HOW TO START A BLOG THAT MAKES MONEY USING WORDPRESS.
How to start a blog?
First of all, I would like to commend you on your tremendous Googling skills today! You likely landed here because you were searching for something related to how to start a blog.
What you are about to read below, is what I believe to be the most accurate and thorough guide to starting a blog on this planet (there might be something better on Mars, but I haven’t checked lately).
To begin, let me introduce myself: My name is Spencer Haws full-time internet entrepreneur since 2011, and I also have a small confession to make. I have started over 200 blogs or websites in the past and I’ve had some tremendous success, but I’ve also had some depressing failures (trust me, you don’t want to know what a “Google slap” is…or feels like).
Let me clear something up real quick in case your head is spinning from my “200 blogs” comment. I don’t recommend that you do that! I created most of these back in 2008 to 2010 where I was conducting some “experiments”. Most of these sites no longer exist…BUT I learned a ton of valuable lessons that I would like to pass on to you today.
Lesson 1, don’t create 200 blogs :). You are going to be much better off (and probably even make more money) if you focus on just one blog to start.
Way back in 2006, I started my very first blog. I honestly had NO idea what I was doing. Luckily I stumbled through the process after hours and hours of research and I finally figured it out!
Since that time, I’ve created several successful blogs (not counting the 200 failures), including this one that you are reading right now. In this in-depth guide, I’m going to share with you exactly how to start a blog using the WordPress platform.
I’m not only going to share the steps with you, but I’ll also be sharing how to make your blog a success from the very beginning – even if you have zero experience.
In addition, once I’ve shown you exactly (with images and videos below) how to set up your blog, I’m also going to share several examples of blogs that are doing really well. This will allow you to see some of the strategies they are using (and I’ll point out exactly what you should be looking at) and how you might be able to apply these to your own blog.
So go ahead and grab your favorite beverage, turn off your distractions, and get ready to focus. What you are about to read is in-depth, educational, and I hope will give you exactly what you need to start your first blog from scratch.
WHAT IS THE PURPOSE OF YOUR BLOG?
Before you start on any of the technical
steps of how to get a blog up and running, I think it’s worth taking a big picture look at what the purpose of your blog is.
This first step may seem simple, but it’s actually quite critical.
I think of it like the time my wife asked me to pick up pepper from the grocery store. I came back with the pepper you shake on your food, when in reality she wanted “a pepper”…you know the green or red vegetable.
A simple misunderstanding of what your pepper blog is for, can lead to some awkward moments with your wife future self.
Are you just blogging for fun? Or do you hope that perhaps someday your blog will make some money?
If you want to make money from your blog, or if you simply want to leave the door open to the idea of your blog making money, then you should consider a few things first. You need to determine if the blogging platform you are using allows you to make money (some don’t).
You also need to think about if there is any interest in the topic that you want to blog about. (If you are just blogging for fun, then it really doesn’t matter).
I’m going to cover all of these topics in-depth.
But for now, just determine if the idea of making an income from your blog sounds like a good idea. If so, move onto the next steps.
DECIDE WHAT TO BLOG ABOUT: WHAT IS YOUR BLOGGING PASSION?
Ah, finding your passion. This can be a deep question. I sometimes get passionate about for Reese’s peanut butter cups, but I then change my mind when I wake up the day after my peanut butter cup binge session with a stomach ache.
You need to pick something that you will care about longer than the next day, week, or even year. You should shoot for something that you believe you will still be interested in learning about or making a impact on, in even a couple years from now or longer.
Perhaps you are lucky and already know exactly what you want to blog about. If so, congrats! You can move onto the next step.
However, for many people, it can be tough to know exactly what they want to blog about. Should you start a food blog, a fashion blog, or cover some other topic?
One thing to realize, is that you know yourself best. You will know what is the best topic for your blog. However, it might just take a little bit of digging for you to come to that realization.
I know the purpose of this guide isn’t necessarily to help you find your perfect blogging topic; however, this really is a critical step! So, I have some very short steps that you can follow to home in on the best topic for you.
If you can find a topic that has some crossover in the 3 areas below, you will have found your perfect topic:
What do you love doing?
What are you good at?
What can you make money doing?
I would suggest writing down 10 topics for each of those questions. Do you see any crossover of things that you are both interested in AND good at? If so, this could be the sweet spot for your blog.
