In this blog, you’ll learn everything you need to know about getting your blog up and running, from picking your domain name to designing your blog.
In a recent blog post, we discussed choosing a niche for your blog.
By this point, you should have a clear idea of what niche to go for, based on your knowledge and skills but, most importantly, on how profitable your niche and audience are.
And now that you know what your blog business will be, it’s time to build your platform: the blog.
Step 1: Pick a domain name
Picking a good domain name is an essential step in building a business. After all, it will become known as the name of your blog, too.
Your domain name as a blogger can be:
You need to pick something easy to remember and easy to type in – you want people to hear your blog’s name and remember it immediately so that they remember you and your business and keep coming back for more.
Once you’ve got a list of ideas to start you off with, you can use a free domain name availability tool to see if your desired domain name is free to buy.
Plus, if your ideal domain name is already taken, it will give you similar suggestions that are free to buy, together with their pricing.
Step 2: Get website hosting
The next essential step is to get a hosting provider, and the great news is that some hosting providers also include one-click WordPress installation, which makes the process so much easier.
Step 3: Launch your WordPress blog
Once you’ve set up your hosting, you can start with WordPress in a few minutes.
Go to your cPanel dashboard in your account, click on My Sites, and then click on “Install WordPress”.
There are a lot of other great blogging/website platforms too, but WordPress is one of the most versatile and easy-to-use platforms, so I recommend it.
Step 4: Plan your blog’s sitemap
Before you start setting up a blog, one more step is planning your blog’s sitemap.
It might sound not very easy, but it’s easy; you need to list all the essential pages that your website will include.
The most important pages to include are:
Step 5: Get your essential WordPress plugins
Another reason why WordPress is so great? All of the fantastic plugins.
These will help you get more out of your website, including setting up contact forms, adding social sharing options, adding sliders and helping improve your SEO.
Here are the essential plugins to start you off with:
Getting plugins is essential, and you should invest in all the basics to start with – this way, you can ensure that your website runs smoothly, that it’s optimized for search engines and that you’re engaging your visitors (to get more leads and sales ultimately!)
Step 6: Install Google Analytics and the Google Search Console and set up WordPress settings
Google offers two free and very valuable tools to website owners:
And as I mentioned before, they’re entirely free.
To install Google Analytics, go to their page here and sign up with your email. Once you’ve set up your account and account details, here’s what to do:
Next, the Google Search Console:
And then there are your WordPress Settings:
Step 7: Get a theme, design your WordPress blog and build your blog pages
Now it’s time for the fun stuff – designing your new WordPress blog. However, it’s also the most time-consuming of these processes – depending on how much you want to customize your theme.
Thankfully, you don’t need to be a designer to be able to create a beautiful website – that’s the beauty of using WordPress.
All you need to start with is to get a theme.
There are plenty of free themes, but the truth is, they’re not as beautiful or as complex and customizable as the premium ones, so if you’re serious about your blog business, I recommend you go for a premium theme.
Once you’ve picked a theme and installed it on your website, go to Appearance in your WordPress dashboard and click on Customize to start editing and customizing your website.
Quick tip: to get a logo designed quickly, you can use Canva and design it yourself, with the help of your templates. I recommend getting their Pro account as well as that means you’ll have access to more free images and templates and you’ll need this tool a lot in your blogger journey (for creating blog imagery, banners, social media updates, ads and many more).
Once you’ve designed your website, it’s time to add all of your blog pages, which you planned earlier in step 4, Sitemaps.
Step 8: Optimize your blog for search engines
Install the SEOPressor plugin on your website to easily optimize your pages for search engines:
The best part is that even if you’re not that familiar with SEO yet, SEOPressor will give you specific suggestions on what to do to better optimize your website.
Plus, it will also suggest more keywords to use throughout your page’s content and help you write a blog post as well as those all important blog post ideas so that you can rank higher up in search results. This will help you get found on the popular search engine Google and also alternative search engines.
Another essential aspect is your website’s speed.
Not only because it’s a better experience for your visitors but also because it will help improve your SEO – Google puts a great price on website speed, so this should be a priority.
To help, install the WPRocket plugin on your website, as it’s one of the best plugins for improving website performance (minify CSS and HTML, page caching, image lazy loading and other useful features that help speed up your website).
And that’s it – your blog is ready for launch!
Now, all you need to do is learn how to start creating content for your blog, as well as create a powerful opt-in.
In the meantime, get started on creating your blog; here’s a wrap-up of all the steps you need to take to launch your blog:
This content was originally published here.