Learn how you can begin starting a weblog in less than an hour. Follow the step-by-step instructions that we used to begin our successful blog page, which now has already reached more than 20 million people and offers been presented in the brand new York Times, TIME magazine, and on the TODAY display.
How to Start a Blog page in Five Steps:
1.Choose your running a blog platform and domain.
2.Design your blog using a simple theme.
3.Modify your weblog to define your look.
4.Select the best plugins for your blog.
5.Write compelling content material, start blogging.
Starting a Blog page: Step-by-Step Instructions
So you’re thinking about starting a blog, nevertheless, you don’t have any idea the place to start, right? Guess what-neither did we. We had been clueless. When we created this weblog a few years ago, we had no basic idea how to start a weblog or how to be a blogger. Heck, we could spell HTML hardly, let alone build a blog.
But good news: it’s easier than you think. We’ve learned a ton of lessons during our ascent to achieving over 20 million people. And now you can learn from our pain and suffering to circumvent much of the tedium involved in setting up a blog.
Here’s how we started our blog, step by step, followed by an instructional video, along with extra rationale and insights:
1.Choose your blogging platform and domain. The very first thing we did when starting our blog was head to Bluehost and register our domain. We didn’t actually need to create WordPress, which may be the platform we use, since Bluehost does all that for you. Bluehost’s basic price is $2.75 a month, which works for 99% of individuals (go to this link to get a 50% lower price off the monthly cost and a free domain). Then, we did a simple, free, “one-click” install of WordPress through Bluehost. Whenever we had questions we could actually chat with the “live chat” people at Bluehost free of charge. They pointed us in the proper direction and made starting our very own blog super easy.
2.Design your blog utilizing a simple theme. An excellent theme provides you the look and feel you need for your blog, allowing you to make a blog that looks precisely how it is wanted by you to look. If you’re not really a coder (we certainly weren’t), then a theme makes the look work a million instances easier. Plus, once you get a theme, which are inexpensive for the proper time they save, it really is owned by you for life. The Minimalists uses the beautiful “tru” theme by SPYR, which is available at BYLT. Head on over to BYLT, browse their assortment of styles, and find the look that’s right for you.
3.Modify your blog to define your style. Once we had our domain, blog hosting, WordPress, and theme, we spent considerable time tweaking the theme to find the look and feel we desired (i.e., producing our vision a reality). Then we spent a lot more time tinkering with the theme and arguing about any of it and tweaking it some more. Once we had created our blog, we create a free of charge Feedburner account so people could sign up to our site via email and RSS subscriptions. And we established a free of charge Google Analytics account to monitor our stats. Feedburner and Google Analytics were both easy to sign up for, and we still make use of both today.
4.Select the best plugins for your site. We only use a few plugins on our site, including “Google Analytics for WordPress” and “Yoast SEO”. They take simply a few seconds (literally a few seconds, it’s simply a click of a key) to set up once you’ve started your blog. And if you really want to play around with some cool plugins, check out WPBeginner’s Best WordPress Plugins.
5.Write compelling content. Last, via WordPress, we started composing and uploading the content for our pages: About Page, Contact Web page, Start Here Page, Books Page, Tour Web page, Archives Page, etc. Next, we designed our logo using free of charge images we found online and text message from a regular word-processing program. Then we put a picture of ourselves in the header (this is important because people determine with people, not really logos). Finally we started writing new blog posts and publishing them regularly (at least one time weekly), accompanied by free of charge photos from Unsplash, Pexels, and the Library of Congress. And the others is history.
How to Create a Blog: Video
Watch our step-by-stage instructional video, which include screenshots of the entire starting-a-blog process:
But good news: it’s easier than you think. We’ve learned a ton of lessons during our ascent to achieving over 20 million people. And now you can learn from our pain and suffering to circumvent much of the tedium involved in setting up a blog.
Here’s how we started our blog, step by step, followed by an instructional video, along with extra rationale and insights:
1.Choose your blogging platform and domain. The very first thing we did when starting our blog was head to Bluehost and register our domain. We didn’t actually need to create WordPress, which may be the platform we use, since Bluehost does all that for you. Bluehost’s basic price is $2.75 a month, which works for 99% of individuals (go to this link to get a 50% lower price off the monthly cost and a free domain). Then, we did a simple, free, “one-click” install of WordPress through Bluehost. Whenever we had questions we could actually chat with the “live chat” people at Bluehost free of charge. They pointed us in the proper direction and made starting our very own blog super easy.
