Welcome to the world of Blogging. 🎉🎉🎉
Blogging is a great way to express yourself, build a business, or share experiences. There are endless reasons that drive people to start blogs. No matter what your reason for beginning is, you can get your WordPress blog set up and running in five easy steps.
1. What’s Your Name?
Don’t select Amazon.com – that one’s already taken! Don’t know what we’re discussing here?
Ok, let’s start at the beginning.
Your blog needs an address in the blogosphere. You know many of these already such as Amazon.com, Sears.com and ilovemydog.com.
These are all names that the designer selected or purchased. You have to start by doing something similar.
What are you going to blog about? That might give you a few ideas for domain names. Ideally, you want a name that indicates what your blog is about in very few words.
Scott Chow of The Blog Starter suggests selecting a name ending in .com, .org, or .net and avoiding the less well-known .biz, .us, or anything else.
They lack familiarity and may impact your ability to reach an audience.
Since your domain must be unique go here and enter the names you are considering. Pro Blogger suggests these items to keep in mind when selecting a name.
The Minimalists suggest using this site: wordoid for help finding a name.
2. Pick a Host
No one can see your blog without a host. The Minimalists, Create and Go and The Blog Starter all recommend using Bluehost as your host.
Many sites offer hosting services. Google them for a list. However, few are as inexpensive and responsive as Bluehost.
Here are the top 7 WordPress hosting providers that We recommend compared:
To set up your hosting, you need a credit card to pay for the initial contract. Your host service will walk you through this process.
Start by ordering the least expensive hosting service, you can always upgrade if you find you need to.
Check out other great WordPress hosting providers on our site.
3. Install WordPress
Now we’re getting to WordPress. The previous two steps were necessary to get you a place in the blog world. By installing WordPress, you are starting the design or, as many call it, the fun part of setting up your blog.
If you used bluehost, the host walks you through the WordPress download steps. If you used a host that does not have an option for downloading WordPress, you will have to go to the WordPress site to download.
Do note that almost all major hosts these days have automatic WordPress installation apps in their admin panel, most popular tools:
- How To Install WordPress Using Installatron
- How to Install WordPress using Softaculous
- How to install WordPress using the cPanel WordPress Toolkit
Manual WordPress Setup
This part is a little confusing. WordPress is a host as well as a design system. Many people host sites happily on WordPress and you may have done so as well.
Either way, do not be confused into signing a second contract for site hosting. To install WordPress, follow the official guide here.
This site includes all the steps you need to install, valuable information about troubleshooting and design, and many topics related to blogging and maintaining a website. Right now, all you need to do is install it, but keep the site in mind for future reference.
4. Select a Theme
Now you are on your site. You have a username and password and you have a blog. Pro Blogger has an excellent introduction to selecting your first theme.
You can also refer back to WordPress for information. This is the beginning of your blog design so it is a substantial decision; don’t rush it. At this point, before you have content, it is easy to change themes, but once you have content, changing themes is more difficult; not impossible, but more difficult.
On our site, we host lots of WordPress themes.
For beginners, I recommend using a Free WordPress theme first, and the obvious choice for those is the WordPress.org Theme Repository.
Once you get familiar with customizing a WordPress theme, and WordPress in general, you can take a look at some Premium WordPress themes that will allow you to customize easily every aspect of the theme. For commercial (premium) WordPress themes the best place to shop is Envato’s ThemeForest.
5. Start Blogging
We can’t tell you what will be in your content, but in WordPress, there are basically two types of content: pages and posts.
You add both pages and posts from the administrative area of WordPress called the dashboard. Most people use pages for content that doesn’t change often.
For example, an About Us entry is generally a page.
The other content type is a post. People tend to use these for the actual blogs they write. How the pages and posts appear is all part of how you use WordPress themes and designs.
The Rest of the Story
This is just the beginning of your blog adventure. Once you start, you will find inspiration and information all over the web addressing such topics as attracting an audience, using advertising, and changing themes. Take advantage of all your fellow bloggers and experts in the field to have to offer and enjoy blogging.