Learn how you can start starting a blog in less than an hour. Follow the step-by-step instructions that we used to begin our successful blog, which now has reached more than 20 million people and provides been highlighted in the brand new York Times, TIME magazine, and on the TODAY show.
How to begin a Blog in Five Steps:
1.Choose your running a blog platform and domain.
2.Design your blog using a simple theme.
3.Modify your blog to define your look.
4.Select the best plugins for your site.
5.Write compelling content, start blogging.
Starting a Blog page: Step-by-Step Instructions
So you’re thinking about starting a blog, but you don’t have any kind of idea where to start, right? Guess what-neither did we. We had been clueless. When we created this blog a few years ago, we had no basic idea how to start a weblog or how to be a blogger. Heck, we're able to spell HTML hardly, let alone build a blog.
But very good news: it’s easier than you imagine. We’ve learned a huge amount of lessons during our ascent to achieving over 20 million people. And today you can learn from our discomfort and struggling to circumvent a lot of the tedium involved in establishing a blog.
How we started our blog here’s, step by step, followed by an instructional video, as well as additional rationale and insights:
1.Choose your blogging system and domain. The very first thing we did when starting our blog was head to Bluehost and register our domain. We didn’t actually need to set up WordPress, which is the platform we use, since Bluehost will all that for you personally. Bluehost’s basic price is normally $2.75 a full month, which works for 99% of people (head to this link to receive a 50% discount off the monthly price and a free of charge domain). Then, a straightforward was carried out by us, free, “one-click” install of WordPress through Bluehost. When we had questions we were able to speak to the “live chat” folks at Bluehost for free. They pointed us in the proper direction and made beginning our own blog super easy.
2.Design your blog utilizing a simple theme. A good theme gives you the appearance and feel you want for your blog, allowing you to make a blog that looks specifically how you want it to look. If you’re not a coder (we certainly weren’t), then a theme makes the design work a million instances easier. Plus, once you purchase a theme, which are inexpensive for the proper time they save you, it really is owned by you for life. The Minimalists uses the beautiful “tru” theme by SPYR, which is available at BYLT. Head on to BYLT, browse their collection of styles, and find the look that’s correct for you.
3.Modify your blog to define your style. Once we experienced our domain, weblog hosting, WordPress, and theme, we spent lots of time tweaking the theme to obtain the appear and feel we wished (i.e., making our vision a reality). Then we spent even more time trying out the theme and arguing about any of it and tweaking it even more. Once we had developed our blog, we setup a free of charge Feedburner account therefore people could sign up to our site via RSS and email subscriptions. And we set up a free of charge Google Analytics account to track our stats. Google and feedburner Analytics were both simple to sign up for, both today and we still use.
4.Select the best plugins for your blog. We only use a few plugins on our site, including “Google Analytics for WordPress” and “Yoast SEO”. They take just a few seconds (literally a couple of seconds, it’s simply a click of a key) to install once you’ve started your blog. And if you really want to play around with some cool plugins, check out WPBeginner’s Best WordPress Plugins.
5.Write compelling content material. Last, via WordPress, we started composing and uploading this content for our webpages: About Page, Contact Web page, Start Here Web page, Books Page, Tour Web page, Archives Web page, etc. Next, we designed our logo using free images we found online and text from a normal word-processing program. After that we put a picture of ourselves in the header (that is essential because people identify with people, not really logos). Finally we began writing new blog articles and publishing them regularly (at least one time weekly), accompanied by free of charge photos from Unsplash, Pexels, and the Library of Congress. And the others is history.
How to Create a Blog: Video
Watch our step-by-step instructional video, which includes screenshots of the entire starting-a-blog process:
But very good news: it’s easier than you imagine. We’ve learned a huge amount of lessons during our ascent to achieving over 20 million people. And today you can learn from our discomfort and struggling to circumvent a lot of the tedium involved in establishing a blog.
How we started our blog here’s, step by step, followed by an instructional video, as well as additional rationale and insights:
1.Choose your blogging system and domain. The very first thing we did when starting our blog was head to Bluehost and register our domain. We didn’t actually need to set up WordPress, which is the platform we use, since Bluehost will all that for you personally. Bluehost’s basic price is normally $2.75 a full month, which works for 99% of people (head to this link to receive a 50% discount off the monthly price and a free of charge domain). Then, a straightforward was carried out by us, free, “one-click” install of WordPress through Bluehost. When we had questions we were able to speak to the “live chat” folks at Bluehost for free. They pointed us in the proper direction and made beginning our own blog super easy.
