How to start a blog is the first question which you will encounter if you have been thinking of starting a blog. Blogging has become really popular in the last decade or so. There are many who blog for fun and many who blog to make a living out of it. Blogging is a good thing no matter how & why, you do it.
Blogging helps you in relaxing your mind if you are a working professional by making you to do something creative. And if you want to do just for hobby irrespective of your professional status, it helps you in gathering information and developing your awareness level about your niche as you tend to do lot of research while blogging.
How to start a blog is not a big deal if you have appropriate information and have passion for blogging.
But
Starting a blog becomes a complicated process because people tend to rush into it without proper preparation and research.
As we know that blogging is very important and if you are here while searching for “How to create a blog” or just “create a blog”, you are already interested in setting up your blog.
And as you are searching for it, it also shows that either you are a beginner or someone having a free blog but want to take it to the next level. So coming back to “How to create a blog”, the first thing you need to know is the niche or market about which you will be writing on your blog.
You can also keep a blog like dairy where you share your daily experiences but if it is going to be about some specific topic, then it’s better to do some research before you actually begin setting up your blog. If it is a online dairy or a personal online journal, then you should go for free services like free account on blogger or wordpress. If you need more information on setting up your free account on blogger, wordpress or any other free blogging platform, please comment with your question, we will explain it you and try to answer your question.
If you are more concern about quality of your blog and want to make money from blogging, then I will suggest you to go for your domain name and hosting. These are the steps which you should follow to set up your blog;
Domain name and hosting– before you do anything online in terms of a website or blog, you need to get a domain name. Try to take some domain which is related to your market or niche. If you are not sure, then you can use Google Adwords keyword tool to do research on that. You have to simply enter any word or phrase which is in your mind and it will give you results containing the variant and related keywords of your word or phrase. You can also use other keyword research tools to do research like IBP and Seo Powersuite.
To know more about IBP, CLICK HERE
To know more about Seo Powersuite, CLICK HERE
Once you know your domain name, you need to get it registered with some registrar. You can choose extension which suites like .com, .in, .co.in etc. There are many service providers but if you are beginner you need some company which provides good customer service so that your queries are answered quickly and swiftly.
Your domain name is like the name of your house but unless until you have the real house, name is worthless, so you need to get the hosting which in this case is the real house. Hosting is critical for the online success. To begin with you can go for shared hosting. It is affordable so you won’t have to invest much in the beginning itself. Most of the service providers provide both, domain name registration as well as hosting services. I am using Hostgator which is not only very economical but also very good customer support. In case of any queries, they offer very good support. I am using VPS hosting but for beginners, shared hosting is good enough. To know more about hostgator and their services,
Indian Bloggers, CLICK HERE
International Bloggers, CLICK HERE
Content Management System Selection– Once you are registered with Hostgator or any other service provider, you need to select a content management system or CMS. This CMS is like a container which will hold your website together. WordPress is the best content management system for bloggers. It is free and comes with whole lot of free themes and plugins to help in starting your blog. Although there are lots of free themes, I suggest going for premium wordpress themses if you can afford it.
I am using Thesis because like many bloggers, i to didn’t put enough efforts in research. I don’t mean that it is bad but there are better and economical options out there like;
Affilorama (exclusive for internet marketing blog)
To know more about the features of Thesis click on the link, The Thesis Theme for WordPress
Once you are done with choosing content management system, you need to install it on your server. It may sound technical but is extremely easy with Hostgator. You have to simply click and install it with a very user friendly interface.
After installing WordPress or any other Content Management System, your site is ready, next step is to write few articles for it.
Traffic – if you are thinking of making a living out of your blog, then traffic is the key factor. This is not only but also the toughest step. This is toughest because often people look for alternative and don’t focus on it. The process by which a website is optimized to get free traffic from search engine like Google and Bing is called search engine optimization or seo.
To know more about free seo tips and techniques, read our other post – Free Seo Tips.
You can also use paid tools which we earlier mentioned in our article. There are many seo tools but I will recommend either IBP or Seo Powersuite.
You should also try to use social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter and Linkedin to get free traffic for your website. Social networking sites are extremely popular among webmasters to get free traffc.
I know this has been quite quick but if you have any specific question about “How to create a blog”, then leave your comment, I will try to answer that.
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