Learn how you can begin starting a blog in less than an hour. Follow the step-by-step guidelines that we used to start our successful blog page, which now has reached a lot more than 20 million people and has been featured in the New York Times, TIME magazine, and on the TODAY display.
How to Start a Blog in Five Steps:
1.Choose your running a blog platform and domain.
2.Design your blog utilizing a simple theme.
3.Modify your weblog to define your look.
4.Select the best plugins for your site.
5.Write compelling content, start blogging.
Starting a Blog: Step-by-Step Instructions
So you’re considering starting a blog, nevertheless, you don’t have any idea the place to start, right? Guess what-neither do we. We were clueless. When we created this weblog a few years ago, we had no basic idea how to start a blog or how to be a blogger. Heck, we could spell HTML hardly, let alone create a blog.
But good news: it’s easier than you think. We’ve learned a ton of lessons during our ascent to achieving over 20 million people. And today you can learn from our discomfort and suffering to circumvent a lot of the tedium involved in setting up a blog.
How we started our weblog here’s, step by step, followed by an instructional video, and also additional rationale and insights:
1.Choose your blogging platform and domain. The first thing we did when starting our weblog was head to Bluehost and register our domain. We didn’t even need to setup WordPress, which may be the platform we make use of, since Bluehost does all that for you personally. Bluehost’s basic price is certainly $2.75 a full month, which works for 99% of people (head to this link to receive a 50% low cost off the monthly price and a free domain). Then, a simple was done by us, free, “one-click” install of WordPress through Bluehost. Whenever we had questions we could actually chat with the “live chat” folks at Bluehost free of charge. They pointed us in the proper direction and made starting our very own blog super easy.
2.Design your blog using a simple theme. An excellent theme gives you the appearance and feel you need for your blog, allowing you to make a blog that looks exactly how you want it to look. If you’re not really a coder (we certainly weren’t), a theme makes the design work a million moments easier. Plus, once you purchase a theme, which are inexpensive for enough time they save you, it is owned by you for life. The Minimalists uses the stunning “tru” theme by SPYR, which is available at BYLT. Head on over to BYLT, browse their collection of themes, and find the design that’s correct for you.
3.Modify your weblog to define your style. Once we got our domain, weblog hosting, WordPress, and theme, we spent considerable time tweaking the theme to find the appear and feel we needed (i.e., making our vision possible). Then we spent even more time tinkering with the theme and arguing about it and tweaking it even more. Once we had made our blog, we create a free of charge Feedburner account so people could subscribe to our site via email and RSS subscriptions. And we established a free Google Analytics accounts to track our stats. Google and feedburner Analytics were both simple to sign up for, and we still make use of both today.
4.Choose the best plugins for your site. We only use a few plugins on our site, including “Google Analytics for WordPress” and “Yoast SEO”. They take only a few seconds (actually a few seconds, it’s simply a click of a button) to set up once you’ve began your blog. And if you would like to play around with some cool plugins really, check out WPBeginner’s Best WordPress Plugins.
5.Write compelling content material. Last, via WordPress, we started composing and uploading this content for our web pages: About Page, Contact Web page, Start Here Page, Books Page, Tour Page, Archives Page, etc. Next, we designed our logo using free of charge images we aquired online and text from a regular word-processing program. Then we put an image of ourselves in the header (that is important because people recognize with people, not really logos). Finally we started writing new blog posts and publishing them frequently (at least once a week), accompanied by free photos from Unsplash, Pexels, and the Library of Congress. And the rest is history.
How to Create a Blog: Video
Watch our step-by-stage instructional video, which include screenshots of the entire starting-a-blog process:
But good news: it’s easier than you think. We’ve learned a ton of lessons during our ascent to achieving over 20 million people. And today you can learn from our discomfort and suffering to circumvent a lot of the tedium involved in setting up a blog.
How we started our weblog here’s, step by step, followed by an instructional video, and also additional rationale and insights:
1.Choose your blogging platform and domain. The first thing we did when starting our weblog was head to Bluehost and register our domain. We didn’t even need to setup WordPress, which may be the platform we make use of, since Bluehost does all that for you personally. Bluehost’s basic price is certainly $2.75 a full month, which works for 99% of people (head to this link to receive a 50% low cost off the monthly price and a free domain). Then, a simple was done by us, free, “one-click” install of WordPress through Bluehost. Whenever we had questions we could actually chat with the “live chat” folks at Bluehost free of charge. They pointed us in the proper direction and made starting our very own blog super easy.
