How to Start a Blog - The Ultimate Step-by-Step Guide (Updated Mar 2024)

Why Start Your Own Blog

How many people get intimidated by the idea of starting a blog, and putting themselves out there online. They asked a question “Why would I even want to start my own blog?”. We would respond back with “Why not?”. Owning, operating and writing a blog doesn’t take very much time out of your normal schedule, and can be both a fantastic outlet creative ideas, as well as a great money maker for your family income.

Many people worry that it won’t be good enough writers or nobody wants to hear what they have to say, so they’d never end up starting one or putting themselves out there.

This is why one of the first steps in starting your own blog or travel blog is actually inside your own head. It is going through and tackling the “why” for you and making that reason one of the primary drivers in how you decide many of the next steps.

For some people, it is more about creative writing and expressing themselves. For others, they don’t care about the writing as much, and just want to have a blog that makes great money every single month.

But whatever your reason is, you need to get crystal clear on it, so you can make better decisions about what works best for you, and have something to fall back on when the going gets tough, we could always will.

Having a reason beyond yourself is one of the greatest things that can motivate you day in and day out. You can be doing it for your family, for a cause you believe in, or just to create a better life for yourself.

Creating a better life for more people is one of the main motivators for why we started How to Start a Blog in the first place, and the more people’s lives we see changed – the more we will create! Let’s start blogging!

Choosing What to Write About

What are the most common questions we get is:

“What should I blog about?”

Writing a blog will be a lot of work for a long time, and will definitely come with its share of ups-and-downs. By choosing a topic that you’re passionate about, it will help you get through those harder times or writers blog that every blogger faces from time to time.

Obviously you need to have this figured out before you can start creating content for your website. Here are a few helpful tips when trying to determine the subject of a Blog that could be around for years to come.

What do you obsess about / spend more than you should on / have your mind go to when you are resting?
By choosing the subject that you naturally are extremely interested in, that will make creating content like pushing a rock downhill. It will be easy, it’ll flow naturally, and the results will show in your writing and the audience it attracts.

What types of things do you obsess about?

When you are waiting in line at the grocery store, what subjects do you think about?

Many people think that just because they are in a certain situation, they should start blogging about that – like parent bloggers. We think you should follow your passion, because that will take you so much farther in the long run there’s something you feel you should be doing.

Choosing a Domain Name

No matter what hosted website solution you choose, one of the most important first choices you have to make is what domain name to register or buy for your blog.

Whatever you choose has a directly reflect the topic that your blog is writing about, and be something that’s easy enough to remember and say the people so that visitors will be able to come back to your blog.

Top-Level Domain Extensions

When most people think of domain names, they either think of .com extensions, .net extensions or .org extensions. These have been the most common extensions for a long time, and any big and reputable brand will use one of those top extensions.

For most people, this is what we would highly recommend, as they are the most search engine friendly, and easiest to remember when verbally telling someone what your blog is.

But one of the main issues is that most of the good domains have already been registered in the past because the internet has been around for decades now.

So if you want one of the top-level domain extensions, chances are you will either have to buy an existing domain from an aftermarket company, or choose a new, quirky, or branded one that you can register fresh.

If you are thinking about a new top-level domain, we highly recommend using GoDaddy for your registration. They have one of the best domain management platforms out there and are one of the biggest in the industry. We hold most of our domains within our GoDaddy account still to this day.

Secondary Extensions

Another common route that many new bloggers are taking, is selecting one of the “secondary extensions” from the market that are much newer, and haven’t been taken up as much.

Domain extensions like .blog, .accountant, .co, .life, .photography, .shop, etc. are all great ones to choose from. Most of the time, you can find a domain name that you normally wouldn’t be able to register on the open market for one of the top level extensions (.com, .net or .org), but you can find it available in these secondary places.

Again, if you are thinking of a secondary domain extension, one of the best places online to get one is GoDaddy. They have the largest selection of secondary domain extensions to choose from, and some of the best prices you can find in the industry.

Register New

How many people coming with the perfect domain name means thinking of a catchy or clever brand name, and getting the .com version available. Depending on the brand name you choose for your blog, this could work fantastically well.

Registering new is also by far the cheapest method of getting a domain because it’s open on the market already. Most of the time existing domains will sell for more than registering it new.

If you’re thinking about registering a new domain, use this affiliate link to get special savings from GoDaddy on your first year’s order. You won’t be able to find deals like that around the web for sure.

Buy an Existing Domain

If you want to be able to register a domain is already taken, chances are that is actually for sale on one of the many online marketplaces or online auction houses.

Or even if you just don’t know quite which one you should register – these can give you a great starting point to browse through the available listings, search by keyword, or just find some hidden gems that are available.

Usually the better the domain name, the more expensive it is. But we have found some absolute gems on sites like GoDaddy Auctions, that are live and generating great traffic to this day!

The best place in the industry to go out and find existing domains is GoDaddy Auctions. They are the largest, most affordable, and best system for purchasing existing domains out there.

We’ve bought and sold dozens of domains from this site, and highly recommend the experience.

Choosing Your Blogging Platform - Self-Hosted Blog or All-In-One Builder

One of the most common debates for people just creating their blog is whether to use a self-hosted solution (getting your own web hosting services, and installing WordPress from WordPress.org), or using one of the all-in-one website platforms out there.

Both options have their pros and cons, so let’s dive deeper into each one.

Self-Host with an Existing Web Host

Most people who are serious about blogging will go with a self-hosted WordPress blog with your own website hosting account, and will install WordPress themselves.

This is probably the avenue that we would recommend, because most websites hosts have fantastic support, and have made it easier and easier to manage your site without technical knowledge required.

The type of hosting you want to be looking at is probably shared account, which means you will be one of the multiple accounts on shared servers, so you don’t have to pay for your own dedicated server, or manage one yourself.

