Do you want to start a blog?
In this guide, we will take you through a step-by-step process to create a blog or website using WordPress.
If you are a beginner with no experience don’t worry!
We will guide you to this entire process thoroughly so that you can easily create your blog.
Quick start blogging guide
If you already have a blog idea and decided the blog name and just want to start?
Open Bluehost and register for the basic plan for just $2.95 per month with a free domain name. This is a three-year plan and it is the best deal out there.
Bluehost is the best blogging platform and recommended by WordPress. Your blog will be up and running within few minutes.
After creating an account in Bluehost you have to create your website. Follow the below steps:
1# Install WordPress – WordPress is the best platform to build a website. You can install WordPress in your Webhosting with just one click.
2# Choose Theme – Install theme to your website. The look and design of the website is defined by the theme.
3# Post blogs – Now your setup is done and you can start posting the articles.
Post articles on regular basis and get readers to your blog. To make money using a blog you need visitors and customers to your website. Try to get more traffic to your website. There are a lot of ways to make money using your blog. We can discuss that later.
Now let’s see the entire process of blog creation step-by-step in detail.
These are the steps you need to follow to start a blog. If you follow the steps exactly, your blog will be setup within 30 minutes.
Steps to start a blog:
- Choose your blog topic
- Choose a blogging platform
- Register domain name
- Get a webhosting
- Install and setup WordPress
- Configure WordPress
- Choose a design or theme for the blog
- Customize theme and add logo
- Install Essential WordPress plugins
- Add essential pages
- Add social media
- Plan your blog content
- Write your first blog post
- Add image, graphics, and video files
- Launch your blog
- Setup Google analytics for tracking
- Drive traffic to your blog
1# Choose your blog topic
You have decided to start your blog. But before creating a blog you have to decide on a topic or niche in which you are going to create your blog.
You can create a personal blog or any niche blog to make money. You have to decide first why you want to create a blog? And on which topic you want to create a blog?
If you have already chosen the topic then you are good to go. But a lot of people are confused, they want to start a blog but they don’t know which topic to choose. If you choose a topic in which you are not interested then you will be bored working on your blog for a long time.
Remember choose a topic in which you are passionate and you have an interest in that topic.
Lot of ideas comes in your mind but not all are worth. You can use some techniques to come up with a topic.
Here are some ways using that you can find your niche or topic. Do a brainstorming on the below-mentioned points and take a note of the topic that strikes in your mind.
- Choose a topic in which you have knowledge. It can be anything which you know better than other people. The topic you can talk about and teach other people. For example, gardening, language etc
- You can create a blog in your interest or hobby. For example football, chess, photography, or gardening.
- See different objects around you and think if any idea strikes your mind. Explore around your house and locality. Most people explore the internet to find the solution to their problem so try to solve the problem in your blog.
- Check your daily life what all the things you are doing daily, what problems you are facing in day today life and see if you can solve that problem.
- Go inline and explore ideas. Check the blogs which you are reading regularly.
Using the above steps you could have come up with some topics for your blog post. If you still don’t find any topic then don’t worry we will provide you a list of blog topics from which you can choose any topic according to your interest and passion.
2# Choose a blogging platform
Once you decided on your blog topic now it’s time to choose the blogging platform. There are many blog platforms available such as WordPress, Blogger, Tumblr, medium, Wix etc.
Most of the beginners do mistake while choosing a blogging platform. According to kinsta.com, 38.8% of all websites on the internet uses WordPress.
Around 93% of bloggers use WordPress for blogging because it is free to use. WordPress is very easy to use, you can install WordPress in 1 click and you will get thousands of free themes and plugins.
Self-hosting or free hosting?
Many beginners thought of starting a blog using free blogging platforms such as blogger.com, wordpress.com, or tumblr.com.
You may not know that these free platforms are having their own limits and ristrictions. Your blog domain name will be a sub domain for example yourname.blogger.com or yourname.tumblr.com.
The second thing is that you are not the owner of your blog as blogger.com or wordpress.com is hosting your blogs and they can delete your blog anytime. You don’t have control over that. So all your handwork will be deleted anytime.
If you want to do blogging seriously then it is recommended to take your custom domain name and webhosting.
Buy your domain name and web hosting. Install the content management tool WordPress.org to run your blog and start blogging. This way you will be having full control of your blog. And this is the right way to do it.
Why WordPress?
There are lot of good reasons why you should choose WordPress.
- WordPress is free and open-source.
- It is highly customizable and any type of website you can build.
- Very easy to use.
- Lot of themes and plugins available.
- You will get full control of your website.
- Does not require special skill to manage WordPress website.
