Are you looking to start a blog from zero? nowadays you don’t even need to have any previous tech knowledge to be able to start a blog, and the process was never that easy.
Starting a blog can sound complicated and daunting although you can consider your blog created in 20-40 minutes from now.
In this guide, we’ll make sure to let you know everything from zero to start your own blog, why you should create a blog, how to choose a niche for your blog, how to make money with your blog, blog, how to promote your blog and much more!
You can highly benefit from blogging in various ways if you do it right, and we will teach you how to.
prefer a summarized guide?
1. Think of a good domain name for your blog
2. Choose a blogging platform (we highly recommend WordPress)
3. Get your web hosting plan in BlueHost (has WordPress Integration)
4. Pick a nice theme (we recommend Astra)
5. Choose useful plugins
6. Customize your website
7. Start publishing your first posts!
Don’t feel threatened by seeing this list, starting a blog is actually really simple and quick, each step won’t take more than a few clicks.
We made sure to give you the most efficient beginner-friendly tools that are also cost-efficient, you don’t want to spend lots of money on tools with your new website.
Your Guide On How To Start A Blog From Zero
Time for what you’re here for, as mentioned above the process of starting your blog from zero is really simple and easy, for blogging, we recommend using WordPress.
When starting your blog you’ll encounter many tools while browsing the internet, some of them won’t provide the right value for your money while others will make your life (and your wallet) way easier and cost-efficient, some of the tools we recommend are also totally free.
Choose Your Blogging Platform
WordPress.org or WordPress.com?
Although their names are almost identical they are super different in managing, pricing, and even the amount of limitations you’ll have in your blog.
WordPress.org is the blogging platform that we definitely are going with for a few good reasons. wordpress.org is giving you full control of your website, which means that 100% of your website is yours, all they do is provide the blogging platform and you need to host it by yourself, you can design your website and monetize it any way you want. on the other hand.
WordPress.com is free to use but very limiting when it comes to functioning and monetizing unless you buy their expensive plan, this plan is for you if you aren’t planning anything with your blog.
In conclusion, if you intend to make something out of your blog it is highly recommendable to use WordPress.org for no limitations.
For more information check out this article regarding WordPress.com vs WordPress.org
Step 1: Pick Your Domain Name
A domain name is the name and permanent address of your website, for example, the domain name of this website is “websitedownright.com”.
Domain names on average cost between 10$-15$ per year thought when using Bluehost you get your own domain name for free for the first year, so it’s very budget friendly for beginners.
Remember that domains are the first impression and the first thing that people can see when encountering your website, so you would want your domain name to be relevant to the niche of your website. it might not be an SEO factor but let’s be honest, people tend to click on websites that got the relevant keyword on them.
A good practice when choosing a domain name can be of 2-3 words related to what are you blogging about.
Another option could be a mixture of 2 or more words in a domain name such as Udemy (you + academy), and Instagram (instant camera + telegram).
And you can also name a website with a catchy name such as sites with rhymes, people tend to remember better a combo of words that rhyme.
Step 2: Choose Your Website Hosting Services
We highly recommend any new blogger to start with the web host “BlueHost” one of the most known names out there in the web hosting industry, it’s no surprise since WordPress themselves recommend to use them, their performance is good for new websites but also really comfortable financially.
Hostings start from 2.95$/M for the first year and you’re even being provided with a domain name totally for free (usually cost 15$ per year), so when it comes to web hosting, bluehost will not rip your wallet and provide you a good hosting for your new blog.
When looking at all of these pricing plans as a starting website it is super advisable to choose the cheapest option since we are talking about a new website that didn’t even have its first visitor yet (besides you).
The main difference between plans is the number of visitors your website will be able to handle every month, using the smallest plan your website will be able to handle at least 10000 visitors per month.
Unless you are a super popular celebrity who is inviting everyone to your new website it is extremely unlikely for your website to reach more than 10000 visitors on a monthly basis during the first year of your website.
Bluehost provides many things for even the smallest web hosting plan but as you grow your website and brand you can upgrade your hosting plan or use a different host with even more resources (for a more expensive price too)to handle a wider amount of visitors.
