Have you wanted to start a blog for yourself or business purposes? Starting anything, let alone a blog can feel like a daunting task, especially if you’re not technologically savvy. Well, I have good news launching a blog is not as challenging as it may seem.
Keep reading this step-by-step guide that will tell you everything you need to know about how to start a blog.
Starting a blog can be broken down into six necessary steps. If you follow these steps correctly, you can get your blog up and running in about twenty minutes.
How To Start A Blog
First, you’ll want to come up with a unique and descriptive blog name. Next, you’ll want to register your blog on a hosting site and get it online. Then you’ll customize your blog by tweaking a free template for starters.
After that comes the fun part, you’ll write and publish your first blog post, and then continue to turn out engaging and relatable content regularly.
Once you have some blog posts, it’s time to promote your blog and start building your following. Once you have a following, you’ll want to look into monetizing your website so you can make money.
Of course, that is just an overview. You’re going to want to keep reading to learn more on how to master these six steps to make your blog a success.
Step 1: Decide What Your Blog Is About
Naming your blog, seems easy, right? Keep in mind that your blog’s name should relate to the topic of your blog.
Pick a Blog Topic
If you don’t know what your blog is going to be about, here are the three main different types of blog topics that might inspire you.
Passions & Hobbies
If there’s a hobby, passion project, or interest of yours that you can’t stop talking about, you might consider creating a blog on that topic. There are so many niches to choose from when creating a blog, so your imagination is the limit. The overwhelming amount topics you could leave you with analysis paralysis so consider these three things:
- Is your blog idea something you enjoy enough to research and create content around continually?
- Is your niche to have products, services, and goods that you could monetize?
- Is your industry large enough that you could create a community around it?
If you answered yes to all these, then chances are you have chosen a good topic and should proceed with creating a blog. You can also look at this list of 50 ideas for Niche sites if your feeling stuck a few of my favorite are:
- fashion
- travel
- sports
- cars
- cooking
Or maybe you have an obscure niche hobby that can also be successful remember it has to be large enough to build a following. For example, creating a blog about underwater basket weaving may be too small to gain traction online. On the other hand, choosing a niche like fitness may be too broad and competitive.
When you are choosing a blog topic, try to find the sweet spot of not too big or too small but something in the middle. Competition isn’t a bad thing finding other people and products in the same place means that it is a viable market and you should proceed with creating a blog
Life Experiences
Perhaps your someone who finds themselves continually learning from life’s experiences. Sharing what you’re learning can help so many others in similar situations feel less alone. Being in the position to share your insight on a struggle or with a specific challenge lends itself to coaching.
Coaching on a topic excellent angle to create a blog and any time your ideas can help another person is intrinsically rewarding.
For example, this could be sharing experiences like living with a disease, life after a divorce, being a stay at home mom, or the struggles of a specific type of work.
Personal Blog
Personal blogs are all about you. These blogs could cover a range of topics from whatever you do daily. If you feel like you have a lot to share with the world, and don’t want to be limited to one topic, you might want to start a personal blog. The problem with this angle is your life gets displayed for all to see and unless your someone with an abundance of charisma and charm, it may be hard to gather followers.
Personal blogs lend them selfs to celebrities and influencers who already have a following. You can blend an own blog with a popular topic like travel to gain an audience. The other option with personal blogging is to be super relatable be sharing life experiences that many may find helpful.
Personal blogs are great for journaling and expressing one’s self but are hard if your thinking of a blog as a side hustle. Personal blogs are just less profitable unless you blend it with a specific topic or niche.
Name Your Blog
Once you have a niche selected, it’s time to choose your blog name. The name of your blog should be descriptive, so readers know what your blog is about merely from its name.
If your blog is topic focused, you’ll want to make sure that the blog topic is somewhere in that name. For example, a cooking blog doesn’t need to have the word “cooking” in it, but you’ll still want a word like “food,” “dish,” “meals,” etc. in there, so your audience knows your blog is about cooking.
When you are serious about making a blog, you will want to consider potential growth. Let us say you want to start a blog about basket weaving. So you name your blog, “the basket weaver.” you go on to make a lot of great content about basket weaving and gain a following, but at some point, you’ll run out of basket weaving content. Choosing a name like “at home crafts” would have allowed room for that growth.
Note: If you’re doing a personal blog, you’ll likely want to have your name in there somewhere.
Choose A Domain Extension
The most preferred domain extension tends to be a .com, but .org and .net can also work. Also, know that your blog domain can’t have any spaces between words. You’ll also want to make sure that no one else has already registered your blog name. I highly recommend going for a .com, and an easy way to find if it’s available is by going to a domain name generator like name mesh or a domain registrar like Dynadot they are way cheaper than GoDaddy and have excellent customer service. You can also get a free domain name when you buy hosting from Blue Host or Green Geek.
Step 2: Get Your Blog Online
Once you’ve decided on your blog name, it’s time to get your blog online. While this may sound technical and hard, it’s not. All you need to do is get blog hosting and blogging software, which usually come together.
A blog host stores the files for your blog and gives them to the user when they type in your blog name. You need to have a blog host to have a blog.
Step 3: Customize Your Blog
Once you log into your blog, you’ll be able to make changes in your blog’s design. Everyone has a different vision on how they want their blog to look. If you go with a WordPress for blogging software, you can easily change your design in just a couple of clicks.
Step 4: Write A Blog Post & Publish It
Now that your blog is up and running, it’s time to start blogging. Follow your blogging software’s instructions on how to publish a post. Make sure you come up with an attention-grabbing title, eye-catching image, and write an engaging, relatable post that’s on theme with your blog.
Step 5: Promote Your Blog
Once you post your first piece, now you have to be consistent with your content. Creating a content creation schedule is a great way to stay on top of your blog. Choose two hours every day where you can write research and create content. You also need to promote your blog as much as possible. Social media is a godsend choose a platform you like and every time you create new content share it on your social media.
Use Social Media
An easy way to get readers to your blog is to post about it on social media like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. Your friends will quickly see your blog, which should swiftly multiply your readers.
You’ll want to make sure you have high-quality, engaging content on your blog first before you tell everyone about it I recommend getting to 15-30 articles or posts before sharing. Either way, you’ll want to have a couple of posts up and ready and be committed to adding more blog posts consistently.
Email Marketing
Once you have helpful and engaging content on your blog, social media can help your blog go viral. You will also want to make sure that your current readers to keep coming back. Return visitors is where email marketing comes into play.
Once you collect the email addresses of your visitors (with their permission), you can tell your audience when something is new on your website. Having an email list will keep readers coming back to your blog, which grows your audience over time.
Step 6: Make Money Blogging
Now that you’ve put in the effort and time of making blog content that is high quality, making money off your blog is the natural next step in the process.
You can make money blogging from selling your services or products, or by doing sponsored posts where you get paid to write reviews of products on your blog. However, the easiest way to make money from your blog is by selling advertising space.
Once you have a popular blog, advertisers will ask you to advertise. You’ll want to take advantage of this by using Google Adsense or premium ad networks. Ad networks like Google Adsense will find advertisers for you, and with a simple copy and paste code, you can start running ads.
Start Your Blog Today
Now that you know how to start a blog start your blog today. Remember to make engaging, reliable, consistent, on-brand content, and soon you’ll have a big following and advertisers. For more resources on building a website, check out our blog.