2.Design your blog utilizing a simple theme. An excellent theme provides you the look and feel you need for your blog, allowing you to make a blog that looks precisely how it is wanted by you to look. If you’re not really a coder (we certainly weren’t), then a theme makes the look work a million instances easier. Plus, once you get a theme, which are inexpensive for the proper time they save, it really is owned by you for life. The Minimalists uses the beautiful “tru” theme by SPYR, which is available at BYLT. Head on over to BYLT, browse their assortment of styles, and find the look that’s right for you.
3.Modify your blog to define your style. Once we had our domain, blog hosting, WordPress, and theme, we spent considerable time tweaking the theme to find the look and feel we desired (i.e., producing our vision a reality). Then we spent a lot more time tinkering with the theme and arguing about any of it and tweaking it some more. Once we had created our blog, we create a free of charge Feedburner account so people could sign up to our site via email and RSS subscriptions. And we established a free of charge Google Analytics account to monitor our stats. Feedburner and Google Analytics were both easy to sign up for, and we still make use of both today.
4.Select the best plugins for your site. We only use a few plugins on our site, including “Google Analytics for WordPress” and “Yoast SEO”. They take simply a few seconds (literally a few seconds, it’s simply a click of a key) to set up once you’ve started your blog. And if you really want to play around with some cool plugins, check out WPBeginner’s Best WordPress Plugins.
5.Write compelling content. Last, via WordPress, we started composing and uploading the content for our pages: About Page, Contact Web page, Start Here Page, Books Page, Tour Web page, Archives Page, etc. Next, we designed our logo using free of charge images we found online and text message from a regular word-processing program. Then we put a picture of ourselves in the header (this is important because people determine with people, not really logos). Finally we started writing new blog posts and publishing them regularly (at least one time weekly), accompanied by free of charge photos from Unsplash, Pexels, and the Library of Congress. And the others is history.
How to Create a Blog: Video
Watch our step-by-stage instructional video, which include screenshots of the entire starting-a-blog process:
15 Factors a Blog Should be started by you
We were inspired to research and write this essay after reading Joshua Becker’s 15 Factors I Think You Should Blog, in which he discusses 15 great reasons why a weblog should be started by you. Why being the main element word here. Basically, he talks about the purpose of blogging, not how to start a weblog just. That’s what all these other blogs about blogging appear to miss; the purpose-the are missed by them why behind starting a blog.
3 Reasons You ought never to Start a Blog
So now you have 15 reasons why you should start a blog, and we’ve proven you how to start a blog, step-by-step, based on our personal experience. But after providing you those detailed guidelines, that could save you the thousands of hours of wasted time, we also want to give you some good reasons why you should not start a blog. (Remember that these reasons are just our opinions, and we usually do not pretend to provide them up as some sort of collection of empirical blogging maxims.)
1.Money. You ought not to begin a weblog to make money. We need to get that taken care of first. If your primary objective is to displace your full-time income from blogging, forget about it. It doesn’t function that way. Do you consider that Jimi Hendrix found his first guitar therefore he could “supplement his income”? No, he didn’t. Rather, he achieved it for the like of it, for the joy and fulfillment he received, and the income came thereafter, much later actually.
2.Notoriety. Don’t plan on getting “Internet famous” immediately. Don’t assume all site grows as fast as ours do, but that’s totally Alright. The simple truth is that we kind of got lucky. We got an excellent domain name, we cobbled together a logo and site design that individuals really liked, we write well fairly, and our content connects with people in a distinctive way. We didn’t start this site to become “popular” though. That’d become ridiculous. Our notoriety and quick rise to “fame” came as a surprise to us, and was a result of a little luck and lots of hard, passionate work.
3.Traffic. Not all traffic is great traffic, so don’t worry about getting a large number of readers right away.
The funny thing is that all these plain things can occur. You will make a full-time income from creating a blog. It is completed by us, Corbett Barr will it, and so do many others. And you could become Internet famous like Leo Babauta or Chris Brogan. But if these are the sole reasons why you start blogging, you’ll be miserable, because it will appear like a working job, and if it feels as though a working work you won’t become passionate about it, therefore you’ll either (a) hate it, (b) fall smooth on your encounter, or © hate it and fall flat on your face.
Instead, create because you’re passionate about it…
20 Recommendations for Your Blog
We receive plenty of emails asking for advice about starting a blog, about how to blog, about blog topics, and about creating meaningful content-even a few pre-determined questions about whether we put on briefs or boxers. These are the answers and recommendations we tend to give.
