At some point or another, I’m sure you’ve considered starting a blog – especially if you’re reading this now. Starting a blog can be intimidating for sure, and it may prove overwhelming at first. Fortunately, I learned a lot through my own experience blogging, and I’ve broken it down into ten easy steps for you. Don’t let yourself get intimidated. As long as you break it down and approach it with discipline, you’ll be able to start your own. It honestly gets easier as you go – a lot of the rough stuff is up front. Without further ado, let’s dive right into how to start a blog!
1. Pick A Niche
First off, it’s important to pick a niche. It’s best to be as specific as possible, while still giving yourself enough wiggle room to have a lot to write about. For example, I started as a personal finance and development blog. Then I narrowed that down to mostly personal finance. Now, I mostly focus on the career development, frugal living, and side hustle income aspects of personal finance. I still touch on other aspects of personal finance, but those are the main ones – and honestly my niche may still be too wide! For example, it may be better to focus on just frugal living.
Alternatively, let’s go with another example. Let’s say you want to start a cooking blog. You should focus on a specific style or type of cooking. Maybe it’s paleo, keto, healthy, cheap, or even bulk cooking (like cooking for a large family). The narrower your niche, the easier it is to build an audience since they know exactly what to expect from you. Just make sure you have enough to write about – my niche is a little wider mainly because I just like talking about all aspects of personal finance and how to use it to go from bitter to richer!
2. Choose A Name
Next up, choose a name. Obviously, it should be related to your niche. It’s best if you can make it short and catchy. One option people enjoy is to use alliteration in the title to make it easier to remember. As long as it’s something readers can easily remember and type, you should be set. For example, Bitter to Richer just rolled off the tongue when I was brainstorming names – so I ran with that. It’s unique enough that it stands out, but simple enough to remember easily. If you’re struggling, come up with a dozen or two names and see what stands out. You may decide that some sort of combination of names is best.
3. Choose A Web Host
Choosing a web host is an important part of the process, and one that will make your life much easier or harder. It’s important to pick a host that offers fast speeds and is reliable. On top of that, any host that is easy to use is a huge plus. Of course, pricing matters too, but there are a surprising amount of competitive entry-level hosts for when you’re first starting out.
Bluehost
My favorite web host is Bluehost, plain and simple. In my tests, it has always been the fastest or second fastest. Beyond that, it has been incredibly reliable – I only had one momentary outage during my entire time as a blogger so far. The outage was so short that by the time I opened up the homepage, the website was back up! Additionally, I find the pricing to be fair and the customer support to be top notch. For more details on my thoughts on Bluehost, check out my full review.
4. Pick A Theme
Once you have a host, it’s time to make your website look nice. Pick out a theme that calls to you. You can look up tons of good free ones online, or you can pay for a premium theme. Part of it will depend on what you need for your blog, but most people will be served marvelously with a free theme.
Customize It
Now it’s time to customize it. There are a million ways to tweak it, but do what you need to make it look good in your eyes. Try to pick a solid color scheme to represent your blog. Remember, this is how the blog will look to the world. It can be a huge factor in whether you keep or lose readers.
5. Add Plugins To Help You
If you’re blogging, you’re likely going to use WordPress. With WordPress you can easily install plugins to give you all the features you want or need on your site. This can range from plugins that help you track data about your website, like pageviews, but it can also be things that affect your blog’s layout. For example, my search feature is from a plugin. On my home page, the most popular posts listed is generated from a plugin as well. There are tons of different ones that can do almost anything you need. So, install them and get to work!
Just be aware of one detail, the more plugins you have the slower your blog load speeds may be.
6. Start Writing And Don’t Stop
Blogging is really all about consistency and discipline. Setting it up initially may be a doozy, but you can power through it easily over the course of a week. However, you can’t just power through all the articles you’ll have to write. Create a schedule and get to it – immediately. As soon as you decide to start a blog (and know the niche), you should start writing.
Create A Backlog
By the time you launch your blog, you should have a healthy backlog started. When I started Bitter to Richer, I had 5 articles in my backlog at all times. Since I published once per week, that could last me over a month. When I decided to publish 3 articles per week, I wrote up a storm. I had a backlog of roughly 30 articles (the equivalent of 10 weeks). Since I’ve never missed a personal deadline for writing an article, I still have that backlog.
Now, not everyone needs to go that crazy with it – I just want the cushion in case something happens and I’m not able to write as much for a period. For most people, I’d say a backlog that is roughly one month worth of published posts is enough to cover your bases.
Launch With Several Articles
When I launched, I published 5 articles on day one – and then did one per week. Now I do 3 per week and am happy with that, but in hindsight I should’ve published more out the gate. It depends on your niche, and the purpose of the blog, but launching with 5-10 articles published, plus your backlog, should be a good start.
Consistency Is Key
All of this has pretty much had one overarching theme – consistency. I have a heft backlog so that I can always be consistent. It’s good for SEO, which is a plus, but I don’t want to let my readers down by having an inconsistent schedule or dropping the ball.
7. Optimize For SEO
Which brings me to my next topic, SEO optimization. There are several great plugins that can help with this. I wouldn’t go crazy over this, but it’s helpful to use plugins and do some keyword research on each post. Just look up what people commonly search with your keywords, and see what articles appear in the search engine of your choice. Those two minor things can generally give you all the information you need to start ranking.
Of course, be patient. When you create your blog, it will take some time to be seen by search engines. Don’t expect significant SEO results for at least 6 months (unless you really know SEO inside and out or have a lot of ways to promote your blog).
8. Promote Your Blog
When you launch, don’t forget to promote your blog! In fact, create a social media account so that you can keep promoting your blog with every new post. A big one for writers and bloggers is Twitter. Twitter, in my experience, gives some decent traffic to the blog, but is best used for building connections with other content creators. Pinterest serves to send the most traffic to the blog, but it has ups and downs and can be rather inconsistent.
Of course, those aren’t your only options – just suggestions based on what I’ve used. I also recommend only starting with one or two social media accounts (at most) so that you don’t overwhelm yourself.
Comment On Other Blogs
Another decent way to promote your blog is to comment on other blogs. Do not – I repeat, do not – just comment on a blog with a link to one of your articles. When you comment using your account, you should have a link to your homepage. The focus should be to just comment something useful and relevant, and people who are interested will click the link and check out your site. The purpose of this is to provide meaningful engagement. Trying to use others as raw publicity will just leave a bad taste in everyone’s mouth and come across like you’re spamming.
Guest Post
Another useful thing is to gust post on bigger blogs or sites. This will include a backlink to your site, which helps promote SEO traffic. Many successful bloggers swear by this, so if you can you should try to add it to your rotation.
9. Worry About Monetizing It After You’ve Built An Audience
I didn’t put ads on my site until I had a moderate audience. Still, ads don’t even net me much money – it just helps pay for the website. Affiliate links are one of the best ways to make money blogging, but first you need to build an audience that trusts you and your stamp of approval on a service or product. So, focus on making good content, be honest, and monetize it once you have a following that knows you’re trustworthy.
10. Start Building An Email List
One of the best ways to market your blog and keep traffic flowing in is through an email list. Start building one as soon as possible. It will seem slow at first, but it will ramp up and become an incredibly useful tool for you down the road. In fact, this may be the most useful tool for you as a blogger!
Conclusion
There you have it, 10 easy steps to help you start a blog. If you have any tips of your own, let us know what they are in the comments. For more content like this, and a free budgeting template and financial goals worksheet, be sure to sign up for the Bitter to Richer newsletter.
