How to Start Your Blog

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How to Start Your Own Blog

– 14 Steps

Bookmark this article for easy reference once you are ready to begin to launch your blog.

If you have clicked on this, you have probably heard what an awesome life you can potentially live as a fulltime blogger. You have probably heard how successful bloggers are making a killing out there. Maybe you always wondered how that affluent mother of three seemed to always stay home when you head to work in the mornings and have recently come to discover that she runs an online business, or that she actually runs her own blog.

Blogging has gained a lot of momentum over the years and has quickly become an option many people can look into to derive a very decent living from.

Before I continue, I must let you know that, especially in the beginning, starting a blog is hard work. If you are quicker than me, it will take you a full month. It took me MUCH, much longer. The fact that I am a perfectionist has never been as big a hindrance as it proved to be when I started my blog. I am just being honest with you because nobody was this honest with me.

This being said, there are far too many good reasons to become a blogger, which I share in Why I Became a Blogger, so all this hard work and time would never have become a deterrent to me, but I just wish somebody would have been more honest about how long it would take, if only to help me manage my own expectations.

Some of the people that I have been looking into are at a stage where they are making over $150,000.00, PER MONTH, pretax. All of this is done in the comfort of their homes, in shorts and a tee, or while traveling the world.

It would be bizarre not to want to find out how these bloggers came to be the bloggers they are, and what you need to do to become the same.

Check out Here’s How Much These People Make Blogging for more information. If you are like me and need the inspiration to keep working at it, you will bookmark that article as well for easy reference.

What is a Blog?

The word “blog” is the shortening of the word, “WebLog”, an online journal where the author (you) chronicles their opinions.

A blog is, essentially, a collection of your thoughts, ideas, and opinions, or those of the group that runs the blog. A blog is not quite the same as a publication, so the approach is fairly informal. As a blogger, you get to form a relationship of sorts with your readers which is great and far more personal than running a publication.

A blog is different from a regular (static) website because it is updated far more regularly (even daily) and it is generally acceptable to add a little bit of personal flair to your posts or articles. Readers are allowed to comment and voice their opinions on your subject matter as well

I own and run two websites, one for my property development company (a static website), and this website, my blog. The difference between the two is beyond noteworthy.

How to Start Your Blog

Here are the main steps you should consider as you launch your blog:

1. Pick Your Niche
2. Select Your Blog Name and Web Hosting Service
3. Choose Your Platform
4. Install WordPress
5. Pick and Install a Theme and Design
6. Add WordPress Plugins to Enhance and Protect Your Blog
7. Brand Your Blog
8. Choose Social Media and Create Accounts
9. Create Content for Your Blog
10. Draft Legal Pages to Protect Your Blog
11. Craft E-Mail Marketing Content and Choose a Service Provider
12. Find the Best Way to Make Money from Your Blog
13. Launch Your Blog
14. Promote Your Blog

1. Pick Your Niche

For the benefit of your readers, it is advisable to choose a defined blogging niche.

As a blogger, more so a fulltime one, your strength lies within your readership base. The easier it is for your readers to choose to become a part of your community, the easier it is for you to grow your community. If they get a sense that your content range is too broad, they may not want to commit as only some of your content will be desired or relatable for them.

When you have clear subject matter, or even a subject range, readers know what to expect from you and find it easier to make a commitment to visit your blog regularly or join your community. Moreover, having a clear niche makes it easier to monetize your community base because all the members of your community are more likely to be interested in the same thing and thus interested in whatever you may want to sell to them in the future. Read more about this by checking out What You Can Blog About: 125 Blog Niche Ideas.

I should probably take this time to let you know right now that, in general, some niches make more money than others. This being said, I have come across bloggers making money in what, to me at least, would have seemed to be tiny markets; I suppose the take-home here is that smaller markets are far less saturated and if you deliver quality, you can easily own the market.

