How To Start a Blog From Scratch in 2023?
If you are looking for a super in-depth guide on How To Start a Blog from scratch in 2023, then you are in the right place.
In this post, you will learn about
- How to Start a Blog in a Niche that works
- Establishing your Blogging goals.
- Getting a blog name with domain and hosting
- Setting up your blog with WordPress
- Generating Valuable Contents on your Blog
2023 is the year of many fruitful opportunities to do something you love and get earn from it.
Blogging is an easy start to make money in a very flexible time and day. However, 95% of the blog fails due to many reasons but the most common one is the author lost its interest.
So for your best preference, here are some great ideas on how to start blogging and maintain yourself on the track.
Why I'm writing this guide of “How to Start a Successful Blog in 2023”?
When I started blogging back in 2013, there is no such guide talking about how to make the blog profitable but I learned things in my own way.
Now, I'm running a lot of profitable blogs and below are few examples.
Being a small team, it's not possible for us to start a blog on every topic that is found on the Internet. So, I just thought of writing this post, which might encourage people to start a blog to write about passion and earning money while doing a day job or even staying at home.
This guide is just the same blueprint of how I create new blogs, thus adapting our guide of “How to Start a Successful Blog in 2023” do wonders for you.
Let's get started.
Step 1: How to Start a Blog From Scratch in 2023 With a Niche that works
The first step to start blogging is to decide what niche you are passionate about.
Most successful bloggers are writing with their own best interest and have managed to monetize it.
However, choosing a niche should be based not only on your passion but also on your interest, experience, and profitable Best Blogging Niches in 2023.
Blogging Niches – Guidelines To Consider
1. Takedown some notes and write your niche interests as much as you can. Then, search for its keywords and see its popularity and profitability.
2. Know your audience and how much they put interest in your chosen niche. This could also help you monetize your blog especially if you are much expert of the field and know where was the audience hits of problems, questions, and presented solutions.
Some of the evergreen blogging niches that always make money are writing on Technology, health, weight loss, travel, personal finance, and lifestyle blogging.
3. Your blogging niche should have Affiliate Marketing. It is the act of recommending products and services of other businesses and making a commission on every sale.
Most big businesses have affiliate programs that you can enter. Once you qualify and are accepted for their programs, you can take advantage of your distinctive affiliate links to contribute to your blog, view click and sales reports, and see any future reimbursements you are scheduled to receive.
4. You have to gain professional leverage at your advantage. To establish a very effective blog, you need to create influence first. So in order to gain power, you need to venture beyond your comfort zone and make the most of your contacts, professional experience, and all at your advantage.
5. A keyword analysis is the most critical move in selecting a course of action for your blog. You also need to fully understand keyword research and search engine optimization (SEO) so your blog can rank and get traffic.
Step 2: Establish Your Blog's Goals.
Upon selecting your niche, you should have a system that keeps track of everything— your to-do and content idea and your goals, ideas, and motivations.
1. It's better to contemplate ahead and note down what you'll do with your blog in the short and long term. Those would be the priorities of SMART – Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Timely.
2. You need to have a place to keep a record of your random ideas and distinctive points of sale in your message over time. Here are things to consider:
- Your very distinctive proposition.
- Blog's headline and subheadline.
- Solutions to problems you solve.
- Easy level of comprehension to present your blog's about.
- Customers persona.
- Main categories of the blog.
- Future Content ideas with target keywords and search volume.
Step 3: Getting a blog name with domain and hosting
The team suggests that you select a site name that is large enough to allow you to rotate, if appropriate.
You widen your scope a little, you can extend your content and have enough dynamism to ensure consistency, resist giving it up, and enhance your website for a long time.
How to select a Domain
1. You must consider the price of your domain which is not expensive nor cheap to sustain the quality of your blog and make enough profit.
2. Pick domain extension for your blog. If possible, try not to use numbers and hypens in your domain name. Instead, add a keyword that best describes your blog. It's not as vital to have a keyword in your SEO blog name, but it could immediately help people recognise your blog niche.
