Before we start discussing different methods of making money online, we need to first of all sort out the essentials because everything has stages and most of all, you need to learn how to crawl before learning how to run. What I mean by this is that we have to get you online first! Today I will show you how to build your first blog, which is surprisingly easy.
The fact that you are reading this article is an indication that you are interested in blogging and want to start a blog, either for personal or business purposes. You probably have a little idea about how to start a blog, and you need a comprehensive guide on the subject.
Don’t worry, I was once in your shoe and had little information to start with. Over the years, I have garnered enough experience as a blogger and have assisted a couple of people to launch their blogs as well.
In this article, I will share some useful tips and a step-by-step process that will help you to get your blog up and running in a couple of hours.
How to Start a Blog | Choose Your Preferred Blogging Platform
To start with, choosing the best blogging platform is one of the most critical steps you must take to make it easier for you to start blogging. This is a necessity considering that there are tons of blogging platforms in the industry with each of them promising to be the best. Here I will review the WordPress and share the step-by-step process on How to set up your first blog post with the guidelines on how to promote the blog and make money from the blogging.
WordPress is unarguably the most popular blogging platform. By hosting a little below 60% of all websites, it is the most used Content Management System around the globe. WordPress is also a free platform that allows you to create a blog without challenges. Although WordPress has a more in-depth learning curve than Blogger, it is nevertheless still reasonably easy to learn and use.
- The most widely used CMS: With millions of websites and blogs hosted on WordPress, it is unarguably the most widely used CMS platform. It hosts approximately 3 out of every 5 websites and blogs (58.55%), more than all other CMS platforms combined.
- Low cost: WordPress is not expensive. You can create a WordPress blog with free hosting at $0.
- Open source: WordPress is an open-source platform, and this exposes it to modification and upgrading to make it the best CMS platform.
- Useful plugins: As an open-source blogging platform, WordPress boasts of an impressive list of plugins that is second to none in the industry. There are paid and free plugins to choose from
What we don’t like
- Vulnerable to attacks
- Some themes have slow load times
How To Set Up A Blog On WordPress With Bluehost
Bluehost is one of the most preferred hosting companies for blog owners. Over the years, the platform has provided hundreds of thousands of blog owners a platform for creating awareness for their blogs on the web. With millions of registered blogs on the platform, Bluehost has come to stay.
If you are contemplating hosting your blog on this platform, here are the step-by-step guides that will assist you to create and launch your blog in less than 2 hours.
Step 1: Choose a domain name
I’ve previously explained the function of a domain name. The first step is to select a domain name for your blog. The rule of thumb is that your domain name should reflect what the blog is all about. Since I blog blogging related stuff, I chose a domain name that reflects it. A simple look at your domain name should give potential visitors an idea of what your blog is about. Depending on the type of blog you run, you can choose from a wide range of domain name extensions. The available extensions are com, org, net, biz, co, and others. You can check the domain availability separately through various online tools like godaddy.com, whois.sc, hostgator.com etc
Step 2: Choose a hosting plan
After choosing the domain name, you need to select the hosting packages. Visit BlueHost deal page hosted on the top blogging coach to have access to the corresponding hosting plans with attractive discounts. The three available hosting plans for WordPress blogs are:
Bluehost Hosting Basic Plan: This is the most preferred hosting plan for beginners. It is apparently the cheapest hosting plan that will cost you $2.75 monthly subscription fee.
Nevertheless, it offers you the basic features you need to keep your blog up and running: unmetered bandwidth, shared SSL Certificate, standard performance, one domain, 50GB website space, and what have you. If you are low on budget or want the basic features, this plan is the best for you.
Bluehost Hosting Plus Plan: You may consider this hosting plan if you need some other features that are not available on the Hatchling Plan. Although it is a bit more expensive at $4.95, this plan is obviously still affordable and offers a wide range of features that include all the features provided by the Basic Plan and more.
For instance, the Plus Plan allows you to host unlimited sites, offers unlimited website space as well as gives you free $200 marketing offers.
