Have you been thinking about starting a blog, but are wondering where to begin? Then you’re in the right place!
I started my blog in January 2015 to use as a creative outlet, and what started as simply a fun hobby for me ended up allowing me to earn a wonderful part-time income – I earned over $2,800 last month alone! I now share my blog income and traffic reports to help inspire other bloggers as well.
Blogging can be a very fun way to make money from home doing something that you truly love. I’ve also found the blogging community in general to be a supportive place where I’ve met some wonderful people that I’m now proud to call my friends. Starting a blog has been such a positive experience for me, and I’m really enjoying every minute of it!
If you are even remotely considering starting a blog of your own, I encourage you to just dive in and do it!
Starting a blog can seem like an overwhelming task, but it is actually pretty easy if you follow my steps outlined below. You can setup a blog in about 15 minutes!
How to Start a Blog:
Step 1: Choose a topic
Questions to ask yourself:
- What are you passionate about?
- Do you have any skills or tips that you would enjoying sharing with others?
- What do you enjoy doing in your spare time?
At the end of the day, just make sure that the topic you choose is something that you are passionate about. It will make the experience so much more fun, and ideas for posts will come more easily to you.
Step 2: Choose a domain
Based on your chosen topic, brainstorm some ideas for potential domain names that you think would be a good fit for your blog. I recommend coming up with a few options, as it could be possible that your top choice is already be taken. Being willing to slightly change the domain you want can make it easier to find an available one that works for you.
For example, I would have preferred embracingsimple.com as my domain, but since that was already taken, I decided to go with embracingsimpleblog.com. Try to be a bit flexible! After you have gathered some ideas of what you’d like your domain name to be, I recommend using GoDaddy’s domain search to easily see what’s available.
Simply type in the domain name you want and click “search” to see if it’s available. If your domain name is taken, the search will give you other options below that are similar too which is nice.
After you have found an available domain name for your blog that you’d like to use, it’s time to choose a host.
Step 3: Find a host
I use GoDaddy to host my blog and honestly couldn’t recommend them more. They have excellent customer service and provide the least expensive hosting services I’ve ever seen, while still offering high quality hosting.
GoDaddy is generously offering their Economy hosting plan for just $1/month for Embracing Simple readers if you use my link and that price includes a free domain, which is pretty incredible. So you can start your blog and pay only $12 upfront for your entire first year – how awesome is that?! Click here to start the process.
Once you’ve headed over to GoDaddy to start the process, you’re going to come upon the screen below. I recommend just going with the “Economy” package, as that is most likely all you will need to get started.
You will then be prompted to choose the domain name you selected earlier in this tutorial. Enter your domain name and hit “Go”.
You will then be taken to your shopping cart, which should look similar to the screenshot below.
Something to note is the section in the bottom left where it says “protect your personal information”. I personally choose to pay the $7.99 to keep my contact information associated with my domain private, but this is by no means a necessary expense and is something you can choose to purchase later on if you change your mind. It’s just worth mentioning as something you might want to consider adding on.
Once you’ve reviewed your shopping cart, click “Proceed to Checkout”. Upon making your purchase, you will receive temporary login credentials to your email inbox. You will need to use these credentials to login to your GoDaddy account and install WordPress.
To login, go to GoDaddy.com and click on the “Sign In” button on the top right of the page.
Step 4: Install WordPress
WordPress is a content management system that is very popular in the blogging world. It’s a super simple and easy way to setup and manage your blog.
You will need to go into your Account Manager on GoDaddy and click on the button to install WordPress. Voilà – you are on your way to being an official blogger! Easy, right?
Now it’s time to make your blog pretty. There are some free themes on WordPress that you can certainly use, but I personally didn’t like what was available for the look I had in mind for my own blog. I did some extensive research and choose to purchase the Genesis framework and the Swank theme.
A framework is essentially a “super theme”, and then you can purchase a “child theme” that sits on top of that framework to get the design and layout you desire for your blog. So Genesis is my “super theme” and then Swank is my “child theme”. It sounds a lot more complicated than it really is, but there are also plenty of other themes you can choose from within the Genesis framework.
Step 5: The fun part – start writing!
Now the fun begins! Get writing producing content for your blog! Once you have started to build up your blog, and you have a selection of posts on your page, we recommend driving traffic to your blog by using blogger outreach to build up your blog to get the best from it that you can.
Anyway, I hope your blog serves as a wonderful outlet for you, as mine has for me.
Blogging has really been such an enjoyable and rewarding experience for me, and I hope it is for you too! If you’re interested in additional tips, check out my resources page for a list of tools that I use and recommend for blogging, as well as my latest blog income and traffic report.
Feel free to contact me if you have any questions, I’m happy to help 🙂 .
There are affiliate links on this page. If you choose to make a purchase, I will receive a small commission at no additional cost to you. I only recommend blogging tools that I love myself and that I think would benefit you too. Thank you for helping to support Embracing Simple in this way!