2.Design your blog using a simple theme. An excellent theme gives you the appearance and feel you need for your blog, allowing you to make a blog that looks exactly how you want it to look. If you’re not really a coder (we certainly weren’t), a theme makes the design work a million moments easier. Plus, once you purchase a theme, which are inexpensive for enough time they save you, it is owned by you for life. The Minimalists uses the stunning “tru” theme by SPYR, which is available at BYLT. Head on over to BYLT, browse their collection of themes, and find the design that’s correct for you.
3.Modify your weblog to define your style. Once we got our domain, weblog hosting, WordPress, and theme, we spent considerable time tweaking the theme to find the appear and feel we needed (i.e., making our vision possible). Then we spent even more time tinkering with the theme and arguing about it and tweaking it even more. Once we had made our blog, we create a free of charge Feedburner account so people could subscribe to our site via email and RSS subscriptions. And we established a free Google Analytics accounts to track our stats. Google and feedburner Analytics were both simple to sign up for, and we still make use of both today.
4.Choose the best plugins for your site. We only use a few plugins on our site, including “Google Analytics for WordPress” and “Yoast SEO”. They take only a few seconds (actually a few seconds, it’s simply a click of a button) to set up once you’ve began your blog. And if you would like to play around with some cool plugins really, check out WPBeginner’s Best WordPress Plugins.
5.Write compelling content material. Last, via WordPress, we started composing and uploading this content for our web pages: About Page, Contact Web page, Start Here Page, Books Page, Tour Page, Archives Page, etc. Next, we designed our logo using free of charge images we aquired online and text from a regular word-processing program. Then we put an image of ourselves in the header (that is important because people recognize with people, not really logos). Finally we started writing new blog posts and publishing them frequently (at least once a week), accompanied by free photos from Unsplash, Pexels, and the Library of Congress. And the rest is history.
How to Create a Blog: Video
Watch our step-by-stage instructional video, which include screenshots of the entire starting-a-blog process:
15 Factors a Blog Ought to be started by you
We were inspired to analyze and write this essay after reading Joshua Becker’s 15 Reasons I Think You Should Blog page, in which he discusses 15 great reasons why a weblog should be started by you. Why being the key word here. Basically, he talks about the purpose of blogging, not just how to begin a blog. That’s what each one of these other weblogs about blogging seem to miss; they skip the purpose-the why behind beginning a blog.
3 Reasons You Should Not Start a Blog
So you have 15 reasons why you should start a blog now, and we’ve shown you how to start a blog, step-by-step, based on our personal encounter. But after giving you those detailed guidelines, which could save you the hundreds of hours of wasted period, we also want to give you some good reasons why you should not start a blog. (Remember that these reasons are simply our opinions, and we usually do not pretend to offer them up as some kind of assortment of empirical blogging maxims.)
1.Money. You should not start a weblog to make money. We have to get that taken care of first. If your primary objective is to displace your full-period income from blogging, forget about it. It doesn’t work that way. Do you think that Jimi Hendrix picked up his first guitar therefore he could “supplement his income”? No, he didn’t. Rather, it was done by him for the like of it, for the pleasure and fulfillment he received, and the income came thereafter, much later actually.
2.Notoriety. Don’t plan on getting “Internet famous” right away. Not every site grows as fast as ours do, but that’s totally OK. The simple truth is that we sort of got lucky. We got an excellent domain name, we cobbled a logo and site design that individuals really liked together, we write fairly well, and our content connects with people in a unique way. We didn’t start this site to be “well-known” though. That’d end up being ridiculous. Our notoriety and quick rise to “fame” came as a surprise to us, and was due to a little luck and lots of hard, passionate work.
3.Traffic. Not all traffic is great traffic, so don’t worry about obtaining thousands of readers right away.
The funny thing is that all these plain things can happen. You will make a full-time income from building a blog. We do it, Corbett Barr does it, therefore do many others. And you could become Internet famous like Leo Chris or Babauta Brogan. But if these are the sole reasons why you start blogging, you’ll be miserable, because it will appear like a job, and if it feels like a working work you won’t be passionate about it, and so you’ll either (a) hate it, (b) fall flat on your face, or (c) hate it and fall toned on your face.
Instead, compose because you’re passionate about it…
20 Recommendations for Your Blog
We receive plenty of emails requesting advice about beginning a blog, about how to blog, about weblog topics, and about creating meaningful content-even a few questions about whether we wear boxers or briefs. These are the recommendations and answers we tend to give.