Bluehost Hosting Prime Plan: Last but not least is the Prime Plan. Going by the name, you will realize that this hosting plan is specifically designed for customers that want to host business blogs with the potential for massive traffic.
Think of all the features of the Basic Plan and other amazing features, this hosting plan offers it all, making it the most comprehensive plan. It is a bit more expensive at $5.95 per month but comes with a lot of other mouth-watering offers and benefits.
Click “Buy Now” to have access to the different features offered by the hosting plan of your choice. When you do, you will see a promo offering you 3 years of hosting for the price of 2 that gives you 53% off.
If you want to take advantage of that offer, accept the offer. Otherwise, cancel it and proceed to the next stage.
Step 3: Provide your billing info
Bluehost will want to find out whether you have sufficient funds to proceed with the hosting. Thus, you will be required to provide your billing info using the form shown below:
Step 4: Review the details
After validating the coupon, you will be given a breakdown of your subscription. Review the details and ensure that everything is in order before confirming the subscription.
This is the subscription detail for a user that subscribed for 36 months. Your details may be different from this depending on the number of years of the month you subscribe to as well as the add-ons you select.
If you are satisfied with the details, check the Terms and Conditions agreement box. Finally, click Checkout Now to finalize the registrations. After hitting the Checkout Now button, Bluehost will give you access to your Control panel via the provided email address and a password to proceed with the hosting.
Step 5: Install WordPress
Bluehost has totally upgraded its web hosting and made it WordPress-friendly. Unlike years back when you have to manually create your blog. Today, Bluehost will install and set up WordPress for you automatically.
If you followed the steps above and have bought hosting and a free domain name from Bluehost, it will start to automatically install WordPress for you.
Basically, this could take anywhere from 5 to 50 minutes. If you encounter a screen like the below image:
If you are confused, simply log in to your Bluehost account. This is how their new Dashboard currently looks like:
Simply click on Login to WordPress to quickly login inside your WordPress Blog dashboard automatically. That’s it.
The cost of setting up a hosted blog may run into about a hundred dollars when you pay for a year of hosting. However, you can reduce your hosting cost drastically if you make your hosting during this year’s Bluehost Black Friday Deals.
Expected to run between November 22nd, 2022 and November 27th, of any calendar year, you can get an 80% discount on any hosting plan of your choice. To make it easier for potential subscribers to avail themselves of this opportunity, the promo is available about three to four times daily, and you can access it with a promo code that will be available during this period.
Thus, rather than spend $100 on hosting your blog during that period, you will spend a meager $20, a whopping 80% off the regular hosting cost.
Design your WordPress blog / Website with a Free / Premium WP theme:
Once the blog setup is complete through the WordPress control panel, the next step is to design the blog keeping in view your offers for your readers. This is not very technical all you need to select the WordPress theme for your blog as per your requirement and install the same. Designing plays an important role in the overall development of the site. The perfect UI / UX will help the user to navigate easily and inturns increase the overall engagement of the site.
There are multiple free and paid themes. The free themes are good to start for your blog but have limited options, the paid / pro version of various themes provides extended support and additional features for your blog.
Choosing your WP theme and configuration – Step by step process:
Step -1: WordPress Theme Selection
You can choose the WordPress theme by following the below steps mentioned in the below breadcrumb pattern: Appearance > Themes > Add New Theme > Popular
Step -2: WordPress Theme Selection -II
In the next step, you can choose anyone from the available theme options like Popular WP theme, latest WP theme & Featured WP theme. The below screenshot clearly shows you how to filter the options based on your requirement.
Step -3: WordPress Theme Installation
Once the theme is selected, in our case we have Twenty Seven Pro, which is the child theme of the Genesis framework. Click on the install button as shown in the below screenshot to install the theme.
Step -4: WordPress Theme Activation
Once the theme is installed, click on the activate button so that the basic design setup is ready and doors will be opened for customization of the theme.
