Thousands of articles on the Internet answer the question how to start a blog in 10 minutes but most of them only speak about the very first steps, such as choosing a hosting or blogging platform, registering a domain name. It’s not just as simple as that.
Before starting a blog, you need to think about its blog topic, structure, monetization strategy, etc. And good news for you because in this guide, I tried to summarize my own experience and recommend to you those tactics and services that I personally used and trusted.
This guide might look quite extensive if you scroll down the blog page, so to make it easy, I first give you the plan below.
Starting a blog: What is a blog?
Befdore you start a blog, it is important to know what a blog is first.
A blog is essentially a website where you can find several useful information in when doing a search on search engines. A blog is a type of online journal or information source that may be updated at any time. A blog is an excellent venue for writers to publish their work, as well as for business owners to market their products and services.
Just imagine, when you ask a question on search engines, it will give you a series of results that are actually blog posts or coming from blogs.
You can post almost anything in a blog post – images, gifs, videos, infographics, illustrations, and more! Since 2019, there have been over 600 million blogs from all over the world, with more than 31 million active bloggers writing at least once every month.
You might think that you have too many competitions if you start now but it is still better to start late than never! And trust me, you just need to follow the right blogging strategies and you can already rise up in search engines in no time!
Why do you need to start a blog?
A blog’s general goal is for to give you a way to connect with your audience or consumers easily and in a more personal way. It acts as a platform for you to share information about yourself or your company.
For business purposes, starting a blog can help you communicate more information about your products and services with your audience and customers. It can also assist you to attract potential clients or leads to your main website, online course, online shop, and other of your businesses.
Blogging is an excellent tool for establishing a strong community and gaining the confidence of your readers. Consistent blogging and the development of high-quality content and blog posts will make your company appear more respectable, and people will begin to turn to your blog for advice, product/service suggestions, and more.
Generally, if you want to gain more brand awareness and brand recognition, then a blog is one thing to consider doing!
Another advantage of starting a blog is that it allows you to create your online profile, particularly on Google search or other search engines. Once you’ve mastered SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and use the appropriate keywords (through keyword research) in your blog entries, you may find yourself on Google’s top page in no time.
Another great benefit of starting a blog for businesses, particularly those focused on products and services, is the ability to give more extensive instructions and how-tos for your items. You may also provide advice on how to use your items. Assume you are a fashion brand.
You may create blog entries with text and photographs describing different ways to design a certain piece of clothing.
And the best part of it all? You can make money just by starting a blog even while you are sleeping! We will get into that more later in this post.
Essential parts of a blog
I believe it is important to know the basic parts of a blog before starting a blog so you won’t encounter confusion whenever you point your audience to a specific place on your blog. It is also important to know the parts of a blog so you won’t have difficulty whenever you need to customize your WordPress theme or add/change codes to your blog.
Listed below are the fundamental parts of a blog that every blogger should know about to deliver a seamless user experience. Do note that you can add or even remove some elements—it will all depend on your preference. However, if you do remove one of these elements, be sure that you are aware of its pros and cons.
Homepage
The homepage is where your visitors will go to if they want a quick overview of what your blog is about and what kind of posts you are making. Your homepage should attract your visitors within the first few seconds. The home blog page should be visually attractive and user-friendly or else, your visitors will quickly leave as they do not know where and how to navigate. Your homepage should also clearly reflect what your blog and/or business is about.
Header
Your blog’s header is found at the top of your blog and it is usually what your visitor first sees. Your header can either be your logo, your tagline, a text, or an image depending on what your branding is and what niche you are in. Of course, because the header is what your visitor sees, you better already tell them what your blog is about through your tagline.
Along with this, your header can include a header menu that shows all other navigations of your blog, along with a search bar.
Pages
Other pages can be found on your header menu. Pages are where you create additional important information regarding your blog or your business. Here are some of the most common pages that your blog should have:
- About page – The page where you can give a more in-depth introduction about you or your business. You can add here your history, your vision, why you started your blog, what your blog is about, and more.
- Categories – Your blog categories are where you classify what kind of posts you are making. It is essential to add Categories to your blog because it will help your readers to find related content that they are interested to read. Furthermore, by adding a category, you are helping your older posts be seen instead of it getting buried by hundreds of new posts.