1.Find Your Market. You needn’t have a niche, nonetheless it assists. When learning how to be considered a blogger, it’s important to ask yourself what you’re passionate about. Running? Cooking? Being truly a parent? Perhaps you have found your passion? If therefore, whatever it is, write about that. If not, you then must 1st find your passion. (Note: We generally suggest that individuals don’t start a weblog about minimalism or the paleo diet or any additional heavily saturated topic. But what we really mean when we say this is: don’t create a weblog about something if you don’t have a unique perspective. If you’ve embraced simple living and have a unique perspective, by all means have at it then. Enjoy yourself.)
2.Define Your Ideal Readers. Once you’ve discovered your niche, you need to know who will be reading your blog. For example, we weblog about living intentionally. Thus, our ideal readers are people who are thinking about exploring minimalism to allow them to clear the road toward even more meaningful lives. If you would like to create about your newborn baby growing up, that’s amazing: your ideal readers are probably friends and family and family. If you want to create about restoring classic cars, that’s cool, as well. Tailor your writing to your readers (whether it’s your family or local community or whoever else will examine your blog).
3.Add Value. Your blog must add worth to its readers’ lives. This is the only way you will get Great Quality Readers to your website (and keep them returning). Adding value may be the only way to obtain long-term buy-in someone’s. Both of us learned this after ten years of leading and handling people in the organization world.
4.Be First. Yes, there are various other blogs out there a comparable thing you would like to write about. Question: So why is your blog different? Answer: Due to you. You are why is your blog different. It’s about your perspective, your imagination, the value that you add.
5.End up being Interesting. Write epic, amazing content. If you want people to share it with others especially.
6.Be Yourself. Part to be interesting is telling your story. Everyone is unique, and your story is an essential one. The important part of storytelling, however, can be removing the superfluous details that make the whole story uninteresting. A great storyteller gets rid of 99% of what actually happens-the absorptive details-and leaves the interesting 1% for the reader.
7.Be Honest. Your blog must be authentic-it must feel real-if you wish people to read it. You can be your blog, or your blog can be you. That’s, you don’t embody the stuff you reveal? If not, people will see through you. “Be the noticeable change you want to see in the world,” may be the famous Gandhi quote. Perhaps bloggers should build the blog they want to write for the world.
8.Transparency. Being transparent is different from becoming honest. You needn’t share every details about your life simply for the sake to be honest. Always be honest, and become transparent when it provides value from what you’re composing. (You won’t ever see pictures folks using the restroom on our site, because that’s not relevant.)
9.Time. Once you’ve discovered how to start a blog, you’ll learn that blogging takes a lot of time, particularly if you’re as neurotic as we are (we spent over 10 hours screening the fonts on this website). And observe those Twitter and Facebook icons in the header? We spent hours on those, deciding that which was right for us). That said, when you have your design setup, don’t tweak it too much. Instead, spend the right time on your writing.
10.Vision. The reason why our site style looks good is basically because we have an excellent host, we have an excellent theme, and most important, we had a vision of how we wanted our weblog to look. Once we had the vision, we worked well hard to create that vision possible. (Note: neither folks had any design encounter prior to starting a blog.) It’s hard to create a beautiful blog if you don’t know what you want it to look like.
11.Find Your Tone of voice. Over time, good authors discover their voice and their composing tends to develop a specific aesthetic, one that is appealing to their readers. Finding your tone of voice makes your composing feel more alive, more real, even more urgent. For extra reading, have a look at our essay about Finding Your Voice.
12.We Instead of You. Utilize the first-person plural when possible. Statements of we and our are stronger than you and your, especially when discussing unfavorable behaviors or tendencies. The first person comes off as far less accusatory. Think of it in this manner: we’re writing peer-to-peer-we are not gods.
13.When to Post. Question: When is the best day time and time to create a blog post? Answer: It doesn’t actually matter. We don’t to a specific schedule adhere. Some weeks we post one essay; we post three sometimes. Yes, it regularly is important to write, but you needn’t get as well bogged down in the facts.
14.Social Media. Yes, we recommend using Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram to help connect with your audience and various other bloggers, but don’t get too swept up in it. Focus on the writing first, sociable media thereafter.
15.Disregard Bad Stupidity and Criticism. Sure, we get yourself a lot of bad comments and stupid questions from ignorant people who aren’t actually our readers (e.g., adverse comments like “You’re not real minimalists” and stupid questions like “Are you men gay?”). We call these people seagulls: they fly in, crap on your site, and fly away. However they are paid by us no mind, because we didn’t begin our blog for them. Delete their move and comment on.
