How to Start A Blog

If you’re looking for a way to make an income from home, I highly suggest starting a blog. It’s my personal favorite way to bring in a side income. I have done other streams, but there’s nothing like blogging in my opinion. I like that I call all the shots, that I work for no one but me, and i decide when something is good enough or needs to be better.

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How to Start Your Blog The Right Way (So you can make money sooner)

When starting your blog, I highly suggest using a platform you can profit off of. After all, I created a blog specifically to create my own profitable business. I’ve heard others out there say you shouldn’t start a blog just to make money. But honestly it’s a lot of hard work, and if you don’t plan on making money with it, it may not be worth all the time and effort.

As a quick overview, when you start your blog you are going to need to do 3 things before you can get started writing your first post.

1. Choose a hosting plan
2. Install WordPress
3. Pick and install a theme (This one is a lot of fun!)

Step 1: Hosting

Ok, time to get hands on now. To start your blog, click here. This will take you to the Siteground hosting page. I love Siteground as a starter hosting for new blogs. I actually use siteground for each of my blogs currently (although I have had Bluehost and flywheel in the past.)

Site ground is fast, reliable and more secure than other starter host packages. Plus, they have Fantastic support. During a mini-crisis last year I thought I lost everything on my blog. I desperately contacted them and they chatted with me through the whole process (it was midnight) and fixed it. (I wouldn’t have been able to sleep knowing that all my hard work was gone forever. Newbie lesson learned: Always back up your stuff.) And Siteground does daily backups!

 

SO WHY SITE GROUND?

They are great. Seriously. I have never had my site go down, even when my traffic doubled their monthly allowance (In a matter of 2 days.) The one and only time my site went down, was my fault. And when it did go down that time, they fixed it for me even though it was midnight! I love their customer service. This shows they have amazing up time too!

CHOOSE YOUR PLAN

They offer 3 hosting plans to choose from.

• StartUp: This one will get you started on the most basic plan. This is good if you are testing the blogging waters. It can handle 10,000 pageviews a month (which is a lot of a new blog.) Normally they charge $9.99/month, but with this link, you can get it for just under $4 a month! That’s a 60% discount.
• GrowBig: This is the plan I started with. I’m glad I did too! I went from 600 page views my first month launching, to 50,000 by month 3. (Though the plan is technically capped at 25,000 they let me stay here until I’m constantly at a much higher rate. Plus you can have multiple websites under one hosting in case you decide you want to try new things out.)
• GoGeek: This is there biggest shared hosting plan.

STEP 2: PICK A DOMAIN NAME

Now, register your domain name. Next, click here and choose your plan (my readers get a discount). Then when you click on the little box called “get started” you can register your domain name.

This is one place not to skimp on the soul-searching. You need a good domain name, one that you love. You guys will be together for the long run, so make sure it’s a goodie.

Your domain name is your website name. It’ll look like this: http://yourawesomeblogname.com.

When picking a great domain name keep these in mind:

♥ Keep it short and sweet. You want something people can remember and type into the address bar.
♥ Don’t get too cute. If they do remember your domain, you don’t want to get “cute with the wording. Stick with real words.
♥ Use a good keyword. Know what you’ll be writing about? Great! Use a great word that describes that in your blog name. This will help people find you even easier!
♥ Avoid numbers and symbols. Again, Keep it simple!
♥ Do a quick search. Make sure someone isn’t using it for something. You don’t want to create a website and have to change the name because it already belongs to someone elses brand.
♥ Don’t wait too long. Lots of people are starting websites, and if you have a great domain name in mind, lock it in!

 

STEP 3: REVIEW & COMPLETE

Another great thing about Siteground is their advertised discounted price applies to any length of term you choose (which is 1,2 or 3 years.) This means if you choose to use their hosting for only a year you still get the monthly premium at the low rate. (Other hostings I’ve used you HAD to sign up for multiple years to get a discounted price, meaning a lot more money upfront.)

STEP 4: Install WordPress

You can use this link to set up WordPress and get started with step-by-step tutorials. If you are having trouble, or it just feels like too much, call their support team. Again, they are AMAZING and will walk you through the whole thing happily. Or if you’re like me, and would prefer less human contact, you can chat with them! It’s why I like Siteground most. Great support! They will help get you all set up!

 

STEP 5: GET STARTED WITH WORDPRESS

Log in to your WordPress dashboard and get started by getting acquainted with WordPress itself. It’s not as complex as it seems. Once you get used to navigating it a bit, it’s not overwhelming. Take it from someone who wanted to bang their head (repeatedly) against their desk when they first saw their dashboard menus. The learning curve goes by pretty fast!

There is a fantastic WordPress Course for Free Here. This will walk you through all the basics, and is taught by Grayson Bell, who is awesome at fixing problems should the need arise!

This is also a good time to break out a new binder and start keeping track of all your blogging ventures. Things like usernames and passwords. They start getting out of hand really fast if you don’t have a place to organize it all. My first month I think I had 20 different accounts all with different passwords. (Many have different requirements.)

If you need more of a walkthrough, I suggest getting this course from Suzi @ Start A Mom Blog. Suzi is phenomenal. I read her book Blog by numbers, and it was like having her walk me step by step on the whole process of setting up my blog, how to make good decisions, how to set everything up to start making money sooner than later. It’s one of the reasons I started making money so quickly. (I made $345 dollars my 3rd month after launching!)

If you aren’t feeling a course right now, sign up for her FREE blog plan! It’s an amazing tool to help you see how to make money with a blog, and what steps you should take over the next few months to set yourself up for success!