How To Start A Blog In Today's Digital World (2024)

in this episode of The Niche blogging tips podcast we're going to discuss how to start a blog in today's Digital World stay tuned anytime you hear me discuss starting a blog I am specifically talking about starting a blog on WordPress and not wordpress.com wordpress.org and that entails making sure you go out and purchase a domain name your www. whatever your name is or whatever the name of the the site you want to name the site.com so I'm talking about going and buy a a site and not a do site b

ut a do domain name and purchasing the hosting so you can host the site yourself that way you have complete control over everything and it involves several steps but it's a straightforward process and in today's episode we're going to talk about 10 pretty much 10 10 steps to how you go about starting your blog on WordPress in today's Digital World the first thing I'm going to discuss the first step is choose a niche and Define your audience and you're going to hear me say this a lot yes I say Ni

che I know some people say niche but I say Niche it's the name of the podcast Niche blog and tips podcast and I've tried and I've tried and I've tried to say Niche every now and then I might get a little cute and say Niche but it's the way I talk I'm from St Louis Missouri so Niche blogging tips choose a niche and Define your audience so whatever is it is that you're into that you want to show the world that you want to share to the world choose that Niche you can blog about that Niche and Defin

e the audience that you're looking for me I'm looking for helping beginning bloggers with Niche sites or Niche blogs or just blogging in general so before you start your blog decide on your Niche topic that you're passionate about that you have an audience at least an audience in your head that you know that you want you want to be seeing with and this will help you create content that resonates with your target readers the next step in the process that you want to do is you want to make sure th

at you choose a niche name choose a domain name you can put your Niche name in The Domain for instance this is Niche blogging tips and choosing that domain name and a hosting provider and you're going to do that in the same step when you choose a domain name you're going to pick a domain name that reflects like I said the blog content and it's easy to remember you can use there so many domain reg regars like name cheep gold daddy so there's a number of them out there choosing a hosting provider

select a reliable provider somebody like host gator blue host sight ground consider factors like server performance customer ser customer support rather and pricing so yeah these the the domain registers they're um the hosting providers rather all of them are not the same so do some re you can look up all the reviews before you make a purchase or whatnot um we recommend really a lot of different ones site ground in particular blue host host Gator even name cheap consider factors like like I said

server performance and what I was saying is all of the hosting providers they're not going to have like the same speeds or what have you customer support may be a little different in some of them the good thing that I can say about most hosting providers is that they have awesome customer service support so if you're ever in trouble or ever have any questions when you're building out your blog when you're starting your blog you can always put in a ticket for customer service and they usually re

ply back even they they even have you know the Online deal to where you can um you can go on the site and you can ask them a question right then and there they may have a live customer service rep right there and the pricing the pricing is going to be similar depending on which hos and provider and the ones that I name are the ones that you should start off with there's other ones that are possibly a little better than the ones that I named and I wouldn't get those yet until your blog is at a ce

rtain level until you have enough traffic on that blog to where maybe you can pay more for hosting and you can get more of a um I don't want to say a more of a reliable service but just better hosting to where your site could hold a lot of traffic The Next Step I have is and installing WordPress this is after you get your domain name and hosting provider installing WordPress most hosting providers offer a oneclick WordPress installation process where you can log into your Hosting account and fin

d the WordPress installer and follow the instructions you're going to need to make sure that you configure your basic settings after you install WordPress things such as your title your tagline time time zone and the WordPress dashboard The Next Step I have in starting a blog in today's digital world is choosing a WordPress theme choosing a responsive and Visually appealing theme for your blog is very important you can either use the WordPress theme itself or you can buy a premium thing I would

recommend you to get a premium thing even if your your money is uh is not up to par to where you're just starting off you don't have a lot of money yeah you can start using a regular WordPress theme and later on change to a premium so don't think that like at the beginning that you have to just run out and go spend a bunch of money on a premium WordPress thing actually there's a lot of different premium things out there I like so many of them the one the one I was going to say was um optimize pr

ess optimize press is is one that has a lot of different themes within it there's a lot of them out there so I'll try to I'll try to link up some down in the show notes install and customize that theme within the WordPress dashboard customizing the theme settings to match your brand and your preferences is very important the one thing that you should do in the next step is install essential plugins plugins are very important I always say the plugins are like the app on your phone the apps on you

r block are called plugins install plugins such as Yos SEO for search engine optimization and a you can install a catching caching plug in for performance I'll try to get into that a little more on the the ones that I would prefer you to put you to use when building out your blog explore additional plugins depending on your blog needs explore and install additional plugins for features like social sharing contact forms and analytics the thing that you must keep intact the thing that you definite

ly definitely want to understand with plugins is that you want to make sure that you don't have too many of them so always say stay in a range of depending on what type of site You're Building stay in the range of 10 to 15 plugins probably don't even have to have that many but I definitely wouldn't go over 20 I definitely wouldn't have over 20 plugins shouldn't need 20 plugins and the reason that you don't want to overload your site with a bunch of plugins because it'll slow your site down it wi

ll slow your site down sometimes when you have too many of those plugins that they could somehow compromise your site that's why I always say if you're ever in trouble if you ever have let's say if your site's not working you built a site then you log on and it's not functioning right more than likely it's a plugin so the quickest way to fix that is to delete or uninstall plug in you can do it one at a time to see what the problem is you will run into that on WordPress no question about it the t

hought of having a Blog is so important especially when you're new but just like a lot of new bloggers you get stuck in a lot of different places because you're getting information from a whole bunch of different places and different bloggers or whatnot but what we did was we put together a free mini course and we call it the 5day blogging mini retreat and you can get that at Niche blogging tips.com or anywhere on the website that's Niche blogging tips.com sign up for our 5-day blogging mini ret

