Starting a new blog and especially for beginners is not an easy task to do. At the same time, it’s not hard if you follow some tips and tutorials to build and protect your site from the first day. Then, you can start creating posts and articles and building your audience and things will be better later.
In this post, I’ll show you how to build your own WordPress blog and make money with it when you have traffic. But, keep in mind that needs a few months with real work or you can hire writers if you want to create quality and professional content for you.
1. Select what you want to blog about
This is the most important step before creating a blog from scratch, if you really want your site to succeed, then you should take your time finding the best niche or a topic that you’re interested in. You can spend hours writing and optimizing your posts.
So, when you choose the right topic to start blogging, your next steps will be easier to achieve. You have to understand the below points before even asking how to set up a blog and make money. In general, there two ways to find the best niche for your project.
a. Select a niche based on your background
If you think that you have knowledge about a topic that you understand, and probably, you have knowledge about it. You will find that blogging is much easier than starting a topic that you don’t have any idea about it. So start thinking about topics you love and you can add value to them.
For example, if you’re a programmer, your best relevant niche will be programming or coding, this will help you much more than things you can’t spend hours writing posts about them.
At the same time you should make a quick search about your niche, is it popular? A topic that you love and have a passion for it is not enough. You need to make sure that search engines and Google especially will send you thousands of visitors every month.
The easiest way to make sure about your audience is to create a list of all the words that come to your mind when you think about your best niche or topic.
Then go to the Google AdWords Keyword Planner and type any of your words to find how many people are searching for that keyword, In the next example of “Design”, you need to find the number of searches for that word.
Just select “all locations” and refine your search words with more than 1000 searches then hit” get started” as in the screenshot.
Then you get a list of keywords organized by groups, just browse these groups and make sure that there are thousands of searches for that group. In this example, the keyword “Graphic Design” has hundreds of thousands of searches per month.
So, you have a good topic to build the site about it and drive visitors from Google and other search engines.
Now you’re sure that if you build a blog about graphic design and similar topics, you can succeed and get visitors.
b. Learn more and find how websites in your niche are doing
You will discover great and amazing information and details that you don’t know about your niche, bloggers are doing their best to create new things. Just use Google and search for sites about your niche. This will save you time in the future. If you want to succeed without risks, then you really should take a look at sites that are writing articles about the same topic as you.
Make a list of the top 10 list and visit them daily, believe me, a successful blogger is a good reader, you’re not the god to know everything. There is something new every day, maybe some ideas you’ve learned in high school will be changed now, this is life.
2. Where and how to start?
You don’t need many reasons to start your blog with WordPress software, it’s the most popular and loved one, WordPress is an open-source development program for blogging. It’s more flexible and easy for blogs than Joomla and Drupal.
There are over 60 million people around the world who use WordPress for their blogs and websites. By the way, you don’t need to download or install WordPress manually, It will be done with one-click installation.
Purchase your domain name
If you think that free subdomains like blogspot.com or wordpres.com will succeed your site, then you’re on the wrong way. You should have your own domain name, so, search for the relevant name for your niche.
If your project is all about design, then your domain name will be better with the word “design”. So start searching for the best available domain name at NameCheap, they’re the largest and most popular domain name registrar company.
Make sure to select a domain name that’s easy to remember, short as possible, it will better with less than 15 characters, and don’t use dashes or special characters. Just keep clean and simple. mywebsite.com is better than my-coolwebsite.com.
Find the best hosting provider
Now you have your domain name, and you need to link it to WordPress. But before that, let me tell you something, your web host selection will have an important role in your blog ranking in Google and other search engines.
You need to choose one of the best web hosting providers to give WordPress the power to get loads fast and crawled easily by search engines.
To make your decision relative as possible, you should estimate your monthly budget for hosting your blog. If you wish to create a small site with fast web hosting and pay cheaper than all the popular slow hosting. I highly recommend one of the following services.