Pros

• Cheaper – you can get fantastic website hosting for $3-$5/m that will grow as large as your blog will.
• More Flexible – with your own website hosting, you are also more flexible and in better control of your site. Most CPanel installations have many options to create subdomains, manage your email, update your sites, etc.
• Multiple Websites – many bloggers will start out with only 1 site, but will quickly start building others around other areas of interest to them. Your own hosting platform allows you to launch multiple sites, without any additional cost from the hosting company.
• Built-In WordPress Installation – almost every hosting company will have one-click WordPress installers built-in, so you don’t have to worry about setting up a MySQL domain, configuring users, etc. Just enter a few basic details and viola!
• Great Support – almost every hosting company have pretty good customer support, and the few that we are recommending below all come with excellent support.
• Free Domain – almost every hosting provider will also include a free domain name with the purchase of a hosting account, which will automatically be configured to your account – so no needing to mess with DNS settings, a separate domain registrar, maintaining domain registration, etc.

Cons

• More setup work – most of the time there are few more setup pieces and settings you’ll need to tweak with this method.
• Slightly More Difficult to Use – This isn’t a huge issue for most people, but often having your own hosting will come with more settings and places to look too, which makes things naturally a little more complicated. You’re in better control of it, but some people can get overwhelmed with all the options.

Hostgator

One of my favorite beginner blogging hosting options is HostGator.

This is the first hosting platform that I ever used, and still have that first account I have a registered to this day. They have fantastic support, dirt cheap prices, great load times and speeds, ability to setup your own email address (with a step-by-step guide), and phenomenal up time on the way.

There is a really good reason that these guys are one of the biggest hosting providers out there.

They offered three great plans for shared hosting which is the one you would probably want to go with when first starting off. Oh, and all come with a great money-back guarantee.

HostGator Hatchling

Rated 5.00 out of 5

$2.75 per Month

Shared Hosting  |  Unmetered Bandwidth  |  Unmetered Storage  |   One-Click Installs  |   SSL Included  |   Automated Backups

HostGator Baby

Rated 5.00 out of 5

$3.95 per Month

Shared Hosting  |  Unmetered Bandwidth  |  Unmetered Storage  |   One-Click Installs  |   SSL Included  |   Automated Backups

HostGator Business

Rated 5.00 out of 5

$9.95 per Month

WordPress Hosting  |   WordPress Optimized  |  Limited Bandwidth  |  Unmetered Storage  |   One-Click Installs  |   SSL Included  |   Automated Backups

If you’re looking for a little bit higher up platform, they do Provide Cloud hosting and managed WordPress hosting as well, with both go for a little bit more every month. If you have a high traffic website, we recommend those for you. But for most bloggers, the shared hosting will be more than adequate.

A2 Hosting

One of our other favorite shared hosting platforms is A2 Hosting.

They’re very price comprable to HostGator, the one thing that sets them apart is their speed. All of their hosting platform to set up with solid state hard drives, and turbo boosted plugins to make sure your website is as fast as possible, all for a great price.

We have dealt with their support teams many times and only have the highest of compliments for the way they handle everything.

Their packages also come with three starter plans, which will depend on what is best for you.

A2 Hosting Lite

Rated 5.00 out of 5

$3.92 per Month

Shared Hosting  |  Unmetered Bandwidth  |  Unmetered Storage  |   One-Click Installs  |   SSL Included  |   SSD Hosting

A2 Hosting Swift

Rated 5.00 out of 5

$4.90 per Month

Shared Hosting  |  Unmetered Bandwidth  |  Unmetered Storage  |   One-Click Installs  |   SSL Included  |   SSD Hosting

A2 Hosting Turbo

Rated 5.00 out of 5

$9.31 per Month

Shared Hosting  |   WordPress Optimized  |  Unmetered Bandwidth  |  Unmetered Storage  |   One-Click Installs  |   SSL Included  |   SSD Hosting

For most people, A2 hosting packages are very reasonably priced, so we recommend going with the turbo package, which gives you the fastest loads beads possible. The faster the load time, the more visitors will stick around your site, and click through and read more post that you have.

WP Engine

Lastly, for the people who want to buy the best managed service out there for WordPress, and have the best speed out of the box, we highly recommend using WP Engine.

This company is quickly middle name for themselves for being the best managed WordPress hosting out there. That means when your website goes down, there is somebody to call 24 hours a day, who is also a WordPress expert, to help you get back up and going fastest.

They have a number of additional tools, such as staging sites, pre-configured WordPress hosting, and more that makes your job as a blogger much easier, and will allow you to focus on your writing, not maintaining your website.

They’re the most expensive solution we are recommending, but you get what you pay for for sure with this company.

WP Engine Startup

Rated 5.00 out of 5

$35.00 per Month

WordPress Hosting  |   WordPress Optimized  |  50GB Bandwidth  |  10GB Storage  |   One-Click Installs  |   SSL Included  |   Automated Backups

WP Engine Growth

Rated 5.00 out of 5

$115.00 per Month

WordPress Hosting  |   WordPress Optimized  |  200GB Bandwidth  |  20GB Storage  |   One-Click Installs  |   SSL Included  |   Automated Backups

WP Engine Scale

Rated 5.00 out of 5

$290.00 per Month

WordPress Hosting  |   WordPress Optimized  |  400GB Bandwidth  |  30GB Storage  |   One-Click Installs  |   SSL Included  |   Automated Backups

If you are serious about your bogging future, then we recommend getting WP Engine from the start. They’re ones that you will never have to migrate away from, and can scale as large as you possibly could imagine.