16.Research. Spend time researching what you’re authoring. The good reason we are able to use therefore many helpful, relevant links inside our essays is because we put in the proper time to analyze our topics.
17.Keep It Simple. This is where minimalism can end up being put on starting any blog, regardless of its genre. You don’t need to place superfluous advertisements or widgets all over your site. Stick to the fundamentals and remove whatever you don’t need. Remove whatever doesn’t add value.
18.Picture. Put an image of yourself on your blog. People recognize with other people. If two goofy men from Ohio aren’t too afraid to put their pictures on the site, then you have nothing to get worried about.
19.Comments. If you’re likely to possess comments on your own site, then browse the Five Words That Kill YOUR SITE by Scott Stratten.
20.Live Your Existence. You’re blogging about your life (or about certain factors of your life, at least), which means you need to live life still. There are issues that we always put before writing: exercise, health, relationships, encounters, personal growth, contribution.
We were inspired to research and write this essay after reading Joshua Becker’s 15 Factors I Think You Should Blog, in which he discusses 15 great reasons why a weblog should be started by you. Why being the main element word here. Basically, he talks about the purpose of blogging, not how to start a weblog just. That’s what all these other blogs about blogging appear to miss; the purpose-the are missed by them why behind starting a blog.
3 Reasons You ought never to Start a Blog
So now you have 15 reasons why you should start a blog, and we’ve proven you how to start a blog, step-by-step, based on our personal experience. But after providing you those detailed guidelines, that could save you the thousands of hours of wasted time, we also want to give you some good reasons why you should not start a blog. (Remember that these reasons are just our opinions, and we usually do not pretend to provide them up as some sort of collection of empirical blogging maxims.)
1.Money. You ought not to begin a weblog to make money. We need to get that taken care of first. If your primary objective is to displace your full-time income from blogging, forget about it. It doesn’t function that way. Do you consider that Jimi Hendrix found his first guitar therefore he could “supplement his income”? No, he didn’t. Rather, he achieved it for the like of it, for the joy and fulfillment he received, and the income came thereafter, much later actually.
2.Notoriety. Don’t plan on getting “Internet famous” immediately. Don’t assume all site grows as fast as ours do, but that’s totally Alright. The simple truth is that we kind of got lucky. We got an excellent domain name, we cobbled together a logo and site design that individuals really liked, we write well fairly, and our content connects with people in a distinctive way. We didn’t start this site to become “popular” though. That’d become ridiculous. Our notoriety and quick rise to “fame” came as a surprise to us, and was a result of a little luck and lots of hard, passionate work.
3.Traffic. Not all traffic is great traffic, so don’t worry about getting a large number of readers right away.
The funny thing is that all these plain things can occur. You will make a full-time income from creating a blog. It is completed by us, Corbett Barr will it, and so do many others. And you could become Internet famous like Leo Babauta or Chris Brogan. But if these are the sole reasons why you start blogging, you’ll be miserable, because it will appear like a working job, and if it feels as though a working work you won’t become passionate about it, therefore you’ll either (a) hate it, (b) fall smooth on your encounter, or © hate it and fall flat on your face.
Instead, create because you’re passionate about it…
20 Recommendations for Your Blog
We receive plenty of emails asking for advice about starting a blog, about how to blog, about blog topics, and about creating meaningful content-even a few pre-determined questions about whether we put on briefs or boxers. These are the answers and recommendations we tend to give.
1.Find Your Market. You needn’t have a niche, nonetheless it assists. When learning how to be considered a blogger, it’s important to ask yourself what you’re passionate about. Running? Cooking? Being truly a parent? Perhaps you have found your passion? If therefore, whatever it is, write about that. If not, you then must 1st find your passion. (Note: We generally suggest that individuals don’t start a weblog about minimalism or the paleo diet or any additional heavily saturated topic. But what we really mean when we say this is: don’t create a weblog about something if you don’t have a unique perspective. If you’ve embraced simple living and have a unique perspective, by all means have at it then. Enjoy yourself.)
2.Define Your Ideal Readers. Once you’ve discovered your niche, you need to know who will be reading your blog. For example, we weblog about living intentionally. Thus, our ideal readers are people who are thinking about exploring minimalism to allow them to clear the road toward even more meaningful lives. If you would like to create about your newborn baby growing up, that’s amazing: your ideal readers are probably friends and family and family. If you want to create about restoring classic cars, that’s cool, as well. Tailor your writing to your readers (whether it’s your family or local community or whoever else will examine your blog).