IS ANYONE INTERESTED IN YOUR TOPIC?
If you are going to start a blog that actually gets an audience, you should probably determine if anyone is interested in your topic before you pull the trigger and set up a blog (which I will get shortly).
For example, I once started a website on the subject of fleece ferret hammocks (I’m serious, I wouldn’t joke about something like this!). Turns out after only writing a couple of articles, I ran out of subject matter…and well, there wasn’t a huge audience of people interested in the latest design fads of ferret hammocks.
Don’t make that mistake by spending hours and hours of time on a project, only to determine six months later that no one really cares.
A free tool that I really like to use to see the interest levels in certain subjects is going up or down is Google Trends. This awesome tool shows you whether more or less people are searching for a certain subject.
For now, I would only look at general topics to use Google trends for. For example, if you are thinking of starting a blog about running marathons, you might search “marathons”. I wouldn’t get super specific in Google trends and look at something like, “will my toenails fall off if I run a marathon” (the answer is…maybe…by the way).
That might be a great subject to write about, but probably not the best way to decide if you should blog about running marathons in general.
As you can see, the interest in Marathons has been fairly steady over the years. Yes, there is some seasonality, but overall, this interest remains in this topic.
The subject about toenails doesn’t seem to get searched for too often, you probably don’t want this to be the entire focus of your new site!
If you see the trend in your topic going down, you don’t necessarily need to panic. Yes, this is a factor. However, it doesn’t mean that no one is interested in it any more.
For example, the interest in the topic “Fashion Design” appears to be trending down just slightly over the last few years. However, I don’t see any sharp drop-off, and I’m sure people will be interested in this subject for many years to come.
WORDPRESS: AN EASY-TO-USE BLOGGING PLATFORM
Now that you’ve determined the purpose and topic of your blog, you can finally get to the steps of actually setting up your blog!
If you do some searching around for blog platforms, you will see that there are dozens of different options, all with their pros and cons. I personally don’t want to see you spending several hours and having a bunch of headaches searching out and trying a bunch of different blog platforms.
That’s why I’m going to recommend that you use the one that I use for all of my sites, WordPress.
The blog you are reading right now is powered by WordPress. The best part is that WordPress is free!
However, not only is it free to use, it’s also highly powerful. There are plenty of beginner blogs using WordPress. However, there are also tons of really advanced websites using WordPress as well.
Sites like CNN.com and the NewYorkTimes.com are also powered by WordPress as well! In other words, no matter how small you start or how big your blog becomes, using WordPress as your platform is a great way to go.
It’s highly scale-able and does everything you will need. One of the things that makes WordPress so powerful is that there is an army of independent developers that creates tools (called WordPress Plugins) that you can add to your blog to make it do certain things.
I don’t want to get too far into the weeds with all the different Plugins that are available on WordPress, I will simply say that you can pretty much do anything you’ve even seen done on a website with WordPress. I highly recommend it.
I will show you exactly how to get started using WordPress in a minute, we first have to take care of a couple of things.
And just as a clarification, you do NOT want to use WordPress.com, so don’t go there and set up a free blog. For your blog, you will want the “self-hosted” version of WordPress. I’ll show you exactly how to get that and set it up properly (in a matter of a couple of minutes) below.
CHOOSING YOUR DOMAIN NAME & BRAND.
You can think of your domain name as your brand. For example, the domain name of my blog here is NichePursuits.com.
Other domain names you are likely familiar with are:
So, do you want your domain name to be your personal name or something that sounds catchy? This is a decision that you need to make before you can get your blog moving along.
I would recommend going with something that people can remember, is relatively easy to spell, and is a .com. Now, a .com is not required, but in my opinion it’s always ideal.
In addition, I would try to keep your domain name between 1 and 3 words long. Anything longer tends to become too long and difficult to remember.
For example, if I was going to start a marathon blog, I might go with something somewhat personal like MarathonSpencer.com. Or maybe more business sounding like MarathonBoost.com
Or if you are still stuck, you can use some creativity tools like Panabee.com or NameMesh.com to help you come up with unique domain name ideas.
Currently, Bluehost is running a special offer where you can get a domain name for FREE if you sign up for a hosting account. You need to get a hosting account anyway, so you might as well consider getting your domain name for free from Bluehost.
Get a Free domain name and over 60% off Bluehost hosting right here.
Source: websites
D. Med
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Source: websites
D. Med
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