We are in 2021, and it has never been easier to start a blog. This statement holds even for people with no prior experience in coding, design, or EVEN WRITING! Believe us; it takes less than 30-minutes to build a functional blog. What takes time is coming up with a blog niche and post ideas.
But we are here to help you out with that too. Beginners that are looking to create a blog of their own will find this guide extremely useful as we will share the seven important steps of creating a successful blog. So without wasting any more time, let’s jump right into the content, shall we?
Choose a profitable niche to blog
Quick question – what are you going to blog on? Well, you have to first decide on a topic and a name for your blog. You can choose many niches from food, fitness, fashion, finance, travel, technology, sports, business, and more. However, we suggest you select a topic that you are interested in. It will become easier to manage the site if you create it around your passion or expertise.
Not just that, it will give you an opportunity to develop high-quality and informative content. But if you are looking to convert the blog into an income source, we suggest you go only for profitable niches. Once you decide on the niche, let the creativity flow as you find a name for the blog. Choose a name that has a high recall value.
Select a blogging platform
We don’t want the future of your blog to depend on a free blogging site. Therefore, we suggest you create a self-hosted blog as it will give you complete control over your site. We will discuss hosting in just a moment. Let’s discuss blogging platforms first.
While there are many blogging platforms available on the internet, we recommend using WordPress. It’s free to use, extremely flexible, entirely customizable, has a large developer community and provides complete control over your blog. All you need is a domain name and web hosting to get started with a self-hosted WordPress blog.
Get hosting(very important)
It’s time you bought a domain name and chose WordPress web hosting. So, which website hosting is the best? We believe the hosting that ensures one-click installs for WordPress is just fine. Web hosting shouldn’t be complicated, and Bluehost makes that a priority.
You get a custom domain name that is free for the first year. It also comes with an SSL certificate for security. Not just that, it also provides free email accounts! But what stands out is its one-click install for WordPress. It’s quick, convenient, and effective.
Customize your blog to make it unique
Did you know there are over 600 million blogs on the internet? Indeed, there will be many blogs in your niche as well. So, how are you going to make your blog stand out in the competition? Make it unique! Choose from thousands of free WordPress themes and customize them to meet your design requirements. Yes, you don’t need design or coding skills for that. The easy-to-use website builder will get the job done. Add your blog’s logo, play with the theme colors, and make sure the site has a proper structure.
Find writers for the blog (very important)
Anyone can start a blog in 2021 since you don’t have to be a writer to run a blog. It’s a good thing if you are, but a lack of writing skills shouldn’t make you quit blogging. There are so many high-quality and qualified writers on freelance websites like Fiverr, and hiring them is a piece of cake. Just create an account on Fiverr and start searching for writers with expertise in the topic you chose for the blog! It’s that simple. Haven’t decided on the blog post ideas yet? Find freelancers who can do the keyword research for you and develop ideas that will generate traffic for your site.
Optimize the blog posts for SEO
Once the freelancers start delivering the blog posts, don’t just post them before running them through some checks. Firstly, check for plagiarism using Copyscape. We suggest you only post content that has zero plagiarism. Next, run it through Grammarly to get rid of any grammatical errors. And finally, optimize the blog post to help it rank on the Google search engine.
Make sure the target keywords are present in the blog post title, headings, and subheadings. Use internal links inside the post contextually and add external links to high-authority websites. The blog post should have enough images and videos to make it interactive and engaging for the readers. Lastly, optimize the meta description and post description to get your post on the ‘Featured Snippets’ section on the SERP.
Practice patience and stay consistent
The last step in this guide to create a successful blog is, in our honest opinions, the most critical step. Running a successful blog requires patience and consistency. Coming up with a content calendar, assigning work to freelancers, optimizing the posts, and posting the content might seem easy. But, it’s hard work.
We highly recommend you practice patience and discipline to get successful at blogging. As you spend more time managing your blog, things will get much easier. You even have an option to automate a blog website completely. We will discuss that in the coming posts.
Keep Reading!
There you have it. We have shared some of the most critical steps you must never skip while creating a blog. Hopefully, this step-by-step guide helped you understand what it takes to build a successful blog. Loved reading this post? Don’t forget to check out the other informative posts we have on our blog!