3.Add Value. Your blog must add worth to its readers’ lives. This is the only way you will get Great Quality Readers to your website (and keep them returning). Adding value may be the only way to obtain long-term buy-in someone’s. Both of us learned this after ten years of leading and handling people in the organization world.
4.Be First. Yes, there are various other blogs out there a comparable thing you would like to write about. Question: So why is your blog different? Answer: Due to you. You are why is your blog different. It’s about your perspective, your imagination, the value that you add.
5.End up being Interesting. Write epic, amazing content. If you want people to share it with others especially.
6.Be Yourself. Part to be interesting is telling your story. Everyone is unique, and your story is an essential one. The important part of storytelling, however, can be removing the superfluous details that make the whole story uninteresting. A great storyteller gets rid of 99% of what actually happens-the absorptive details-and leaves the interesting 1% for the reader.
7.Be Honest. Your blog must be authentic-it must feel real-if you wish people to read it. You can be your blog, or your blog can be you. That’s, you don’t embody the stuff you reveal? If not, people will see through you. “Be the noticeable change you want to see in the world,” may be the famous Gandhi quote. Perhaps bloggers should build the blog they want to write for the world.
8.Transparency. Being transparent is different from becoming honest. You needn’t share every details about your life simply for the sake to be honest. Always be honest, and become transparent when it provides value from what you’re composing. (You won’t ever see pictures folks using the restroom on our site, because that’s not relevant.)
9.Time. Once you’ve discovered how to start a blog, you’ll learn that blogging takes a lot of time, particularly if you’re as neurotic as we are (we spent over 10 hours screening the fonts on this website). And observe those Twitter and Facebook icons in the header? We spent hours on those, deciding that which was right for us). That said, when you have your design setup, don’t tweak it too much. Instead, spend the right time on your writing.
10.Vision. The reason why our site style looks good is basically because we have an excellent host, we have an excellent theme, and most important, we had a vision of how we wanted our weblog to look. Once we had the vision, we worked well hard to create that vision possible. (Note: neither folks had any design encounter prior to starting a blog.) It’s hard to create a beautiful blog if you don’t know what you want it to look like.
11.Find Your Tone of voice. Over time, good authors discover their voice and their composing tends to develop a specific aesthetic, one that is appealing to their readers. Finding your tone of voice makes your composing feel more alive, more real, even more urgent. For extra reading, have a look at our essay about Finding Your Voice.
12.We Instead of You. Utilize the first-person plural when possible. Statements of we and our are stronger than you and your, especially when discussing unfavorable behaviors or tendencies. The first person comes off as far less accusatory. Think of it in this manner: we’re writing peer-to-peer-we are not gods.
13.When to Post. Question: When is the best day time and time to create a blog post? Answer: It doesn’t actually matter. We don’t to a specific schedule adhere. Some weeks we post one essay; we post three sometimes. Yes, it regularly is important to write, but you needn’t get as well bogged down in the facts.
14.Social Media. Yes, we recommend using Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram to help connect with your audience and various other bloggers, but don’t get too swept up in it. Focus on the writing first, sociable media thereafter.
15.Disregard Bad Stupidity and Criticism. Sure, we get yourself a lot of bad comments and stupid questions from ignorant people who aren’t actually our readers (e.g., adverse comments like “You’re not real minimalists” and stupid questions like “Are you men gay?”). We call these people seagulls: they fly in, crap on your site, and fly away. However they are paid by us no mind, because we didn’t begin our blog for them. Delete their move and comment on.
16.Research. Spend time researching what you’re authoring. The good reason we are able to use therefore many helpful, relevant links inside our essays is because we put in the proper time to analyze our topics.
17.Keep It Simple. This is where minimalism can end up being put on starting any blog, regardless of its genre. You don’t need to place superfluous advertisements or widgets all over your site. Stick to the fundamentals and remove whatever you don’t need. Remove whatever doesn’t add value.
18.Picture. Put an image of yourself on your blog. People recognize with other people. If two goofy men from Ohio aren’t too afraid to put their pictures on the site, then you have nothing to get worried about.
19.Comments. If you’re likely to possess comments on your own site, then browse the Five Words That Kill YOUR SITE by Scott Stratten.
20.Live Your Existence. You’re blogging about your life (or about certain factors of your life, at least), which means you need to live life still. There are issues that we always put before writing: exercise, health, relationships, encounters, personal growth, contribution.
How to Start a Successful Blog in 2018 posted first on https://wesleytvirgin.tumblr.com
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