1.Find Your Specific niche market. You needn’t possess a niche, but it assists. When learning how to be a blogger, it’s vital that you ask yourself what you’re passionate about. Running? Cooking? Being a parent? Have you found your enthusiasm? If therefore, whatever it is, write about that. If not, you then must find your passion first. (Note: We generally suggest that people don’t start a weblog about minimalism or the paleo diet or any additional heavily saturated subject. But what we really mean when we say this is: don’t create a weblog about something if you don't have a distinctive perspective. If you’ve embraced simple living and also have a exclusive perspective, then you should have at it. Enjoy yourself.)
2.Determine Your Ideal Readers. Once you’ve discovered your niche, you should know who will be reading your site. For example, we blog about living intentionally. Thus, our ideal visitors are people who are thinking about exploring minimalism to allow them to clear the path toward more meaningful lives. If you want to write about your newborn growing up, that’s amazing: your ideal visitors are probably your friends and family. If you want to create about restoring classic cars, that’s cool, as well. Tailor your writing to your readers (whether it’s your family or local community or whoever else will browse your blog).
3.Add Value. Your weblog must add worth to its readers’ lives. This is actually the only way you'll get Great Quality Visitors to your site (and keep them coming back). Adding value is the only way to obtain long-term buy-in someone’s. Both of us learned this after ten years of managing and leading people in the organization world.
4.Be Initial. Yes, there are various other blogs out there about the same thing you want to write about. Issue: So why is your weblog different? Answer: Because of you. You are what makes your weblog different. It’s about your perspective, your creativeness, the worthiness that you add.
5.End up being Interesting. Write epic, amazing content. Especially if you want people to share it with others.
6.Be Yourself. Part to be interesting is telling your story. Every person is unique, as well as your story is a significant one. The important component of storytelling, however, is definitely removing the superfluous information that produce the story uninteresting. A great storyteller gets rid of 99% of what actually happens-the absorptive details-and leaves the interesting 1% for the reader.
7.Be Honest. Your blog must be authentic-it must feel real-if you desire people to read it. You could be your site, or your blog can be you. That is, perform you embody the stuff you reveal really? If not, people shall see through you. “Be the change you want to see in the world,” may be the famous Gandhi quotation. Perhaps bloggers should build the weblog they want to write for the world.
8.Transparency. Being transparent is different from getting honest. You needn’t share every details about your life simply for the sake of being honest. Always be honest, and become transparent when it adds value to what you’re writing. (You won’t ever observe pictures of us using the restroom on our site, because that’s not relevant.)
9.Time. Once you’ve learned how to begin a blog, you’ll learn that blogging takes a complete lot of time, particularly if you’re as neurotic as we are (we spent over 10 hours assessment the fonts on this site). And find those Twitter and Facebook icons in the header? We spent hours on those, deciding that which was right for all of us). That said, after you have your design create, don’t tweak it an excessive amount of. Instead, spend the time on your writing.
10.Vision. The nice reason our site style looks good is because we have a great host, we have a great theme, and most important, a vision was had by us of how we wanted our blog to look. After we had the vision, we worked well hard to create that vision a reality. (Note: neither of us had any design encounter just before starting a blog.) It’s hard to create a beautiful weblog if you don’t know what you want it to look like.
11.Find Your Voice. Over time, good authors discover their voice and their composing tends to develop a particular aesthetic, one that is appealing to their visitors. Finding your tone of voice makes your composing feel even more alive, more real, more urgent. For extra reading, check out our essay about Acquiring Your Voice.
12.We Instead of You. Utilize the first-person plural when feasible. Statements of we and our are stronger than you and your, especially when talking about adverse behaviors or tendencies. The first person comes off as far less accusatory. Think about it in this manner: we’re writing peer-to-peer-we aren't gods.
13.When to create. Question: When may be the best day and time to create a blog post? Solution: It doesn’t actually matter. We don’t adhere to a particular schedule. Some full weeks we post one essay; we post three sometimes. Yes, it consistently is important to write, but you needn’t get as well bogged down in the facts.
14.Social Media. Yes, we recommend using Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram to greatly help connect with your audience and other bloggers, but get too caught up in it don’t. Focus on the writing first, public media thereafter.
15.Disregard Bad Stupidity and Criticism. Sure, we get a lot of negative comments and stupid questions from ignorant individuals who aren’t actually our visitors (e.g., bad comments like “You’re not true minimalists” and stupid queries like “Are you guys gay?”). We contact these folks seagulls: they fly in, crap on your site, and fly away. But we pay them no mind, because we didn’t begin our blog for them. Delete their move and touch upon.
