Starting a blog in this day and age is not an expensive or overly complicated task thanks to modern technology. Here is a complete guide on how to start a blog, and how to make money from it as well, if desired.

How To Start A Blog In 5 Easy Steps

Steps: 1. Choose A Blogging Platform 2. Choose A Domain Name & Web Host 3. Set Up & Design Your Blog 4. Start Blogging 5. Ways To Earn Money

Step 1: Choose A Blogging Platform

There are a wide variety of blogging platforms out there, some free, and some not. By far the most popular of which is WordPress. Currently, there are 82 million active WordPress users. There are more people using WordPress than people living in the United Kingdom! If you don’t fancy WordPress, here are some alternatives. 1. Drupal 2. Joomla 3. Blogger Here are some advantages to using WordPress: 1. Easy to set up and use – seriously, I started making money by designing WordPress sites in middle school. 2. A lot of free templates and themes. 3. Massive community for support. 4. Helpful blogging features such as comments, easy posting, likes, etc.

Step 2: Choose A Domain Name & Web Host

Now, it is technically possible to start a blog without buying a domain name and web host. However, I highly recommend against doing this. Here are some reasons why you shouldn’t start a blog for free. 1. You don’t get your own domain name. You’ll get stuck with a sub-domain like myblog.wordpress.org, or myblog.tumblr.com. Ugly, right? 2. There are heavy limits on customizability, bandwidth, and many more vital features. 3. You don’t own your blog. Many free platforms have stipulations in their terms of service dictating that they essentially own your content and can re-use it for their own purposes. Knowing this, I would highly recommend purchasing a domain name and web hosting account – it’s not even that expensive!

1.) Picking A Web Host

As for what web host you should use, I highly recommend Sunshine Tech and Media. I cannot stress enough that you should stay away from GoDaddy and any brands owned by Endurance International Group. Both are notorious for slow speeds, outsourced and inexperienced support, up-charges, and over-priced hosting. Endurance International Group currently owns BlueHost, HostGator, iPage, and many more brands, none of which are good. 2.) Picking A Domain Name Next, you want to make sure that you have a short an attractive domain name. One website that I love to scour for expired domain names is expireddomains.net, it’s completely free and allows you to get domains previously owned by others that got deleted due to non-payment. Other than that, try to come up with a list of desired domain names for your blog, and use a domain search tool to check which ones are available.

Step 3: Set Up & Design Your Blog

How you go about completing this step varies depending on what blogging platform you chose to use. If you chose WordPress, there are countless themes, templates, and pre-made sites both for free and for a premium. One important step is to choose a niche for your blog. This may be something broad like pets, or something narrow like dog bathing. There are many websites and YouTube channels that can help you find out how to design your website, a good website is W3Schools and a good YouTube channel is Darrel Wilson.

Step 4: Start Blogging

Now comes the step that (hopefully) is the fun part. Once you have your website all set up, start blogging! Depending on the niche that you chose for your website, start blogging about your desired topic and make sure to conduct search engine optimization while doing so. It’s a good habit for SEO optimization and keeping blogging a priority to create at least one blog post every day. If you’re a blogger, that means you probably already type pretty fast. If you are typing even at 70 WPM, you can finish a short blog post of 150 words in just a little over 2 minutes.

Step 5: Ways To Earn Money

There are several ways to make money by blogging. If you want to make money through your blog alone, then methods of making money boil down to a few methods. I have listed some below. 1. Placing advertisements on your website through Google Adwords. This is easy enough to set up in WordPress, Drupal, and most other CMS platforms. 2. Allowing people to guest post on your blog for a fee. You can attract these writers by posting advertisements on Craigslist, content writer forums, Reddit, FaceBook groups, etc. and by – through SEO optimization and consistent content writing – boosting your performance on major search engines in order to make your blog more popular. You can also make money by blogging for others, but if you want to make money through your own blog, this method probably won’t mean much to you. Freelance content writers can make quite a bit of money, you can find gigs on websites like Fiverr, UpWork, and Freelancer.com. Congratulations! You now have a blog up and running! Make sure to consistently post on your blog and revise your design every few years. Happy blogging!