Choose a niche that you know you are passionate about. Something that you have realized that you can talk ALL DAY LONG about. That topic that your partner or spouse nearly rolls their eyes about when you bring it up when you and your partner are out with friends.

Find your niche first; figure out how to monetize it last!

If you choose a niche that you are not passionate about, your content will be lame and your readers will know it; don’t fool yourself. You will struggle to build a committed audience. In the blogging world, above all things, CONTENT TRUMPS EVERYTHING!!!

2. Select Your Blog Name & Hosting Service

This is where far too much time can potentially be wasted. I know it may not make sense to you right now, but there really are no rules on this front. If I were to try my best to come up with a rule, I would probably caution against a name that is too long, but I know I could also easily find a couple of bloggers who go against this principle and are making a killing.

In general, keep it simple and if you really can’t find a name, just go with the one your parents gave you.

Your hosting service selection is far more deserving of your pensive consideration. This being said, you are in luck because this is a journey that I have walked ahead of you. I have made mistakes and learned from them for the both of us.

After all of my mistakes, lessons, and research, I decided to go with BlueHost. If you use this link, you can get a plan at a discounted rate. Bluehost is simply the best if you want to be a blogger that makes money.

I will explain the reasons for this in a little more depth in Step 3 and Step 4 and Step 11.

3. Choose Your Blogging Platform

Your choice of platform is firmly related to the extent of your understanding of my explanation of what the fundamental differences between a regular website and a blog are. If you did not quite grasp this, you may want to quickly scroll up and make sure that you understand it.

Finding a hosting company to launch your website is fairly straightforward when you are looking to get your website hosted. As I said, my love for property investment has lead me to become a property developer. I do not have satellite offices, so my website is essentially my online office and the basis on which my customers ultimately make their purchases. Trust me when I say, “I know what it takes to own a good static website as well as a good blog.”

What I have learned is this:

Like I said above, the difference between a static website and a blog is the rate at which content is added to the website. Because a website only gets refreshed once in a while, relatively speaking, the interface where this gets done does not matter much. Also, most websites have a single, all-inclusive, website project file/folder that gets uploaded to the server of the web host and published on the internet. You have probably come across a notice informing you that the site you are trying to access is under maintenance. This is usually when changes have been made the website and the website is being updated.

A blog, on the other hand, needs to be far more dynamic. You need the ability to be able to upload your most recent post without interacting with or disrupting the rest of the blog (website). Also, because of how frequently this gets done, it needs to be a simple, user-friendly process.

To this end, WordPress is a great platform to go with. WordPress powers 32% of the entire internet. It has a massive user base so it is always improving and has 56 official translations. As a newbie blogger, at least at this stage in your career, I can confidently say that WordPress is the best platform for you to use for your blog. Setting up a blog, for me at least, is a massive learning curve on many fronts; don’t make it harder by going against the grain and finding yourself not being part of a large community from whom to learn when you are having difficulty. Just go with WordPress.

Bluehost is great because they understand this and have designed their platform to be interwoven with WordPress. Hence, for you, the aspirant blogger, Bluehost is the way to go.

4. Install WordPress

I like Bluehost in particular because it makes this step incredibly easy. Once you log into your Bluehost portal, you are virtually one click away from installing WordPress onto your web host’s server.

These two are so interlinked that you can actually use Bluehost to log into your WordPress account each time, once you have installed it. If you only want to remember one very secure password, this may be a good option for you.

5. Pick & Install a Theme, & Design Your Blog

Your choice in this step is probably the single most important step of all at this stage, saving for the niche you choose. This will determine how customizable your blog layout can be, and it will also determine how much time you spend developing the website that is your blog.

Trying to go with a free theme for a blog you want to make decent money from would be a BIG mistake; I am assuming my reasons for saying this are obvious. If you just want your blog to be a place for you to vent, motivate or just record an online journal of sorts, by all means, use a free theme. WordPress has a couple of free themes that are preinstalled as part of your installation. But if you want to make money, you need something you can fully customize. Creating a theme is no small task and people who make good themes have invested a lot and need to make a return on their investment.