How much domain name and Webhosting will cost? It will cost less than $5 monthly to host a website. Continue reading for complete details in below sections.
3# Register domain name
The domain name is the name of your website. To visit your blog this domain name will be entered in the browser. It is known as the URL of your blog or website. For example. www.google.com
Domain name will be unique and you are the owner of this domain name.
First, you have to come up with the domain name idea and check if that domain name is available or not. While choosing a domain name consider few points:
- Domain name should be catchy and easy to remember
- Make a domain name within 8 to 12 characters
- Pick a domain name that can be easy to brand
- It should be easy to pronounce
Always consider buying a .com domain name. If you are making a blog for a specific country then you can buy a particular country domain for example .au for Australia, .in for India.
You can buy cheap domain name using domain name registrars namecheap, Godaddy, Domain or Hostinger.
Companies are selling domain name of .com, .net, .co etc. The price of a domain name ranges from $10 to $20 per year whereas preregister, popular or commertial value domain names are expensive.
Some of the companies are selling cheap domain names so compare the price in different domain name registrar websites. You can buy domain names from namecheap.com. godaddy.com, domain.com, siteground.com, and bluehost.com
If you want to get a free domain name then skip this step and go to next.
4# Get a Webhosting
Once you select a domain name, now it’s time to buy a Webhosting. Webhost service is the most important component of any blog or website. Webhost is a server where your website is stored and accessed from all over the world.
If webhosts goes down then your blog will not work. As your blog is hosted in a Webhosting company server, your website performance depends on them.
You have to make sure to buy a reliable Webhosting service. The Webhosting company will make sure that your website is up and running 24X7.
Most Webhosting companies provide free domain names with hosting services.
I am personally using Bluehost to host all my blogs as it is recommended by WordPress. I never faced any issue and I am highly satisfied with the bluehost webhosting services. I am suggesting you to buy Webhosting from Bluehost.
You will get 60% off on bluehost webhosting and a free domain name. So you can save lot of money.
What you will get?
- Webhosting $2.95/month
- Free Domain Name
- Free SSL Security Certificate
- One Click WordPress Installation
- Free email address (yourname@yourdomain.com)
If you don’t have any budget problems then definitely go for long term Webhosting plan.
Follow the steps to buy web hosting and a free domain name:
- Open Bluehost in browser and click on Get Started button.
2. In the next screen selects the plan that you want to purchase. The most popular plans are Basic and Choice Plus
3. On this screen, you have to enter the domain name of your blog. Here if your domain name is not available then try some combination or pick from the suggested domain name.
This domain name you will be getting free of cost.
For the available domain, you will redirect to the next page. Here you enter the Account information and package information. We recommend you to select the 36 month as it the best price and save a lot of money.
Scroll down to the Package extra section. Here some other services are available which are already selected. We recommend you remove these options for now. It is up to you if you want to buy it now. You can buy them later if you decide to buy any of the services.
Scroll down, enter your payment details and complete the purchase. You will receive an email from Bluehost related to purchase and details to login to your Webhosting cPanel.
Now you are the owner of custom domain name and Webhosting and you are ready to start your blog.
5# Install and setup WordPress
After completing the process of buying web hosting and domain name you have to install WordPress. It is very easy to install and most web hosting companies provide one click WordPress installation.
Follow the below steps to install WordPress:
- Login to your Bluehost or your webhosting account.
- Click on the WordPress button on the top right side of the screen.
- WordPress installation will start.
- After WordPress installation, you need to set the username and password for your blog.
If your hosting service does not provide one-click WordPress installation then you can do manual WordPress installation.
6# Configure WordPress
After WordPress installation, you have to configure your wordPress blog. For that, you have to go to your WordPress dashboard. Follow the below steps to configure:
1. Open your blog admin page in a browser. To do that enters yourdomain.com/wp-admin in the browser. Replace your domain with your domain name you got from Bluehost.
For example. https://www.yourdomain.com/wp-admin
2. Some basic settings you can do before going to the next step.
Goto Setting > General and Site title and Site tagline
In the General setting change the Bluehost coming soon option to ON.
3. Goto Setting > Reading and uncheck “Discourage search engines from indexing this site”.
4. Goto Settings > Permalinks and choose the option “Post name”.
Permalinks: A permalink is the full URL of the post, page of any blog. It starts with the domain name followed by the post title or whatever name you want to give for the post.
There are lot of other settings also there but these settings are enough to start.
7# Choose a design or theme for the blog
For designing your blog you don’t have to learn graphics and html, css or programming. WordPress provides thousands of themes to download and install directly to your blog.
A theme is a group of files that collectively shows the overall appearance or look of any blog or website.