reat it's a free mini course a free 5-day blogging mini retreat is what we call it check that out at bloging tips.com the next step step number six in starting your own blog in the digital world is create important Pages you have to create essential pages when you are building out a Blog Pages such as your homepage about us contact a privacy policy page so make sure you build those out a home about contact privacy you can use a built-in WordPress page Editor to create and publish these pages so

it's real easy just click the page button click once you click on the the page to make a particular page you know add the title then that's when you put the content in there whether you want to put images or or not on those particular Pages make sure you have obviously a Blog Page step seven writing your first blog post this is the content creation part of starting a blog in today's Digital World start by writing and Publishing your first blog post no matter what it is just make sure that I woul

d say make sure when you're writing that first post it could be a post of like 500 words with a couple of images using engaging title break up the text with headings and image and make sure that your content is valuable to to your readers so whatever it is that you you're putting out if you um have if you started the content creation process of searching what type of content that you want to use you want to make sure that you're looking at I guess other blogs also to see how they're writing what

they're writing about or what have you 500 Words is is fine for your first blog post your next blog post obviously you can your word count could be more than 500 you want to keep everything thing at like 500 because Google is not going to be favorable the search engine is not going to be favorable to just 500 Words content in every blog post in most Niche niches I say it in niche in most niches niches I keep saying that because somebody somebody got mad at me one time and uh said it's niche not

Niche hey man wherever you from it's niche to me so if you want somebody else to say Niche or whatnot hey maybe this is not the the platform for you so step number eight Implement SEO best practices you want to optimize for search engine optimization and that's something that I was just talking about when I was talking about the search engines being favorable to your content that Yos SEO plugin man it's a lifesaver to optimize your blog post for search engines focus on writing high quality rele

vant content with proper keyword usage it tells you everything within that y SEO plugin on the on the if you Scroll once you install a plugin and you start writing your content you can scroll like down to the bottom and you'll see you'll see it it'll let you know so you want to make sure that it'll give you a whole bunch of green check marks and it'll tell you if it's orange if it's you know okay and it also give you a red indication in some areas also when you need to add certain things or when

the particular content is not up to par so that's why that Yos SEO plugin is a lifesaver it's a must for me step number nine promote your blog here is what today's digital world I guess that part of the episode here's why that's so important because obviously social media you want to share your content on social media once you build up enough Traction in your blog people are going to start sharing your blog for you or if you use certain audience platforms such as Pinterest people are really goi

ng to share it for you but make sure you create your social media accounts for your blog and share your content regularly also make sure within that make sure you're not just sharing your content make sure you're engaging with that particular page also on other Pages you don't just want to share your stuff if you just share your stuff it's not going to mean anything to that particular platform so make sure you engage on platforms like Facebook Twitter Instagram I wouldn't say Instagram I mean yo

u can you can have an Instagram for your blog and you can promote your stuff on Instagram so yeah I'm not I'm not gonna I'm not gonna say don't do Instagram but Facebook Twitter Pinterest then Instagram you want to build an email list also and that's a whole another a whole another video that I'll be doing in the future about building your email list set up an email newsletter using convert kit mail chimp aweber encourage your visitors to subscribe to receive updates for your blog the good thing

about building the email list is that you can make an offer and exchange for the email list so let's say if you are really doesn't matter what what you're doing but if you if you have a offering you're offering information in return for an email that's a good thing because you can create an email newsletter and you can actually share your blog post with in that email newsletter while you're building that list anytime people want to let's say if you let's say if you are offering something you ne

ed to offer something of value first of all that's really what I'm trying to say offer something of value offer something free maybe later on maybe you got a course later on that you wanna that you want to promote and sell and you can use your email list with that so promoting your blog sharing on social media building an email list is very essential when you start your blog the last thing I'm going to talk about is and this is Step 10 this is monetizing your blog and this is optional you know I

know everyone is not going to build a Blog to monetize it but a lot of us are or want to monetize our block explore monetization options once you block has gained some traction consider monetizing through methods like affiliate marketing sponsored content or selling digital products just remember building a successful blog takes time consistency and effort and keep producing valuable content and engaging with your audience and adapt your strategy based on feedback and analytics feedback and ana

lytics those are those are the 10 steps in starting your blog I'll make a another piece of content I'll make a video for the video side people on the YouTube side I'll make a video at some point where I'll share my screen and we'll build a site we'll start a blog and I'll show you step by step process because I know some people even like on the audio side they can hear me they they they understand most people understand a concept but actually some people learn by actually seeing it get done the

stepbystep way and um we'll do that so I kind of want to give on this show I kind of want to give different angles to the process of how to start a blog and it's it's different today building blogs than it was I guess 20 years ago and even a little further back than that the process is a little different it's actually easier to build now but I think back in those days you were able to do more or or do do a little less and make these shortcuts and do a lot of other different things in order to ge

t traffic to your blog but it's a little different now you want to really concentrate on good content because when you concentrate on good content your readers they see that they'll keep coming back and you want to do you want to do it that way so building building a Blog is important because people read that's something that we need to understand when we understand our audience how can we communicate our message to them we can communicate our message on the audio side because people listen to a

udio we can do it on the video side because people watch videos and we can do it through writing because people read and that's just the way people communicate so kind of think of it from that perspective and think of from that perspective when you you are on this side on the on the blogging side we put together a resource page for a lot of things that we don't talk about in these episodes make sure you check that out it has things such as ebooks audio books which are things that are for sale al

so it has things such as different affiliate links that help us pay the bills so make sure you check this out at Niche blogging tips.com resources that's nich bloging tips.com resources now back to the show thanks for checking us out and we'll see you in the next episode of the nich blog and tips podcast