How to Start a Blog | 9 Steps to Create a Blog to Make You Money (2023)
Before starting a blog you need to do a little planning So that in the future you do not have to face something that could have been considered in the past.
If you’re here to learn how to start a blog, you must have a basic idea of your blog. You can organize and improve your ideas by reading this guide. And start earning money from home as a passive income or full-time job.
It is a complete guide. If you don’t have any idea where to start, it will help you a lot.
Choose A Suitable Niche
When you start a blog, the topic you share is your niche. Your niche is the area of knowledge you have to write about.
Choosing your niche is the first important step. Choosing your blog’s niche requires answering two questions.
1. In which subject do you have a strong interest and enjoy discussing?
Choosing a niche in which you are interested and have knowledge would be the best option. You can easily become an expert in that area without putting in too much effort.
Starting a blog in a niche with low knowledge is not impossible, you just need to work hard.
Your interest in the niche is the most significant aspect. Choosing a niche without an interest is not a good idea, it’s best to get inspiration from others.
Visit blogs that are similar to your interests to gain insight into what knowledge you require, how to enhance it, and how to present it. This will also help you choose a potential niche.
2. Are more people finding the same topic on the internet?
Is there a substantial amount of people willing to learn about the topic?
Additionally, more individuals are discovering the same information on the internet.
Google is an excellent place to inquire about this. If it shows more results, then you can write about the topic.
Technology, travel, fashion, food, gaming, and other topics are just a few examples of topics.
If you’re not sure what you want, you can start a blog about your favorite topic. The most important thing is to start something because you’ll learn things after spending some time on them.
Choosing A Blog Name
Choosing your blog name or domain name is the next step. Your blog’s name is used by people to remember it and search for it. It’s possible that it will become your brand after some time.
Pick a name that is catchy. To pick a blog name, take into account your niche; it’s more beneficial if it’s connected to it. There are advantages and disadvantages to linking your blog name to a specific niche.
The advantage is that your blog name will help people understand your content. The drawback is that you must write for a specific niche and cannot expand or change your topic.
Pick a name that is not too specific, easy to remember, and sticks in the visitor’s mind when they see it.
Take a pen and paper or open a notepad, search for words that relate to your subject of interest, and create some combinations.
Try a handful of word combinations until one sticks out to you.
Catchy words can be used as prefixes and post-fixes in combination, such as i, 10x, fast, beast, boom, boost, box, buzz, tech, town, treat, tribe, or tricks.
Collect 9 to 10 such combinations and examine them using the domain checker tool.
I suggest you avoid using your name as a domain name because it could sound like a personal site since there are few people who know you and your profession. If you’re not a celebrity, it may have different meanings for different people. Only use your name as a domain if it’s a brand and you’re very well-known.
When selecting a domain name, take into account certain factors.
- For Domain extension TLDs(Top-Level Domains), Your first choice should be .com because it has more authority in the minds of the people. The second choice may be .net,.biz, etc.
- You can also try country-specific names like .ca, .us, co.uk, or .in if your blog presents information about a specific country or area.
- Don’t use too many numbers in the domain name. It may be confusing when typing the name. The domain name should be easy to type and pronounce.
- Avoid selecting names that have the same pronunciation but differ in spelling.
- Avoid selecting names that have the same pronunciation but differ in spelling.
- Short names are better, with 4-5 characters and a maximum of 10 characters. Easy to spell and remember.
- The use of hyphens is controversial because some say it is good for SEO but difficult for typing.
Choosing A Platform For Blogging
To start a blog, you have to use a CMS. A content management system(CMS) is software that handles your blog and generates new pages and other items according to your settings. You can use different themes to change its look. It’s not a complicated process, so don’t get confused. Soon, you will be familiar with all of these things.
WordPress, Wix, Drupal, Blogger, and Pixapa are all blogging platforms.
WordPress is one of the most famous among them. Over 63% of the CMS market is dominated by WordPress. WordPress is my preferred platform because it is a user-friendly, free, and trustworthy one. There are more resources available, including free themes and plugins to use. A large number of tutorials and materials about WordPress can be found on Google. It has a large community.
WordPress can be installed without any technical knowledge by almost every hosting company with a single click. You can also use Wizzard to install it.
You can also install plugins for enhanced capabilities of WordPress service.
Installing WordPress
Sign in to your hosting account Cpanel.
Navigate to bottom of cPanel to “Scripts” Section.
Now click WordPress icon shown as picture below
This will show A new screen.
Now Click “Install Now”.
Now fill in information about your blog.
Your domain URL and Latest version are selected by default.
Enter your Site Name and Site Description as shown in the picture below.
Now fill in your email address and click install
Your installation will begin now. It could take a few seconds or a few minutes. You can now customize your WordPress blog to meet your needs.
Selecting a WordPress Theme to Change the Blog’s Look and Design
A WordPress theme consists of code files and media files that define the style and design of a WordPress website or blog. The default theme for WordPress is quite simple.
You can easily change the design of your blog by changing the theme. Select the theme in the WordPress dashboard, download it, install it, and activate it. Thousands of themes are available in the WordPress theme library. Both free and paid themes are available.
The theme can be changed at any time with ease. Your website’s appearance will be altered, but the data will remain intact. The content of your post will remain the same; a different theme will alter the design of the blog.
All posts are automatically fitted based on the design.
Let’s learn how to change themes in easy steps.
Logging into the WordPress dashboard is necessary to make changes or create a post. The WordPress Dashboard can be accessed by entering the URL yourdomain.com/wp-admin in the browser bar. Replace yourdomain.com with your own domain name.
