How To Start a WordPress Blog in 2018
The Definitive Guide
How to Start a WordPress Blog in 2018?
Starting a WordPress blog and making it successful is a dream for many out there. With this guide, I'm pretty sure you will get the courage to start your WordPress blog online and make it successful.
How to Start a WordPress Blog 2018 ?
If someone raises a question, don't hesitate to share this guide since I wrote every possible steps about starting a WordPress blog and you don't need a second guide to learn.
There are only four steps to start a blog
- Choosing a niche
- Getting a Domain and Hosting
- Setting up blog
- Write posts and get traffic.
Sounds simple as that? Read further to know How to Start a Successful WordPress Blog in 2018.
More...
Again, this is not a guide that drops you in the middle. Right from choosing a niche and getting traffic , I covered everything to make your blog successful and stand out of crowd.
Things to Consider Before Creating Your WordPress Blog
Consistent.
Before reading further, I need to stress it again. Consistent.
Consistent is the only thing to make your blog successful. If you're consistent enough, then I'm pretty sure you will be making $5000 within few months.
No. I'm not kidding, I've done it, so I'm pretty sure about writing it. It's not only me, lot of bloggers who made it successful with the level of consistency.
So if you promise me about consistency, you can continue reading.
#1 Choosing a Niche
Niche.
What Google says about niche.
a specialized segment of the market for a particular kind of product or service.
The concept is simple. Choose a niche you're comfortable.
If you're science professor, you can start a WordPress blog on science related stuffs rather than starting a blog on all subjects.
If you're medical student you can share you learning through your blog and you don't need to blog about solar systems.
Once you finalized your dream niche, you can start writing about it. If you're choosing a wrong niche and struggling later, then it will be like your 9-5 job, doing something you don't like.
If you're a multi talented then presenting you the evergreen niches that will surely make money blogging in 2018 for the rest of your life.
- Health - People want to stay healthy. You can help them by sharing what you know about health-related subjects. For example, you can write posts about the latest dieting systems or the most popular exercise programs.
- Hobbies - Obviously, writing about your own favorite passtime is easy and simple. You know a lot about the subject, and you are passionate about it. If you are an avid chess fan, write about your favorite openings and World Champions. If you like basketball, write about new drills and/or your favorite NBA players.
- Blogging Guide - These days, blogging is a great way to establish networks and earn money. This is the reason why many people want to become bloggers. If you want to start a blog, why don’t you help others who want to start their own blogs?
- Personality Development - No one is perfect. People can learn a thing or two about improving the way they behave and interact with others. If you are successful in this field, or a certified personality trainer, this is the best niche for you.
- Technology - Technology keeps on changing. And people want to keep up with it. Choose this niche if you know a lot about the latest gadgets and technological trends.
- Food - Everyone needs food to survive. Consequently, the articles you’ll write about this subject will be useful as long as humans eat food.
- Internet - The internet has changed the way people live. If you are a certified geek, you can write about this aspect of technology.
- Dating - Humans have an inherent need to find their mate. Because of this, many people are using search engines to find dating tips and techniques. If you are good in this aspect of life, share your skills and knowledge with the less-gifted ones.
- Career Guidance - Budding professionals want to know how they can reach the C-Suite in the shortest time possible. If you know some things about the corporate world, share them through a continuous stream of blog posts.
Finally, anyone can make money with this type of evergreen niches and I can see some niches rounding your head.
You complete first part of "How To Start a WordPress Blog in 2018" and going to take the next step - bringing life to your blog.
#2 Getting a Domain and Hosting
Blogging is more than just writing and posting your articles online. You also need to make sure that your posts are available to anyone who would want to read them.
Excellent posts are useless if your blog site is inaccessible most of the time. To secure the accessibility of your blog, you should find a reliable hosting service provider.
The process of getting a blog site starts with purchasing a domain name. A domain name is a word or phrase that ends with a website extension (e.g. “.com”, “.org”, “.net”, etc.). People who want to read your posts will type that domain name on the address bar of their browsers.
GoDaddy is a solid choice for buying domain names. However, the company’s hosting services are not ideal for blogging and gets poor ratings from real users.
If you want your blog to be stable and accessible, then you should go for a reputable hosting service provider like FastComet.
Note: Most of the blogs which ranks for "How To Start a WordPress Blog" recommends BlueHost or someother EIG companies as the best hosting but in reality, FastComet offers better performance, free domain and same renewal prices.
Here are the main reasons why you should get “hosting” from FastComet, and yes this blog too hosted on FastComet Dallas data center.
FastComet uses the best caching mechanism available today and most importantly they are affordable than BlueHost & HostGator.
The company offers three types of hosting services, namely:
- StartSmart - With this option, you can get unlimited traffic for one website. It costs about $2.95 a month.
- ScaleRight- This option gives you unlimited traffic for multiple sites. You can get it for about $5.95 per month.
- ScaleUp - I'm using this plan to host this blog. I'm pretty sure you don't need any managed VPS costs $50 a month, you can actually choose this one which costs $9.95/month with exclusive features.
