Do you want to start your own blog? It requires only an hour and few basic steps to create a successful blog. Start by choosing a platform and domain name for yourself. Also consider your hosting options. Remember simple themes always work better. Design your blog using one.
Modify it to get your desired aesthetic look and overall feel. All you have to do now is to select suitable plugins. Lastly, do not forget that the content of your blog should always be valuable to readers and compelling. Let us discuss these steps one by one in detail.
- CHOOSING RIGHT HOSTING:
Let’s keep things simple for beginners. Instead of going in details and evaluation of different approaches to setting up a website, use WordPress. This means you will have to chose amongst hosting companies that are supporting WordPress
WordPress is the most popular content management system (CMS). Statistics show that around 20% of active websites today use WordPress. It is also a popular choice with bloggers. It is renowned for easily editable and customised functionality options for layout, themes and content creation.
And the best thing is WordPress is free to download and easily installed in various devices. It provides online help and works fast and secure. The best part is you do not have to touch the code at all. You will manage to work well if you combine WordPress with any cheap hosting account.
An all time image hosting choice is BlueHost. It is strong recommendation from the creators of WordPress and has been a popular choice since 2005. BlueHost is cheap and user-friendly. It is backed up by technical support and has large capacity caps that help your blogs grow.
BlueHost Offers WordPress free installation in its hosting packages. Experts think that for a beginner BlueHost offers enough features and functionalities. But if you have a higher budget and fancy advance features and very high capacity, you may opt for inMotion Hosting or WP Engine.
- CHOOSING A DOMAIN NAME
Domain name is important because it is first point of contact for audiences of your blog. The mail is everlasting first Impressions in minds of your audience. Many hosting servers like BlueHost and inMotion Hosting include a free domain in their hosting packages.
Experts suggest that the domain name must be easy to remember and spell. They should give a fair idea regarding the theme of your blog or your brand concept. SEO experts suggest fitting in one or two keywords into the domain name to help your website ranking on various search engines.
- SET UP WORDPRESS
Login with your username and password into the URL that is provided in e-mail that you receive after installing WordPress. You will be directed to a dashboard that will have options like Creating your contact page or about me page and add post on your blog.
You will also be given control over the layout, settings and functionalities of your site. Could you start go to permalink in settings and change them from Plain to ‘Post name’, ‘month and name’ or ‘day and name’. This change in settings will help you with Search Engine Optimisation.
And while you’re on the settings page, go to general settings and customise your blog site title and tagline. Verify that your given email address is correct so that you may receive password reset procedures (if needed) on correct Email ID.
WordPress will give you access to set of free themes. They will include basic functionalities and a suitable for beginners. Chris scenes have a bunch of colour schemes and layout. However, be reminded that many other blogs may also have same theme!
Those wishing to create a brand vision through their blog are not recommended to use these generic themes. Also, WordPress free themes will have limited customizations which may cause issues once your blog gains more traffic and becomes more popular.
Additionally, if you wish to add more powerful and interactive features, create shortcuts or integrate with 3rd party services, you may use WordPress plugins. These are extension feature sets that you can add on your current themes.
But before you add too many plugins, be informed that it will make your blog navigation and loading slower. Plugins also add to security issues and are susceptible to hacking spams, especially unupdated one’s. Time to time, review your plugins and delete inactive ones.
We list four popular plugins for you. These are kind of must have’s:
- Akismet- this has anti-spam features for the comment section.
- Jetpack- this includes additional power-packed features like visitor statistics
- WordFence- this is specially designed for WordPress blogs and protect them from hacking and malware
- Yoast- this includes special features for search engine optimisation4. CREATE CONTENT:
No matter how much features and functionalities you have, it is ultimately a powerful content that will generate traffic to your blog. Picturise in your mind who your audience will be and communicate to your bloggers to write accordingly.
Make sure the writers write about topics that really interest them or of which they have actual knowledge. Write relevantly. If it is a stem blog, it should talk of research projects. Affiliate blogs should concentrate more on informing and educating buyers.
However, there need not be any restriction on writing style. There is no prescribed length for a blog to be successful. A rough guideline will be to look what your competitors are doing. Some bloggers will simply choose to do things in different than usual ways.
What needs to be taken care of is that blogs should be posted with a minimum set frequency. Provide your reader with something new to read on. Continuously updated paisa how to work better with search engine rankings.
Again as with the length, there is no right or wrong frequency. Such things will vary with topic to topic, audience to audience and with objective of the blog. Ironically, too frequent content is also not a good idea. Space out your content reasonably.
With, WordPress you can make use of the inbuilt scheduler that lets you know when new entries on the blog will be required. This will help you plan for writers and arrange for fresh content ahead of time. It will ensure that fresh content is available at regular intervals.
- BUILD TRAFFIC:
Ultimate aim of any block will be to Grab attention of as many videos as possible. While there may be many marketing nice and tricks available it will all depend on promotion and Search Engine Optimisation.
A good idea will be to let the visitors subscribe to an email so that they keep coming back for more content again and again. Also try to register on social networks with the same name (or a close variant) as your domain to prevent others misusing your name in their favour.
With social media you may be able to increase your blog’s approach. With a presence on Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn you will increase chances of more readers coming to read your content. Include social media into your blogging strategy as a must.
We hope that you have found these steps useful and we wish you good luck starting your very own blog