Best Website Hosts Compared

	Our Rating	Price	Type	Web Host Company	Managed Hosting	WordPress Optimized	Number of Websites	Free Domain Included	One-Click Installs	Bandwidth	Storage	CPUs	Memory	Number of Databases	Monthly Visitors	Free Migration	Email Included	SSL Included	SSD Storage	Control Panel	CPanel Included	Automated Backups	Staging Sites	Dedicated IP	Money-Back Guarantee
HostGator Hatchling	Rated 5 out of 5	$2.75 /month	Shared	HostGator			1			Unmetered	Unmetered			Unlimited	Unlimited
A2 Hosting Lite	Rated 5 out of 5	$3.92 /month	Shared	A2 Hosting			1			Unmetered	Unmetered			5	Unlimited
HostGator Baby	Rated 5 out of 5	$3.95 /month	Shared	HostGator			unlimited			Unmetered	Unmetered			Unlimited	Unlimited
A2 Hosting Swift	Rated 5 out of 5	$4.90 /month	Shared	A2 Hosting			unlimited			Unmetered	Unmetered			Unlimited	Unlimited
HostGator Business	Rated 5 out of 5	$9.95 /month	WordPress	HostGator			3			Limited	Unmetered			3	500,000
A2 Hosting Turbo	Rated 5 out of 5	$9.31 /month	Shared	A2 Hosting			unlimited			Unmetered	Unmetered			Unlimited	Unlimited
WP Engine Startup	Rated 5 out of 5	$35.00 /month	WordPress	WP Engine			1			50GB	10GB			1	25,000
WP Engine Growth	Rated 5 out of 5	$115.00 /month	WordPress	WP Engine			5			200GB	20GB			5	100,000
WP Engine Scale	Rated 5 out of 5	$290.00 /month	WordPress	WP Engine			15			400GB	30GB			15	400,000

Using an All-in-One Website Builder

What are the other options of people choose when creating their website, is an all-in-one website builder, or hosted login platform that will take care of all the technical details for you, so you can focus on your writing.

Some of these are great for starting off, and some of the other ones can scale much larger if you really take off and get a ton of traffic to your blog.

Pros

• Easy – these tools have made it the easiest possible to get started blogging right away. No needing to setup hosting, register domains, etc.
• Affordable – most platforms are super affordable between $10 – $20 per month, so you won’t break the bank.
• Pre-Configured and Maintained – everything is already pre-setup and maintained for you, so you don’t have to worry about your site at all.
• Built-In Themes – no need to worry about finding and paying extra for themes, as everything is usually built in and guaranteed to work on the platform. Most have a great number of free themes available, but some will have a selection of premium themes for a slight fee.
• Built-In Plugins – many website builders also have plugins pre-installed, such as social media posting tools,

Cons

• More Expensive than Self Hosting – our top hosting recommendations start at $3 – $5 per month, so at $10 – $20 per month, these are significantly more expensive over time.
• Not as Flexible – if you’re looking at launching multiple websites, or may want to do other things (subdomains, email, etc.), these builders usually aren’t as easy to work with.
• Pay for Each Site – with shared hosting, you can launch as many websites as you want for the same hosting cost. With site builders, you’ll have to pay for each and every site you create.

WordPress Hosted

WordPress powers a majority of websites on the internet, and is the most widely used website platforms on the planet. They have two options available – self-hosted (downloadable) and hosted (the take care of everything). Either can let you make a free blog.

If you are brand new to blogging we cannot recommend the Hosted WordPress platform highly enough. It is built by the people who build WordPress itself, so it’s perfectly tuned for anything and everything you could want to do World login. They have fantastic plugins available right from your site, great turbo boost with tools like JetPack, and will be able to grow as large as you can.

Starting off, you can create your WordPress blog completely for free. Then overtime, when you get more serious about it or get more visitors to your site, you can upgrade to some of the more paid services, which are all very affordable, to extend the functionality in the scale of your blog.

If you are on the fence about creating a WordPress blog, we highly recommend creating a free Hosted WordPress blog, and see how you like it.

Wix

What are the other most highly recommended website builders we have out there, is Wix.

I’m sure you’ve seen plenty of the advertisements around TV or YouTube, and it’s for a great reason. The power over a hundred million websites all over the world, and have built a fantastic product for being able to create a website without very great technical knowledge.

They are just as focused on blogging though, as you can create a fantastic website for your business, club or any other use for website you would have.

With great drag-and-drop builders, templated elements, theme customizers, and extensions, you can build exactly the blog that you were imagining, at a very affordable price.

Best Blogging Platform

By far the best blogging platform / content management system (CMS) out there is WordPress. It Powers a majority the internet, is completely free, and can scale to become whatever you wanted to be the future. The latest version is packed with great features and plugins.

There is no better blogging platform out there than WordPress for almost anyone. We use it on almost every site we created this day, and don’t foresee a time where we will not use it.

It has the largest community of support and developers in the world, great free and paid themes and plugins, and as much extensibility and functionality as you could ever imagine. Want to pivot to an e-commerce site? No problem! Need to have better opt-in forms, forum functionality, social network (through something like WordPress BuddyPress)? It can do it! Nearly every web hosting provider can host it on a web server you would rent.

Unless you have a really good reason not to, there is no question that WordPress is one of the best choices for almost any new blogger out there to use as a content management system.

Installing Your WordPress Site

For those of you who decided to go with a self-hosted blog / WordPress instance, now the time to actually install WordPress on your hosting account.

The way that we highly recommend for most people, is actually using the one-click installers that come with almost every web host company out there (such as softaculous apps). This removes a ton of the headache of figuring out an FTP client, logging into a web server, messing with a configuration file, MySQL databases, username and password combos, etc. Just a few clicks and you can be logging into the WordPress admin in minutes!

It will be different for each and every side, but you ought to reach out to your support to figure out how to do it for your individual one.

Here is a great video from HostGator on how to use their one-click installation software to automatically get the latest version of WordPress live on your web host server. It’s as easy as clicking a button or two!

How to Install WordPress Manually

If your web host doesn’t have one-click installation software installed on your server, you can always install WordPress manually, using their famous 5 minute installation process. It may look a bit intimidating, but it’s not very difficult, and you’ll definitely have the latest version. Here’s our step-by-step guide:

1. Download the Latest WordPress Version – head on over to https://wordpress.org/download/ and download the latest version of WordPress from there by clicking the Download WordPress button, which should be in a zip format.
2. Configure your Domain Name – you now need to make sure your domain name is properly configured on your web server. If you used a 3rd party domain registrar, you’ll have to make sure your nameservers or DNS records are properly pointed to the web server. You also need to know which folder on the web server the domain is pointing to. If it’s the primary domain on your web hosting account, this will probably be the root directory.
3. Create a MySQL Database and User – you now need to make sure your website has a place to store its info. If your server uses CPanel, the best way is to use the “MySQL Database Wizard” to quickly create a database, username and password combo, and make sure they’re linked up. Privileges-wise, you can just enable everything.
4. Upload WordPress to Your Server – now is time to upload the zip file to your web hosting server. You can use the file manager from the backend of your host control panel, or any FTP client (our favorite is Cyberduck). Once it’s uploded, you can un-zip the file to the main file directory.
5. Navigate to yourdomain.com/installer.php – there is already a configuration file built into the install, which you can get to by going to your domainname.com/installer.php in your web browser. From there, you’ll be asked some basic information such as your domain name, MySQL database credentials, blog name, email address, etc.
6. Voila! You have a live blog – now you can login to the WordPress admin, start adding content, install your theme, configuring plugins (like the Yoast SEO plugin), and getting your site live in the world!