As you put in your details you’ll have the option to purchase “Package Extras” which some of them are super important while some other not as much, purchasing Domain Privace Protection is a must for keeping your personal information such as name, adress, phone number, and email hidden from the public database of registered domain owners.
Regarding the other packages, they arent a must to use although you can always buy the other packages later.
Congratulation, you own a website!
Now that you have a domain and a host for your website, time to check out how your website looks like and what you can do to make it stand out by entering WordPress.
Click on “Manage site” to check out what you’re working with, luckly, WordPress is super easy to learn and to adjust to, of course it wont happen in 5 minutes but you dont need to know anything about coding to make a beautiful and responsive website.
Step 3: Get Your WordPress Theme
Your WordPress theme is your blog’s appearance and functioning, though using a theme is as easy as clicking a button when starting out.
WordPress offers a lot of themes to use, thousands of themes, some of the themes are free while some of them provide a “premium version” with extra features which of course isn’t a must but can make your website look even better if done correctly.
One of the most popular themes is Astra (free version) for its lightweight on your site (faster load speed) and many customizations, although when looking to get more design control over your website you can also upgrade to the Astra premium plan where your variety of options is much wider.
Know that there are many amazing themes such as Divi and many more but the choice is up to what theme you are comfortable with.
All you need to do to pick a theme is to click on the “Add New Theme” and you’ll have a huge list of themes where you can pick from. A great thing when you’re picking a theme is that you have the option to preview a theme before picking it, that way you can test out the design options and figure out which theme is the best for you and fits the most your website.
Currently, there are nearly 5000 different themes to pick from on WordPress, with such a huge number of themes you will surely find the right theme for your website, and if you aren’t sure which theme you think will fit your website, hover your mouse on the theme you intend to check out and you’ll see the option “Live Preview”, it will make you check how the theme goes with your website and figure of this specific theme is to your liking.
Here you have a clear view of the new theme you’re testing out, for this example we are checking out Astra, it’s perfect for new website owners to check out like this which options suits them better.
Besides goofing around with a new theme for your website it is a great chance for you to touch WordPress and get used to how themes work to improve your website design.
Step 4: Starting Your First Blog Post
Right now you got a website which is hosted by a web host and a nice looking theme, now it’s the perfect time to start your first blog post and start building content.
When starting your first blog post, go to posts >> add, and then you get access to the creator panel. WordPress works with blocks, every block provides different tools for your post creation.
You have many ways to write and customize your articles using the WordPress blocks, the big number of blocks might look a little overwhelming at first but as you go you get to know all of the blocks that you need for creating your blog posts and creating blog posts become easier.
The great part about the block system is that you can do nearly everything post-related with one click, such as text, headers, images, videos, audio, tables, and more.
all you need to do is to click on the black (+) button and you can freely use the blocks given by WordPress and start blogging!
You should test out the blocks and see how you can use them to your advantage and by the time you learn how to create blog posts faster and more beautifully.
Another feature that the WordPress post editor got to offer is patterns.
to make your life even easier WordPress provides you with already built patterns that you can work with, just picking any pattern that you like or see as fitting and adjusting it for your post.
For an example with the picture above, I picked a pattern, and now I can freely change to picture of the pattern and change the text to fit the context of my blog post.
Processing everything at once can be overwhelming although you will see that after 5 minutes of experiencing and checking out the options you’ll get the hang of it.
The WordPress blocks are the default way to create posts although there are a lot of good page builders plug-ins that have more options and customizations such as Elementor, one of the most familiar names in WordPress for its simplicity and amount of resources it provides with its free version.
Step 5: Choosing The Right Plugins For Your WordPress Blog
Plugins are apps that add extra features to your website without typing or even knowing code, generally, plug-ins will make your life as a website owner WAY simple and efficient.
And guess what? you can download plugins with an act as simple as pressing a button, some plugins will make your website faster, some will provide tools to improve your SEO, and even completely change the way you create posts to a way more efficient method.
Plugins have nearly no limits, remember “do not use too many plugins that hold a weight on your website, doing that might cause your website to be slower and cause a longer load time for your visitors.