Here are some to the best and high performing themes:
Themes are available in different designs, colors, Layouts. There are thousands of free and paid themes available for WordPress. You can choose any of the themes according to your business and niche. For example, if your blog is related to fashion you can install a fashion theme.
- Goto Appearance > Themes to open themes page, here you can see a lot of themes are there. Explore the themes and see the popular and latest themes and choose anyone. You can search the theme based on your niche.
2. To install the theme click the install button on the theme
3. After installation Activate the theme by clicking Activate button.
You can install and see multiple themes one by one to see which ones look good for your blog.
8# Customize theme and add logo
Once you have installed the theme now you need to customize the theme according to your blog. You have to enter the blog name, add logo, and various other settings.
Goto Appearance > Customize to open theme customization page
Here you can see your blog on the right side and a lot of options on the left sidebar. You have to do the changes for most of the settings of the left sidebar. These options vary depends on the theme.
In site Identity, you have to enter your blog name, tagline, and upload the logo.
You can create your logo using the free tool available online. But if you are serious about your online business then you can go for a professional logo design. You can get a custom logo designed by a professional logo designer for $5 from Fiverr. Professional logo designs build your brand and help to grow your business.
Complete other settings Colors, Headers, Background, Menus, and Widgets. If you don’t want to do all the settings then also it is fine. You are good to go for now later you can do more customization after publishing several posts.
9# Install Essential WordPress plugins
Now you have to install some of the essential WordPress plugins. A WordPress plugin is a small software that provides some additional features which enhance the WordPress functionality. You will come to know more about the plugins once you start using these plugins.
There are thousands of plugins available in WordPress for adding additional features to your WordPress blog. Most of them are free plugins and also paid plugins are available with advanced features.
Here is the list of essential WordPress plugins:
- Yoast – Yoast WordPress plugins is an SEO tool that helps to optimize the content of the website and make it Google-friendly and readable. Based on the focus keyword for a post it will give suggestions to improve the content of the post.
- WP Rocket – This is one of the best WordPress cache plugins. Using this plugin you can speed up your website and its performance. It is easy to use and any non-technical person can easily use it.
- Insert Header and Footer – To integrate with other products or services sometimes you have to add code snippets to your header or footer. Using this plugin you can add the code without editing your theme header files.
- Contact form 7 – Using this plugin you can create a contact form for your blog visitors.
- Smush– Smush is one of the best plugins to compress the images of the website. It will reduce the size of images by 2X times without degrading the quality of the image.
- Akismet Anti-spam – This is a base anti-spam plugin and helps to stop spam comments and spam contact forms on your website.
- Google xml sitemap – This plugin will help your website to index in Google, Bing, and other search engines. It will create a sitemap of your website that will help search engines to crawl it easily to index.
- Google Analytics Dashboard by ExactMetrics – This plugin will show the google analytics data of your website. This data is displayed in a simple format that is easy to understand.
10# Add essential pages
After your design, you have to add some important pages to your blog. These pages help you with privacy policy, disclaimer, and other disclosures. Add these pages to your blog.
About me – This page shows the details about you and your blog. This is a very important page people usually want to see the owner of the blog and it also builds trust.
Contact Us –On this page, you have to add a contact form with name, email, and message fields. If any of your blog visitors want to contact you then they can fill the details in the contact form and submit. You can use the contact form 7 plugin to add a contact form.
Other pages you need to add – privacy policy, disclaimer, disclosure, and terms and conditions.
11# Add social media
Social media plays a very important role in any blog’s success. Your blog presence should be there on social media. Start creating social media profiles for your blog. Create a Facebook page or Facebook group, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, and others.
Add the social media icons in your blog and blog post. These buttons should be easily accessible so that any reader can share the post on social media. You can use free social media plugins Addthis to add social media icons to your blog.
12# Plan your blog content
Now you are ready to start posting your blog but before start writing you have to have a content plan. You cannot post only 1 article and expecting a lot of readers.
You require ideas for your posts so start making notes on possible ideas around your niche. You need at least 10 to 20 articles in your blog to get readers.
So list out different topics in your niche you feel people love to read. Note down the topics and create an outline of the articles. Once you have a list of topics set an article publishing schedule. Whether you want to publish the article daily or weekly. Use any planning tool or excel to track the progress.
13# Write your first blog post
This is the first time you are writing an article? You will be confused and may be a little depressed. Everything starts with your first blog post. This is the beginning and you can imagine your blog success down the line.
Pick the topic from your list which you know better than other topics. Do your research and create an outline of the content. Remember that your blog post should be interesting and educational. Your aim should be to answer questions, solve the problem and engage the reader.