For advanced users, you can also install WordPress locally using an application like MAMP, which has built-in configuration (like XAMPP, MySQL, PHP, etc.). The MAMP free version will work as well as MAMP pro for most people. 

Simple and Clean Layout

One of the most important things to consider in choosing a theme is the functionality and visual layout for website visitors. That means your site should be as readable and simple as possible, with your content taking the focus.

It’s a common desire to want the most beautiful and stylish site, but many times these types of themes make reading the actual blog content somewhat difficult, are full of too many images that slow down the load times of your site, and will break more often.

The simpler the better for your blog design and layout. Let your writing fully display your creativity. It’s great to have a good looking website, but the most important thing that will get your more visitors is the actual content.

Fully Responsive Design

In this day-and-age, it’s absolutely crucial that your website be easily accessible from any mobile device out there. That becomes difficult over time with so many variations of different mobile devices, phones, tablets, operating systems, screen reader etc. There used to be separate mobile themes for sites, but they didn’t work on all mobile devices. But now it’s even better, with responsive theme design.

These actually focus on making the website adapt based on the width and size of the screen in general – not specific to each new device or HTML standard. That way, as technology changes and adapts, or mobile devices completely change format, your blog and content will be fully responsive to those changes, and always look great on any device size. It’s called responsive design, and any good theme nowadays will have it natively built-in. Your HTML code will remain the same, but your CSS will change how it looks based on width of the web browser.

There usually isn’t anything different you need to do on your end – your fully responsive theme will just automatically work on your site.

Free vs Paid Themes

One of the first questions that most bloggers have when deciding on a theme, is whether a free theme will be good enough, or whether it’s worth it to go with a premium theme.

There is no absolute right or wrong answer on this one, and it will really depend on you, your resources, what features you want, and how serious you are about your blog.

While some of the free themes are great, many of them don’t have great features or solid construction enough to not break down over time. They also might look cheap to your readers sometimes. Going with an affordable paid theme can be something that is not that expensive, but gives you a world more customization options in the long run.

Premium themes also come with many plugins and features built in, such as social media integrations (sharing posts to social media channels, Facebook comments, Instagram feed in your sidebar etc.), custom widgets for that theme, retina ready layouts, multiple sidebar positions, multiple content layouts, popular WordPress widgets, etc.

Best Free WordPress Themes

The best place to look for free WordPress themes is in the WordPress theme repository. It’s the official Automattic company site that has an approval process for submitting new themes to the repository. Here’s a few quick tips about choosing a free theme:

• Fully Responsive Design – I know we just talked about this above, but I think it’s important to re-iterate. Your theme needs to incorporate responsive design if you want to be relevant now, and for years to come.
• Good Customization Options – unfortunately many free themes skimp on the theme options to customize the look and feel of your site. Try to pick a theme that gives you lots of flexibility.

Here are some of our favorite themes in the free section:

TwentySeventeen

 

Adventure Blog

 

Blog Personal

 

Modern Blogily

 

Best Premium Themes for Self Hosted WordPress Blogs

As for paid / premium themes, there are hundreds of companies that build and sell website themes out there, and there is a wide range of quality.

Sure you can buy something super cheap, but often times you are getting what you paid for.

You want to look for a number of things when picking out a premium theme:

• Great Customization Options – the more ability you have to customize your site with either the built-in theme options, customization plugin (like Visual Composer) or the WordPress theme customizer, the better your site will look on the front end.
• Drag-and-Drop Builder (optional) – If you want a bit more granular control on the customization options of your site, you want to look for a theme customizer / drag-and-drop builder such as visual optimizer, Divi framework, or others.
• Fast and Optimized for Load Times – any blog theme that doesn’t load in under 2 seconds will kill your traffic and user experience over time. Make sure to do your research to find out which ones load the fastest.
• Built-In Plugins and Features – going with a premium theme also usually has perks of custom plugins and features that free doesn’t have. There are great custom plugins available from most premium companies, which can really extend your blog’s functionality.

The following theme company recommendations are all super reputable companies with long histories of quality and dependability. They aren’t super expensive at all, and will be a great investment into the future of your company and success.

Elegant Themes

Elegant Themes has long been one of my favorite theme companies on the market. I started using their themes almost 9 years ago, and they have just kept improving the platform.

Their Divi theme (and Divi child themes) is a fantastic front-end framework builder, drop-down menu creator, etc. that lets you customize almost every bit of your website’s look and feel with an intuitive drag and drop editor (no web developers, HTML and CSS knowledge needed!). They also have many other set blog styles to choose from as well, such as Extra, which is one of the best all-in-one blogging themes on the market.

StudioPress Themes

StudioPress’s Genesis Framework is one of the most popular, stable and powerful frameworks on the market today. It basically functions as the backbone to any of their front-end skins (known as a child theme) that can put a different skin on the front end of your site.

The Genesis Framework is one of the platforms that will grow with you as large as you can scale. So if you’re looking for something for the long term, anything from StudioPress or built on the Genesis Framework is a great option.

Step-by-Step Instructions on Installing Your Theme

1 – Download Your Theme Files / Find it on the Repository

If you’re using a premium theme, you’ll probably have a ZIP file of the theme itself ready to install. If you’re using a free WordPress one, you can just skip this step as long as you know what the name is.

2 – Go to Appearance → Themes in the WordPress Admin

This is the main themes page. Here you’ll find all currently installed ones, and can switch between everything.

