is the process of researching and selecting the right set of keywords that people types when they search content on search engines like yours.
After finding the targeted keywords, you should apply those in your blog post. Especially include the main keywords in the headline. Also, do not forget to write attractive SEO friendly Meta description tags. It helps a lot in the ranking factor.
7. Start promoting your blog
When you are newly starting a blog, you will not get visitors easily. Doing SEO takes time. So creating a well-designed blog and writing great content is not enough to start getting visitors. In order to get visitors to your blog, you will need to spend some money and time to promote your blog, especially in the beginning.
At first, you can tell and inform your friends to read your blog. This way you do not need to spend money, But you have to invest your time. You can also submit your blog to search engines. You can submit your blog’s sitemap to Google to crawl the pages of your blog.
Also, you can start promoting your blog by writing guest posts. A lot of websites offer guest posts. You can write and publish content on other’s famous websites. This can help you to get good active readers to your blog. Guest posting is an excellent way to build an online presence.
You can also add a newsletter and do email marketing to bring back your readers to your blog. When the visitors enter their email address, you can email them and inform them easily about your new blog post. This is a very effective way to bring back your lost visitor.
Lastly, if your budget is big, you can use paid promotion. There are different types of paid promotions. You can approach influencers. Also, you can create advertisements and start campaigns with the help of Adword and Facebook ads. This is a very effective way to drive traffics to your blog.
8. Make money by blogging
You can start making money from your blog. You can apply for Google Adsense and when they approve your blog, you can show the advertisement on your blog and make money.
For that, your content should be unique and your blog design should be clean, attractive, and user-friendly. You can also use other advertisement agencies to show ads on your blog such as Mediavine, Adthrive.
You can also start making a huge amount of money just by doing affiliate marketing. Affiliate programs are ways of promoting other’s products and generating benefits from successfully carrying out sales through a commission. You can also sell your product and service if you offer anything.
You can sponsor other brands and write posts on them to make money. Those posts are called a sponsored posts and those posts usually promote advertiser products or services and this a good way to make money from your blog.
Conclusion
You should keep in mind that blogging is not just about making money. It is about creating useful content and writing blog posts that will attract readers and make them come back for more.
In the future, if you are able to build a popular blog and become an authority in your niche, the advertisers could approach you to publish their posts. For that, you need visitors. So, keep improving your blog content and post quality content to help others. Do not stop posting and doing the SEO properly can help you to make your blog popular.
I hope this tutorial helps you and I think you understand everything clearly. If you get stuck or have any questions about this tutorial, just leave a comment below.