Recommended hosting services:
- WP Engine is a fully managed, and premium WordPress hosting service with all the support and things. You don’t have to learn the next tutorial if you choose this hosting provider. That does all the job for you, that including installation, backup, security, and everything.
- HostGator, they’re a shared hosting service, and they work well for beginners.
All the modern hosting companies have an auto-installer for your WordPress blog, as I said before, you don’t need to download or install WordPress manually. If you need more information about web hosting you can check my previous post about the best modern and fastest web hosting companies.
Installing and configuring WordPress
After selecting your best relevant web hosting company, they will send you all the details in order to access your cPanel account. If this is the first time you use web hosting, you need to know some simple things.
- The cPanel is your control panel, it’s the most popular one, your hosting account will be controlled through this cPanel.
- The database is the place in your web hosting where your files and programs are located.
- Plugins are simple add-ons that you can install later to suit your needs.
a. One-click installer
Now you can log in to your cPanel account.
Most hosting companies will add your domain name automatically when you’ve signed up, if not you can add your domain name directly in your cPanel. Just locate the next icons and click add-on domains.
Now install your WordPress software directly from your cPanel, locate an icon where it’s named “script installer”. In other web hosting cPanel, you will find “Quick install” as explained below.
Then, the auto-installer will ask you to choose that software for your domain name. Of course, you need to select WordPress as the screenshot:
After the complete auto installation, you need to save your login and details, just take a note to remember them, and click the link to your home page.
b. Upload the WordPress theme
Now your WordPress blog is installed, and you need to login to start. Open your chrome or Firefox browser and type https://www.yourblog.com/wp-admin of course, change that with your domain name.
After downloading your theme, you have to upload it to your blog. So, go to your WordPress dashboard and locate “Appearance” at the left menu, click on it, then “themes” and select “upload” the next example.
After uploading your theme, you have to install it by clicking “install”, then “activate” and congratulations, you have just created your first WordPress website, with an amazing and professional theme.
If you find these steps difficult, you can contact me and I will do the work for you for free, helping a new blogger is my first goal.
Recommended WordPress plugins
I recommend the next free plugins to make WordPress more flexible, fast, and easy to use.
- W3 Total Cache will accelerate the page loading time with caching and optimization of all your CSS and Java scripts.
- TinyMCE Advanced will add more functions and options to your dashboard, you will customize your posts very easy.
- WordPress SEO will make your posts optimized for Google, it will suggest you make some changes in every post, this will help your articles get good search engine ranking using simple tips.
- WP Smush.it will compress all your uploaded images to make your images optimized, this is very important to accelerate your page’s loading time.
- Wordfence Security will scan WordPress and protect it from viruses.
- Start blogging
Now you a WordPress site with all functions and options, it will be hosted by a trusted company, protected, and you can start writing your first post. But keep in mind that blogging is a passion, it needs time, effort, and energy. If you can set up your site and post once a day, at least, then, connect your site with social media, such as Facebook, Twitter, you will succeed.
Useful Tips
Submit your site to Google, Bing, and Yahoo
You have to tell Google about your website, first go to http://blogsearch.google.com/ping and let Google add your domain to their index. Then, open a webmaster account with your Google account and add your domain to index it fast. For Bing and Yahoo, they have the same submitter from Bing, just go to www.bing.com/webmaster.
Don’t use spam tools
This is a very important tip, Google will penalize your website if you submit it with automatic tools, it looks like spam for them. Stay away from companies who offer submission, Google lets you submit your blog for free.
Conclusion
Now, that you have learned how to properly build a new WordPress blog from scratch, you should take care of your site, and post regularly, and connect with other bloggers.
Now, it’s time t check out these affiliate programs, all of them can offer good commissions and you can starts promoting them on your site, but focus on content first and after some time, starts monetizing.
In the first weeks or months, you should promote your posts one by one using your social media accounts or any other ways. Then, Google and other search engines will start sending traffic to your posts. It depends on your niche and how your posts are. Good Luck.
