Are you confounding how to start a blog? From your should I start? Why do these many people get into blogging? Why people adopt blogging as a profession? If these are some of your questions revolving around your head then you have come to the right place. Here, I will try to give answers to these questions.
Before starting on how to start a blog guide, let’s take a look at some of the advantages of blogging.
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Advantages of blogging
- Blogging provides you with a platform to express your ideas and feelings to others.
- You get paid for it. Many top bloggers earn quite a bit through blogging.
- Also, you could promote your products or services through your blog.
- And most importantly, you could earn some of the fans around the globe.
After knowing some of the advantages, you might have already developed a thought of creating a blog for yourself. But still, there might be few questions bugging you. Some questions might be:
- Do I possess the right age to start blogging?
- How much time and money would it take, to build a blog?
- Can I create a blog by myself?
- From where should I start creating a blog?
About age, you are never too young or too old to start a blog. It does not matter either you are 8 or 88, you can create your own blog and start the adventure in less than 1 hour. Regarding money, it depends on your domain name and hosting plan you pick. On average, you can prepare your budget around $50 for a decent service. And yeah, you could create your blog by yourself. Furthermore, if you don’t have any clue on how to start a blog by yourself, here we are to guide you to create your blog successfully.
How to start a blog?
1. Pick a blog niche
2. Pick a blogging platform
3. Choose a hosting company
4. Choose a suitable domain name
5. Now set up your blog
6. Start posting online
You may make lots of mistakes in your first blog. Even myself, I have made a lot of horrible mistakes on those starting days. But with the help of this guide, you can prevent yourself from some of these mistakes happening with you and your blog. Let’s get started step-by-step.
Step 1: Pick a blog Niche
Many people use to concerned more about what domain should I pick, which company and which package should I use for hosting, which blogging platform should I pick, which themes should I use and question similar to this. But, more important that you must pick a blog niche first. You must have a clear plan and vision for what to post there.
Otherwise, you might end up with a good domain name and hosting but with no solid content. However, with no good and enough content you are not going anywhere. That’s why having a clear plan and vision of what you are going to write on the blog is very important.
Pick a blog niche about something you love and have passion rather than something that possesses more monetary value. Pick the niche with which you are more connected so that you might not get tired of talking and writing about it even for years.
Step 2: Pick a blogging platform
The next step is to decide which blogging platform to use. And the main reason, I placed it at the second step is that, what if you buy hosting services from a company but they don’t host your preferred platform. That’s why I feel that the platform must be decided at first.
There are many blogging platforms such as WordPress, Blogger, Joomla, Squarespace, Wix, and a few more. In this article, we will solely focus on how to start a blog on the WordPress platform. However, if you want to try some other platform mentioned above, you can do a little search on google on how to start a blog on blogger or another blogging platform.
Instead of picking a blogging platform, you can even hire some developers and create a custom CMS that fits exactly to your need using some other language and framework such as Laravel, Zend, CI, Django, .Net MVC and many more. But, it would require extra time to develop and extra bucks to hire a developer. So, we are not discussing those in this article.
All of these different platforms have their own pros and cons but among them, WordPress is most widely used. This might be because of the ease to use it and the larger community of WordPress so that users can share their problems and difficulties if they encountered any of them.
In case if you have not decided yet, I would suggest you pick WordPress as your blogging platform. If you look at the statistics, around 30% of all websites including custom-coded CMS is built using WordPress. If we consider only the CMS market, the shares of WordPress rise up to 60%.
With these numbers of people involved, you can be sure that the development of WordPress is growing even rapidly. So, I would suggest picking WordPress. However, I am talking about self-hosted WordPress, not wordpress.com.
Step 3: Choose a Hosting Company
Pick a company where you are going to host your files. I personally, placed this step in third because many hosting companies provide a free domain with their hosting plan. So, in many cases, the user buys a domain at first and then later realized that they could have got that domain for free.
Currently, some of the popular web hosting companies are Hostgator, Bluehost, GoDaddy, InMotion Hosting, Siteground, iPage, MOCHAHOST, and many more.
Some points to consider before choosing a hosting company
- Do they host the CMS you are using?
- The next thing you need to consider is its uptime, hosting package, and price in the combine. How much they are offering at a certain price and what is their uptime.
- If you are just starting and don’t have enough money to buy some hosting, then you can go with some free web hosting too. But, I will not suggest using free hosting as it has many limitations and sometimes may suspend your account without any notifications. But still, if you are not very serious about blogging and just want to learn you can go with these free hostings. To make this easy for you we have listed the top 10 best free web hosting.
Step 4: Select a suitable domain name
For creating a blog, you should pick a suitable name for it. It would be better if you pick the name of your blog according to the content you are going to write in it. The name of your blog should be descriptive. So, the reader just figures out about the content from the name of the blog.
However, there are not any hard and fast rule about picking a domain name. Furthermore, what I have witnessed is that there are some of the blogs whose names do not make much sense but still these sites are doing great. So, what I have learned from that is if you have good content and a good marketing strategy. Then, there is no doubt about you hitting the peak.
But still, it would be better if you pick some descriptive as well as a catchy domain name for your blog.
Step 5: Now set up your blog
Once you are done with the domain name, hosting, and CMS platform. It is time to put up your blog. This is the step, where it would get a little tricky.
However, if you have picked one of the popular CMS such as WordPress, Joomla then almost every popular hosting company will provide a one-click installation for you. After that, you can pick one of your favorite themes and can customize it as you wish to give it the perfect look.
Here, you can use any page builder tools to edit your design with as easy as just drag and drop.
Furthermore, there are also some other CMS like WIX which will provide you with this drag and drop feature by default.
Step 6: Write First Post
After you are done with customizing, your blog is ready for a post. However, there is a misconception, that if you want to write a blog post, you should be a great writer. This might be right to some extent but not totally true. Many blog posts are written in an informal and conversational style.
The main thing is that your visitors should get the message from the content which you are trying to pass to them. The purpose of blogs is to convey personal opinions on certain things and topics. And even to start a blog, there is no requirement to be an expert on the topic. If you are writing a blog about a dish, then there is no need to be a food scientist on it. The readers might just want to read about the mistakes and experiences you have cooking a certain dish.
Do not obsess over your first post because there may be some mistakes and errors in it. Write about a topic which you like and are passionate about. Your passion will shine through your article and will gather an audience. After writing your blog publish it.
I hope this article has provided a lot of instructions and information to solve your ambiguity on how to start a blog. If so, would you mind it to share with your friends?
