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 to be 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 six simple 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 Name And A Niche
First off, it’s important to pick a name and a niche. It’s best to go a 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 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.
Or, let’s go with another example, and 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 narrow 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!
Picking 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 it 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, and 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.
2. Pick A Host And Start Building
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.
Create A “Coming Soon” Page
It can help if you create a coming soon page while you’re working on your website. That way people aren’t seeing content come up then come down, or just visit an empty web page when they navigate to your site. A coming soon page takes just a minute to create, and it lets visitors know they should come back later!
3. Customize It And Install Plugins
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.
Then 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.
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.
4. Create Some Content For The Launch
When I launched, I published 5 articles on day one – and then did one per week. 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 creating a healthy backlog, should be a good start.
5. 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 my 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. Instead, 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 as spammy.
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.
6. Keep Building An Audience
Keep working on building an audience while you make new content! Fortunately, there are many ways to accomplish that…
SEO
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).
Email Lists
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!
Meaningful Content
Above all, it’s important to keep producing great, meaningful content for your audience. Give them content that they can actually use, and give it to them at a steady pace!
Optional: Monetize Your Blog
You don’t necessarily have to monetize your blog. However, if you choose to go down that route, then there are several great options.
Affiliate Links
Affiliate links are links that connect your audience to a product or service. If a member of your audience clicks the link, then makes a qualifying purchase, you’re given a piece of the sale. This is one of the most lucrative and consistent methods for bloggers to make money.
Ads
Putting ads on your blog comes with pros and cons. It slows down your blog, most people hate it, and it offers little revenue. However, you can rely on a steady, consistent source of income. In my case, I like to put ads on the bottom of the page (that people can easily close). It helps ensure there is enough income to keep the blog running, but it’s not so invasive that it detracts from the user’s experience.
Digital Products
Digital products can be exceptionally lucrative. Once you have honed in on your niche and have a lot of content, creating something of your own to sell can bring in a lot of extra money.
Conclusion
There you have it, 6 simple 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.