We all know what happens when you are cheap, you often end up paying more than if you would just done it the proper wat the first time.

I went with the Divi Theme, from Elegant Themes. Have a look at the pages on my blog to see what I was able to do with the Divi theme. Bear in mind, that I am not a web developer by any stretch of the imagination, and I didn’t get any help building this website (saving for my lovely fiancée who has an eye for design), so I wouldn’t even dare to think that I have begun to tap into even a quarter of what is possible with through the Divi Theme.

If you are looking to save a couple of bucks, you may also want to give the Avada theme a look. It is not as customizable, but if you’re are not that savvy when it comes to web design, it may not matter that much at this point. It is slightly cheaper than the Divi theme.

6. Add WordPress Plugins to Enhance & Protect Your Blog

WordPress is like an operating system; themes, plugins and all the rest, are basically software. 

My fiancée and I both have iPhones (her decision), but our phones are totally different and mean totally different things to us. While both of our mobile phones are based on a common platform (iOS), we have set up our phones differently and installed different applications to our phones. We can, an often do, mistakenly pick up the wrong phone, but quickly realize that we are not holding our own mobile phones because of how differently we have set our phones up. My fiancée knows that she is holding an iPhone even if she mistakes her phone for mine, so do I when I make the same mistake with her phone.

Like our phones, each of us will need themes and plugins to get what the best of what we need from WordPress. I have listed a few plugins that I found to be helpful, or at the very least, good to know about.

It is good to know that just like apps and software, they may not always be designed by the operating system (WordPress) developers, and so they may not always be 100% compatible and may not run smoothly.

The Divi theme works perfectly with Bluehost and WordPress, so if you use this combination, all you will need to worry about is plugins.

Plugins, on the other hand, may vary. Some plugins may slow your website down. Other plugins may not work nicely in conjunction with certain plugins. The best advice with plugins is to install them one-by-one and monitor how each plugin install affects your website’s performance. If are any indications or problems, it will be easier to find the offending plugin if you are able to accurately retrace your steps.

Also, only download plugins that you really need, because, while they may be very helpful, plugins slow down your website.

There are a whole range of plugins for WordPress, but here are the essential ones that you need:

Here are some plugins I started out with:

Here are some plugins I started out with:

Website Traffic Analysis:

• Google Analytics (Website Traffic Analysis and Statistics)

SEO Tools:

• Yoast SEO (rates your pages based on  target keywords, internal & external links, image tags, meta descriptions, readability, and other parameters that affect Google page ranking

Social sharing:

• Social Warfare (Social Media Warfare) (helps make your blog posts shareable to social media)

Comment Customization & Filtration:

• WpDiscuz(basic plugin that allows more customization of comment section on your blog.

• Fancier Author Box (allow for a more fancy author box)
• User Profile Picture (overrides Gravatar and allows you to easily add a profile picture)
• Akismet  (Free) (Anti-spam plugin)

Website speed and performance:

• W3 Total Cache (Free) (Caching plugin to help increase website-speed) (Free)
• WP Smush (Free) (Reduces image file sizes and boosts page’s SEO ranking)

WordPress backup: (Choose one)

• iThemes Security (Free) (protects and secures your website in several ways)
• Backup Buddy (Free) (backs up your website onto a downloadable zip file)

Security:

• Wordfence (Free) (firewall and malware scanner)

Additional Plugins You May Like:

• Contact Form 7 (Free) (manage multiple contact forms; supports multiple security plugins)
• Related Posts by Zemanta (displays related posts within a post of yours for readers to link back to your blog posts)
• UpPrev Plugin (animation for related posts feed)

7. Brand Your Blog

Now you will need to create a logo. A text based logo is the easiest, not only to create but to apply to your website and media pages in general. The great news is that you don’t have to pay anybody to do it. You can do it yourself and you can do it for free!!!