16.Research. Spend time researching what you’re writing about. The nice reason we are able to use therefore many helpful, relevant links inside our essays is basically because we put in the right time to analyze our topics.
17.Keep It Basic. This is where minimalism can be applied to starting any blog, irrespective of its genre. No need to place superfluous advertisements or widgets all over your site. Stick to the fundamentals and remove whatever you don’t want. Remove whatever doesn’t add value.
18.Picture. Put an image of yourself on your blog. People identify with other people. If two goofy guys from Ohio aren’t too scared to place their pictures on their site, then you have nothing to be concerned about.
19.Comments. If you’re going to possess comments on your own site, then browse the Five Phrases That Kill Your Blog by Scott Stratten.
20.LIVE LIFE. You’re blogging about your daily life (or about certain elements of your life, at least), and that means you still need to live life. There are factors that we always put before writing: workout, health, relationships, encounters, personal growth, contribution.
We were inspired to analyze and write this essay after reading Joshua Becker’s 15 Reasons I Think You Should Blog page, in which he discusses 15 great reasons why a weblog should be started by you. Why being the key word here. Basically, he talks about the purpose of blogging, not just how to begin a blog. That’s what each one of these other weblogs about blogging seem to miss; they skip the purpose-the why behind beginning a blog.
3 Reasons You Should Not Start a Blog
So you have 15 reasons why you should start a blog now, and we’ve shown you how to start a blog, step-by-step, based on our personal encounter. But after giving you those detailed guidelines, which could save you the hundreds of hours of wasted period, we also want to give you some good reasons why you should not start a blog. (Remember that these reasons are simply our opinions, and we usually do not pretend to offer them up as some kind of assortment of empirical blogging maxims.)
1.Money. You should not start a weblog to make money. We have to get that taken care of first. If your primary objective is to displace your full-period income from blogging, forget about it. It doesn’t work that way. Do you think that Jimi Hendrix picked up his first guitar therefore he could “supplement his income”? No, he didn’t. Rather, it was done by him for the like of it, for the pleasure and fulfillment he received, and the income came thereafter, much later actually.
2.Notoriety. Don’t plan on getting “Internet famous” right away. Not every site grows as fast as ours do, but that’s totally OK. The simple truth is that we sort of got lucky. We got an excellent domain name, we cobbled a logo and site design that individuals really liked together, we write fairly well, and our content connects with people in a unique way. We didn’t start this site to be “well-known” though. That’d end up being ridiculous. Our notoriety and quick rise to “fame” came as a surprise to us, and was due to a little luck and lots of hard, passionate work.
3.Traffic. Not all traffic is great traffic, so don’t worry about obtaining thousands of readers right away.
The funny thing is that all these plain things can happen. You will make a full-time income from building a blog. We do it, Corbett Barr does it, therefore do many others. And you could become Internet famous like Leo Chris or Babauta Brogan. But if these are the sole reasons why you start blogging, you’ll be miserable, because it will appear like a job, and if it feels like a working work you won’t be passionate about it, and so you’ll either (a) hate it, (b) fall flat on your face, or (c) hate it and fall toned on your face.
Instead, compose because you’re passionate about it…
20 Recommendations for Your Blog
We receive plenty of emails requesting advice about beginning a blog, about how to blog, about weblog topics, and about creating meaningful content-even a few questions about whether we wear boxers or briefs. These are the recommendations and answers we tend to give.
1.Find Your Specific niche market. You needn’t possess a niche, but it assists. When learning how to be a blogger, it’s vital that you ask yourself what you’re passionate about. Running? Cooking? Being a parent? Have you found your enthusiasm? If therefore, whatever it is, write about that. If not, you then must find your passion first. (Note: We generally suggest that people don’t start a weblog about minimalism or the paleo diet or any additional heavily saturated subject. But what we really mean when we say this is: don’t create a weblog about something if you don't have a distinctive perspective. If you’ve embraced simple living and also have a exclusive perspective, then you should have at it. Enjoy yourself.)
2.Determine Your Ideal Readers. Once you’ve discovered your niche, you should know who will be reading your site. For example, we blog about living intentionally. Thus, our ideal visitors are people who are thinking about exploring minimalism to allow them to clear the path toward more meaningful lives. If you want to write about your newborn growing up, that’s amazing: your ideal visitors are probably your friends and family. If you want to create about restoring classic cars, that’s cool, as well. Tailor your writing to your readers (whether it’s your family or local community or whoever else will browse your blog).