2.Design your blog utilizing a simple theme. A good theme gives you the appearance and feel you want for your blog, allowing you to make a blog that looks specifically how you want it to look. If you’re not a coder (we certainly weren’t), then a theme makes the design work a million instances easier. Plus, once you purchase a theme, which are inexpensive for the proper time they save you, it really is owned by you for life. The Minimalists uses the beautiful “tru” theme by SPYR, which is available at BYLT. Head on to BYLT, browse their collection of styles, and find the look that’s correct for you.
3.Modify your blog to define your style. Once we experienced our domain, weblog hosting, WordPress, and theme, we spent lots of time tweaking the theme to obtain the appear and feel we wished (i.e., making our vision a reality). Then we spent even more time trying out the theme and arguing about any of it and tweaking it even more. Once we had developed our blog, we setup a free of charge Feedburner account therefore people could sign up to our site via RSS and email subscriptions. And we set up a free of charge Google Analytics account to track our stats. Google and feedburner Analytics were both simple to sign up for, both today and we still use.
4.Select the best plugins for your blog. We only use a few plugins on our site, including “Google Analytics for WordPress” and “Yoast SEO”. They take just a few seconds (literally a couple of seconds, it’s simply a click of a key) to install once you’ve started your blog. And if you really want to play around with some cool plugins, check out WPBeginner’s Best WordPress Plugins.
5.Write compelling content material. Last, via WordPress, we started composing and uploading this content for our webpages: About Page, Contact Web page, Start Here Web page, Books Page, Tour Web page, Archives Web page, etc. Next, we designed our logo using free images we found online and text from a normal word-processing program. After that we put a picture of ourselves in the header (that is essential because people identify with people, not really logos). Finally we began writing new blog articles and publishing them regularly (at least one time weekly), accompanied by free of charge photos from Unsplash, Pexels, and the Library of Congress. And the others is history.
How to Create a Blog: Video
Watch our step-by-step instructional video, which includes screenshots of the entire starting-a-blog process:
15 Reasons You Should Take up a Blog
We were inspired to research and write this essay after reading Joshua Becker’s 15 Reasons I Think You Should Blog, in which he discusses 15 great reasons why you should start a blog. Why being the key word here. In other words, he talks about the objective of blogging, not just how to begin a blog. That’s what each one of these other blogs about blogging seem to miss; the purpose-the are missed by them why behind starting a blog.
3 Reasons You Should Not Start a Blog
So you have 15 reasons why you should start a blog now, and we’ve proven you how to start a blog, step-by-step, predicated on our personal encounter. But after giving you those detailed guidelines, which could save you the thousands of hours of wasted time, we also want to give you some good reasons why you should not start a blog. (Remember that these reasons are just our views, and we do not pretend to offer them up as some sort of assortment of empirical blogging maxims.)
1.Money. You ought not to start a blog to make money. We need to get that out from the real way first. If most of your objective is to displace your full-time income from blogging, just forget about it. It doesn’t work that way. Do this Jimi is thought by you Hendrix picked up his first guitar so he could “product his income”? No, he didn’t. Rather, he achieved it for the like of it, for the joy and fulfillment he received, and the income came thereafter, much later actually.
2.Notoriety. Don’t anticipate getting “Internet famous” right away. Don't assume all site grows as fast as ours did, but that’s totally Alright. The simple truth is that we kind of got lucky. We got a great domain name, we cobbled together a logo and site design that individuals really liked, we write well fairly, and our articles connects with people in a distinctive way. We didn’t begin this site to become “famous” though. That’d be ridiculous. Our notoriety and quick rise to “fame” came as a surprise to us, and was a total result of a little luck and lots of hard, passionate work.
3.Traffic. Not absolutely all traffic is good traffic, therefore don’t worry about getting a large number of readers right away.
The funny thing is that all these things can occur. You will make a full-period income from building a blog. It is performed by us, Corbett Barr will it, therefore do many others. And you could become Internet famous want Leo Chris or Babauta Brogan. But if they are the sole reasons why you start running a blog, you’ll be miserable, because it will seem like a job, and if it feels like employment you won’t end up being passionate about it, and so you’ll either (a) hate it, (b) fall toned on your encounter, or (c) hate it and fall flat on your face.
Instead, create because you’re passionate about it…
20 Recommendations for Your Blog
We receive lots of emails asking for advice about beginning a blog, about how exactly to blog, about weblog topics, and about creating meaningful content-even a few questions about whether we wear boxers or briefs. These are the suggestions and answers we tend to give.
