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Are you considering starting a blog? In this article, we’re going to share with you our secrets on how to successfully start a blog. Most importantly, we’re going to show you how easy it is to make your blog succeed.

The good news is that starting a blog now is easier than it’s ever been, and there’s no reason not to start blogging today. In order to succeed, follow our 10 simple steps and you too can become a successful blogger.

Starting a Blog in 10 Simple Steps

Starting a blog has never been easier. Follow our 10 simple steps and before you know it, you’ll have your very own successful blog.

Step 1: Register a Domain Name For Your Blog

Before starting a blog, you’ll need to pick a name for it. Once you have a name for your blog, you can go ahead and register that name as a domain for your website.

The key to picking a memorable name for your blog is to keep it simple. If we take a look at what names are out there for our favourite book related websites, they’re memorable because they’re easy to remember.

Think Mashable, Gizmodo. Even Huffington Post. They all follow a common theme: their domain name is short and snappy. Make your blog easy to remember and people will keep coming back.

When you’re brainstorming blog names, try to make a shortlist of 5 to 10 ideas. This will give you some flexibility when you’re checking to see if a domain is available for your blog name.

Once you’ve got your shortlist of blog names, head over to NameCheap to register your domain. I’ve used NameCheap to register all my domains in the past and have found them to be the cheapest and easiest to use.

You can use the tool on Name Cheap’s homepage to quickly find out if any of your blog names are available.

Keep in mind that whilst there are plenty of alternatives to .com for your blog, we recommend against using some of the more obscure options like .xyz or .life. They may sound fun, but in the long term, they could be detrimental to your success.

We recommend sticking to Top-Level-Domains (TLD) like .com and .net. Not only will TLD’s help your blog appear more trustworthy, they will also make it easier to remember.

Once you’ve chosen a domain name, go ahead and register it. This is a simple process, and should take no longer than 5 minutes.

NameCheap will give you some options to upgrade your domain registration, but we’re going to leave these unchecked. Why? Because our web host will be providing some of these upgrades for free. More on this later in the article.

Note: We recommend against purchasing web hosting with your domain. If you decide to switch web hosts in the future, you may have issues transferring your domain.

Click view cart and on the next page you’ll be shown these same options. We don’t recommend changing anything on this page aside from the length of time you want to register your domain for.

The longer you register, the less you pay, however, when you’re just getting started, 1 year should be enough. You’ll be reminded by NameCheap when your domain is up for renewal, so you don’t need to worry.

Once you’re happy, click confirm order, enter your payment details and within minutes your domain will be registered and ready to use.

Click here to get started with NameCheap

Step 2: Choose a Quality Web Host

The next step towards learning how to start a blog is finding a quality web host. Your web host will be your blog’s home and it’s important to not only consider price, but also a bunch of other factors that will influence the user experience.

When you’re comparing web hosts, be sure to take into account these factors:

• Customer support: As a newbie in the blogging world, you’ll want to make sure that when something goes wrong, you have great customer support to help you out.
• Performance: I had a bad web host in the past and had a LOT of downtime across my websites. Not only was this frustrating for me, but it also affected my users. Choose a web host with minimal downtime and fast page load speeds.
• Room to grow: To achieve your goal of becoming a successful blogger, you’ll need room to grow. Choosing a web host that will allow you to upgrade your account is a must.
• Price: Price isn’t everything, but when you’re starting out, it’s important to find good value. You’ll want to find a web host that gives you the balance of all these features at a reasonable price.

Depending on your choice of web host, you can find all of these qualities and more for $5 or less per month. Luckily for you, we’ve done the hard yards and found a web host that ticks all these boxes.

Hostgator offer all of the above, and more, for as little as $2.75 per month on their shared web hosting plan. When you’re getting started, this should be all you need, but you do have the option to upgrade your account later.

Once you’ve selected a plan, you’ll be asked to enter your domain name. If you’ve followed step 1 and registered your domain with NameCheap, you’ll need to select ‘I already own this domain’.

After this step, everything else is fairly self explanatory. When you get to step 4, we recommend un-checking all the boxes except for site lock monitoring and the free SSL certificate.

Site lock is a great tool to protect yourself from hackers and the SSL certificate will keep your customer’s data secure. Having an SSL certificate will also help your blog rank higher in google.

There are some other options here you can take advantage of, but they’re not essential at this stage.

Click here to get started with Hostgator

Step 3: Choose a Platform For Your Blog

Now that we’ve covered off the basics of how to start a blog, let’s focus more specifically on the actual blogging.

One of the most important decisions you can make as a budding blogger is which platform to use for your blog. Most people choose a CMS (content management system) for their blog because it provides everything they need to start writing, publishing and managing their content.

