Introduction to Blogging
If you have ever said to yourself that I enjoy writing and I would like to start a blog but I have no idea where to start then, this article is for you. Blogging can be a fun hobby or a great business depending on what you’re looking to do. So if you’re looking to start a vlog next year but you’re clueless on where to start this simple step-by-step guide is going to help you. The very first thing is to determine what you are blogging for. Do you just want to test it out for fun as something to do in your spare time or you’re looking to try and make a side income from it. Maybe you’d like to go all the way into making this into a full-time job. The potential is endless when it comes to blogging but it’s important to get your motivation for starting a blog down first. This will influence a lot of other decision that you make and it’s okay if you don’t have the answer to every single question or have every single goal buffed out right now. It’s hard to know the potential of something that you’ve never even started before, but either way ask yourself the question of is this strictly a hobby or is this something that I’d like to try and make money with and grow in the future.
Choosing a Blogging Platform
From there we can choose your blogging platform. There are a few popular places you can start a blog like Wix Squarespace or WordPress. The best option in our opinion and the one that’s most popular is the start a blog on WordPress. We tried Wix out a few years ago and we didn’t really like it but once we switched to WordPress, we never looked back and if that is the option that you choose you have two other options from there. You can either use wordpress.com or you can use wordpress.org and we’re going to go over the differences between both wordpress.com is the free version and this is a great place to get started. If you are just looking to do this as a hobby as something fun in your spare time or if you really don’t have the money to put an upfront investment into your blog and you just want to try it out and this is why we say to make some sort of decision on whether blogging is going to be a hobby or a potential money maker for you in the future. Because if you choose wordpress.com there aren’t a whole lot of monetization options for you to choose. Also customizations and options of what you can really do are pretty limited. However it’s not a bad place to get started on in fact that is where we started our first blog.
Setting Up a WordPress Blog
So you can go to wordpress.com and make a free account from there, then all you really have to do is install a theme which is pretty much just just a one-click install all the themes we believe there are free and all you can do is some limited customization options from your theme from there. Without wordpress.com you also have the option to upgrade plans, for example you can upgrade to the business plan which will help you customize your domain name. If you stick with the free option your domain name is going to look something like new.wordpress.com but if you upgrade to the business plan you can get rid of WordPress and just have new.com and in fact the first blog that we had this is exactly what we did we paid for the business option of wordpress.com and since we’ve done that we don’t recommend it something that you do. Because it’s not really worth it. If you’re looking to start making money with your blog and you’re ready to invest some money into it to turn it into a business, going with wordpress.com and upgrading to the business plan is just a waste of money. Because you still don’t get a lot of the customization options there and it’s super super limited. So if you’re serious about starting your own website or you’re looking to upgrade and put money into your website just go with the other option of wordpress.org instead. luckily though if you do start with the free version wordpress.com you are able to migrate your site and all of your blog posts to wordpress.org. So there’s no harm in starting in the free version but you can also skip that option. If you decide to go with wordpress.org you’ll open yourself up to a lot more customization options. You can download free plugins you can have your own domain name and you can have more control over what your website is going to look like and how it’s going to run, Including more monetization options. However more setup is required because you own your website so everything that needs to be done you’re going to have to set up and install yourself. But now let’s get into a little bit more about how to set up wordpress.org because if you do choose this option or you decide to upgrade to this option things that might get a little bit more confusing because you have more control over what you need to do. So WordPress itself is technically free it’s basically the software that you use to run your website. However to get access to WordPress you need to buy what’s called posting for your website and this is the company that you’re paying to run your website and host it online once you pay for hosting then you are going to get access to the WordPress software. You’re going to need two things when you start a website. Hosting and a domain name and you can buy both of these from the same company and there are quite a lot of options to choose from. So you may need to do some research and get some reviews but the main thing that it’s going to come down to is the price. You may also want to look at things like how good their customer service is in case you ever need to contact them which does happen from time to time and how fast your site runs is partially relied on your hosting company. So you want to make sure that they are able to run your site quickly and also look at all the other amenities that they offer, but if you want some direction on where to look the companies that we recommend is namecheap which is where we started out or siteground which is where we currently we use. psychron is a bit expensive but in our opinion it’s worth it and if you can’t bundle as much as possible. So for example liana has a three-year hosting plan. If you go with a bigger package you’re going to be able to save a lot more money. If you’re serious about blogging the more in advance you pay the bigger your savings are going to be. However when we got started we just went with the one year plan because we didn’t have the money up front and we wasn’t sure if we were going to be serious about blogging or do this for a long time. So that is an option and probably something we recommend when you’re just starting out. Don’t put out a huge investment for three years if this is something you’re just testing and also another thing is if you have wordpress.com we believe siteground will help you migrate your site over to their wordpress.org. Once you’ve decided on a hosting company you are also going to need a domain name and like we said you can typically buy those from the same hosting company. Your domain name is something you really want to think about because it’s going to be your website link it’s going to be how people interact with your site and it’s going to be your blog name. So you want it to make sense with whatever topic it is you’re talking about and it might also help you rank and search a little bit if you happen to put keywords in your blog name as well. Once you have your domain name all you have to do is type it into the hosting company that you are buying hosting from to see if it is available and if you are really stuck and you have no ideas you can always look up some information duration or look up domain name or website name generator so see if you can come up with something from there. But since that’s pretty much the easy part let’s Jump Ahead a little bit here and talk about your blog Niche because that is pretty much directly connected to your domain name.If you need to any hosting comparison you can search Web Hosting vs WordPress Hosting, Which is Best for You for your knowledge.