1.Find Your Market. You needn’t possess a niche, but it assists. When learning how to be considered a blogger, it’s important to consider what you’re passionate about. Running? Cooking? Being truly a parent? Perhaps you have found your enthusiasm? If so, whatever it is, reveal that. If not, you then must find your passion first. (Note: We generally suggest that individuals don’t start a blog about minimalism or the paleo diet plan or any other heavily saturated subject. But what we actually mean when we say that is: don’t generate a weblog about something if you don't have a unique perspective. If you’ve embraced simple living and have a exclusive perspective, you should have at it then. Enjoy yourself.)
2.Define Your Ideal Readers. Once you’ve discovered your niche, you need to know who'll be reading your site. For example, we blog about living intentionally. Thus, our ideal readers are people who are thinking about exploring minimalism so they can clear the path toward even more meaningful lives. If you would like to write about your newborn growing up, that’s fantastic: your ideal readers are probably friends and family and family. If you want to create about restoring classic vehicles, that’s cool, too. Tailor your writing to your readers (whether it’s your loved ones or local community or whoever else will read your blog).
3.Add Value. Your blog must add worth to its readers’ lives. This is the only way you'll get Great Quality Readers to your website (and keep them returning). Adding value may be the only way to obtain long-term buy-in someone’s. Both of us learned this after a decade of leading and handling people in the corporate world.
4.Be First. Yes, there are other blogs out there a comparable thing you would like to write about. Question: Why is your weblog different? Answer: Due to you. You are why is your blog different. It’s about your perspective, your creativeness, the worthiness that you add.
5.Be Interesting. Write epic, amazing content. Especially if you would like people to share it with others.
6.Be Yourself. Part to be interesting is informing your story. Everyone is unique, as well as your story is an important one. The important part of storytelling, however, can be removing the superfluous information that make the whole story uninteresting. A great storyteller removes 99% of what really happens-the absorptive details-and leaves the interesting 1% for the reader.
7.Be Honest. Your blog must be authentic-it needs to feel real-if you wish people to read it. You could be your blog, or your blog could be you. That's, perform you embody the stuff you write about really? If not, people will dsicover through you. “Be the noticeable transformation you want to see in the world,” may be the famous Gandhi estimate. Perhaps bloggers should build the blog they want to write for the world.
8.Transparency. Being transparent is different from getting honest. You needn’t share every fine detail about your life simply for the sake of being honest. Always be honest, and become transparent when it adds value to what you’re writing. (You won’t ever observe pictures of us using the restroom on our site, because that’s just not relevant.)
9.Time. Once you’ve learned how to start a blog, you’ll learn that blogging takes a complete large amount of time, especially if you’re as neurotic as we are (we spent over 10 hours testing the fonts on this website). And see those Facebook and Twitter icons in the header? We spent hours on those, deciding that which was right for us). That said, when you have your style setup, don’t tweak it an excessive amount of. Instead, spend the time on your writing.
10.Vision. The good reason our site style looks good is basically because we have a great host, we have a great theme, & most important, a vision was had by us of how we wanted our weblog to look. Once the eyesight was experienced by us, we proved helpful hard to create that vision possible. (Note: neither of us had any design experience prior to starting a blog.) It’s hard to create a beautiful weblog if you don’t know what it is wanted by you to look like.
11.Find Your Tone of voice. Over time, good authors discover their voice and their writing tends to develop a specific aesthetic, one that is appealing to their visitors. Finding your voice makes your writing feel even more alive, more real, even more urgent. For extra reading, check out our essay about Locating Your Voice.
12.We Instead of You. Utilize the first-person plural when feasible. Statements of we and our are stronger than you and your, especially when talking about negative behaviors or tendencies. The first person comes off as far less accusatory. Think about it in this manner: we’re writing peer-to-peer-we aren't gods.
13.When to Post. Question: When is the best day and time to publish a blog post? Answer: It doesn’t really matter. We don’t to a particular schedule adhere. Some full weeks we post one essay; we post three sometimes. Yes, it regularly is important to write, nevertheless, you needn’t get too bogged down in the facts.
14.Social Mass media. Yes, we Twitter recommend using, Facebook, and Instagram to greatly help connect with your audience and additional bloggers, but don’t get too swept up in it. Focus on the writing first, sociable media thereafter.
15.Ignore Bad Stupidity and Criticism. Sure, we get yourself a lot of detrimental comments and stupid questions from ignorant individuals who aren’t really our readers (e.g., bad comments like “You’re not really true minimalists” and stupid queries like “Are you guys gay?”). We contact these folks seagulls: they fly in, crap on your own site, and fly aside. But we pay them no mind, because we didn’t begin our weblog for them. Delete their move and comment on.