At the same time, it should be interesting then only a reader will come back again. Make sure you content should be more than 1000 words. While writing you should know about the target audience, for whom you are writing this article. By this way, you will be able to write a focused content which can solve problem and engage the reader.
When you start writing the content write continuously, do not stop in middle to correct the spelling. Just complete the writing with the sentences and ideas striking in your mind. After completion of writing start editing and proofread the content several times until it looks good to you.
Take the help of your friend or hire affordable professional proofreader to make it perfect.
Here are some useful resources for blog post ideas:
- How to Write Your First Blog Post
- 189 Creative Blog Post Ideas That Will Delight Your Audience
- 255 Blog Post Ideas That’ll Tantalize Your Readers in 2022
14# Add image, graphics, and video files
Once the article is ready to thin you can add supporting graphics, images, and videos. If you post an article without any graphics then visitors will spend less time in blog.
Images and graphics are must for a blog in this competitive world. Images will help reader to understand content easily and makes the post longer.
Studies says that post with graphics and images shows more engagment then post without any graphics. Add graphics such as graphs, charts, stats, comparison charts, infographics, and featured images. Etc.
You can create high quality images by your own or hire a professional graphic designer.
How to create high quality images?
Here is the list of tools you can use to create graphics:
- Canva – It is a graphics designing tool which is free to use. No technical skills required. For advance features you can buy canva pro version.
- Pexels – Database of free stock images and videos.
- Snappa – Online graphic designing tool free and paid versions are available.
- Freepik – Graphic resource library where you can find images, vectors, icons and lot of other stuff for free.
Create video related to content and add these graphics in post. You can download free images and graphics from stock photo sites pexels, pixabay, and freepics.com.
15# Launch your blog
Add a catchy blog post title to get more attention from readers. Write 5 to 10 title of the blog then choose one which looks more eye-catching and appealing.
Once your post is ready you can see the preview of the post to check everything is fine. Make sure that your primary keyword is present in blog title and post URL. This helps to rank higher in Google ranking. So once everything is done just hit the Publish button.
Now your blog is launched and everyone can see your blog. Open the browser and enter your blog domain name to check your blog is published properly. Now share your blog post on social media and with your friends.
16# Setup Google analytics for tracking
Once your blog is launched then after that you need to analyze your blog to see, how many visitors are visiting your blog? who is visiting your blog and what content they are reading? From which location more visitors are there? All this data Google analytics will provide for free. So create an account in Google Analytics and link it to your blog.
So whenever anyone visits your blog Google analytics will record the details. After a couple of months, enough data will be collected from Google analytics which you can use to optimize your blog.
Google Analytics will show how much traffic you are getting, from where traffic is coming, visitor demographics, and many other useful data.
17# Drive traffic to your blog
Traffic means visitors to your website. The more visitors you get the more revenue you will generate. You have created a good blog with a lot of informative and interesting content, excellent design but you don’t have visitors. You cannot make money with your blog if you dont have traffic.
After creating your blog you need to work on generating traffic to your blog. Visitors should find your content through search engines, social media, and other means. The traffic should be high quality and targeted. You need more traffic to your blog and also increase in engagement means visitors should spend more time on your blog.
Google search traffic is the most important traffic source. It an organic traffic source, if someone search on google for some topic related to your blog then your blog should display in the search result. To display in search result your website should be indexed by google. For that you have to create a sitemap and create account in Google search console. Google search bot will crowl to your website or blog and index all the web pages. After couple of days your blog will be indexed and start getting impressions on google search.
Start optimizing your blog by on-page SEO and off page SEO to get better rank in google. The ultimate aim is to get the first rank in Google search.
There are different ways to get traffic to your blog:
- On-page SEO
- Off-page SEO
- Email marketing
- Social media marketing
- Directory submission
- Building Backlinks
- Guest post
Here are some useful resources to drive traffic to your blog:
- 11 Proven Ways to Drive Traffic to Your Website
- 7 Proven Strategies to Increase Your Blog’s Traffic by 206%
Implement these points to your blog, after few days or weeks you will start seeing more traffic in your blog.
Bottom line:
Lot of people want to start their blog. They will search on internet how to start a blog and keep on reading and researching. But most of then never start their blog, they will just keep on talking about it but they will never take the action.
But I guess you are not among then. You will take action.
You will read the post and follow the steps to create your blog, write articles, grow your audiance and start make money.
You are not going to wait like othere who will wait days and months for right time. You will start today and work for days and months to build a source of passive income.
If you have any query then please comment below.
Start right now…and build your future.
Don’t forget to Subscribe to our RSS feed, Like us on Facebook, or Follow us on Twitter!”
Related Posts:
