Start a Blog - Beginner Guide

There are so many blogs created everyday. Is it worth starting a blog in 2020?

More and more are coming online and searching for the best and latest information possible even though content is saturated. Information keeps changing and If you start writing valuable content , you can still stand out and start making money even today.

This beginner-friendly Guide will show you how to start a blog with all the steps needed to start a blog in one hour. No technical skills required to get started.

Let’s get started

Contents

Decide What You’re Going to Blog About

Before starting a blog , You need to select a Niche. Niche is nothing but an area where you have expertise or passion.

Below are some of things you need to think about before selecting your Niche.

How passionate you are about the topic or blog niche
How passionate other people are about the topic or your readers
Ways you can make money from the topic

Once you have clear idea on Niche, let us go to next step

Choose a Blogging Platform & Web Host

Blogging platform is where you manage all the words, blog posts, images, videos, and everything on your blog.

For this article, we are going to choose WordPress as a blogging platform as it is free to use and has a lot of resources available online to get started.

Once you select a blogging platform, next thing is Web hosting. Web hosting makes your blog live and is tha machine behind the blog that saves all your blog posts , images , videos and provides space for your blog to store things.

Choosing and Purchasing a Domain name

Domain name is a specific name your IP address to be called with. This is your blog name where people when type in the browser , will reach to your blog. You should select a blog name related to your niche so that users can easily remember and find out using Google search

You can choose and purchase a domain name from any domain providers like GoDaddy or NameCheap. You can also choose and purchase a domain name from a web hosting provider like Siteground. I prefer purchasing a domain from a web hosting provider so that blog setup is easily done when you buy a hosting plan.

Let us go through each of steps to setup everything:

Step 1: Get Domain and Hosting

If you want to create a website, you’ll need a domain name and hosting plan. I use and recommend Siteground as they are one of the best web hosting services with the best uptime and fastest loading times.

You can read full review of SiteGround here: SiteGround Review 2020

Start by visiting Siteground. As you can see, they offer three hosting plans but I recommend you choose the Grow Big plan as you can host an unlimited number of websites on the Grow Big plan.

Select the plan and then follow the steps to complete the purchase. First, you’ll need to choose your desired domain name and then enter your billing and payment details.

If you have already a domain name, you can enter as per the below screenshot. If you have no existing domain, you can select a new domain name. Make sure you select a domain name , that is closest to your Niche which you are going to blog about.

Once you selected a domain, complete account and payment details as shown below.

As soon as you submit the payment, your hosting account will be created. You can login to your customer area and continue with WordPress installation.

Install WordPress

As you login to your customer area, you’ll notice an orange button at the top that says Start New Website. Click that button and then select Start New website > WordPress.

You will then need to enter another username and password for your website. You’ll use this to log in to your WordPress dashboard so make sure it’s different from your hosting login information.

When you’re happy with your username and password, click Continue.

Siteground will install WordPress for you and you’ll see a notification in your account area. Click on the Manage Site button to see a login button next to the site you want to work with. This will take you immediately to your WordPress dashboard.

Customize WordPress

Now, before we move on with next steps, there are a few things we need to take care of first in our WordPress admin area.

For starters, uninstall the Starter plugin Siteground installed as you don’t need it. Head to Plugins > Installed Plugins, select Starter plugin, deactivate and then delete the plugin.

Deleting default posts and pages to clear the website of default posts and pages as shown below

Similarly, go to the pages and comments section and delete the default pages and comments with the same procedure.

The next step is to go to Settings > Permalinks and change them to Post name. This structure will make your pages and posts more user friendly for the search engines.

Then, the last step is to go to Plugins > Add New and search for Really Simple SSL plugin. This will fix the error with the browser telling us our site is not secure. Simply install and activate the plugin then click on Enable SSL. This will make your site secure and safe from hackers and spammers.

That’s all, Congratulations, your blog is now live. You can access your WordPress dashboard anytime by going to the link

“https://www.yourdomain.com/wp-admin”

“Now you have everything you need to get started with a blog.

Before you start on your first blog, make sure to leave a quick comment to let me know what you think of ‘Start a blog: The Beginner’s Guide’.