16.Research. Spend time researching what you’re writing about. The good reason we are able to use therefore many helpful, relevant links inside our essays is basically because we put in enough time to analyze our topics.
17.Keep It Basic. That's where minimalism can become applied to starting any blog, regardless of its genre. No need to place superfluous widgets or advertisements all over your site. Stick to the basics and remove whatever you don’t need. Remove whatever doesn’t add value.
18.Picture. Put a picture of yourself on your own blog. People determine with other people. If two goofy men from Ohio aren’t too afraid to place their pictures on their site, you have nothing to worry about then.
19.Comments. If you’re going to have comments on your own site, then browse the Five Phrases That Kill YOUR SITE by Scott Stratten.
20.LIVE LIFE. You’re blogging about your daily life (or about certain elements of your life, at least), and that means you need to live life still. There are points that we always put before writing: exercise, health, relationships, experiences, personal growth, contribution.
We were inspired to research and write this essay after reading Joshua Becker’s 15 Reasons I Think You Should Blog, in which he discusses 15 great reasons why you should start a blog. Why being the key word here. In other words, he talks about the objective of blogging, not just how to begin a blog. That’s what each one of these other blogs about blogging seem to miss; the purpose-the are missed by them why behind starting a blog.
3 Reasons You Should Not Start a Blog
So you have 15 reasons why you should start a blog now, and we’ve proven you how to start a blog, step-by-step, predicated on our personal encounter. But after giving you those detailed guidelines, which could save you the thousands of hours of wasted time, we also want to give you some good reasons why you should not start a blog. (Remember that these reasons are just our views, and we do not pretend to offer them up as some sort of assortment of empirical blogging maxims.)
1.Money. You ought not to start a blog to make money. We need to get that out from the real way first. If most of your objective is to displace your full-time income from blogging, just forget about it. It doesn’t work that way. Do this Jimi is thought by you Hendrix picked up his first guitar so he could “product his income”? No, he didn’t. Rather, he achieved it for the like of it, for the joy and fulfillment he received, and the income came thereafter, much later actually.
2.Notoriety. Don’t anticipate getting “Internet famous” right away. Don't assume all site grows as fast as ours did, but that’s totally Alright. The simple truth is that we kind of got lucky. We got a great domain name, we cobbled together a logo and site design that individuals really liked, we write well fairly, and our articles connects with people in a distinctive way. We didn’t begin this site to become “famous” though. That’d be ridiculous. Our notoriety and quick rise to “fame” came as a surprise to us, and was a total result of a little luck and lots of hard, passionate work.
3.Traffic. Not absolutely all traffic is good traffic, therefore don’t worry about getting a large number of readers right away.
The funny thing is that all these things can occur. You will make a full-period income from building a blog. It is performed by us, Corbett Barr will it, therefore do many others. And you could become Internet famous want Leo Chris or Babauta Brogan. But if they are the sole reasons why you start running a blog, you’ll be miserable, because it will seem like a job, and if it feels like employment you won’t end up being passionate about it, and so you’ll either (a) hate it, (b) fall toned on your encounter, or (c) hate it and fall flat on your face.
Instead, create because you’re passionate about it…
20 Recommendations for Your Blog
We receive lots of emails asking for advice about beginning a blog, about how exactly to blog, about weblog topics, and about creating meaningful content-even a few questions about whether we wear boxers or briefs. These are the suggestions and answers we tend to give.
1.Find Your Market. You needn’t possess a niche, but it assists. When learning how to be considered a blogger, it’s important to consider what you’re passionate about. Running? Cooking? Being truly a parent? Perhaps you have found your enthusiasm? If so, whatever it is, reveal that. If not, you then must find your passion first. (Note: We generally suggest that individuals don’t start a blog about minimalism or the paleo diet plan or any other heavily saturated subject. But what we actually mean when we say that is: don’t generate a weblog about something if you don't have a unique perspective. If you’ve embraced simple living and have a exclusive perspective, you should have at it then. Enjoy yourself.)
2.Define Your Ideal Readers. Once you’ve discovered your niche, you need to know who'll be reading your site. For example, we blog about living intentionally. Thus, our ideal readers are people who are thinking about exploring minimalism so they can clear the path toward even more meaningful lives. If you would like to write about your newborn growing up, that’s fantastic: your ideal readers are probably friends and family and family. If you want to create about restoring classic vehicles, that’s cool, too. Tailor your writing to your readers (whether it’s your loved ones or local community or whoever else will read your blog).