Here's the top ratings used domains: .com, .co, .org, .us, .net, .blog, .io and .biz.
Here is how you final domain selection should be.
Choosing the best hosting for blogging
The blog ‘s effectiveness relies significantly on your service, so you should choose a web hosting company. A host service platform maintains your system up and running without disruption, provides protection, and incorporates WordPress.
The best option at this phase is a quick and easy hosting provider plan. It is much recommended to use SiteGround as the best way to learn how to launch a blog.
The SiteGround has hosted over 2,000,000 clients and keeps a 98% satisfaction rate continuously increasing throughout the year. You could choose what packages you want to avail, it is best to go for a hosting plan with domain privacy. Here are some important details of Site Ground:
- Uptime: 100%
- Load Time: 0.4 seconds (400 milliseconds)
- Support: 5/5
- Website: www.siteground.com
With also promising features:
- Free WordPress Installation
- Multiple Server Locations
- Site Transfer Assistance
- Free Daily Backup
- 24/7 Support Phone/Chat/Tickets
- Free CDN Service.
I'm not recommending SiteGround just because they got good reviews online but I'm a paying customer to SiteGround since 2016 hosting multiple sites of mine.
Step 4: Setting up your blog with WordPress
The blog platform is widely recognized as the Content Management System (CMS), where you'll be starting to write, customize, and publish your blog entries. You must have something that is user-friendly, efficient, and affordable, of course.
Most people are running their WordPress blogs, which has 8,864,249 users. WordPress also provides several free plugins, themes, and a variety of ways to customize your blog. You wouldn't need any technical programming skills to get started.
Installing WordPress on SiteGround
It is much easier to install WordPress with SiteGround:
1. Sign up for SiteGround hosting and log in to your SiteGround Customer Area.
2. Under Websites, click on “New Website” and then enter your domain name and then ” Select the WordPress button.
3. Thus a new section will appear automatically on the page where you need to fill the account details such as email, username, and password, for the new WordPress site. Select the Continue button.
4. Lastly, pick any modifications you want to append or add them later if needed. Select the Complete Setup button and your new WordPress site will be live.
Use best WordPress theme
Web pages with such a poorly structured template are difficult to maneuver and hinder the customer experience with your blog.
You might want to customize your site with the standard layout which fonts must be around 14 and 17 scales, recognizable and easy to understand. You could also have a search bar that looks decent with your phones and screen monitor.
Sign in to your WordPress admin page first. You could always open your WordPress authentication server by accessing
https://yourdomainname.com/wp-admin.
You can easily search themes by selecting which category you need into Subject, Features, and Layout options. Once logged in, select the “Appearance” option from the sidebar menu. Then, the “Themes” option and to particularly add new themes at Wordpress, click “Add new” on the top of the site.
Then, just simply install the theme you particularly like. However, you could also surf other paid themes outside the Wordpress sites:
- StudioPress
- Thrive Themes
- Elegant Themes
- GeneratePress
Once you avail from these, an email of zip file will be sent to you. To install the external theme, just go with “Appearance” option, then “Add new” to upload the zip file and install.
Customize Your Blog's Theme
The WordPress theme is a series of templates, files, and stylesheets that govern the layout and structure of your WordPress-enabled blog. Here are some Wordpress appearances you could edit:
- Site Identity – the website name, logo as well as other navigation features.
- Colors – Select color schemes for fonts, buttons, blocks, and other objects.
- Menu – you can modify the location of your settings menu and which pages you want to go with.
- Additional CSS – it is a place in which you can position the custom CSS rather than fiddling with your theme editor files.
Install Essential WordPress Plugins
WordPress provides thousands of plugins with various features, covering everything including digital marketing and schedule integration to sign up-in forms and SEO tools.
Such frameworks make it incredibly simple to learn how to create a blog as they execute a lot of interesting activities without a need for coding expertise.
Even then, it would not be recommended to install dozens of these tools on your blog, as they seem to limit down your site and may dispute each other during updates.