Selecting a Blog Niche
If you’ve never heard of a niche before it’s essentially just the topics that you’re going to be talking about on your blog. So for example travel cooking or makeup. Many people opt for starting a lifestyle blog but in that case you still need to pick whatever topics you’re going to be talking about whether that is topics like fashion makeup self-care or whatever other topics you want to talk about under that lifestyle umbrella. The biggest thing you have to consider here is what are you passionate about. You need to understand why you’re choosing the topic that you are choosing. What value can you add to the conversation, if you look at a topic and you say you want to write about cooking because it looks easy or everyone is doing it or even because it’s going to make a lot of money. That is not a good reason for choosing a blogging Niche. Because if you are not passionate about your topic you’re going to get burned out really easy when the money doesn’t come and you’re going to stop vlogging before you really start to see the results. So instead if you decide that you want to start a cooking blog because you have a lot of homemade hand-me-down recipes from your grandma that you want to share with the world that is a good reason to start a blog because there is Passion behind it there is actual reason. Because when it comes to making money blogging if that is what you are trying to do or you just want a lot of fame or accolades or reads or whatever if those are your reasons for starting a blog or starting on a certain topic you’re going to be disappointed. you have to have passion behind what you do because it takes a long time for the money to start rolling in for the likes and the shares and the views and the comments and all of that. It takes a long time for those things to come in and if you just do something because it makes a lot of money you’re gonna be disappointed and you’re probably gonna stop. But your reason for starting a blog doesn’t need to be super extreme. maybe you just really enjoy traveling and you want to document your journey so that you can show other people places that they’re missing when they travel to these certain places. Whatever it is for you write down a few different passions if you have more than one and kind of look at them and see which one you think is going to be best for you to start a blog on . Which ones are you the most excited to write about and which ones do you know the most about and from there you can choose a domain name that fits whatever topic you’re talking about as long as it’s available and don’t forget you always have the option to choose your name which works really well for lifestyle bloggers because then any topic that you talk about is technically going to fit under your name and you may be wondering but what if I have multiple passions that I want to talk about. Our advice is going to be a little bit different than you’re probably going to hear in this blogging space because my advice is to write about all of them. At least for a little while. If you have three topics that you are interested in and they are vaguely similar to each other create a category on your blog for all three topics and start writing on all three of them at once. One of them may end up taking off and doing really well or you may realize that one topic you thought you were really interested in you actually aren’t that interested in. Your blog is going to evolve and change over time so don’t be afraid to just play around with it. Now let’s move back into the blog setup.
Customizing Your Blog
Once you have your hosting the WordPress software it’s going to be just a one one click install more than likely. So that is going to be super easy to set up. After that you’ll be able to access the back end of your website and our advice is to bookmark that link so that you can get back to it easier. now let’s talk a little bit about the back end of your WordPress site and how to navigate it. So this is the main dashboard here and it’s going to give you an overview of your site. You’re going to have this box here at a glance that shows you how many posts comments and Pages you have on your blog. Your activity will be here you’re probably going to have one blog post published to show you how to use the Gutenberg editor and stuff and your recent comments are right here and you have a few other things WordPress events. We usually justkeep this down at the bottom because we don’t pay attention to it and the quick draft you have a few things that you can do here like opening and closing it and then you can decide where you want these things to go using the arrows right here. So you can kind of organize this how you want it to be the rest of the things on here are from plugins that we have installed and we’ll go through my plugins and show you all of that if you go here to Updates this is going to show you everything that needs to be updated on your site. The version of WordPress here on your plugins and your themes, like right here we have a plugin that needs to be updated we have automatic updates already scheduled but you can see the one here. if you want to like update it right away the next thing that you’re probably going to see is the posts if you want to go to all the posts that you have on your blog you can go right here you can see all posts publish posts drafts if you put anything in a trash can though another option will pop up for trash and then pillar content which we don’t typically use. If you want to add a new post you can either click on add new here or add new here but we want to get down to the categories because this is important for how people are going to navigate your blog. So you want to add a new category all you have to do is type in the name here and then this is the slug so this is the URL friendly version of the name it’s usually in lowercase and only contains letters. So basically that is all blogging post is our name of one category and then all Dash blogging Dash posts is what the slug of that is. So if we were to click on it would be new.blog slash all blogging post and it would look like this. you can decide what other category you want to be a part of if you want it like nestled under another one totally optional like it says you don’t have to do that. We personally have just left mine all as parent categories which is like main categories. You can put in a description which