We also proved a step-by-step guide on how to install a WordPress plugin
If you aren’t sure where to start don’t worry, we will tell you our top pics regarding the best plugins for helpful and popular categories such as:
Page Builders & Design Plugins
The WordPress default editor and post creator is good but it can be sometimes quite limiting, and because of that many creators made page builders that give way more freedom when creating a post and designing your page.
There are great options such as:
if you’re looking for a great page builder/design for free you should check out Elementor although Divi is our top pick for the best premium choice.
Performance Plugins
It may not be very known to any starting website creator at first but there are many ways to make your website go faster than it is right now and keep it like that, especially when creating long posts, it was even proven that a longer load of a page can take a big part of your visitors to bounce off doe to people becoming less patient nowadays.
WP Rocket so far is the best in that category which countless big websites are using to keep their websites as fast as possible.
Security Plugins
The more your blog grows the more your website is at risk of getting into trouble at the hands of hackers and bots.
There are effective plugins to bring your blog types of security for totally free.
Regarding top security, Sucuri is up to the task. However, with a new website, it’s more than enough to use a free plugin for security/use Cloudflare and have a backup of your website files every post/few posts you make just in case, the safer the better.
SEO Plugins
Technical SEO is one of the main SEO factors that get google to know what your posts are about and lets the google bots know what people should type in google to encounter your result (though depends on other factors which result in the number you will be).
Rank Math does nearly everything for you SEO-related and figures out what your posts are missing to rank better for these specific keywords.
people tend to stay on your website for longer if they find what they want.
Step 6: How To Make Money With Your Blog
A lot of people start a blog to get extra income, and of course, you’d want to be rewarded for your hard work, after all, you provide the information to your visitors for them, and of course, you deserve it.
There are plenty of ways to turn your blog into a passive income source, and some bloggers are making a living from blogging, the bigger your audience is the higher the income potential your website has.
Just don’t make your visitors feel like walking wallets by using ads every paragraph and telling people to buy every product that has an affiliate program.
Affiliate Marketing
One if not the most popular way to make money through your blog, think about product owners for a moment, lets’s say protein power product owners, they would love having their product featured or recommended in blogs that are talking about fitness.
You recommend a product through a link that a company or more are recommending to you and each purchase that was made through that link will provide you a percentage of the purchase or a clean amount.
For some products, you’ll have to contact the company directly or look for an affiliate/partner button on their website to get a link from them to promote with, and there are also affiliate networks that help you and let you find affiliate products for your niche way quicker such as:
- ShareASale
- Awin
- Fiverr
- Impact
- & much more
Some niches have a lot of affiliate programs and some have less, usually to find affiliate programs for your niche type something like (your niche) affiliate programs or (your niche) partner programs and you will get a lot of affiliate programs to check out.
JUST don’t be blinded by high percentage commission, do make sure that it is a good product to not mislead and ruin the trust of your visitors.
Adding Google AdSense To Your Blog
This earning method is being used by many bloggers and is the most popular way for bloggers to earn money, we all see these google ads sometimes when entering an article regarding something we are looking for.
When using Google Adsense you pick a spot or a few on your website pages where display ads will be shown to your visitors and for every click they make you get paid.
Advertisers pay Google to advertise them and your website will get the ads that are the most suitable for your visitors which means, getting the most google Adsense possible income from your visitors.
Sell A Product
When getting an audience you are building a group of people that trust you and will follow you, that means that selling a product of yours will highly increase the odds of your audience purchasing such as:
- E-books
- Courses
- Membership for
- Premium content
- Host a paid
- Webinar
There are many more ways to make money besides these examples, some creators and website owners think of creative ways of their own to make money, you need to know which kind of monetization will fit your website and which won’t work.
Do Freelance Services For Your Visitors
It is a very popular way of making money online because all you need to start is to offer your service on a platform and get paid for it, then why not use your website to get all of that traffic to your clients.
you can either create a Fiverr account and bring your visitors to your services or sell them on your website
As a blogger, you’re an expert on your niche at this point and you most likely know way more than all of your visitors, why not use all of that knowledge and profit from it.
The best part is that you aren’t forced to pick only one service to offer, the sky is the limit, pick as many services as you wish and make your passion for your blogging niche as another income source.
How To Bring Your Website More Visitors?
You worked quite hard and you have an awesome website which is very helpful and pretty to the eye, but where is everyone?