I would recommend that you use www.fotor.com or www.canva.com to design and create your logo. Again, I recommend a text-based logo.

I presume you all may know what a logo is, but maybe not all of us know what a favicon is. A favicon is an icon that displays in the left-hand portion of the tab in your browser. On my blog or website, you would see a navy blue circle with the letter “D” inside it. That is my favicon. You can use Canva.com to design your favicon.

In both cases, simplicity is key. Do not spend too much time on this step.

8. Choose Social Media Platforms & Create Accounts

At this point, you should choose which social media you will use to promote your blog. But before we get into that, let me give you a quick crash course on what you may not have realized. This may seem rudimentary, but it is expedient to your success.

Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn and etc. are social media platforms. That’s pretty obvious, I know. The sad news is that social media is not a very good platform for promoting your blog organically and for free, although you should not ignore these platforms altogether.

Google, Pinterest, and YouTube are unique in that they are search engines and not so much social media platforms. Google is (predominantly) a search engine for text; Pinterest is a search engine for pictures; YouTube is a search engine for videos. I know these definitions are not 100% true in the real world, but in the blogging world they are 150% true and this is why it matters:

Social media allows its users to publish content. If that content is yours, you get an opportunity to potentially be spotted, if your post is posted at the right time. If not, your content will be missed, and the cute laughing baby video will get the click instead. Recent algorithm changes are moving away from this in lieu of content that is determined to be more popular.

Search engines are better because they allow you to not just be spotted, but to be searched for and FOUND! This is EVERYTHING to us as bloggers.

My advice would be for you to study your potential market and see which platforms they prefer to be on. Do a bit of reading about the demographics of all the popular social media platforms and you will get a decent idea for where to look to meet your target market.

I would advise you to choose at least one search engine and one social media platform. Pinterest is a great source of traffic for most bloggers and is growing at a staggering rate. You would be remiss to not at least fervently consider Pinterest as one of your main drivers for traffic, but of course not all niches are the same so you must go where your audience is. This being said. If your audience is not currently on Pinterest (this will apply to very few niches), then you need to keep checking Pinterest because, at the rate that it is growing, they most likely will be in time to come.

Moral of the story, most of us will need Pinterest.

Google is far too complex and competitive, and not all of us have it in us to pull off YouTube.

9. Create Content for Your Blog

If you feel anything like I feel about my niche, this will be, by far, the easiest part. The bad news though is that, at this stage in your blogging career, you must blog about subtopics people want to hear about and not just what you feel passionate about and hope that the masses will flock to you. You have to gain their trust by giving them what they want first, within your chosen niche of course.

Once this has been achieved, then you can mix it up a little to give yourself a competitive edge by distinguishing yourself from other bloggers in your niche.

It may also be a good idea to create categories for your posts. This may be much more necessary for yourself than your audience.

10. Create Legal Pages to Protect Your Blog

This is probably the single most important thing to have in place, BEFORE, you start your blog. This will protect you. I will be presenting a bit of legal information in this section, but this is not to be used as legal advice. I am not an attorney, so you may do well to look into this a little more.

Legal pages protect you, but most importantly they afford your readers an opportunity to see how you conduct your business and how you will treat their personal information BEFORE they feel they can trust you and elect to make use of your website or become a part of your community.

I have four legal pages on my blog:

• Disclaimer
• Terms and Conditions
• Privacy Policy
• Comment Policy

You can buy these as a set online. All you would need to do is fill in your details in the blank spaces.

Not many bloggers have comment policies and with good reason. The main reason I need a comment policy is because I use software to filter out spam and malicious content.

I will try to post in the future high-level principles that my policies address, but again, this would not be legal advice.

You can have a look at mine, but consult with a legal specialist in your area to make sure that you comply. Just remember that, like insurance, your legal pages only protect you if you had them in place BEFORE you had a claim against your blog. Your legal contracts are always forward-looking, never retrospective.

But, again, I am not a legal specialist by any stretch of the imagination.