When we look at the big players in the CMS world, we automatically think WordPress. WordPress is a free and easy to use platform that’s utilized by over 75 million websites around the world. Their users’ range from small blogs to big businesses.

There are other CMS platforms like Weebly and Joomla but they take a little bit more time to get the hang of. For that reason, we’re going to stick to WordPress in this article.

As a side note, Hostgator also have web hosting that’s specifically optimized for WordPress. These plans are a little more expensive than the shared plans, but they’ll give you faster page speeds.

If you want to take advantage of optimized WordPress web hosting with Hostgator, click here to get up to 40% off.

Click here to get started with WordPress

Step 4: Setup your WordPress Account

One of the great benefits of choosing WordPress is how simple it is to link up with your web host. Hostgator have a suite of tools to help create and link a WordPress account to your web host in minutes.

After you’ve paid for your web hosting with Hostgator, you’ll receive an email confirming your purchase. In this email you’ll find a link to your control panel, commonly referred to as the cpanel.

You’re going to want to click this link and enter the log in details for your account which you’ll find in the same email.

The cpanel is where you’ll find access to what we’ll call the “back-end” of your blog. In the cpanel, you’ll see a lot of icons, but we’re going to get you to click on quick install under the software tab.

You’ll then see three icons. Click the WordPress icon.

On the next page, click your domain from the drop down list and leave the directory field empty.

Enter your blog title, personal details and admin username. The admin user will be your username when you log into your WordPress blog. Try not to use your first name or something that could be easily guessed. This will add an additional layer of security to your blog.

Once you’re happy, double check all of your details, tick BOTH boxes at the bottom and click Install Now.

Whilst your blog is being set up, Hostgator might try to upsell you on some of their other products and services. We suggest you skip this step.

A few minutes later, you should receive an email with the details you’ll need to access your WordPress blog. Keep these details in a safe place as they hold the keys to accessing your blog with WordPress.

We also recommend bookmarking your blogs’ admin URL so that you can easily find it in future. You should also change your password to something memorable which can be found in the settings section of your WordPress dashboard.

Step 5: Link your Domain to your Web Host

Once you’ve set up your WordPress blog in Hostgator, you’ll want to make sure people can access it. To do this, you’ll need to link your Hostgator account to your WordPress blog.

Shortly after purchasing your web hosting plan with Hostgator, you’ll receive an email with your name servers.

A name server translates a domain name into an IP address and makes it possible for a user to find your blog when they type in the domain name.

Keep this email open and log into your NameCheap account. Once you’re logged in, click domain list on the left side of the page.

Next to your domain, you’re going to want to click manage.

From here, we’re going to scroll down the page until we see nameservers. Select custom DNS and enter your nameservers from Hostgator’s email.

It’s important you click the green arrow once you’ve entered BOTH nameservers, otherwise these changes won’t take effect.

It may take up to 48 hours before your domain is linked to your web host, but more often than not it will take less than 24 hours.

Step 6: Create a Content Plan

We’ve covered off most of the technical steps to help with starting your blog. Now we’re going to focus on the fun stuff, writing content.

Writing content might come really easily to you, or you might struggle to put pen to paper, but either way, you’ll need some direction. When it comes to blogging, there are a bunch of different angles you can take with your writing.

For example you could:

• Start a travel blog;
• Follow technology trends & write about them;
• Start a beauty blog

You could even take a different approach and recommend the best blogs based on your reviews.

Either way, this should help you get an idea of the direction you can take your blog. It should also get you thinking a little bit about the type of content you want to create.

As you start to think more about your blog’s content plan, you’ll want to start mapping out a schedule for your content. This will help you to get really clear about how you’ll structure your content.

Not only that, if you can set a structure around when you want to put out content, it will help you better structure your life.

For example, if you plan to publish 5 articles each week, you’ll need to give yourself time to write and edit each article.

Make use of free tools like Google Sheets and Trello to break down tasks and avoid getting overwhelmed.

Most importantly, be realistic and work out a schedule that works for you.

When you’re getting started, you’ll need to be publishing regular content before your blog starts gaining traction. A lot of people go to the effort of learning how to start a blog and give up after one or two articles. Don’t be that person.

Step 7: Use Themes and Plugins to Make Your Blog Stand Out

Before you jump in and start writing, you’ll want to make sure your blog looks the part. One of the many benefits to using WordPress is the level of customization you can have with your blog.

The majority of themes and plugins offered by WordPress are free, which means you can make your blog shine at no additional cost.

Right now, your blog is probably using one of the standard WordPress themes. Have a look in the WordPress theme directory for a theme that speaks to your blog. There are thousands of free themes and a lot of these themes are specifically for blogs, like the Sydney theme.