Even if your content is the best content out there you’d still need a way to get your website more popular and bring these visitors to encounter your content.
there are plenty of ways to bring visitors to your website, but the best practice is to use a few of them or even all of them if possible.
Word To Mouth
Let’s start with the simplest there is, letting your friends, family, and basically whoever you can about your blog is a good start, it may not be your site 10000 visitors in a month but every traffic to your site brings value to it, plus since they already know you, they have also high value because these people already know and trust you.
SEO
Everyone talks about how important SEO is and but why does it matter so much? in short, SEO is “Search Engine Optimization”, basically search engine bots are “crawling” to your website and identify which kind of content you’re making and where to place it in the search results.
There are more than 100 SEO factors although there are plugins that take care of the majority of them such as Rank math. the better your SEO the more you’ll grow.
Social Media
This kind of explains it by itself, the more places you show your website on the internet the more likely people will visit your website through them.
The best part about having social media for your website is that you’re building an audience at a faster speed and you can even use the same content you make on your website and post it on the other social media to promote it.
Upload Videos To Youtube
The big platform which some creators make an insane living from. this might be something for your blog in the future and even a new approach, youtube viewers definitely can become potential visitors and if you do affiliate marketing or any type of selling, youtube can be a great place to review/talk about what these products got to offer.
Most importantly you can even earn extra by youtube ads, it’ll be possible to earn from your visitors by watching your videos and buying the stuff you suggest.
Paid Advertisement
Can be great if you’re looking for a lot of visitors in a short amount of time, there are a few ways to do paid advertising such as:
search engine ads (such as google/bing/etc)
social media ads (Facebook/Instagram/Twitter/Pinterest/LinkedIn/etc)
Google’s display ads.
Better do all of your research before using any search engine ads because using that method without knowledge might lead you to lose a lot of money with nothing gained.
Pros Of Starting A Blog
Starting a blog can benefit you in more ways than people might think, from extra money while sitting at home to improving your presence on the web, creating a blog surely has its ways to impact your life for the better.
here are a few advantages of starting a blog:
Your blog has unlimited potential
Think of your blog like an apple tree, it starts as a seed, and as you keep watering it and giving it the right materials it keeps growing, after some time your tree became huge, and eventually, it will start dropping apples which you can refer to as income, just that the difference between a blog to an apple tree is that a blog does not have limits on how big it can grow.
You can make money with your blog
Of course, income is the main reason for many bloggers to start blogging.
this can be a great way for many people to get income from home and in many cases even make your blog your full-time job.
Just keep in mind that some months cant go as good as other months so it’s highly recommendable to not depend on your blog to get rid of your “9-5 job” at least until you’re sure you’ll be able to finance enough trough your blog.
Build your online brand and reputation
Getting your business a blog can certainly be super effective to build an audience that trusts you.
Seeing a blog of a business that touches on subjects of their niche shows people how knowledgable your business is and makes you more memorable for your audience the next time they will look for anything regarding your niche.
Learning new skills while blogging
Blogging by itself provides you with useful skills which you may find helpful for your blog and even for the future can be a future job or as a freelance such as:
- Writer
- Web Design
- Email Marketing
- Social Media Marketing
- SEO
- WordPress Problem-Solver (in freelance sites)
These are only a few options provided with gaining the knowledge of blogging and you could benefit from every skill you earn while blogging.
It gets easier over time
Writing is a great skill to have but it’s even greater when having your blog.
As you keep writing, words are flowing way smoother, your tone of writing becomes more special and unique to yourself and your writing style will be more impactful to the viewers which will grow your audience even more.
Cons Of Starting A Blog
We all would love to have the pros of blogging but sadly blogging isn’t going to be any benefit to you unless you do it right and thinking the audience and money come by itself can cause you to lose your time and most of all your money.
Blogging won’t make you “rich quick”
As much as other bloggers may make it look easy don’t make anyone mislead you that blogging is a magic tool that will get you rich in the first month and you can expect your first income from your blog after 3-12 months or even more (depends on how you do it).
Although doing your blog the right way will surely make it worthwhile in the future.
Blogging requires dedication.
