When I started blogging I had absolutely no idea what I was doing. Honestly, looking back I’m surprised I had the nerve to start one knowing as little as I did, but impulsively starting a blog was one of the best decisions I’ve ever made. Blogging has become my creative outlet, sanity-saver, and a great way to connect with other people and help support my family while staying at home with my kids.

Over the last few months I’ve been asked by a lot of people to talk more about the ins and outs of blogging so I thought I’d start at the beginning with a post about how to start a blog. I’ve learned so much over the last two years, and my hope is that this post will help you start your blog with more confidence and guidance (and less stress and confusion!) than I started with.

This post contains affiliate links. For more information please see my disclosures page.

1. What’s your blog about?

The best way to start a blog is to first figure out what you want to write about and what your goals are. Having a vision for your blog at the beginning will determine the type of blog you should start.

Here are some great questions to ask yourself:

• Do you want to start a private family blog to share updates with family and friends or will you share your posts with the world?
• Will your blog be a hobby or do you want to turn it into a business?
• How much, if any, money are you wanting or willing to spend each month?
• How much time do you want to spend blogging each week?
• What do you want to write about?
• Are you looking to get rich quick?

If you answered, “Yes!” to that last question, just stop now. I’m kidding, kind of. I would never want to discourage anyone from starting a blog, but it’s definitely not a get rich quick scheme… unfortunately. The good news is that the earning potential truly is as unlimited and varied as you can imagine. There are a ton of different bloggers out there who are earning full time incomes in a gazillion different ways (yes, that’s practically an exact count!). 🙂

If you aren’t yet sure of how to answer these questions, that’s okay, but having an idea of whether or not you want to earn money from your blog is very important.

2. Hobby vs. Business

If you want to start a hobby blog and don’t want to spend any money, I would recommend using a free service like blogger or wordpress.com (not wordpress.org! That’s for those who want to total control over their blogs and want to monetize. I’ll talk more about that in a minute). These platforms will make it easy to share your thoughts with the world or family and friends while costing you nothing in return. There are some downsides to these free services (limitations in monetizing and your blog could be shut down at any time or taken from you), but if you’re blogging for fun you probably won’t run into any problems.

If, however, you’re hoping to one day make money from your blog, wordpress.org is the way to go. WordPress.org is the platform on which the majority of blogs are built, and it gives you the ability to really make your blog your own because you’re in charge of everything.

I’ll admit that when I started blogging wordpress.org intimidated me. I had to deal with all of these new issues like finding hosting and themes to make my blog pretty, not to mention learning how to use wordpress. It was overwhelming!

Despite my research and knowing that wordpress.org was the best place to start a blog, I started on wordpress.com. It was easy and not at all intimidating, but within only a couple weeks I transferred everything to wordpress.org and never looked back. If you feel overwhelmed by wordpress.org, I get it, but if you want to blog professionally do your future self a favor and just start now. You’ll quickly learn everything you need to know, and you won’t have to worry about transferring all of your content to your wordpress.org down the road and learning a whole new platform when your blog is already a huge success. Your future self is already thanking you!

3. Purchase your Domain

Your domain is what comes between the “www” and “.com” (or “.net” etc). It’s the name of your site. It’s how people will know you so, no pressure, but it’s kind of important.

Truth be told, I both love and hate my blog name. I thought of a bunch of possibilities, but most of them were either already being used or, even worse, purchased and being neglected. I ended up choosing “My Love for Words” because it comes from a song that I love (Simple Life by The Weepies), and I’m expressing myself through… My Love for Words. Sometimes I kind of hate the name because it sounds like I should be blogging about books or something, and that’s definitely not the focus of my blog. Naming fail? Maybe. I don’t know. Either way it’s special to me.

Ultimately, I don’t think your domain will make or break your blog, but choosing a name that either clearly relates to your content, is catchy, or is your actual name are great places to start. Definitely take time to brainstorm and choose wisely because the larger your blog grows, the harder it will be to change it.

Once you’ve found the perfect name, you can purchase your domain. In my research, I read over and over again that it’s best to purchase your domain and hosting separately so that’s what I did. I purchased my domain through godaddy.com. They’ll offer you a bunch of bells and whistle at checkout that will quickly cause your total to climb, but the only thing I paid extra for was the domain privacy. This keeps your personal information secure and will cut down on the junk mail you receive. In my opinion, it’s a must.

4. Purchase Hosting

Your blog will be on your host’s servers, which is how it ends up on the internet. There are a lot of hosting options, but when I was researching hosts blog after blog raved about Bluehost. I’ve used Bluehost since I started my blog and have only had great experiences. Their customer service is great, responds quickly, and can even speak in understandable terms to the technologically challenged like me. Best of all, it only costs a few dollars a month, which is awesome!

You can click here to get started now, and we’ll walk through the steps below together.

A) This is the Bluehost home page. Just click the green button to see their available plans.

B) On this page you’ll be able to choose your plan.

C) Get or transfer your domain.

D) Enter your account information.

E) Choose your package. If you choose 36 months to get the lowest plan price you’ll pay for all three years worth at sign up.

F) Here you can add additional domain names. Purchasing one/some may be a good idea. It increases the cost, but it can also help to preserve your brand. After coming up with your perfect name, the last thing you want to happen is for someone to buy the same name with .net or .co at the end. This is an easy way for someone to create a blog, piggyback off of your success, and confuse your followers.

G) Now you’re in! It’s time to choose a secure, hard to guess password. Unfortunately, with some success comes hacking attempts. Some people may try to guess your password and take control of your site so the more random and harder to guess the password, the better.

H) Now you can access your account.

I) Install wordpress.org, which can be found under “website builders.”

J) Choose your domain and Install

 

K) This is all of your important blog information including how you’ll access wordpress for your site so be sure to pay attention to this information and keep it in a safe place.

L) Sign in and Get Started! After you sign in you’ll want to change your username from “Admin” to something unique and hard to guess (in other words not your blog name!). Changing your username from the default “admin” to something different makes it that much harder for something to successfully hack into your site.

M) Finally, you’re at your wordpress dashboard! If you feel overwhelmed or intimidated looking at this, I totally understand, but trust me when I say you’ll get the hang of it quickly. It’s really not as difficult as it may look.

Not as scary as it seemed, right? I’ve had great experiences with Bluehost. Their customer service is great, and they’ve helped me fix problems on more than once occasion, but if you have any questions, please let me know in the comments below or feel free to e-mail me at myloveforwords{at}gmail{dot}com.

Blogging has added so many great things to my life, and I’d love to see it do the same for you! For more blogging info, be sure to sign up for my new blogging newsletter below.