Here are some plugins recommendation to improve your blogging site:
Akismet: Blocks spam comments automatically, the most essential plugin among all.
WooCommerce: If you are planning to sell eCommerce products, use this plugin, else not needed.
Rank Math: The most versatile SEO plugin in the market, a better alternative to Yoast. Rank Math does half of your SEO job with clear to use instructions.
WP Rocket: The mandatory plugin to speed up your WordPress sites, though it's paid. WP Rocket is a fully-featured in one site speed plugin that can do anything from minimizing HMTL, CSS, and JavaScript, integrating with your CDN, can database bloat, and much more. Try W3 Total Cache, the free alternative.
Elementor: Elementor Pro is considered the best WordPress landing page build and tool to generate a home page and a couple of other blogs. They've got a free version of Elementor, but the Pro version appears to take it to a whole other level with far more excellent templates.
ConvertKit: The Free email lead generation plugin. With ConvertKit, you can get started for free and use their landing page and optin forms to collect email addresses. You can see your own ebooks with ease.
Setup Blog's SEO Permalink Structure
The URLs of your blog posts and pages are a really important determinant factor. When you create a new page or article, you will see a page editor and select a URL after a dot com.
The text after .com is what the permalink appears to look like. Permalinks are static hyperlinks which should take your viewers to a particular web page. Your permalink is fixed to “your domain name.com/postID” by default.
1. Before you start writing a blog, you should change your permalink structure into more specific. You may choose im variety of options. However, most bloggers use “Post Name” and “Custom” structures. From settings, click “Permalinks.”
2. It is important to know that your blog URL must be permanent and remain unchanged. This is to avoid inbound links which results 404 error page.
3. Ensure to save the settings before you exit the tab. Also, make sure to set up the Google Analytics and the Google Search Console within your blogging site. These two tools are highly required to update your blog and track your traffic. Both can be properly installed with Wordpress plugins.
Step 5: Generating Valuable Contents on your Blog
After you've done previous steps, you can now start writing a blog according to your chosen niche. The following are things you need to consider in writing a blog:
- Your blog must have the main focus keyword. You could insert the keyword in your permalink URL, the title of your blog, heading, and subheading, in text paragraph atleast 1 per 100 words in a very long content and may add to meta description.
- For example, the focus keyword of this blog post is “How To Start a Blog” and this is how I entered the data in Rank Math SEO plugin.
- Put quality and value to your content making it more attractive and accessible to your audience.
- Lessen commercialized contents or advertisement.
- Always do grammar check, spelling, sentence structure and plagiarism.
Write and Publish Your First Blogpost
1. Select “Posts” from the left sidebar, then “Add new”. You will be headed to editor where you can start writing.
2. You can go to “Preview” option to double-check your content.
3. Click “Publish” button to officially publish your first blog. Once done, go to Google Search Console and submit the new URL to index your content.
You could also monetize your blogging site by Affiliate Marketing, Paid Advertisement, Offering Services and Selling your own products.
To be a successful blogger, you need to learn a lot and do everything on your blog to see the success rates. It is recommended that you develop a habit of learning and always discover new things by reading and criticizing a blog and a lot more.
Frequently Asked Questions From My Readers in Past
1.Is it too late to start a blog in 2023?
Definitely, not. I started this site in Jan 2023 and now generating more than 1000 visits per days and generating good income.
2.Should I start a blog or Instagram?
If you want to earn passive income monthly, choose blogging. If you are not interested in writing & managing blogs, choose Instagram.
3.How long does it takes to start a blog?
If you have an idea and goals, setting up a blog can happen quickly.
4. Does it cost to start a blog?
Yes and No. You can start a blog for free at blogger.co,m but the limited monetization options. Starting a blog with a blogging platform with WordPress opens up many possibilities for monetization.
5. I still have questions, how should I contact you?
You can contact us for any help regarding setting up, we are happy to help you as a token of appreciation for getting hosting through us.