Blogging may sound very tempting to attempt while seeing the success of the other bloggers but don’t forget the amount of dedication it requires in order to make any success with it, you’ll need to work on your content, relevancy, and most importantly, giving the audience what they are looking for.
Blogging is time-consuming.
As we discussed regarding the amount of dedication to starting a blog, this will result in a lot of time working on your blog and making sure everything is going on properly, we recommend you to work on your time management so that you won’t neglect your life outside of your blog.
Can overwhelm if not managed properly.
If given too many tasks in a short amount of time or just not handling your schedule it can be very possible for you to be overwhelmed and that can affect your life outside of your blog.
The last thing we all want is our blog to be a double-edged sword or even just a money and time drainer, make sure that.
Blogging Q&A
Still curious about blogging? bellow we’ll discuss the most common questions that we encountered when people wonder how can you start a blog, of course, know that if you have any more questions we’d love to answer everything in the comments.
can you make a living through blogging?
The short answer is yes. the earning potential of blogging is limitless, but to reach the point of making a living through your blog, you’ll have to work hard for it, don’t let anyone tell you that blogging is easy and you’ll be making thousands on a daily basis one week into blogging.
Can I just use one of those free blogging platforms?
free blogging comes with tons of design limitations, the blogging free platforms will advertise them a lot on your free blog and it’ll be quite impossible to make any money with free blogging, if you plan to just blog for fun then you should use one of these instead
How much does it cost to start a blog?
If you intend to blog for fun and don’t mind tons of ads from your providers on your blog and limitations you can start a blog for free, although if you intend to start a blog and have a website that looks professional, no provider ads and no creativity limits, there are 2 things that you’ll have to pay for:
Domain name – around 15$ per year.
Website hosting – around 50-150$ per Year for a decent host.
if you’re looking for the best cheap option go for Bluehost since for the first year they provide you hosting + a free domain name for 2.95$/Month.
How do bloggers make money?
PPC (pay per click) ads, selling space on your website to advertise, commissions from affiliates, and many more!
The ways which bloggers can make from are nearly limitless since you can advertise and sell whatever you want on your website (as long as it’s legal), as your website gets bigger you might notice companies in your niche starting to contact you to request a promotion for their brand and be sure that some pay quite a lot for that.
Why do some blogs fail and how to avoid it?
There are quite a few reasons for some blogs to fail, the biggest reasons that we have seen are:
Quitting too soon: to get good organic traffic you’ll have to invest some time on your blog since it takes time and hard work to gain traffic.
Too many ads: think about it as a viewer, you look for something and then you click on that page to see 10 ads on the first second you enter the site, not only you got your viewer to go back and look for another result, they will most likely not come back knowing they’ll get drowned with ads.
Times between posts are too long: since you’re building an audience, you gotta keep your viewers interested, now we aren’t asking you to post every 5 hours but also don’t post once in 3 months.
Poor content: sadly blogging isn’t as easy as it sounds and typing a low word count post with misspellings ain’t gonna make you any bigger, having quality blog posts that are long, relevant, and educational won’t bring more views, you will also have a way higher chance for other websites to link to your website and earn more backlinks.
Bad SEO: SEO is extremely important for your success while blogging. in the past, you could write a blog post about a topic, for example, cookies, and if in that post you’ll keep stuffing the word cookie suddenly your SEO boosts and you get mass traffic.
nowadays google learned from that mistake and they even punish people in the rankings for keyword stuffing.
How often should you post on your blog?
while creating content for your website try at least to post once a week, creating a posting schedule won’t only help you be more organized but it’ll also make your audience aware that every week/few days there is a new post that they can check out.
think about it as having a show on tv that has a new episode every week.
What should I name my blog?
When it comes to starting a personal blog that is for fun call it whatever you feel like, though other blogs, name their blog with something related to the industry they are in.
for example, if you intend to start a blog about coffee-related topics, add the word coffee to the domain name in one way or another to let any person who encounters your blog’s name know what it is about and attract them.
We hope this guide on “how to start a blog from zero” was helpful.
please feel free to ask anything in the comments, we would love to hear from you.
Thanks now I am starting go blog ,I will try not to have cons thanks again continue in tour carree
Glad to hear you liked our guide!