How to Create a Blog
Creating a Blog is easier than ever and if you are a complete beginner who has nothing to do with the coding or web design. With some guidance and the right tools, you can create your professional or your own personal blog within an hour and can go online.
In our step-by-step guide, we will take you all along the way while avoiding common mistakes new bloggers tend to make.
Now we start the process of creating a blog. There are many steps involved in this process.
Blog Topic
The first step you have to do is select a blog topic. There’s one thing that most successful blogs focus on like it may include travel, fashion, food, or your business. We recommend that you choose a topic that you like or feel passionate about. It is even great if you’re a specialist in something, then it will help you to grow your blog through good content.
Tips about a Topic
There are three questions you have to ask yourself.
- Are you having expertise in something?
- Anything you’re passionate about?
- Are you learning new things and want to share your experience with others?
For example, I am interested in fitness and want to share my experience with others about nutrition and different exercise. Blogging is a medium where you can share your experience with millions of people, it will help you to keep in touch with your clients as well as get new clients.
Right Blogging Platform
You have two option free blog or self-hosted blog. You can start free blogging on any of these platforms such as Word Press, Blogging, and Tumblr. However, free blogging isn’t a way to go if you’re serious about blogging.
A free blogging service has many disadvantages. There are many limitations in free blogging like getting monetization, traffic is very hard and customization of site is limited, you will have no full control of the site.
The solution at that time will be to upgrade but it will be more expensive. I will recommend you start a self-hosted blog. In self-hosted blogging you will enjoy full customization; you will face no limitation related to your blog content such as audio, images, or videos. The look of your blog will be more professional and the main advantage of a self-hosted blog is, you will be the owner of your site.
Best Platform for Blogging
Many blogging platforms are available now it depends on us, which platform is best for us. Some platforms are easy to learn and use while some are difficult and limited, require more hard work to learn.
According to some recent statistics that word press is the most commonly used platform in 2020. It has about 85% share in the market. As I told many platforms are available for blogging but word press is most popular among these platforms.
Advantages of Self-hosted Word Press
- It is open-source or free to use.
- It has a bigger community for development.
- It is regularly updated.
- Most importantly, you will have full control of the blog.
- It comes with hundreds of theme.
Cost of Self-hosted Blog
There are two things that you have to pay for.
Domain Name
This is the address of your blog such as www.yourblogname.com. You can get a domain free with hosting.
Web Hosting
It is a space you get to host your blog. You have to pay per month or per year for this service. This service is available at the cost of $4/month.
Here all your investment is to buy hosting for blog and if you think you cannot continue with the blog then you can cancel the service any time and many companies offer you 30-day money-back guarantee. We advise you to go for your self-hosted route so you can start to develop and build your blog from the first day.
Click here to register domain and hosting at ScalaHosting
Register Domain Name and Hosting
Now the practical step start from here and first you has to go for registering a domain name and web hosting.
There are many companies, providing web hosting but I will recommend you SCALAHOSTING.
There are following benefits you can get from Scalahosting as given below:
- Free domain and SSL certificate.
- 50 GB storage with unlimited emails.
- Unlimited database and Bandwidth.
- Shared environment with free migration.
- You can enjoy this service at $3.95/month.
- One click installer for word press.
It doesn’t matter which company you choose but makes sure that it has one-click installers for word press; it will make it much easier for you to manage your site or blog.
Install WordPress
After SignUp for ScalaHosting then you are able to install the WordPress platform on your site because every company offers a one-click install of WordPress.
• Login your cPanel.
• In the Homepage scroll the page down to section Softaculous App Installer.
• Click on the blue icon of the WordPress installer.
Once WordPress is installed then login into the WordPress admin dashboard. The address of your admin dashboard is www.yourdomainname.com/wp-admin.
General Setting
Click on general setting on left sidebar of dashboard.
Site Title
Here you put the name of your site. It is the main title of your site.
Tagline
It is the summary of your blog, it represent what your blog about.
Site Address
It shows the address of your blog.
Visibility in Google
You make sure that Google index your blog. Go to setting –> Reading then uncheck the box “Discourage search engines from indexing this site”.
Permalinks
It plays an important role in the ranking of your individual posts and defines the URL of your single post. This step is very easy, go to setting Permalinks. I recommend setting your permalink to “Post name”. It will optimize the post of your blog and Google also recommends it.
Choosing a Theme
WordPress makes you a good designer by just clicking the theme of your choice and by doing nothing you can enhance the look of your site.
Thousands of theme available free, download the theme of your choice and you can customize it yourself easily.
Go to WordPress dashboard, navigate to appearance themes, there are already some installed themes and you can add new themes also by clicking on “add new”.
There you will see the following categories, just click on popular, you will find many beautiful free themes. Just click any of these themes that best suit your blog, then click install and activate it.
Customization
Every theme comes with its specific pre-configured design, you can customize the design of your theme according to your choice. Go to appearance –> Customize. Depending on your theme, there is a different set option available in the sidebar menu and some options are common as given below.
Side Identity
Three things you can add here, site title, logo image and a site icon.
Color
You can change and adjust the color of your site.
Header
You can set here an image or graphic.
Background
You can manage site’s background image or color.
Logo and Favicon
You can set the company logo and favicon image by clicking the header section of the site in customization. Just click on the add logo button it shows specifications of the image you can add.
You select site icon or favicon image by enabling the button, specifications are mentioned to select the size of the image for site icon as shown in the image and the image appears at the main top bar of a web browser.
Blog Color or Image
You can manage color or add an image to the background from customizer as shown in the image.
Add new Page or Post
Are you ready to create the content of your blog? If yes, then go and click on add post or page and start writing to it.
First of all, you will add the following pages to your blog as given below:
Blog
This section is created automatically on homepage and all your blog posts are listed here.
About
This page tells all about your content and people behind the blog.
Contact
Visitors can contact you directly from here.
Add new Page
Here you decide how many pages you need to add, this process is simple. The creation of a page for any purpose is the same.
There are two ways to create a page, from sidebar just click on the page it will show two options “All Page” and “Add new”.
Add new Post
The blog is the special functionality of WordPress CMS. WordPress has a separate section for managing blog posts. Adding a new post is the same as adding new pages.
Add Navigation Menu
It is very easy for visitors to find different pages due to the navigation menu. You can add categories, pages to the menu bar. Go to appearance –> Menus, list of categories and pages are available, just click checkboxes next to the pages or categories that you want to in the menus and click “Add to menu”.