11. Create E-Mail Marketing Content & Choose a Service Provide

Your e-mail list is your most prized possession as a blogger, more so as a blogger that wants to make money from your blog.

You need to start collecting e-mail addresses from the very launch of your blog. If you have read my article Why I Became a Blogger, you will know that one of my favorite things about running an online business is how easy it is for your business to simply plug other businesses into yours and benefit from their expertise without having to hire them outright, but instead just collaborate in the most seamless way.

I prefer to use ConvertKit to build, grow and manage my email list.

The fact that its founder, Nathan Barry, was a blogger speaks volumes, so I won’t describe why you should use ConvertKit as opposed to others in this article. My logic tells me this: If a blogger felt so unsatisfied with what was available that he decided to create a whole new email marketing company, what does that communicate to you about what is on offer out there?

I will write a post dedicated to this topic soon, but for now, I think that should be sufficient reason for you to choose ConvertKit, as I did.

Use my link to get your first month free with ConvertKit.

With that done, it may be a good idea to create a digital incentive for people to join your mailing list. Gone are the days where people simply eagerly subscribe to having you fill their mailboxes with emails every other day. You need to give them something in exchange for their email address. You will have to create something they want that can only be delivered to them via their email address.

12. Find the Best Ways to Make Money with Your Blog

There are several ways to make money as a blogger. I would suggest only looking at how to do this at this stage of your prelaunch journey so as not to compromise the quality of your content while chasing money.

There are five main ways to make money through your blog

• Paid Ads: Getting paid by advertisers to advertise to your readers
• Sponsored Posts & Brand Partnership Agreements: Being paid to blog about something in particular
• Affiliate Marketing: Promoting other people’s products on your blog
• Creating & Selling Products: Promoting your own products on your blog (namely: Printables, E-Books, Digital or Physical Products)
• Promoting Your Own Specialized Service Offering: Using your blog to earn the trust of your clientele and increase your client base

You can read my post on The Best Ways You Can Make Money Blogging to find out more about what all of this means.

It is okay to start your blog without knowing how you will make money. What you should not do is launch your blog without a system in place to collect email addresses from your readers. Your e-mail list is the lifeblood of your business as a blogger. You may not know how you will make money from this list in the beginning of your blogging journey, and that’s perfectly fine, but if you want to make money blogging, your income will correlate to the strength of your email list.

I use ConvertKit to manage my email list and send out any broadcasts that I want to share with my audience. If you use my link, you can get your first month for FREE!

Once you have this, you can later sell to this base of leads you would have been building up.

13, Launch Your Blog

Now you are ready to launch your blog. You have designed your website you have created content. It’s time to unleash your content to the world. They will not know what hit them.

The most important thing here is how consistently you will release your content from this point onwards. I would advise you to create a posting schedule before your launch. Get a good idea of what you can commit to and deliver on and stick to it. Google is watching. Pinterest is watching. Your audience is watching. Don’t disappoint.

On all of these fronts (and more) consistency is rewarded and you are ranked higher as you are predictable in this regard.

14. Promote Your Blog

So, I have bad news for you. Google doesn’t care all that much that you have just launched your blog. It would be a terrible idea to rely on them now, or for a very long time to come, to rank your blog in searches.

This being said, you are in control of how you promote and market your blog everywhere else. As I said above, use a search engine. For most this will be Pinterest. Google is far too competitive and expensive. Most of us are too scared to get in front of the camera and create content for YouTube. So use Pinterest and at least one social media platform. Read, How to Drive Traffic to Your Blog, to find exactly how to explode your traffic using Tailwind. 

The harder you promote your blog, the more visitors you will get. The more visitors you have, the more money you can make from your blog.

Also, you need to install Social Warfare to your blog through WordPress. This will allow your readers to share your posts through their personal social media accounts. They will only do this if they like your content, hence I emphasized choosing a niche that you are passionate about so that you can consistently deliver quality content.

Go on now, get your blog out there!!!

All the best!