How To Start A Blog – The Most Sensible Guide

August 1, 2011 by Garen
Filed under: Website Talk, Wordpress and Blogging

Commonly, people want to learn how to start a blog for various reasons. Please see this post for all the advantages of having a blog verses just having a regular site that people come to (please see how to start a website if you are looking to begin a site). It is actually a carefully thought out process and does take some time to explain before you get your feet wet in starting a blog.

How To Start A Blog

Pick Your Blog Topic

This can often be the hardest part to creating a blog. Deciding what you are going to actually write about or blog about. If you learn one thing from this post it would have to be; blog about something you really like and will continue to like for years to come (not just a phase or fad). If you start blogging and 2-3 months goes by and you lose steam your blog will suffer.

Paid Blog or Free Blog?

Often this is a novice problem that lots and lots of people have trouble with. Do I want to use a paid service (such as buying a domain and web hosting service). WebHostingHub.com (see WebHostingHub review) offers a free domain (savings of $10 for a domain) with their packages so this can save you some money and I have found they are a wonderful hosting service to do business with (you can get a hosting account with them for under $50 a month). Or possibly are you on a limited budget with minimal money to invest. Chances are if this is you, you might consider WordPress, Blogger, Tumblr, ect (see full list of free blogging platforms). These free services do have a good value for newbie bloggers because you can get your feet wet in the bloggingsphere without spending any money at all. However, I should note that if you start a blog with them you can get shut down without any notice at all. Not to mention, you are limited to a TOS on what you can and can’t do with their service.

Choose A Domain For Your Blog

A domain is simply a www.basicblogtips.com name. (Good blog by the way from Ileane on using social media and essential tips for running and maintaining a blog.) But, please remember you can’t just change your blog or brand so put some real thought into what you want you domain name to be. Bare in mind if you are trying to get organic search from the search engines you are going to want your keywords in your domain name.

Web Hosting For Your Blog

As noted above I recommend WebHostingHub.com, but there are certainly a number of options for a web host. Any of these would also be a good choice, but maybe a bit more expensive, Hostgator, InMotion, BlueHost, iPage, and Fatcow. However, everyone of those web hosting providers uses cPanel except Fatcow. Fatcow uses Plesk 4.0 which is a decent control panel but for this simple guide I will show you how to set up a blog with cPanel.

Also, I want to let you know that you only need a shared hosting plan for blogging in the beginning. There is no sense of spending a lot of money for resources and bells in whistles that you don’t need. Trust me, just go with shared hosting in the beginning. If you need to migrate to VPS or dedicated plan later on down the road you can simply backup your MySQL databases and move. Shared hosting will do everything you need in a blog so don’t waste your money.

Installing WordPress For Your Blog

Now comes the fun. Once you have already bought a domain and hosting plan you are going to need cPanel as stated above. You are going to need to a know a couple general things about cPanel to get started. Don’t worry you don’t have to know anything about coding or really be all that technical. In fact, I don’t really know scripting and know a lot of people that know less on HTML/PHP than me and do just fine. Rather than be explaining it, just make sure you watch this video to learn how to install WordPress with ‪Fantastico‬.

A Couple Things To Keep In Mind – For Your Blog

WordPress Themes

You can customize your blog with a series of themes. A couple good places I found to buy a nice looking themes is DreamTemplates and WooThemes. I prefer WooThemes over DT a little because I think they look a little more professional and integrated with more customization. That is just me. There are tons of places you can get free themes if you are on a tight budget. A couple good ones I found are http://wordpressthemesbase.com, http://www.freewpthemes.net, http://www.wpskins.org, ect. (please feel free to add to the list; there are TON of them out there).

WordPress Plugins

Plugins can do a number of different task. For instance, you can install a plugin on your blog that will make it easier for people to follow you on Twitter, join your Facebook fanpage, or any task. Similar to Apple’s theirs an app for that with WordPress; there is a plugin for that. So keep in mind that just because you have purchased a theme or acquired a freebie you can easily instal WordPress plugins to help give your blog a custom look and feel to it.

Last but not least have fun when you learn how to start a blog because it can be a great money maker and very entertaining. There are a lot of niches blogs out there so make sure you set yourself apart from the same old same old. Put some serious thought about what you are going to do to make it unique. Don’t expect to be an overnight success. There is a lot of phony stuff out there which shows newbie bloggers how to be an overnight success. A lot of creating your own blog is actually going out there and promoting yourself in an ethical way. The first step would be to hop over to WebHostingHub.com and grab a FREE domain and hosting package for under $50 a year! Now you know just how to start a blog, so get started!

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