When you’re choosing a WordPress theme, try to find one with lots of 4 and 5 star ratings. This way you’ll know other people are using it and it serves its purpose. Once you’re happy with a theme, click download, and WordPress will do the rest for you.

Unlike themes, WordPress plugins are less about the look and feel of your blog, and more about the functionality.

We recommend when you’re starting out as a blogger, you download the following free WordPress plugins:

• Askimet Anti-Spam: Protects your comments and contact forms from spam;
• EWWW Image Optimizer: Compresses your images for faster site speeds;
• Jetpack: Monitors site traffic, downtime and protects your blog from malicious attacks;
• Yoast SEO: Helps you to write content that’s search engine friendly, resulting in more people on your blog.

There are thousands of other free plugins for WordPress that you can download. Take the time to research what plugins you might need, but keep in mind that the more plugins you have on your blog, the longer your pages will take to load.

Step 8: Get your Blog Noticed on Social Media

As your blog starts to gain momentum and your readers see you putting out regular content, they’ll want somewhere to keep track of it.

Sure, they could come back to your blog each time, but they probably won’t. You’ll want to build a community outside of your blog where you can keep your readers up to date with new posts. You can also start to build a relationship with them there.

Our advice would be to stick to one or two social channels when you’re getting started. This way, you can focus more time developing these channels.

With a blog, we recommend getting started with either Facebook or Twitter. We also recommend using Pinterest once your blog starts to grow.

After setting up your social media channels, you’ll want to start sharing every blog post that you publish.

Add social media buttons to all your posts with plugins like AddToAny Share Buttons. If your readers like your posts, they can share with their family and friends which will help increase your audience size.

Step 9: Create an Email Subscriber List

If you speak to a few different bloggers, almost all of them will tell you that they wish they’d created an email subscriber list when they first started. It’s such as easy step to take, but it’s often not taken until much later in a bloggers’ journey.

In a world of social media, email is often overlooked as a channel that has one of the highest levels of engagement. This is especially obvious when we consider that a user is 6 times more likely to click through from an email than they are from a tweet – Campaign Monitor.

Let’s also consider that:

• 72% of users prefer to receive promotional content via email, as opposed to 17% who prefer social media. – MarketingSherpa
• Email marketing drives more conversions than any marketing channel, including search and social media. – Monetate
• 61% of users prefer to be contacted by companies through email over any other marketing channel. – Adobe

Now you understand the value of email, it’s time to introduce it to your blog.

Mailchimp is a great email tool to get started with. They have 3 different plans, but there is a free plan which will allow you up to 2,000 subscribers and 12,000 emails per month.

With the free Mailchimp for WordPress plugin, you can add email subscription forms to your blog and encourage your readers to sign up to receive updates.

To sync your Mailchimp account with your WordPress blog, you’ll need to log in to your Mailchimp account to find your API key.

Click your profile name to expand the account panel and select Account. Click extras and select API Keys. Copy an existing API key or create a new one.

Once you’ve taken this step, log into your WordPress dashboard, hover over plugins, select installed plugins and then click on Mailchimp for WordPress. Open the settings menu and paste the API key into the field. Click save changes and the status should change to connected.

Now, when you publish a new blog post, you can send your readers an email notification through Mailchimp and encourage them to come back to your blog.

Click here to get started with Mailchimp

Step 10: Monetize your Blog

By now, you should have a pretty good grasp of how to start a blog. The final step is to understand how you can turn your blog into a passive income generator.

There are a number of ways you can monetize your blog, but the easiest by far is affiliate marketing. Affiliate marketing is based on a referrer (you) advertizing products and services on behalf of a company, and collecting a commission on each sale.

Depending on the style of blog you create, you’ll want to search for companies that you can recommend in your blog posts. Find out if they have an affiliate program and if they do, apply to join, so that you can link to products on their website within your blog post and collect a commission when someone buys via your affiliate link.

There are literally thousands of affiliate programs out there which you can join and recommend products from. We’ve put together a list here of our favorite affiliate programs for beginners.

There are of course other ways to monetize your blog, and as you start to get more eyeballs to your website, you might want to consider:

• Pay per click advertizing;
• Paid product reviews;
• Writing an e-book and sell it through your blog;
• Or even selling your blog at Flippa.com;

No matter how you decide to monetize your blog, you’ll always need to give value to your reader.

The more value you provide to your readers, the more trust you’ll build with them. As you build trust, the more likely your readers are to follow your recommendations and click through to the products you recommend.

Conclusion

Hopefully, you’re now seeing that starting a blog isn’t as difficult as you might have thought. There’s a structure to becoming a successful blogger and our 10 simple steps will help you get there.

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