3.Add Value. Your weblog must add worth to its readers’ lives. This is actually the only way you'll get Great Quality Visitors to your site (and keep them coming back). Adding value is the only way to obtain long-term buy-in someone’s. Both of us learned this after ten years of managing and leading people in the organization world.
4.Be Initial. Yes, there are various other blogs out there about the same thing you want to write about. Issue: So why is your weblog different? Answer: Because of you. You are what makes your weblog different. It’s about your perspective, your creativeness, the worthiness that you add.
5.End up being Interesting. Write epic, amazing content. Especially if you want people to share it with others.
6.Be Yourself. Part to be interesting is telling your story. Every person is unique, as well as your story is a significant one. The important component of storytelling, however, is definitely removing the superfluous information that produce the story uninteresting. A great storyteller gets rid of 99% of what actually happens-the absorptive details-and leaves the interesting 1% for the reader.
7.Be Honest. Your blog must be authentic-it must feel real-if you desire people to read it. You could be your site, or your blog can be you. That is, perform you embody the stuff you reveal really? If not, people shall see through you. “Be the change you want to see in the world,” may be the famous Gandhi quotation. Perhaps bloggers should build the weblog they want to write for the world.
8.Transparency. Being transparent is different from getting honest. You needn’t share every details about your life simply for the sake of being honest. Always be honest, and become transparent when it adds value to what you’re writing. (You won’t ever observe pictures of us using the restroom on our site, because that’s not relevant.)
9.Time. Once you’ve learned how to begin a blog, you’ll learn that blogging takes a complete lot of time, particularly if you’re as neurotic as we are (we spent over 10 hours assessment the fonts on this site). And find those Twitter and Facebook icons in the header? We spent hours on those, deciding that which was right for all of us). That said, after you have your design create, don’t tweak it an excessive amount of. Instead, spend the time on your writing.
10.Vision. The nice reason our site style looks good is because we have a great host, we have a great theme, and most important, a vision was had by us of how we wanted our blog to look. After we had the vision, we worked well hard to create that vision a reality. (Note: neither of us had any design encounter just before starting a blog.) It’s hard to create a beautiful weblog if you don’t know what you want it to look like.
11.Find Your Voice. Over time, good authors discover their voice and their composing tends to develop a particular aesthetic, one that is appealing to their visitors. Finding your tone of voice makes your composing feel even more alive, more real, more urgent. For extra reading, check out our essay about Acquiring Your Voice.
12.We Instead of You. Utilize the first-person plural when feasible. Statements of we and our are stronger than you and your, especially when talking about adverse behaviors or tendencies. The first person comes off as far less accusatory. Think about it in this manner: we’re writing peer-to-peer-we aren't gods.
13.When to create. Question: When may be the best day and time to create a blog post? Solution: It doesn’t actually matter. We don’t adhere to a particular schedule. Some full weeks we post one essay; we post three sometimes. Yes, it consistently is important to write, but you needn’t get as well bogged down in the facts.
14.Social Media. Yes, we recommend using Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram to greatly help connect with your audience and other bloggers, but get too caught up in it don’t. Focus on the writing first, public media thereafter.
15.Disregard Bad Stupidity and Criticism. Sure, we get a lot of negative comments and stupid questions from ignorant individuals who aren’t actually our visitors (e.g., bad comments like “You’re not true minimalists” and stupid queries like “Are you guys gay?”). We contact these folks seagulls: they fly in, crap on your site, and fly away. But we pay them no mind, because we didn’t begin our blog for them. Delete their move and touch upon.
16.Research. Spend time researching what you’re writing about. The nice reason we are able to use therefore many helpful, relevant links inside our essays is basically because we put in the right time to analyze our topics.
17.Keep It Basic. This is where minimalism can be applied to starting any blog, irrespective of its genre. No need to place superfluous advertisements or widgets all over your site. Stick to the fundamentals and remove whatever you don’t want. Remove whatever doesn’t add value.
18.Picture. Put an image of yourself on your blog. People identify with other people. If two goofy guys from Ohio aren’t too scared to place their pictures on their site, then you have nothing to be concerned about.
19.Comments. If you’re going to possess comments on your own site, then browse the Five Phrases That Kill Your Blog by Scott Stratten.
20.LIVE LIFE. You’re blogging about your daily life (or about certain elements of your life, at least), and that means you still need to live life. There are factors that we always put before writing: workout, health, relationships, encounters, personal growth, contribution.
So done with SEO plugins. Now, I use this AI-assisted text editor, I think it's called Ink for all. Who else has tried this? http://bit.ly/2XUjrhu
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