How To Start A Blog In Minutes – A Step-by-Step Guide
Blogging is a way to live your life independently. So, if you are planning to start a blog, do not wait for the perfect time. Do it right now! In this post, I will tell you the simple steps that can actually help you understand how to start a blog in just a few minutes. Here are the easy steps:
1. Niche
Niche is something you should research before even registering your domain name. Choosing your niche is very important. Before getting started one should ask him/herself whether he is willing to continue writing on that nice or not. Choose the niche that you are comfortable in. In my case, I choose Digital Marketing as I am doing it for the last 5 years and I am quite comfortable with it. I am sure I won’t be irritated if I have to write hundreds of articles about it. So choose the niche you are passionate about.
2. Domain Name
Your website name will represent you as a business so it should be unique and meaningful. Meaningful, in terms of relevancy with the kind of stuff you are going to discuss on your blog. If your goal is to focus on a specific topic, I would suggest you go for a keyword-specific domain. Like WpBeginner deals in WordPress installation, troubleshooting, and customization which is why their name is more than justified for their business. But if your intention is to cover several areas under a broad category I would suggest you register a generic domain name. In my case, I ended up with SetMyDestiny as I am going to write on different categories under Blogging, SEO, Affiliate Marketing, etc. In my future post, I will dedicatedly write about how to choose a domain name.
From where to purchase a domain name?
Though there is numerous domain registrars available in the market I would recommend buying your domain from the following registrars as they are the cheapest and best service providers for domain registration and web hosting.
3. Blogging Platform
The blogging platform is a very important concern for a blogger. Choosing the right platform can help you start your blog easily and comfortably. If you are not having a budget to invest in self-hosting, you can start with Google BlogSpot (aka Blogger.com). Apart from BlogSpot, there are several other platforms that provide free hosting like Word Press, Weebly, Tumblr, etc.
But I would recommend you to go for a self-hosted blog if you are looking for a career in Blogging. It would not cost you more than $20 to get a domain name of your choice and host it with a reliable web hosting provider. As suggested above Namecheap is best when you are just starting and a have low budget.
4. Design
Design plays the most important role in the success of a blog. Be specific about the design of your blog. The first thing a visitor notices is the design of the website. It should look professional and clean. If you are building your site on WordPress you can choose a free theme from their rich repository. But as your blog grows and have some content and traffic go for the premium themes. Believe me, there are lots of benefits of building your website using a premium theme.
Although there are no of reasons I am recommending you to get a clean wordpress theme, few most important benefits are listed below:
- Superior design: that saves you hundreds of dollars that you would pay to a web designer.
- Trusted: you can trust a theme that is being used by thousands of webmasters throughout the world.
- SEO friendly: Free themes are bug suspicious and can harm your SEO ranking but purchased themes are well-tested and you can rely on their code.
- Load time: when it comes to SEO ranking website load time matters a lot. A well-coded theme can help you get faster loading and can help you get a better ranking over search engines.
- Support: When you will buy a premium theme, you will be provided dedicated support as well that you wouldn’t have gotten with free themes.
Keeping the above points in mind I started my blog with Genesis Framework and I found it very strong and easy to manage. The best part is their support. There is a dedicated Facebook Group where you can get instant help regarding any technical issue in your theme. Apart from Facebook, you can also write them via email and I found their support team helpful and quick to respond via email as well. So, If you are looking for a quality theme I would highly recommend Genesis to get started with your blog.
5. Content
Content is the king of every online business. The more strong and useful content your blog is producing the more credibility it will get. Before a write-up does smart research on the topic that you are about to write about and then collect information and recompose it in your own way. You can take ideas from other writing but do not copy them. Always remember the more original your content is the more ranking it will get on search engines.
These are some basic things you should follow to just start your blog if you want more information and have any doubts about the above-discussed points, let me know your views in the comment section. I will be more than happy to answer your queries.
Hey, I just forgot to mention that after you set up your blog you will need to do it’s on-page optimization, so you can use SEO Yoast, a free WordPress plugin that can help you optimize your on page