you can see all of mine have descriptions and then you just click add new category and you will see it right here these are important because these are the topics that you talk about on your blog and they’re also going to go on your home page so make sure you get those sectioned out whatever you’re going to be talking about. The next thing here is tags and these are what you put on individual blog posts same thing here name slug description if you want we didn’t bother putting a description but if you put a blog post in a category people can click on that tag and then it will show them everything that has been tagged with that it’s kind of it’s pretty much similar to categories. The next thing here is Media this is pretty much just all of the images you have on your site we don’t really use that but that is there and then we have Pages. Adding new pages is easy because it essentially just looks like a blog post format but designing the new pages is a little bit more difficult. The pages that we recommend that you have is a home page of course an about me page a contact and Links Page and a privacy policy page those are like the main basic things that you need to have. Other ones that you could have but you don’t necessarily need is we have one for my favorite blogging resources and you could do this for your favorite category of anything. If you are a travel blogger you can put your favorite travel gear if you’re a photographer you can put your favorite photography stuff and no matter what Niche you’re in if you have blogging things that you like like you’re hosting or you’ve took any courses or gear or anything like that you can also put that in your favorites even if you don’t talk about blogging. Because these can all be affiliate links to help you make a little bit of extra money. That is something that you can add later down the line when you start getting into affiliate companies and you start Gathering gear and stuff and the other thing that you can have in the future if you start offering them is services so like I have pin creation Services pin audit Services Pinterest Management Services. We have a page on my blog for those as well. The next thing down here is comments this is just going to be where you can see all of your comments from all of these are things that we have downloaded the appearance. we’re going to look at in a bit so the next thing we’re going to look at is plugins.
Using WordPress and Plugins
So these are the plugins that we have installed on our blog. So if you are looking to add new plugins all you have to do is click on the add new and then you can type in search for any plugins we are pretty sure everything here is free and then if you want a lot of times they have upgrades where you can buy stuff or plug in do pro versions we’ve never done any of that all of the plugins on my blog are currently free. Then there’s a few other things here tools and settings a lot of the stuff is either not necessary to touch or it is stuff that we’ve downloaded ourself with plugins. Moving around that let’s talk about choosing a theme next because when you first install WordPress . You’re going to have a pretty Bare Bones website. So you’re gonna need a theme to make it look the way that you want and this can get overwhelming because there are a lot of options and a lot of prices. We would start with either creative Market or Etsy to look for your themes and don’t worry about some of the Crazy Prices that you see on themes because you really don’t need to go all out when it comes to buying a WordPress theme there are some pretty inexpensive options and at this point you may want to start looking at what brand colors you are interested in many if not all themes will allow you to change whatever color that the default theme comes with. But you also want to make the site look and feel correct as well take your time choosing a theme and make sure that it is mobile friendly you want your site to load fast and be accessible on mobile because those are both ranking factors in Google to try and get your blog post to rank on the first page. Before you go all in and choose a theme though let’s back up a little bit and decides more about our brand our mission and our audience first. This is important to decide before you choose a theme because your target audience is going to expect a different feel from your blog. If you are attracting artists they might expect a more fun theme vs if you are trying to be a professional journalist they might expect a more professional Black and White theme so what’s your mission. Are you talking about food and wedding cakes or are you going to have a parenting blog. These things should be factored into what theme you choose and you want to look at your brand colors do you want to recolor the whole website to match your brand or do you like the original colors of the theme and you want to match your brand to the colors that are already there. Both are an option but you want to make sure that you know what choice you’re going to make before buying and installing the theme because the theme may be pink and bright and so the black and blue colors that you have for your brand might not look good if you switch them out. After you’ve chosen your theme we want to show you some other customization options that you can do. There are some basic things that you can change inside of WordPress we are here on the main dashboard again we’re going to go to appearance and customize some of this you might have already done based off of your theme like your site identity you can put in your site title if you have a tagline and then if you have a site icon usually your logo. You can put that here and it’ll show up here in the browser tabs bookmarked bar everything like it says there topography all these other things you probably have figured that out with your theme. So what we want to talk about is the menus because this part is important it’s the navigation of your website how people get around it and you want to make sure that it’s easy for people to navigate to. So we have my home page which we have done in Elementor and I’ll show you a little bit about that later that is a different plugin of how we got this to look the way that we want it to and then we have blogging which is one of the custom links that we set up. So this probably was one of the things that your theme helped you with but the category is probably not.