3 – Click “Add New”

In the top of the screen, right next to the title, click the “Add New” button.

4a – [Premium Themes] Click “Upload Theme”

If you’re using a premium theme, and you have the ZIP file on your computer, click the “Upload Theme” button also right next to the title, and navigate to where your files are.

4b – [Free Themes] Install via WordPress Repository

If you’re using a free theme, you can just search straight on this page within the repository, and locate the one you want to install.

5 – Click “Activate” on the new theme

Once your theme is installed, you’ll need to click the “Activate” button to make sure it goes live on your site.

6 – Customize via Theme Options Panel

Every theme will be a little bit different when it comes to customization options. Some have their own built-in customization options panels, and some rely on the built-in WordPress theme options customizer, which also works great. Many themes now include different drag-and-drop builders (such as visual composer), so you can make your blog look exactly how you’d like. Here’s a great look into how Visual Composer works. Just follow the support that comes with your theme for more details.

Great Places to Find Other Themes

If you’re looking for something with a bit more functionality, and not just a standard blog theme, Theme Forest is a great place to look. They have things like business WordPress themes, WooCommerce themes, Drupal themes, Shopify themes, eCommerce WordPress themes, HTML website templates, WordPress plugins, Javascript plugins etc.

Google Analytics

If you ask anyone familiar with web design, they will say the absolute best analytics platform out there is Google Analytics. Not only is it free, but it collects some of the best information out there on the internet, all powered by the largest search engine on the planet.

It is pretty easy to set up by going to their website, and following the step by step instructions they give you.

Depending on what kind of website platform installation you have, chances are there was a plugin for WordPress or whatever website builder you chose, that will make it very easy to install your code.

Google analytics will show you exactly how many visitors you are getting from every source (search engines / organic traffic, social media, direct, referral, etc), from where in the world are coming from, and every behavior imaginable they are doing on your website.

We still use Google analytics on absolutely every site that we own, and rely on that data to make informed business decisions every day.

Google Webmaster Tools

One of the other main tools that we recommend using is Google webmaster tools. It is the place that you will interface your site with Google, show it what pages and blog posts you have, how many visitors you’re getting from search engines, which rich snippets you’re displaying, and get in-depth information as to which post gets the most clicks and rankings from search engines.

Bing also has their webmaster tools, will you can do most of the same things as in Google, except it is for the Bing search engine instead. We recommend setting up in both, as you will likely be getting blog traffic from both search engines.

Best WordPress Plugins

While the basic installation is great out of the box, adding a few selective free WordPress plugins and paid plugins can greatly extend its functionality, and spice up your post content. But be careful though, too many plugins will slow down load times on your blog posts, and bog down your site. Here are the few of the best blog plugins that we highly recommend, and use on almost every self-hosted WordPress blog that we own. They should work with all themes and sidebar widgets.

Yoast SEO – (Free and Paid)

Most bloggers rely on social and search engine traffic power their blogs. There is no better WordPress SEO plugin out there than the Yoast SEO plugin (aka SEO by Yoast) for each piece of blog content on your site that you want to rank. They have both a free plugin and a premium version that are both great to use, and will allow you to change your blog titles, create meta descriptions, create sitemaps, and many more little tasks that have HUGE impacts on how well your blog posts rank in Google and other search engines.

We usually just stick with the free plugin here, but the premium version does have a number of other features to help you increase the number of visitors you get from social media, search engines, and more.

WordPress JetPack – (Free and Paid)

Another great extension tool created by the same company who created WordPress, is WordPress JetPack. It is an entire tool box of tools and widgets, specifically created for bloggers, the greatly extend the functionality, features and security of any blog.

It includes things like firewall protection, social sharing, in-depth analytics, video and image hosting, social media sharing buttons, and much more directly into your WordPress site, which will speed up your load times, get your blog content more readers, store and load your images, and help you not get hacked over time.

While the free version is great, we highly recommend upgrading to the premium version for small yearly price, Which packs much more features that you will really need once your blog is up and going.

Gravity Forms (Paid)

Every website needs to include a contact form or opt-in forms on some part of their site or another. Well there are a number of great free contact form plugins out there, the one that we install on every single one of her WordPress sites, and keep going back to is Gravity Forms. You can embed your contact form via shortcode, widget, or theme function.

It isn’t the cheapest plug-in, but can do just about anything you want to do, including taking payments, integrating with email platform, and much more, depending on what level you purchase.

Sucuri Security (Free and Paid)

When it comes to security, there’s no better name of the game then Sucuri Security. Because WordPress is so widespread, it also created large target for hackers. This is a plug-in that we install on almost every single one of our WordPress site, so we will not have to worry about getting hacked.

Both the free and the paid versions are fantastic to use, and provide peace of mind that you were site will not be going down anytime soon.

Two other great options are iThemes Security (formerly Better WP Security) and WordFence Security, both free from the WordPress directory.

W3 Total Cache – (Free Plugin)

Our favorite cacheing plugin is W3 Total Cache, and for good reason. With over 1 million active installs, this free plugin is saving a ton of bandwidth and increasing load speeds of blog content all over the world. It has tons of customization options that allow you to compress your site code. create static versions of your web pages, intelligently deliver images, and much more. Chances are this can reduce your load times by a few seconds just by installing it.

BJ Lazy Load – (Free Plugin)

One of the easiest ways to reduce load times of your blog post content is to use a plugin like BJ Lazy Load to display your images as the user scrolls down. Basically it replaces all of your images with a tiny 1×1 image, and as the user scrolls, it reveals the images that the user sees. This way, the content takes less time to load up front.

Sumo – (Free and Paid)

One of the best Hosted tools out there for growing your site in almost any way is Sumo.com. It is a hosted tool that comes with a WordPress plugin.

They provide the absolute best and most well rounded growth and social media tools to share your blog post content for your website out of anyone. So if you want to get more customers, get more traffic, or track your success, they have tools that can do just that. Their social sharing buttons seem to get the most number of shares out of any social media sharing plugin out there.

They have great free versions of many of the tools, so you can get started without paying anything. Then when you grow and need more tools or functionality, you can easily upgrade to the premium version.

