How To Start a Blog From Scratch

Before the social networks existed, blogging has started as a means for people to share their personal experiences, photos, and stories with their friends and family.

Nowadays, a blog has become a tool for personal branding, a method for companies to acquire new customers and to establish a stronger connection with their existing clients, a method for experts to share their expertise, and even a way for regular people to make money.

According to Google Trends, the number of searches worldwide for the term “how to start a blog” had a steep rise since 2004.

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The misconception that blogging is an easy path to success motivates many persons to start a blog. Hundreds of blogs are started every day, but a high number of these are abandoned within the first three months.

Many people start a blog without making a proper niche research, don’t realize that blogging requires constant work, and they think that once they write the content, the search engines will just send them traffic without having to do extra work.

If you want to build a successful blog, you have to plan carefully every step of the way, ever since the initial idea of starting a blog.

Motivation behind starting a blog

You can start a blog from the passion for a specific topic, or for the potential financial benefits.

If you choose your niche wisely, you can monetize your blog in many ways. You can promote products and services as an affiliate, sell your own products, sell ad space, sell promoted posts, and so on.

And what if you get tired of blogging? You can simply sell your blog later on for significant sums of money.

There will always be people or companies interested in buying successful blogs. The blogs with high-quality content and a high volume of traffic are sold from a few hundred dollars, up to millions of dollars, depending on blog’s niche, domain name, traffic quality and volume, content, etc.

For a list of which I think are the top benefits of owning a blog, read the article below.

After you are absolutely determined to start your blog and you know everything that the blogging activity involves, the first significant aspect is to determine which is the purpose of your blog and your end goal.

If you aren’t starting a blog for your company, you have to do a proper niche research and choose the main topic of your blog based on a few key factors. This step will require doing a bit of brainstorming and keyword research.

Then, you will need to choose a domain name for your blog. The domain name will become representative for your business and will become your virtual address where people can find you.

How To Start a Blog

Now that you know the benefits of owning a blog, how to choose a niche and the right domain name for your site, it’s time to move on to the practical process of building your blog.

You first need to register your chosen domain name, purchase a web hosting plan for your site and make the connection between your domain name and your web hosting account.

I describe the process in detail in the articles below. I also recommend you the companies I use for registering my domain names and the web hosting providers I trust.

At this stage, you should have your domain registered and connected to your web hosting account.

After your domain registrar finishes the nameservers propagation process, you can proceed to the long-awaited step of building your site.

You are further going to learn precisely how to install WordPress without too much hassle even if you are not a programmer.

This step involves a bit of technical knowledge, but I’ve described everything step-by-step, with screenshots and clear instructions so anyone can go through this stage successfully.

Congratulations! You are now a blog owner.

Now that you have installed WordPress and your site is live, chose a theme for your site and know how to install plugins, let’s proceed to the next step.

In the next few posts, I teach you how to optimize your blog. More exactly, I guide you how to make your WordPress blog faster, more secure, and more SEO friendly.

Now that you’ve learned how to optimize the most important three aspects of your WordPress site, I’m going to give you a few tips about the content creation.

While anyone can write, not everyone knows how to write good content and articles that have a chance to rank well in the search engines results.

I’m going to share with you a few tips on how to write better content and a few techniques to make your posts more SEO friendly.

Once you have a few posts published on your blog, it’s time to start promoting your blog.

It’s not enough to only write high-quality content and wait for the traffic to come. Do not make the same mistake that most people do and let the success of your blog to depend on the search engines.

Conclusion

Blogging requires a constant work and attention.

The decision of starting a blog is a long-term commitment. Blogging is not easy, it won’t make you rich overnight, and it requires a lot of work.

The content creation will occupy most of your time. However, you should also dedicate a few hours per week to update the old content and to promote your articles.

Besides the ability to write, another essential quality that a blogger should have is patience. It will take time to research your topics, it will take time to write the content, and it will take time to have your site’s content indexed by the search engines.

No one can guarantee you that your blog will become successful, but if that happens, a blog has a huge potential.