Creating and Structuring Blog Posts
So If we go down here to add items the categories that we created earlier with all of your blog post topics on it this is where you can put your categories so that people can access them from your home page or anywhere on your website really. You can go down here to categories and see all of the ones that you have set up and we have one set up for all blog posts beginner blogging tips make money and Pinterest marketing and social media those are the ones we are the most common that we write about and then we have one for lifestyle which is productivity organization and all of these other ones here. we also have a few custom links for our shop so you can go up here to custom links and you can add in any link that you want whatever you want it to say. So we have my blog content calendar and a few other products linked here that’s going to take you directly to our Etsy shop and once you get to the point that you have Services if that’s something that you want to do you can also add in Pages as well. So we have a work with me with all of my different pages on it then we have the essential pages that you need a about our a contact links and a private policy so when you first start out you’re probably going to have this and you don’t necessarily have to have this under contact you can just have your about us wherever you want your contacts and links on there we’ve just done this because we have so many other things that it’ll put in a second row like it’s done here . If I have everything all out so I just have this under contact you don’t have too many things in your navigation menu because then it’s going to get fusing and you want your site to be easy to navigate and the way that you can set this up uh let’s say you want to add a post we personally wouldn’t add any posts unless they’re something super super important like how to start a blog or something and you want to link directly to that post. All you have to do is click on the plus and it’s going to show up at the bottom here and then you can drag it wherever you want so let’s say we’re going to add this into our lifestyle we can either have it here and then it’s going to show up as its own button right there or you can kind of bump it in a little bit and then when you go to click on lifestyle hover over it you’re going to see your post there. You can also Niche it in a little bit and let’s say you want it under self-care and mindset specifically you can do that so that they hover over lifestyle you see the error for lifestyle for self-care and mindset and then 12 small ways to make your life easier this year is there and then you can always change the navigation label to say whatever you want so like let’s just say you want to say make your life easier this year. So that it’s a bit smaller you can do that and it’s going to tell you what the original thing is so now it’s going to say make your life easier this year instead and then you can go down to here and then if you want to just get rid of it you just hit remove. Now we are going to talk about Elementor and how we did our home page because this is something that you can do as well. So on our home page we are going to go here to edit with Elementor and this is a little bit more advanced but we want to talk guys what’s possible this is the plugin that you can use we have the free version of it so we can’t use every single thing but we picked out where all the boxes were going to go if you click on it you can see what the title is going to look like the link what type of tags like you can put in images wherever you want you can add in any boxes wherever you want them to go. So let’s say you want to add an extra box here. You can just click the plus and let’s say you want to add a text editor here you can have it say whatever you want and like we said this is a little bit more advanced so we are not going to show everything about it but this is what our home page looks like as a whole.
Previewing and Publishing Blog Posts
Now it’s time to fill up your blog with content and then actually start writing some blog posts and there’s a lot that goes into writing blog posts we can’t go through everything here but if you want to learn a little bit more information on it. To start a new post you’re going to go here and add new we are going to go to all post just so we can show you what a post looks like filled out and we’re just going to use the first one that we have right here. So we are using what is called the Gutenberg editor in WordPress it’s a plugin that you can download as opposed to the classic WordPress and it really depends what your preference is if you want to use this one or not. We prefer the Gutenberg a little bit but you don’t necessarily have to have it and if we go over here to posts. This is what we mainly want to focus on here you can see the summary of your post you can see what the visibility is set to public is going to be the one you’re going to use themost and then if you are writing a post you can schedule it obviously this one’s already been posted but you can schedule your posts out to any time and date that you want this is the URL and you always want to make sure you change the last part of your url. Because this part is always going to be the entire title until you change it and you just want this last little part here to be the main point that you’re trying to get across or the keyword that you’re trying to rank for. So make your life easier is the one we are trying to rank for and then this is the full link down here and then this is how you add your posts into the categories which is the main thing that we wanted to show you so you can search for categories here but we mean unless you have a ton you don’t really need to search for them you can just scroll and see so this one you’ll find under all lifestyle posts and productivity and organization and then down here is the tag. So we just have this one under productivity we don’t find that a lot of people use the tags too much so we don’t Focus too much on the tags. But if you do start typing something you’re gonna see your tags show up down here. If you have a ton of them or you can go with the most used ones down. There’s a couple other extra things up here but there’s nothing too crazy to worry about you can have a document overview over here you can see all of your paragraphs and things or you can go to to your outline and see your different outlines here. This is if you switch to giraffe obviously mine’s posted so we can switch it back to a draft if we want and then this is the preview where you can see desktop tablet or mobile and then you can also preview it in a new tab if you’re looking at the desktop version.