If you're going to choose FastComet, then you don't even need to get domain from GoDaddy. FastComet now offering free domain forever for life. Actual domain costs $14.99 per year from GoDaddy but you can save such costs while hosting with FastComet.
#3 Setting up your blog
Now that you have a domain name and a hosting service provider, you should get a CMS (i.e. Content Management System). There are many companies that offer CMS. However, WordPress is the top CMS available today. Don't worry WordPress is open-source and they won't charge anything.
There are some free alternatives out there (e.g. Tumblr), but these options are not ideal for monetized blogs. With WordPress, your site will be streamlined for monetization. Earning money using your WordPress blogs will be easy and simple. There are also number of Best Blogging Tools to grow your blog faster.
The following numbers will show you how great WordPress is:
- It holds 65% of the global market for Content Management Systems.
- It hosts 1 out of 4 websites in existence.
- It is the home of more than 76,000,000 blogs.
- It launches about 50,000 sites on a daily basis.
The Things you need to set up a WordPress Blog ( Don't worry, we have plenty of resources on this blog for WordPress related tutorials.)
The Right WordPress Theme - The theme you will use affects the overall appearance of your blog. When you launch a WordPress-powered blog, the system will give you a default theme. The default theme looks good, but you should switch to a new one if you want to differentiate your site.However If you're on a budget, you can opt for free WordPress themes and FastComet will do installation for you. Here are three of the best WordPress Themes available today:
- Genesis - This framework gives you professionally-designed WordPress themes at affordable prices. These themes are beautiful, SEO-compliant, and clean-coded. Choose this framework if your focus is on establishing a great-looking blog.
- Thrive Themes - The themes from this framework are specifically designed for marketing purposes. If you are planning to use your blog as a marketing tool, choose a theme from the Thrive framework. This website is powered by FocusBlog Thrive Themes.
- Elegant Themes - When the company brought Divi Builder, one of the best landing page builder for WordPress, it let's users to design any type of WordPress without touching a single line of code.
The Right WordPress Plugins - Plugins boost the functionality and “user-friendliness” of your blog. There are numerous plugins in the WordPress library and also I wrote a guide on Best WordPress Plugins that powers Bloggingio. But the essential ones are:
- Google Analytics - This free and comprehensive analytics tool can help you learn a lot about your blog. Install this on your blog to obtain detailed information about the activities of your readers and the performance of your site.
- Yoast SEO - This plugin optimizes your site and allows you to set meta tags for your posts. Thus, it is a critical tool for achieving solid online presence.
I wrote an detailed post of the list of WordPress Plugins I use for my sites here.
The Right WordPress Blog settings - WordPress has default settings that are great for unpublished blogs. If you want to share your blog with the world, however, you should change the configuration of your blog. Here are the essential settings that you should change:
- Modify the title, time/date, and tagline of your site.
- Set the reading configuration.
- Eliminate the placeholder text that WordPress places in new pages.
- Adjust the permalinks of your blog.
- Create new categories for your posts.
- Choose the Best WordPress Themes from my list.
- Add plugins to boost your blog’s functionality.
Once you have all these, you are ready to write blog posts and attract readers.
#4 Write posts and get traffic
You done everything and now its time to show your consistency as promised. To become a blogger, you need to write your content and attract a consistent stream of site visitors. The following tips will help you get started:
- Write for specific readers - To grab the interest of your readers, you may write content specifically designed for a particular group of audience. Don’t write for “everyone”. Rather, target specific reader groups and see how they respond.
- Use social networking sites to promote your blog - If you have a profile in the popular social networking sites (e.g. Facebook, Google+, Twitter), you may use your existing connections to get more site visitors. For example, you may include the URL of your new blog posts in your Facebook “updates”. As an alternative, you may shorten that URL and share it as a “tweet”. If you are in the corporate world, you may also use the LinkedIn or Quora platform to gain more exposure.
- Use the results from Google Analytics - Numbers can help you in maximizing the performance of your blog. You want to earn money from your blog so you should know its current performance. Currently, the simplest way to learn more about a blog (and any website, for that matter) is Google Analytics. This tool will give you detailed and comprehensive data regarding your blog.
- Put images in your posts - You can greatly improve the attractiveness of your posts by adding pictures to them. Choose beautiful, interesting pictures that are related to your content. It would be best if you’ll place an image at the top of your article and another one in the middle. This way, you can keep your content from being monotonous.
- Use keywords in your posts - Search engine optimization is an important aspect of owning a blog. With SEO, your site will appear in the search engine results of people who might want to check it. That means you should incorporate SEO into your posts. And the easiest way to achieve that is by placing carefully selected keywords into each of your articles and you can use tools like KWFinder to find the easy to rank keywords.
- Become a guest blogger - This is an excellent way to increase your exposure. If you are new to the blogging game, you will likely have problems attracting readers. People don’t know you yet, so they are not interested in reading your articles. Well, you can remedy this by writing posts on other people’s blog. Your existing network can help you with this task.
Concluding
I never missed anything to start a blog and I will update the blog with more screenshots and FAQs in near future.
The Guide on How To Start a WordPress Blog was first published on Bloggingio.