- Contact Page – This is where you will put your contact form, your email address, and/or your office address so your visitors can easily reach out to you.
- Shop – If you are selling your own products, it is important to let your visitors know that they can easily shop through your blog. By adding a Shop page, you can conveniently showcase your products or you can redirect your visitors to any eCommerce site you are in.
- Courses/Services – This is somewhat similar to the Shop page. If you are selling online courses or any online services, it is best to let your audience know that immediately so they can browse through your selection.
Placing your pages on your header menu where it is quickly visibly seen is important as this is where your visitors will go to when they want to know more about you.
Blog Posts
A blog post is can either be a text article, image, infographics, or set of videos that you post or publish on your blog. You can write your first blog post in the form of an introduction – who you are and what your blog is all about.
It is important to know that the more regular you update or publish, the better because this will make your visitors keep coming back to your blog. Of course, the content of your posts must be related to your brand.
If you are a fashion blog, it wouldn’t be ideal to suddenly make a post about cars or technology. No one will find you credible with that. You should only post about what you have expertise in and what you are comfortable talking about.
Comments
Blog comments can be found within your blog posts. It will actually depend on you if you want to turn on your comments or not. But I just want you to know that the comments section is one of the top places in your blog wherein you can build a community and engage with your readers, so I do suggest turning them on.
You can always have the spam filter on or manually approve incoming comments so you can filter out what goes on in your comments section.
Opt-in form
An opt-in form is your subscription form for your email newsletter. This can either be in the form of a pop-up and/or a widget within your blog. I recommend collecting subscribers to your newsletter the moment you start your blog (even if you don’t send out newsletters yet!). You wouldn’t want to miss out on people who might just be your potential customers!
So once you do decide to send out your first newsletter, you will already have a significant amount of users to send it to.
Footer
Your blog’s footer is found at the bottom part of your blog. The footer usually consists of your blog’s Privacy Policy page, Terms and Conditions, and even your social media icons.
FAQ: How do you start your own blog for free?
Yes, it’s possible. If you are looking at starting a blog as a hobby, then you can start it for free on one of the platforms: WordPress, Ghost, Tumblr, Weebly, Medium, Wix, and others.
But imagine, even if you started it as a hobby and after a while, you realized this actually is your dream job and you want to start making money with your blog. If you started a blog on a free platform, your monetization (making money on a blog) options will be very limited.
Then you’ll need to move all the blog content, images, etc., everything that you built, to a paid platform, and you will definitely need some technical specialist to help you with this. So, you will have to pay for moving your site and all that you saved by starting a blog for free, plus much more will be spent on the switch.
1. How to start a blog on WordPress
The choice of blogging platform should be defined by your resources. If you are about to create a blog first time in your life, you probably need a platform, which is widely used, easy to maintain and has a large community of users around it, so when need help or advice, you can easily find other people who use the same platform.
If this all applies to you, WordPress.org is your best choice. And will hardly be replaced anytime soon because of the thousands of themes, widgets, marketing automation tools available for WordPress website owners.
When your blog gets bigger, probably you will need to find a professional to help you improve the site, with WordPress it will be easy and relatively cheap because there is a huge competition between technical experts who work with WordPress platform.
Another question is whether to use WordPress.com as a free hoster or pay for a self-hosted blog. If you create a blog just for fun, then the free WordPress.com web hosting will serve you fine. But if you are serious about starting a blog and see it as a potential source of income and passive income, you should consider a little of investment for web hosting.
You see, free stuff is great, but it always implies certain limitations. If you choose to host your blog for free on WordPress.com, you won’t be able to use display ads and some widgets. A blog on another free hosting – Blogger (belongs to Google), can run ads, but it will always earn less than a similar blog on a paid web hosting.
Some of you could think, not a big deal – I’ll start with a free blog, and when I see how it goes, I’ll switch to a paid platform. Well, to be honest, for you as a beginner, ensuring a simple transfer of all your content to another platform, can be quite a difficult task. As I said, if you are serious about creating a successful website, the best way is to start a self-hosted blog on the WordPress content management system.