Step -5: WordPress Theme Customization
Post-activating the theme, the customization option is ready for the web developer to set up the theme. Here you can now customize the header, footer, menu, navigation links, logo and also can add a call to action options.
Basic WordPress Blog Settings to start:
To set up the blog you need to learn a few technical settings that will control the visual appearance of the blog like top navigation links, category and sub-category creation, setting the URL pattern of category/sub-category, pages and posts, About & Contact us page including services page (list the services offered by you).
Permalinks / SEO friendly URL:
Permalinks option is used to create the SEO-friendly URL pattern to access your blog posts. You can set up the pattern for the blog posts like https://topbloggingcoach.com/learn-seo SEO Friendly URL pattern is one of the important On Page SEO factor. You can learn more about the On-Page SEO guide at Top Blogging Coach.
How to set up the Permalinks setting:
To set up the URL pattern – you need to click on the Permalinks option under the setting tab – This will open a page where you can easily decide and set up the URL pattern. The URL plays a major role in the overall SEO process – changing URL patterns through permalinks more frequently will hurt SEO very badly and impact the overall visibility in search engines. You can go through the Basic SEO Guide to know everything about search engine optimization. URL pattern once set up should not change if you want to gain the organic visibility of your blog in search engines. The below screenshot will give you a clear idea about how to set the permalinks settings. This is the developed option in WordPress technically, all you need to use it properly.
Once the option for permalink is set by the web developer in the setting tab for the blog posts, now you can use this feature to set up the SEO-friendly URL pattern while publishing any post.
Blogs Menu / Navigation Structure & How to Create the menu items:
It’s very easy in the WordPress control panel to set up the menu items. The same menu items will be displayed in the top navigation structure as shown in the above picture. You can navigate to the menu option under appearance to set up the menu for your blog/website (Appearance > Menus). ( The clean navigation structure will help the users and google bots to discover the content easily and in return will increase the probability of visibility in search engines.
How to create a page in WordPress Theme?
In addition to the blog posts / long knowledgeable articles, we also need some basic pages for our website/blogs. Through the WordPress control panel, you can create any number of pages as per your requirement and link them from the top navigation through Menu creation or from the footers. The most common pages that you see in almost all blogs are Contact Us, About Us, Hire Me (if you are providing any services). You can click on Add New option under Pages to create new pages and then set up the URL using the permalink options.
There are basically lots of resources on the internet that will teach you how to start a WordPress blog. Attractive deals and offers on web hosting packages during Black Friday deals. In order to help you with that, check out the few links below:
Conclusion: How to Start your Personal Website / Blog on WordPress (Step by Step Guide)
Yes, going for the numerous free blogging platforms out there is often very tempting judging by the fact that you’re not going to spend any dime on the process, but on the long run, you’ll realize that it’s never the best as you’ll be limited to so many things.
This is because you’re not really the owner of the blog, and it could be deleted anytime any day, and you won’t do anything about it. But when you have your own self-hosted blog, you decide how it goes, you pull the trigger whenever you wish, you’re the boss.
Therefore, if you’ve finally decided to create start your own blog, I’ll advise you to get your own domain and hosting.
Jerry Duling says
I thought this was a great overview…well done.
Nwangene Theodore says
Hi Jerry,
I understand what you meant but I will still write
more articles on this. Just check back again and
you get to learn more. I can’t cover all in one post you know.
Thanks for coming by.
Simmeon says
Hey Nwangene,
The first blog I created was hosted on Godaddy, I made the mistake of buying the package that only allowed me to host a single website. Anyway from then on I learn to always go for the unlimited options.
If I ever decide to change host, I’ll most likey use Hostgater’s VPS, it seems quite decent for the price. Nice guide bro.
Nwangene Theodore says
Hi Simmeon
It is always good to learn from our mistakes because experience they say is the best teacher. Thanks for visiting my blog, will surely return it.
Hope to see you here again.
BTW: I replied the email you sent me.
Thanks
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I’m truly enjoying the design and layout of your website. It’s a very easy on the eyes which makes it much more
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Theodore Nwangene says
Thanks
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