Looking to start a WordPress blog and wondering where to start? If you wish to create your own website or blog – and do it cheaply and get started quickly, I can help! In what follows I’m going to teach you how to start a WordPress blog or website in 7 easy steps!
Blogging has helped us to pay our way through our studies and like for many bloggers, financial freedom by blogging about our passions, can be extremely rewarding.
Many bloggers who started off part-time now have a full-time income from blogging. Some such stories include:
We (Valeria and Paul) now work for ourselves blogging and this means that we can work from anywhere in the world and be geographically free and we can choose our own work hours. Starting our own blog has been one of the best decisions we have ever made.
Working from home and for yourself has never been easier!
Table of Contents
How to Start a WordPress Blog
Let me walk you through 7 Easy Steps to get online and to increase your own income! We will walk through the following:
- Decide what topic you will build your blog on.
- Select a hosting company (I will explain what this means below).
- Pick a domain name (website name).
- Install WordPress.
- Buy a WordPress theme and install it.
- Start blogging and creating content for your site.
- Start generating income from your blog website.
1. Deciding on Your Niche
I have written a detailed post on ‘10 Tips to Choosing a Blogging Niche‘ – so make sure to check out this post if you need inspiration!
But let me mention the basics here. To find a niche think about:
- What is your passion? What do you love and would love to write about every week for one year if you had to?
- What could you make money from? What is your end goal? Is it to make money?
I designed this diagram below to show you how to choose your niche. It is the space where your passions and what you love, meet what can be monetized.
If you love dogs, could you write a series of eBooks or provide an online course such as via Teachable.com and make money this way?
So! Assuming you know what you are looking to blog about and what your passion is that you wish to write about, you will need hosting and you will need a domain name (website name)! What is hosting? Let me explain!
2. Decide on a Domain Name & a Hosting Service
In order to have somewhere for your blogging website to sit, you need somewhere to host it.
Just like you need somewhere to live, your website needs somewhere to live or to reside. So you need hosting. It is your business address. Your URL.
The company I started blogging with and that I recommend is Bluehost.
Why? Bluehost is one of the cheapest and most reliable (at least in my personal experience) as a hosting platform for beginner bloggers.
It only costs *$3.95 if you sign up now for the Introductory offer! (For those of you in the UK like us, that is around £2.75 a month). This is a real Budget Friendly way to start blogging and to build your business online.
The great thing also about using Bluehost is that your domain name (website address) is included for FREE! (You do have to sign up for 12 months though for the domain but this works out as the cheapest plan).
For better Site Speed for my main business site SymondsResearch.com (where we sell training course materials for freelance trainers), I use Siteground Hosting.
3. Buy Hosting (and Get a Free Domain Name)
Click Here or on the image below and then select the green “Get started now” button you will see onscreen.
When you start off, you should only need the basic package! So I recommend selecting ‘Basic’, the cheapest hosting plan!
Next, after choosing the hosting package above, you then need to choose your domain name!
Enter a website address and see if the name you want is available! Need help choosing a domain? Email me if you need guidance.
Also, if you are unsure then you can read our post on how to choose a domain name for your blogging website and there we give 10 tips for getting that website URL that suits you.
To buy the domain name and hosting I would recommend:
- Select ‘Domain Privacy’ – because this will hide your name and address online and avoid you potentially ending up on mailing lists etc.
- If you can afford to, I would recommend signing up for 36 months, which provides the best-paid plan and 36 months will give you plenty of time to develop your blog.
By buying your hosting with Bluehost and getting the domain name for free, this makes it quite easy as you move forward!
So you are now ready for the next step!
Once you have entered your payment information and accepted the Terms and Conditions, you will be asked if you wish to have any of the add-ons. I would suggest to NOT bother with these add-ons as you should not need them at the start and you can always add them on in the future.
Once you have paid, you will receive a message that looks like this!
So make sure to choose a good password, Just click on the ‘Create Password’ box you will see.
You will then see this screen and you are thus ready to install WordPress!
4. Installing WordPress on Bluehost Hosting
This is where the FUN starts!. Time to finally get your blog or site looking like something real! Something tangible! And the good news is that this should be quite easy as Bluehost make the process simple.
FIRST: On Bluehost, after the previous steps, you will now be faced with a message by Bluehost asking you to pick a theme. I would suggest just choosing any of the themes you wish as this can easily be changed later on.
(There are hundreds of classy pre-made themes you can choose from but I cover this in a post on the best themes to buy). There are a number of very affordable and high-quality themes for all type of sites and blog from ThemeForest.
NEXT: Click on ‘Start Building’ and Bluehost will set up WordPress and you are ready to go!
HELP: You might be saying – Help!
I can’t follow all these steps. Help!
One of the reasons why I recommend Bluehost is because I have found that their support is very good i.e. quite speedy and efficient. If you do get stuck you can contact Bluehost to help.
Mission accomplished. You wanted to start a WordPress blog – and you are now well on the way!
5. Writing Your 1st Blog Post
Key Tips for Writing Your Blog Posts
- You want the correct balance of quality versus quantity.
- You are better off to do one great post a week of 1000 words or more than 5 posts of 200 words.
- Posts that are too short give search engines such as Google nothing on which to place you in searches for because the content is too small to give value.
- Use the FREE Grammarly tool as this will auto-suggest grammar and spelling mistakes in your content.
- Make sure you create dynamic headlines.
6. Finding High-Quality Images for Free
On your posts, you will want to use great high-quality images so that your posts look dynamic and draw people in.
We have written a list of the 7 best sites to get free stock images from online so take a look at this post:
7. Getting Visitors and Traffic to Your New Blog
The two sources I recommend to start driving traffic to your site are by using:
- Pinterest (for short-term immediate traffic)
- SEO (as a long-term strategy)
Being on Pinterest (see our Pinterest account here and follow us) is a great idea when you start off your blog because you can get traffic very quickly.
Take a look, for example, at the growth of the Symonds Training Programs that we have been involved with.
As soon as we started using Pinterest, the traffic took off and is constantly on an upward trajectory.
And below you can see the stats that show this instant growth is driven by Pinterest.
Before you email to say that stats are low, this is the stats for a brand new site.
The site is constantly growing traffic-wise though and Pinterest is central to this growth.
You can get a Pinterest Business account for FREE and get set up instantly.
Pinterest works very well because, as a newbie, you have as much chance for your image to show in Pinterest search results as established bloggers.
This is different from Google search results where you only begin to show in the top pages after a year or two of optimizing your site.
If you want to use Pinterest, then these resources will be helpful:
- 10 Essential Pinterest Tips for Beginners
- Our Pinterest Profile so you can follow us
- How to Use Tailwind (this plugin enables you to schedule a week’s worth of Pinterest pins all in one go and is what pro-bloggers use to maximize traffic through Pinterest).
SEO
The other key way to build traffic that we suggest is via SEO. What is SEO?
Get more blogging tips and tricks. Just subscribe to our YouTube Channel!
SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is really a long-term strategy.
You need to do a number of things including developing links to your websites, adding high-quality and well-written content, inter-linking within your content, making sure you use keywords within your content, and a number of other tasks.
7. What Next?
You are ready to start writing content for your blog or website! So what next?
You might find these pages useful to get started:
- Guide to writing for the web and best practice for blogging to success.
- 5 Reasons Why You Must Build an Email List to Develop your Online Business
Affiliate Disclaimer: This post may contain some affiliate links, meaning that I can make a commission on them but from the affiliate and at no expense to yourself. See affiliate disclosure if needed. The affiliate income helps me to maintain this site.
Bluehost Pricing: * used to signify that prices are subject to change.
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