3.Add Value. Your blog must add worth to its readers’ lives. This is the only way you'll get Great Quality Readers to your website (and keep them returning). Adding value may be the only way to obtain long-term buy-in someone’s. Both of us learned this after a decade of leading and handling people in the corporate world.
4.Be First. Yes, there are other blogs out there a comparable thing you would like to write about. Question: Why is your weblog different? Answer: Due to you. You are why is your blog different. It’s about your perspective, your creativeness, the worthiness that you add.
5.Be Interesting. Write epic, amazing content. Especially if you would like people to share it with others.
6.Be Yourself. Part to be interesting is informing your story. Everyone is unique, as well as your story is an important one. The important part of storytelling, however, can be removing the superfluous information that make the whole story uninteresting. A great storyteller removes 99% of what really happens-the absorptive details-and leaves the interesting 1% for the reader.
7.Be Honest. Your blog must be authentic-it needs to feel real-if you wish people to read it. You could be your blog, or your blog could be you. That's, perform you embody the stuff you write about really? If not, people will dsicover through you. “Be the noticeable transformation you want to see in the world,” may be the famous Gandhi estimate. Perhaps bloggers should build the blog they want to write for the world.
8.Transparency. Being transparent is different from getting honest. You needn’t share every fine detail about your life simply for the sake of being honest. Always be honest, and become transparent when it adds value to what you’re writing. (You won’t ever observe pictures of us using the restroom on our site, because that’s just not relevant.)
9.Time. Once you’ve learned how to start a blog, you’ll learn that blogging takes a complete large amount of time, especially if you’re as neurotic as we are (we spent over 10 hours testing the fonts on this website). And see those Facebook and Twitter icons in the header? We spent hours on those, deciding that which was right for us). That said, when you have your style setup, don’t tweak it an excessive amount of. Instead, spend the time on your writing.
10.Vision. The good reason our site style looks good is basically because we have a great host, we have a great theme, & most important, a vision was had by us of how we wanted our weblog to look. Once the eyesight was experienced by us, we proved helpful hard to create that vision possible. (Note: neither of us had any design experience prior to starting a blog.) It’s hard to create a beautiful weblog if you don’t know what it is wanted by you to look like.
11.Find Your Tone of voice. Over time, good authors discover their voice and their writing tends to develop a specific aesthetic, one that is appealing to their visitors. Finding your voice makes your writing feel even more alive, more real, even more urgent. For extra reading, check out our essay about Locating Your Voice.
12.We Instead of You. Utilize the first-person plural when feasible. Statements of we and our are stronger than you and your, especially when talking about negative behaviors or tendencies. The first person comes off as far less accusatory. Think about it in this manner: we’re writing peer-to-peer-we aren't gods.
13.When to Post. Question: When is the best day and time to publish a blog post? Answer: It doesn’t really matter. We don’t to a particular schedule adhere. Some full weeks we post one essay; we post three sometimes. Yes, it regularly is important to write, nevertheless, you needn’t get too bogged down in the facts.
14.Social Mass media. Yes, we Twitter recommend using, Facebook, and Instagram to greatly help connect with your audience and additional bloggers, but don’t get too swept up in it. Focus on the writing first, sociable media thereafter.
15.Ignore Bad Stupidity and Criticism. Sure, we get yourself a lot of detrimental comments and stupid questions from ignorant individuals who aren’t really our readers (e.g., bad comments like “You’re not really true minimalists” and stupid queries like “Are you guys gay?”). We contact these folks seagulls: they fly in, crap on your own site, and fly aside. But we pay them no mind, because we didn’t begin our weblog for them. Delete their move and comment on.
16.Research. Spend time researching what you’re writing about. The good reason we are able to use therefore many helpful, relevant links inside our essays is basically because we put in enough time to analyze our topics.
17.Keep It Basic. That's where minimalism can become applied to starting any blog, regardless of its genre. No need to place superfluous widgets or advertisements all over your site. Stick to the basics and remove whatever you don’t need. Remove whatever doesn’t add value.
18.Picture. Put a picture of yourself on your own blog. People determine with other people. If two goofy men from Ohio aren’t too afraid to place their pictures on their site, you have nothing to worry about then.
19.Comments. If you’re going to have comments on your own site, then browse the Five Phrases That Kill YOUR SITE by Scott Stratten.
20.LIVE LIFE. You’re blogging about your daily life (or about certain elements of your life, at least), and that means you need to live life still. There are points that we always put before writing: exercise, health, relationships, experiences, personal growth, contribution.
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