After that, you will see this login screen.
After successful login, you will see the WordPress Dashboard
Step 1. Now search for Appearance in the left sidebar and click it.
Step 2. Now Click Add New at the top of the dashboard in front of Themes.
There are numerous themes to choose from. Choosing a theme is a difficult task because all themes are beautiful. You will be locked in Squirrel Syndrome.
To overcome this situation, you can use the Feature Filter button.
In the next picture, you will see, there are three vertical columns. In the “subject” column you can choose a blog as you are searching theme for a blog. In ‘feature’, you can choose according to your preference, for example, a custom head. The ‘layout’ column allows you to select the blog layout.
These filters only display themes based on selected features. This will be very helpful in narrowing down your theme options list.
After selecting your options, Click Apply Filters.
You will see several themes which will be suitable for your needs. There will be a huge list.
Clicking on the theme thumbnail will provide a quick preview of the theme’s design and look. It will demonstrate how your blog will look after using this theme.
If the theme appeals to you, you can click on the install button at the top left side of the preview window inside the red box. Once the installation is finished, the Install button will turn into an activate button.
To activate the theme, click the ‘activate’ button inside red the box in picture below.
If the theme doesn’t suit you, you can repeat the process and choose a different one.
Blog Theme Customization
Once the theme has been selected and activated, the next step is to customize it to meet the needs of our blog and make it unique for our domain.
Although there are several customization options, we will only discuss the ones that are mandatory for a blog. The blog title and logo setup are mandatory. We can make other customizations at a later time.
To begin the customization process go “Appearance” in left sidebar, click the ‘Customize’ button on your current theme.
As shown in the picture below, you will see a customization screen.
Different themes may have some differences in the sidebar menu options. The ‘Site Identity’ is the main option that needs to be changed.
Click the “Site Identity” option in left sidebar.
In the next screen, you can add the blog title, blog tagline, and upload the blog logo.
As shown in the picture below, you can fill in the information.
To upload the blog logo, click on ‘Select Logo’. Once you click, a media library will appear where you can upload the logo of your blog or website.
Then you can also change the size of the logo from “Logo Size”.
The site title is the next step. Type in your blog’s title or name.
Fill in the tagline of your blog or business after that.
To upload the icon of your blog or website, click on ‘Select site icon’ at the end. When someone opens your blog or website in the browser, this icon is displayed in the browser tab.
At last, Must click the “Publish” button to save all changes; otherwise, all the changes you made will be lost.
Keep in mind that there may be some differences in appearance, but the options will almost be the same. Don’t stick with this look, it’s only a guide on how to start a blog and add information about it.
Search Engine Optimization of the Blog
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is an important component of blog setup.
The objective of SEO is to ensure that search engines can locate our content and send traffic to our blog.
The earning potential of our blog depends on the amount of traffic it receives. Search engines help a lot to drive traffic to our blog.
Visitors search on Google by typing specific words to find content. These words are referred to as keywords. Our goal is to write for these keywords so that Google index our blog for these keyword content and send traffic to our blog.
Writing content about these keywords is necessary, but we also need to make technical changes to our blog to alert Google that our blog has content for these keywords.
Even though dealing with technical issues may seem difficult, WordPress has options to make it effortless by using SEO WordPress plugins.
To Install SEO plugins, visit the WordPress dashboard and locate “Plugins” in the left sidebar.
Click “Plugin” and then click “Add New”.
You will see several plugins. Now search for an SEO plugin.
To search for an SEO plugin, write “seo” in the search box. You will see a log list of SEO plugins for WordPress.
At the top, there are three primary SEO plugins that are well-known for SEO. Yoast SEO, Rank Math SEO, and All in One SEO are all good options that you can use.
There are free features available in these plugins to use. For additional functionality, you have the option to purchase paid versions. Their free versions are also very useful for SEO.
In order to use the SEO plugins, click ‘install’ and then ‘activate’.
To enhance the WordPress blog SEO, you need to make some adjustments after installing the SEO plugin.
How to Write a Blog Post and Publish it
It’s time to publish a post after all the WordPress setup work has been completed. Let’s create content for your blog.
Log in to the WordPress dashboard. Find ‘Posts’ in the left sidebar and click on it.
You can see that the Hello Word post is already there. It is a default post that comes with the installation, and it is intended to show a sample of the post.. We don’t require it, so remove it. Click on ‘Trash’ under the post.
Click on ‘Add New’ to create a new post.
The post editor screen is visible to you. Enter your post title in the title box (replace Add Title with your post title).
As you can see in the next picture I have added the title How to start a blog
Under the title box, you can see ‘Type/to choose a block’. You can insert the content of the post in this text box, and use the “+” sign to change the type of text entered in this box.
To enter additional content text, click outside of these text boxes, and a ‘+’ will appear. To enter text, simply click on this “+” sign.
After clicking the “+” sign, you will see a Selection box.
Use this selection box to select Heading(H1, H2, H3, H4, H5, H6), Paragraph, Image, Gallery, List, Quote, and many more text formatting attributes to organize the content of the post.
Every time you can create new headings, upload images, create new paragraphs, list, and so on.
Now after adding your post content click the “Publish” button at the right side on the top. After clicking one time you have to click it second time to publish the post.
Next Step After Learning: How to Start a Blog
I hope you have found the answer to the question of how to start a blog. The main objective of the blog is to generate income. To achieve that, it is necessary to offer value to your readers in your content. If you provide good content, they can indirectly help you. They will bookmark and share your content with other people. This is a factor in improving SEO and ultimately generating more traffic.