Tips on Getting Started Writing Your Blog Posts

Many people get stuck up about the format, length, the perfect headline, blog post ideas, content marketing strategy or topic writing the absolute perfect blog post, and procrastinate actually writing for way too long.

DON’T LET WRITER’S BLOCK KEEP YOU STUCK BEFORE YOU START!

One of the things that many successful writers will tell you is just getting started is the biggest hurdle that they have to overcome. They often throw out the first few ideas or even page or two of writing, which they use as a warm-up for the real thing.

Even if you don’t want to use in the future, don’t let a white page block you from actually creating high-quality content. Start writing about whatever ideas come to the top of your head. You can always delete it later, or edited so it’s better before you ever post anything.

One thing that we may or may not recommend for getting over the hurdle getting started, maybe an alcoholic drink or two 🙂

Writing High-Quality Content

Now the fun part! Let’s get it to actually craft a beautifully written blog post.

How Long Should a Blog Post Be?

First and foremost most people question how long they should write each blog post. The real answer is… it depends.

It depends on your style of writing, the topic you want to cover, the overall voice and tone of your blog, and how much you really know about that subject.

Some blogs write short-form content (eg – 100-word articles), which are more streams of consciousness throughout the day. That style makes it very easy to create a blog post and very little time, but don’t often get into the depth that many readers are looking for.

Other blogs focus on writing long-form content instead, which can be thousands of words per blog post, and only post a few times a month. These off and go very deep on one particular subject, and become a pillar post and whatever category they are talking about (like this topic you are on now).

We like to aim somewhere in the middle with most of the blogs that we own, with 500 – 2,000-word posts being a great place to aim for. The search engines tend to favor the 1,500 – 2,000-word blog post the best though, which is a great thing to keep in mind for the future.

Create Your Content Marketing Strategy – Be Specific on Topic

Bloggers also vary greatly on how specific or broad they get in a single article. Some generate lofty and conceptual articles that talked about a variety of subjects, and others dive deep into one particular idea or sub-niche.

Again the specific content marketing strategy that you choose will depend on everything about your blog, personality and writing style.

We recommend shooting somewhere in the middle, so the subject is not too hyper focused on something that doesn’t really make a difference for most of your audience, but also specific enough so you can really cover a subject well.

Create Intriguing Blog Post Titles

Writing a headline or blog post title is more of an art than a science, but there are still great frameworks for writing very attention-grabbing headlines that get more clicks in social media and search engines. Here are a few of our best tips:

• Simple and clear – don’t try to be too clever with your headline. Get right to the point of what your article is about.
• Use specific numbers – blog post headlines with more specific numbers or a roundup list in a particular niche always get shared more on social media.
• Make a bold statement – be bold! Don’t be afraid to speak boldly about your subject, as it will naturally gather more attention.
• Ask a question? – this can be a great way to plant some intrigue and mystery in the minds of your readers.

Keep Your Keywords in Mind

What is that many bloggers forget is that not only are they writing for their target audience, but they’re also writing for search engines. Google, Yahoo and Bing provide most of the search traffic that blogs get, and this organic traffic is a fantastic way to build your number of readers very fast.

When writing your articles, you need to focus on including relevant keywords that people will be searching for within your content. The key is to place keywords as naturally as possible, and not try to stuff in too many, or use keywords unnaturally, as that will get you penalized quickly. This art is known as on-page SEO (which stands for Search Engine Optimization).

You also need to include many of the related and tangential ideas, and long-tail keywords around whatever particular topic is the main theme of your article. Google basically sees that as a measure of authority and expert knowledge about a subject.

For example, if you are writing about baseball, but never mention words like “bat”, “ball”, “bases”, “players”, etc., then Google will assume that this isn’t a very comprehensive article on the subject, and won’t rank you very highly.

Get on a Schedule

The most successful writers are very disciplined and scheduled about their blogging. Very few times does the inspiration to write just come upon you. So you need to create that time with scheduled blocks to just focus on your writing. Blocking social media accounts also helps to keep bloggers focused on actually writing, instead of wasting yet another hour surfing social media.

Go where you are most creative

Many freelancers prefer to work from cafes or shared workspaces for the same reason – it’s easier to separate work and home, and always have a place they go to for getting focused work done.

I personally prefer a coffee shop or co-working space, but many writers love getting outside into nature for inspiration.

Include Images and Videos

One of the best things you can do for your website is including great videos and images that are relevant to what you’re talking about. People love strong visuals, and will stick around much longer on your blog post if you’ve included great videos on the subject as well.

Places to Get Videos

In our opinion, there is only one main place to get great videos to embed – YouTube. It hosts billions of videos and is growing every day. Chances are if you can’t find a video about your subject, you aren’t looking hard enough. With a simple search, you can uncover thousands of results to post.

We recommend keeping it to a handful of videos per article, but it will really depend on what you’re writing about.

Places to Get High-Quality Images

We also highly recommend using compelling imagery around your site, to make it feel more professional and engaging.

High-quality images are one area in particular though where you have to pay extra close attention as to where you get those images from, and who owns the copyright. You can get in deep trouble and face thousands in fines if you just steal images from wherever.

We recommend using stock photography websites such as Deposit Photo or Shutterstock for getting stock photos at fair prices. It’s much cheaper to pay for the images up front, than have to settle in court for using them illegally.

Getting Outsourced Content

One idea the true writers don’t actually really like is the idea of getting outsourced content for their blog. If you are in it to create more of a business than have a creative outlet, that this could be a fantastic way of multiplying your time and seeing blogging success faster.

There are many great writers online they could be hired for their affordable prices, to create any level of content you could dream up. You’d be surprised how many best selling authors also ghost write for other publications and can be hired to create content for your blog.

Places like UpWork, Bunny Inc, and more are great places to get great content written at affordable prices.

We recommend Bunny Inc for getting single pieces of content written at a time, and UpWork for finding freelance writers from all over the world.

Getting Your Blog Content Written for Free

One other method that is not talked about very often is getting free content for your blog by other people.

If you were looking to do this, you are needing already somewhat successful blog that people will actually want to write for.

But there are many businesses and other writers out there who will be willing to guest post on your blog, in exchange for a link back to theirs, and publicity in front of your readers.

You will have to go through and edit the post they give you, but this can be a great way to bolster the amount of articles being posted on your blog.

You can find these kinds of relationships by reaching out to other websites or social media channels in your industry and ask you if they want to guest post on your site. Once your site gets large enough also, freelance writers will also begin to contact you about guest posting or social media syndication.

Organic Traffic

The bread-and-butter source that most bloggers use to increase traffic is by utilizing search engines and on-page SEO to rank higher for the terms they want to, and getting free traffic all day long. It’s what we rely on here at How to Start a Blog, and is something we highly encourage.

Search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing all serve results to billions of visitors every day and direct that targeted traffic to websites like yours. We’ve personally operated sites that get hundreds of thousands of visitors every month, all for free!

Now while that sounds fantastic, it can be harder than it seems to get started. It will take a while writing to boost up your authority, backlinks and published body of work to really take off well in the SEO world.

The best advice we can give in that is to just write fantastic articles, all narrowed around a particular topic, and it will naturally contain great long-tail keywords, and eventually it will start to gain traction and drive more traffic back to your site. A SEO plugin like Yoast SEO can help to optimize each article better. Just make sure to fill in a great meta title, meta description and target keyword, and you’ll be on the right track.

We go much deeper into this in our Blogging Writing SEO article if you want to learn more.

Social Networks Traffic

Another place that many bloggers have seen great success is in getting traffic from social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and more.

Whenever you create a blog post, we highly recommend sharing it to your followers on all of those platforms, so you can start to get more and more traction on those sites, as well as drive traffic back to your site.

Occasionally, a blog post will just “go viral” and you will have no idea where this flood of visitors comes from, but enjoy it! Chances are your post got shared by influencers somewhere on social media, and your hard work is being rewarded by many followers going nuts over it. Great job!

On all of the major social platforms, we recommend creating a separate page for your blog, that includes the brand, logo, links and more. This will allow you to post as much content as you want without pissing off your friends and family by posting your own blog articles all of the time.

We also recommend putting up social sharing buttons on your site, so users can easily tweet it on Twitter, or share it with their Facebook followers.

Google Analytics Traffic Signals

Most people are trying to figure out how to get more traffic to their site, so start by optimizing what they have. Here are a few of the metrics and data points within Google Analytics you can use to measure how well your content is performing, and how much people are liking it.

• Bounce rate – this will tell you how many people click the back button immediately after landing, and go back to where they came from without clicking through to another page. The higher this rate, the worse off you are. If you have a really high bounce rate, we recommend going back and making your content better, or user experience more professional so people don’t bounce right away.
• Time on Site – same as bounce rate, this will show you the average duration that people stick on your site for while reading. The longer the better in our opinion. Often you can add more videos, images and more to encourage more interaction between you and your visitors.
• Pages per session – this is also a great metric to look at for determining how engaged readers are with your content. The more pages they are clicking around to, the more they like what they’re reading.
• Social Sharing – this isn’t a metric in Google Analytics, but is also an important one to look at. The more people are liking and sharing your content, the better you will do. You can use a tool like https://www.sharedcount.com/ to find how much your posts are being shared on social media.
• Audience Insights – Google also collects an incredible amount of data on your readers, so you can find out detailed information about their demographics, and form a clearer picture of who your target audience is.

While these seem like technical metrics, they are deeply important to Google’s algorithm, and tell a story of how well you are writing your content to them. The better you can make these numbers, the more engaged readers are with your website, and the more traffic search engines will send your way.

Guest Blogging

Guest blogging has been a bigger subject amongst bloggers more recently, due to its ability to get you in front of a bigger audience and more readers, without having to pay for advertising. Basically, you or someone else write a great guest post that is intended to only be posted on another website, in exchange for a link to your site and mention about you and your business. This will hopefully drive traffic and additional readers back to your site.

Some bloggers might also reach out to you to place a guest post on your site. This can be a great way of getting high-quality content written for free, but you’ll have to determine if the content they’re submitting is best for your niche, audience and readers before you agree to the guest post.

Advertising - Google Adsense

For most bloggers, it’s very easy to throw up a few ads on your blog posts and start to make a few dollars to a few hundred dollars per day. This would be greatly depending on how much traffic do you have, and your niche as to how much you can potentially make our daily basis. But we firmly believe that most bloggers can get to a level that can replace their normal day job in a matter of months.

There are many ad networks out there, but the one we recommend to most bloggers is Google AdSense. It is the easiest to sign up for and use, and has the greatest variety of advertisers on it. They pay pretty good rates per-click, and are a stable platform that can grow as large as you can.

There are tons of very large websites that solely monetize with advertising, and Google Adsense is a prime way that they keep a large staff paid well.

Just go over to their site, complete the approval process, setup a few auto-placement ads to run, and voila! You are now making money and monetizing your site as a professional blogger!

Affiliate Marketing Programs

If you write about a subject that involves people buying things, then there are a few great places that you can send like-minded people to while recommending products, via affiliate links that will give you a small commission on each sale – known as affiliate marketing. That is how we mostly monetize this site, and is something we recommend to most bloggers starting out.

Amazon Associates

Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the last 20 years, then you know Amazon is one of the largest retailers in the world, and sells just about anything and everything imaginable.

They also have a fantastic affiliate program called Amazon Associates, that will allow you to make a percentage of every sale that you send to them, within a 24 hour window. That means you can be recommending fishing poles to buy, but if someone you send purchases a TV, you can also get a percentage of that, which often is between 2% and 6%, depending on the product category.

They also have great embeddable tools and custom affiliate links that you can place in your blog content or social media posts, that will directly display images, accurate prices, and affiliate links back to the site.

Amazon is definitely one of our first choices for monetizing many blogs out there.

Clickbank

If you promote things that also potentially have some education component of them, one of the largest online marketplaces for digital product affiliate programs is ClickBank.

They allow anyone in the world to sell digital or physical products, and attract affiliates (like you) to promote that product via your personalized affiliate links for them in exchange for a very healthy cut of the sale, sometimes up to 50% and even 75% commissions on every product sold, so you can effectively recommend products to your readers you didn’t even make, and earn more money than the person who created it!

They have products about anything and everything, and once you get dialed in on how you promote them, can make a TRUCKLOAD of cash every month.

Private Affiliate Marketing Programs

Depending on your niche, there are plenty of more private affiliate programs that we won’t get into today, from anyone else who sells online. That can be anything from other larger retailers (WalMart, Bass Pro Shops, etc.), to larger affiliate networks (CJ, ShareASale, etc.) that have large collections of affiliate programs all under one roof.

You’ll have to signup and get approved for any program out there, but can easily monetize a blog by recommending other people’s products, and replace your full-time job with passive income fairly quickly (depending on how much traffic your blog posts get).

Sponsored Posts / Social Media Posts

If your blog gets some significant traffic, you can start to think about writing sponsored posts (or blog posts that companies pay you to post about). You can consider them native ads that look and feel just like your normal blog posts. Depending on your agreement, you may have to post about them on your social media accounts a few times, email a link out to your email list, or keep them featured on your homepage for a period of time.

If you have a large following on your social media channels too, some companies want to do a series of sponsored posts on those to reach that audience (also considered influencer marketing).

Usually these sponsored posts are a one-time fee, but can easily be hundreds to thousands of dollars, depending on the amount of traffic your blog gets.

Create your Own Products

Lastly, if you want to get really industrial, you can always create your own physical or digital product that you can sell on your website.

We won’t get too deep here as to how to do that, as you could write many books about the ins-and-outs of that. But often times, creating a course focused on their expertise is not that hard for blog writers to do, and can be a great way to supplement earnings.

Then you could post that course on platforms like Udemy, or sell it yourself on ClickBank, and get the leverage of a marketplace of people also being able to promote what you sell.

To Sell or Not to Sell?

For most people, the decision to sell the project they have been pouring their blood, sweat and tears into for years is a really heavy decision. It is not something you should go about lightly, and something that can greatly change your future. Here are a few things to consider when determining if you want to sell your blog or not.

• Growing or shrinking – one of the most attractive website purchases for a buyer is to purchase something that is continuing to grow in traffic, readers and monetization over time. No one wants to buy a sinking ship declining in traffic, so if you are thinking about selling, make sure your business continuing to grow, and has a track record of success.
• Niche – some niches are just more attractive than others to potential website buyers. If you talk about underwater basket weaving, chances are the audience is small and you don’t make very much money on the site, and it’s not actually that sellable. Most potential buyers are focused on making money with whatever blog they purchase, so the niche your content is in, and audience it targets is important.
• Workload – No website buyer wants to buy a job, so the more systemized the business is, and the more passive income it receives, the more attractive it is to potential buyers, and higher price you’ll get for it. That is why we recommend everybody try and make their blog as systemized and processed as possible, so you can get the highest multiple for it.
• Monetization Method – how are you monetizing your blog and making money from your readers? The most sought-after methods that potential buyers are looking for are affiliate marketing, placing ads, creating your own digital product or ebook, eCommerce, and more.
• How much is it making – Almost all blog purchases under a few million dollar level, are all priced on a multiple of earnings. This basically means, depending on a number of factors about your website (niche, number of blog posts, social media following, quality of content, click-through rate of your affiliate links, email list of readers, sales of your digital products, traffic, etc.), you will get 2 to 4 years of profit upfront as a lump sum payment. So when you consider selling your blog, make sure you are making as much as possible with it, and also have a track record of success to be able to show potential buyers.
• History of success – No one wants to buy a brand new blog that has no proven track record of success. That is why if you considering selling, make sure you have a verifiable history behind the business, so they can have more trust that it will continue on that trend line after they purchase it.

Ways of Improving Your Valuation

If you are considering selling your blog, it’s worth it to spend the time to optimize and better monetize your blog, to increase the final valuation and sale price. Most bloggers overlook this step, and end up leaving thousands on the table.

• Adding More Content – buyers are always looking at the amount of content and indexed pages you have in search engines, so you should definitely post all blog posts you have lying around.
• Optimizing Ad Space – if you haven’t split tested your ad layouts, ad networks / advertisers / affiliate program, or even using affiliate links instead of ads, you should definitely give it a try. Sometimes this can double the passive income you get from your blog, overnight!
• Adding and Testing Affiliate Links – finding the perfect amount of links in your content is a constant testing process. You want to have plenty of opportunities for readers to click your affiliate links in your content, but not too many to upset them.
• Grow Your Email and Social Media Audience – buyers love a large audience to be able to promote new products to, so make sure that you focus on building up each of those lists over time, which are viewed as tangible assets when you sell.

Website Brokers

If you’ve made your mind up about selling your business, one of the places that we highly recommend the most is utilizing on online business broker who will give you an honest look at pricing, position it best to sell, and get in front of thousands of people who are wanting to buy websites and have the money to do so.

It is a growing industry, so there are plenty of brokers out there who are scammers, or will not do a great job at selling your site. It is just as important as picking a realtor who is honest, and out for your best interest.

One of the top brokerages that we recommend if you’re selling a site that is worth over $50,000 is Quiet Light brokerage. they have the best selection of high-quality websites around, and developed a fantastic reputation industry for being honest, upfront, and genuine and how they approach business. We have bought and sold multiple sites through them, and only have top things to say about how they run their business.

If you would like a private introduction to one of their Brokers, and a special deal to make sure you get treated well, please contact us through our website, and we’d be happy to introduce you.

Online Auction Sites

What are the name of the places that other people used to sell their website is online auction sites, that gets your website in front of many people all around the world.

This is often a cheaper route to go then using a website broker, but you also get what you pay for, in that sites that sell on auction websites often sell for much less than they would with a traditional broker.

One of the most popular and well established sites out there for this is Flippa, which has sold tens of thousands of websites on it in the history of the business. It definitely is the wild-west with this listing platform, as you see anything and everything imaginable listed for sale. But if you want a discounted way of selling a site, especially if brokers may not want it – this is your place.